Jordan Peele’s Get Out takes the horror of the suburbs literally.
PEELE’S LAYERED RACE COMMENTARY SPELLBINDS
George A. Romero still insists, whenever chance occasions the opportunity, that Night of the Living Dead is not a film about race – that the bitterly ironic ending, in which the black hero is mistaken for a zombie and shot dead by a zealous band of white vigilantes, has no political import to speak of, and that anyway, how could it be, because star Duane Jones was cast strictly on the merit of his audition, and the screenplay never specified the colour of the character’s skin.
But if Romero’s disavowals can’t seem to quash the established reading — if that ending prevails nonetheless as a trenchant yawp against the violence of white supremacy — it is perhaps because the genre lends itself so readily to metaphor. The ghouls and bogeymen of the horror film, the indefatigable masked killers and machete- wielding maniacs, are empty vessels, bare canvases, ideal repositories for meaning. Horror encourages interpretation of this sort by design. Its exponents are richly expressive, and the grisly details — whatever their authors consciously intend them to represent — can hardly help but suggest something more.
Little in Jordan Peele’s new horror film Get Out means more than it seems or more than in plainly intends to. This isn’t because the film is absent social import or an unmistakably political dimension; rather it’s because the social import has been imprinted directly on the surface, and because its political dimension, so much like the unintended one of Night of the Living Dead in gist and substance, exists on the plane of story and action, not at all cloaked by generic convention.
Get Out does not encourage interpretation. In fact it precludes it: what it means, it says – no exegesis required. Of an ordinary horror movie one can well imagine saying, with a knowing and scholarly air, that it is about imperilled black bodies navigating affluent white spaces, about the menace of appropriation and the fear a black man must endure, always, in the presence of white people who may at any time mean them harm — though “about” in the sense that these themes are evoked, vaguely signified, or intimated. But Get Out is about this literally. It is about a black man in the suburbs and the white residents who mean him harm.
The would- be victim is Chris ( Daniel Kaluuya), on the scene in upstate New York with his white girlfriend Rose ( Allison Williams) to meet her cheery, Good Liberal parents ( Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener), a neurosurgeon and a psychiatrist, respectively, who keep black help, hoard souvenirs from Maui, and in a clueless bid to seem ingratiating make a point to say they’d have gladly voted Obama for a third term. But something more nefarious, one can tell right away, is lurking just behind the Stepford shrubbery, and it isn’t long before a devilish plot reveals itself: Rose’s parents and their elite coterie of country-club friends have a habit of abducting young black men, submitting them to hypnosis, and, by way of an madcap medical procedure once described by Karl Pilkington on the Ricky Gervais Show, claiming their bodies as their own. All this diabolic lunacy, of course, Peele depicts with B- movie relish, delighting gamely in the comic-sinister thrill. The details can afford to be outlandish because the dynamic is scary enough for real.
“Why black people?” is the very pertinent question Chris poses to his captors after he learns of the fate to which he’ll soon be subjected.
The intended beneficiary of Chris’s body, a blind art dealer named Jim ( played with fiendish gusto by Stephen Root), explains the biological appeal: the white villains simply aspire to be “stronger, faster, cooler,” and what more expedient way to do so than to co- opt bodies like his? Scarcely has an evil plan articulated the anxieties that inspired it so explicitly.
Get Out does not derive its relevance or urgency from the way it suggests or implies hard truths; it doesn’t suggest or imply much of anything, but instead lays these truths bare, boldly, even comically, so that what in a more traditional horror film might smoulder metaphorically, here burns as bright and as clear as day. When the villain grabs a rifle and takes aim at Chris at the end of the film she does not shoot because she mistakes him for a zombie. She, like the film, is more honest: she shoots because he’s black. What more is there to suggest? ΩΩ1/2