Get Out — A ‘black film’ about white people
Director Jordan Peele’s film Get Out has been busting genre boundaries and gathering well-deserved attention since it first hit mainstream theatres nearly a year ago.
Listed under the “comedy-musical category” at the Golden Globes and usually listed as a “thriller” in its publicity, Get Out, with its unique blend of suspense, social commentary, humour, horror and even a dash of science fiction, transcends easy categorization.
The plot, however, is deceptively uncomplicated: Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) drive out to the sprawling, bucolic estate of Rose’s mother and father for a meet-the-parents weekend. When it turns out that the hearty handshakes and wide smiles mask a thundering undercurrent of hostility and shameless racism, Chris finds himself tricked, trapped and fighting for his life.
Chris and Rose proceed to play a tense game of cat-and-mouse amidst a strong surrounding cast that includes the comic relief of Chris’s perceptive and protective best friend Rod (LilRel Howery), Rose’s terrifyingly aristocratic mother Missy Armitage (Catherine Keener), blind art gallery owner
Jim Hudson (Stephen Root) and Georgina (Betty Gabriel) and Walter (Marcus Henderson), the Armitage family’s enigmatic maid and groundskeeper, respectively.
Reaching back to the historical atrocities of a slave auction with one hand and forward to contemporary racial politics with the other, Peele crafts a clever metaphorical statement about how the legal abolition of slavery did not abolish the deadly ingredients of insecurity, ignorance and arrogance that continue to plague the U.S. As Rose’s father Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford) insists about white people, “We are divine. We are the gods trapped in cocoons.” None of this should be shocking. (The fact that it will certainly be shocking to some audiences is the real shock.) There isn’t much here that most black people haven’t experienced in real life.
Thematically, the film deals with the appropriation of black culture by whites where “black is in fashion” even as reactionary policies and racist principles newly revitalized under Donald Trump in the real-world have come back in imbecilic force. Chris asks the obvious question: “Why us? Why black people?” Dean Armitage’s answer, that rich white people want to be “stronger, faster, hipper” is as unsatisfying in the film as it is in life. Any other possible answer is obscured by the hypnosis in the film that parallels the cultural brainwashing by racists, those complicit in racism and by the beneficiaries of a racist system that keeps black people paralyzed in “The Sunken Place.”
With cinematic ancestors in Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) and Eddie Murphy’s Delirious (1983) in which Murphy famously observes that black people, unlike white people, would never stick around in a haunted house, Get Out is a movie we’ve never seen before about racial dynamics we see every day. It is uncompromising, unsubtle and, as perhaps the first ever “black film” about white people, it is probably the most honest depiction of white denial in the history of film.
Most so-called horror movies terrify with their conjuring of the surreal. Get Out terrifies by its spot-on reflection of the real. But this isn’t a horror movie, a comedy-drama or a supernatural thriller. As Peele explains, tongue-in-cheek, “It’s a documentary.”