Making a hit comedy-horror movie out of America’s racial tensions
Le réalisateur de Get Out s’exprime.
De nos jours, dans une grande ville américaine anonyme, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) et Rose (Allison Williams) sortent ensemble depuis cinq mois lorsqu’ils se rendent tous les deux pour la première fois à la campagne chez les parents de la jeune femme. Chris est noir. Rose est blanche. Cela ne devrait poser aucun problème… Get Out, dans les salles le 3 mai est un film d’horreur plein d’humour. Rencontre avec son réalisateur.
In America, and among a devoted online audience, Jordan Peele is known as one half of a sketch show double act called Key & Peele. It airs on Comedy Central and has gained a reputation for the pair’s spot-on im- personations and forensic attention to comic detail. A couple of years ago in a long glowing profile in the New Yorker, Zadie Smith noted: “Beyond Key & Peele, it’s hard to imagine Peele in any vehicle not constructed around a comic character of his own devising.”
2.She certainly didn’t imagine him as a muchlauded writer and director of this year’s most
celebrated horror film. But that’s exactly what Peele has become with the box office hit Get Out. Last month, the film took $33m on its opening weekend in America, gained a highly unusual 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and is trailing widespread critical acclaim in its noisy wake.
BLACK IS BLACK
3. Drawing on a horror tradition that owes a great deal to the novelist Ira Levin – in particular the cinematic adaptations Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives – Get Out looks at the experience of a young black man, played by the British actor Daniel Kaluuya, when he is introduced to his white girlfriend’s parents. It’s by turns tense, funny and terrifying. And in an era of Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter, it taps into America’s racial tensions in the most unsettling and yet compelling fashion.
4.But Peele, an affable and highly articulate proponent of his work, had the idea for the film back when Trump was just a less confrontational Alan Sugar, and Black Lives Matter was yet to be founded. “The genesis for the film was when Obama was elected and there was this sentiment that we can stop talking about race now because we’ve just solved the problem,” he tells me on the phone from Los Angeles. “We are now living in a system where racism is involved with policy. We’ve left the era where people were trying to pretend that race doesn’t exist.” 5.Peele himself is biracial. He was brought up by his white mother in New York City, and had hardly any contact with his black father, who died 18 years ago. He told Zadie Smith that he thought race was an “absurdity” and it was “crazy” to define children in terms of their racial identity. But long before that interview he was already thinking about the hidden drama of racial identity and how it might be employed in a horror format.
THE PLOT
6. Much of the sly appeal of Get Out rests on the fact that the racism that Chris (Kaluuya) encounters is not initially overt. The setting is the white upper-middleclass liberal elite, the kind of people who pride themselves on their post-racial sensibilities.
7. At first Chris can’t be sure whether the odd notes of discomfort he feels are in his own paranoid head or foreshadow something more sinister. There’s an ingratiating realism to the set-up, so that the audience shares in the uncertainty, and easily identifies with an attractive young couple going through the meeting-the-parents ritual which, just as in the Sidney Poitier classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, carries an extra layer of social unease.
8.In an early establishing scene a black man is seen walking through the white suburbs at night. It’s a wonderfully disturbing inversion of the white guy in the black ghetto trope. The wide streets with their neat hedges and large houses seem to seethe with hidden menace. Peele explains why he wanted this opening. “I felt it was important first and foremost to get the entire audience on board with the inherent fears that a black man has.”
9.Is that his own experience of the suburbs? “I’ve got to tell you, a fairly consistent part of my experience is worrying about how I’m going to be perceived in the ‘wrong’ neighbourhood. I’m trying to get through it as quickly as possible. It’s one of the pieces of the African American experience that people don’t know is always there. When you’re out of place, or feel out of place, you feel there is danger there. With the police as well. I think the majority of police are really good people and really good at their jobs but that doesn’t change the fact that with any interaction I have with them, I’m viewed as a potential threat.”
10.It’s a revealing picture of a perception that all too often goes unrecorded. One of the realities that Get Out implicitly references is the scenario in which Trayvon Martin, a 17-yearold unarmed African American student, was shot dead five years ago in a Florida suburb while walking home. His mixed-race Hispanic killer, a neighbourhood watch coordinator, walked free on the grounds of self-defence. “There was that,” says Peele, then, lightening