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Jordan Peele has added his name to the growing list of Black auteurs reconciling with the problematic “colonization” of African-Americans in contemporary visual culture with his revolutionary horror masterpiece, Get Out. By instilling his form of absurdist comedy and socially conscious visual ingenuity into the historically limiting horror genre, Peele showcases the potential to circumvent the subjugative iconography of mainstream African-American cinema.
Through racial investigation of the attractions and conventions of the horror genre, the contrast between Blackness and Whiteness in terms of property rights of personhood becomes apparent. In “Can One ‘Get Out’? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism”, Ryan Poll delves into an Eddie Murphy stand-up bit from Delirious (1983) in which he declares the traditional Hollywood horror movie to be an inherently White genre. Murphy jokes that if a Black person walked into a house where an apparition appeared or was hinted at, they would ‘get out.’ Poll follows this line of thought, asserting that “By this logic, feature-length horror movies... are only possible because of White ignorance. Murphy’s joke insightfully implies that White people are incapable of recognizing horror… until it’s too late, which is another way of saying that for White people, the experience of horror is unexpected and contingent, not foundational” (1). Murphy’s joke is not only profoundly resonant for the reasons Poll goes into but also because this concept undoubtedly inspired Get Out’s narrative. It’s important to note that the reason Peele’s African-American protagonist, Chris, doesn’t have this ‘Get Out’ moment as he first steps into the Armitage house is because the ‘apparition’ Murphy jokes about is disguised by the social idealization of White culture; a signifier of the contrast between White and Black personhood rights.
Get Out’s narrative echoes Alessandra Raengo’s description of human rights, such as freedom, liberty, and immunity, as a type of property in Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled. Raengo says, “Whiteness is the attribute that guarantees freedom—indeed, the impossibility of being enslaved—and freedom is a form of property. Whiteness, therefore, means having property rights in one’s personhood. Freedom is thus a function of having personhood, defined as having possession of oneself” (18). Seeing as the premise of Get Out involves Chris and Rose, a Black and White interracial couple, going to visit Rose’s White family in the era of ‘woke politics’ for the first time, the narrative already contains enough substance for a comedic social drama. And while this is what the film starts out being, as the plot progresses, Chris begins to question his safety amidst the growing irregularities of the Armitages and their company before the story ultimately skews into an absurdly horrific body-snatching plot involving the surgical transference of White minds (usually belonging to old or crippled bodies) into young, Black bodies. By allowing their Black subjects a distorted consciousness to match their physical paralysis, the Armitages are essentially enslaving Chris’ self-possession to the bidding of their White desire and self.
The metaphorical implications of this narrative progression are astoundingly resonant not only in the mirrored historical context of slavery but also in the social dichotomy of its contemporary wake. To declare, ‘slavery is no longer existent today’ might be correct in a quantitative sense, but psychologically, Get Out refutes that statement. This remarkably White attitude, which prefers to ‘move on’ blindly from slavery, prospers under the normalized ‘veil’ associated with the White idealization of the American family. While some who maintain this disposition do so subconsciously, others, like the Armitages, are self-aware and horrifically abuse the ‘veil’ intentionally with their racist agenda. The brilliance of Peele’s genre-blending is embedded in Poll’s further extrapolation of how horror films and everyday life are perceived differently across the racial barrier:
In its dominant form, the genre works because White people fundamentally imagine the world without horror. Yes, such can happen, but it happens “over there,” distant from the everyday ontology and experience of Whiteness. African Americans, in contrast, are keenly aware that the world is pervaded with horror and are constantly vigilant for signifiers of such (1).
What makes Get Out so scary is precisely what prevents Chris from recognizing the house’s horrific presence and exiting: the ease with which the Armitages can socially mask their genocidal intent. Through trial and error, they have become so cryptically elusive that by the time their Black victim realizes what is happening, it is already too late. Perhaps the scene that becomes the creepiest in this context comes during the house tour Rose’s father, Dean, gives Chris. Despite Chris’ historically trained aptitude for identifying horror signifiers, Dean waves seemingly ordinary family artifacts in front of his face, and it is only once we learn the Armitage’s true intentions that we can understand how meticulous they are with their disguise. The only extension of the house that seems to raise any instant concern for Chris is Georgina, the Armitage’s maid, later discovered to be a physical vessel for the spirit of Rose’s grandmother.
Georgina’s character is integral to the story as a maternal figure who visually signifies the impact of slavery’s scarring on American visual culture. Interestingly enough, it is Rose’s psychotherapist mother, Missy, who pries the foundational maternal trauma at the root of Chris’ tobacco addiction out of him. In the process, she directs Chris to an imprisoning area of his consciousness visualized by infinite darkness, rendering him both mentally and physically docile. This scene is not only structurally imperative because it foreshadows the methods by which the Armitages psychosomatically disarm their Black subjects before transplanting their brain, but it also alludes to the maternal symbolism Rizvana Bradley explores in “Vestiges of Motherhood: The Maternal Function in Recent Black Cinema.”
The symbolization of maternity in and as the space of the womb has been essential to the imagination of the horror film genre… Get Out doubles down on its capacity for horror by defying the classic iconography of the horror film as one without limits. For it is not the enclosed space of the Armitage house, but the infinite darkness of the sunken place, mobilized by the specter of Black maternal loss, that is the true source of the film’s horror (1-2, Bradley).
It is likely that this infinite darkness, or rather the inability to escape the sunken place of Black subjugation, be it mental or physical, is the film’s most horrifying concept to African-American viewers, but why then does Peele choose to feature the film’s three mothers as conduits of this region? The answer lies within his visual defiance of classic horror iconography during the film’s introduction of the sunken place.
When Chris enters the house, Missy switches on a nearby light, immediately contrasting their relation to horror visually by introducing Chris’ entrance to the house from a vantage point of historical darkness. Chris’ reluctance to come away from this space into Missy’s White environment is denoted by the spatial differences in their framing; Chris is shot in a medium close-up while Missy is further detached in an over-the-shoulder wide shot. This visual relationship continues until Missy’s framing closes in when she addresses the danger Chris’ tobacco addiction presents to her daughter’s health. This increasing proximity continues until Peele gives her a close-up following an insert of the ‘focal point’ tea glass she is using to subconsciously direct Chris into the trauma of his mother’s death. A hazy, rear-facing image of Chris as a child glued to the television on a rainy day is spliced into the screen before Peele takes the focus back to the slow zoom-in on Chris during Missy’s emotional interrogation of him. By the end of the zoom-in, which stops on a tilted close-up of Chris as he holds back tears over the guilt of his paralysis as his mother lay dying outside due to a hit-and-run. Missy, whose framing remains contrastingly even-grounded, pushes Chris’ disorientation beyond the physical realm and into the mental plane of the sunken place, which is visualized by a pan that moves with the child Chris down through his bed and into the limitless darkness of the sunken place. That it is the grown Chris that comes out on the other side is an indication of the sunken place as a metaphor for a space of contemporary Black subjugation. It is essential to recognize that it is under the pretense of social White idealization, or rather the conception of the colorblind as the ideal American family, that allows Missy’s hypnosis of Chris. The TV’s partial prevention of Chris from saving his mother’s life suggests that his subjugation is undertaken in White culture socially and visually to create the sunken place. Since Chris is ultimately able to escape the sunken place and facilitate the destruction of the Armitage’s body-snatching stronghold, it is evidence of Peele’s defiance of the imprisoning limits of African-American agency in conventional horror iconography.
Though their significance is more often associated with absence, African-American maternal figures historically play an essential role in horror movies. While the film features three maternal figures, only Rose’s mom is evident as such on the surface because, for most of the story, we are unaware Georgina is Rose’s grandmother, and Chris’s dead mother is only recounted in memory. This distribution of maternal agency in the narrative points to what Bradley believes reflects intentional maternal exclusion in the conventional African-American horror film,
These films insist upon simultaneously marking and excluding the mother from the emotional drama of Black subjective life and its complex and contradictory expressions of intimacy, which have as much to do with the breaking and splintering of familial bonds as bridging gaps. It is clear that the mother sutures these bonds; she is a scar, a visible reminder and remainder of a terrible historicity that cannot be assimilated into the idealization of the American family (7).
On a superficial and metaphorical level, Get Out can be interpreted as a story about bridging gaps between American families. Chris tries to overcome the historical distance persisting socially between White and Black America, but in his attempt to do so, he encounters the horrifying remnants of slavery mentality hidden so carefully by the Armitages under the “veil” accompanied by the White idealization of the ‘colorblind American family.’ Unsurprisingly, the origin of this encounter, or rather the first hint of danger, lies in Chris’ introduction to Georgina’s character. Dean tries to play Georgina off as an African-American woman who cared for his parents before they died and, as a result, is ‘part of the family.’ Yet, her subjugation (job as the housekeeper) and awkward social behavior mark her as a scar of slavery. This reflects Peele’s hint at the White invasion of Blackness in visual culture and his emphasis on the emotional symbolism of history evident in the film’s maternal figures. It is Rose’s mother who directs Chris to the limitlessly dark space of modern Black enslavement, and she is only able to get him there once she has exposed his traumatic guilt about ignoring his dying mother to watch the TV, a representation of a prevailing obedience to imaginary White visual culture over Black social reality. In this sense, social entrapment in the sunken place becomes the source of the film’s horror, but as Poll remarks “there are ways to escape from American horror, that is, there are spaces outside of American horror” (1-2).
Peele not only manages to find this space in limit-defying horror ingenuity but also with the infusion of his brand of absurdist social-comedy into the film. To many, his foray into horror was a surprise given that Peele was previously renowned for his sketch comedy show Key and Peele. He addressed this skepticism and the translation between horror and comedy during a 2017 interview in which he referred to comedy and horror as ‘two sides of the same coin.’ “Any really successful or great horror movie, you go and see there’s going to be laughter from nervousness. Most important for me, in order to achieve both of them you need to have a certain grounded-ness, a consistency. So for me it was like, ‘Look, this will work if I apply this absurd story to reality,” (Peele). By easing open the confining structure of the horror genre with this emphasis on apolitical nervous-comedy, Peele successfully rejects the traditional signifiers of Black pop culture and correspondingly attracts a wider audience, thus skewing the conventions of mainstream African American humor and horror. David Gillota expands on this element of Key and Peele’s comedy in “Black Nerds: New Directions in African American Humor”, “Rather than interrogating broad social and systemic inequalities, Key and Peele approach race either through the lens of personal experience, or as an absurdity. This approach to race ultimately challenges the rigid and essentialized visions of Blackness that are often perpetuated by mainstream media” (18, Gillota). As one of today’s post-soul Black artists (who Gillota distinguishes for their ability to break from the extension of conventional tropes of Black culture), Peele’s objective becomes locating the social balance between the horror and comedy of Get Out’s absurd body-snatching plot. The film’s massive financial success reflects Peele’s mastery as an entertainer. However, what demonstrates his prowess as an artist is how Get Out contributes to the ongoing reconciliation of Black misrepresentation in American visual culture.
Educated discussions of the racially problematic U.S. visual culture that Get Out explores date back as far as W.E.B. Du Bois’ conception of the color line and “double consciousness.” Raengo breaks down Du Bois’ concept, stating, “He characterized the Black subject as one affected by “double consciousness,” or the effect of seeing oneself through the eyes of another. With concepts that express the visual construction of race—how race is most immediately, although not exclusively, apprehended as a marked difference in the visual field” (22). The two consciousnesses Du Bois refers to are both present in each of Armitage’s victims. Perhaps the most poignant scene featuring such a victim comes during the party scene when Chris encounters the only other Black man present. He recognizes the man as an associate from the city named Andre. However, Chris is shocked to find that he meets an entirely different and new man. The difference between the two, in short, is that the Andre Chris meets is White. Though his skin color doesn’t say so, Andre’s outfit, his demeanor, his disconnect with Chris, a White wife at least twice his age who calls him Logan, and his performativity for the guests are indicative of socially White behavior. Thus, as evidenced by Andre, the victims of the Armitages are Black subjects whose White self-perception is stapled onto them both mentally and physically.
Given the metaphorical Black subjugation by White “post-slavery” social idealization that entrapment in the sunken place implies, Peele is emphasizing the widespread cultural confusion over the image of Blackness and the importance of overcoming it for survival in America. Raengo states that,
...just like he (the Black subject) is suspended between the impossibility of finding an ideal reflection of the self and identifying with the image of the other that is projected onto him—Fanon ultimately conceptualizes Blackness not as a visual property but rather as a visual relation; Blackness is not something that preexists before this encounter but is rather its by-product (25).
There is widespread disagreement over what connotes the proper visual representation of Blackness, yet the mission for those who intend to achieve it is common: combatting Black invisibility. It should then come as no surprise that Chris is an acclaimed photographer (with a concentration on Black Americans) who aims to take ownership of his images and, thus, his own image. The power of this symbolic act is evident during the climax of the party scene in which Chris accidentally flashes Andre, catalyzing his brief neurological self-awakening within the body robbed by the Armitages. Since he knows he won’t have long before Rose’s mom returns him to the sunken place, he keeps his warning to Chris brief: “Get Out!”.
As the author of his image, Chris’s awareness of the “veil” enables him to survive by escaping from the subjugation of the image imposed on him by the Armitages. I’ve referred multiple times to a “veil” in reference to W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of the same name articulated in Raengo’s following excerpt:
Du Bois says the Black is born under a “veil,” or a coat of opacity that shrouds her into invisibility, a void or darkness created by cultural misrepresentations, and also the territory of the unknown, the mysterious, and the unclear. Because of the impenetrability it creates, the veil is made to bear the repressed fantasies of the master, acting as a screen of projection of collective misconceptions about the Black (24).
The sunken place denoted by the image of limitless Blackness and the sound of African spirits is a product of the “veil” Du Bois conceptualized. Though the Armitages manage to trap Chris here, they only do so briefly before Chris discovers he can elude the hypnosis-induced sunken place trance by plugging his ears with the cotton of the chair he is bound to. This awareness, combined with his recognition of the photo flash as an instrument of self-possession and protection, ultimately enables Chris’ survival. As Rose’s grandfather is about to kill him for murdering the Armitage family during his escape attempt, Chris flashes him with the camera and awakens the original owner of the body the Armitage patriarch occupies. The unity these two gain via this disarming indicates Peele’s message regarding how understanding the “veil” can be weaponized in the construction of Blackness. Raengo elaborates on this, stating that “By seeing through the veil, the observed becomes the observer… it institutes a second sight: the ability to see oneself being seen, to see oneself seeing (i.e., seeing the image of Whiteness projected onto oneself as a screen), and to behold the entire scene” (24). Just as Chris survives the Armitages’ attempt to enslave him in their White image via his knowledge of the “veil” in visual and social culture, Peele implies African-American viewers can free themselves from the contemporary image of White subjugation with similar manipulation of the “veil.” That he can dissect such culturally essential topics through the masterful navigation of a highly entertaining, genre-blending directorial debut makes Jordan Peele one of the definitive post-soul artists of this cinematic generation, just as it makes Get Out one of the most important movies of the decade.
Bradley, Rizvana. “Vestiges of Motherhood: The Maternal Function in Recent Black Cinema.” Film Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 2, 2017, pp. 46–52. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26413862. Accessed 3 May 2021.
Gillota, David. “Black Nerds: New Directions in African American Humor.” Studies in American Humor, no. 28, 2013, pp. 17–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23823874. Accessed 3 May 2021.
Peele, Jordan. Interview. Conducted by Eric Eisenberg. CinemaBlend, Future plc, 22 Feb. 2017, www.cinemablend.com/news/1628150/how-horror-and-comedy-can-work-together-according-to-get-outs-jordan-peele. Accessed 7 May 2021.
Poll, Ryan. “Can One ‘Get Out’?” The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 51, no. 2, 2018, pp. 69–102. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/45151156. Accessed 2 May 2021.
Raengo, Alessandra. Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled (Film Theory in Practice). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.