Image via Universal Pictures
Perhaps you didn’t find the reveal to be big, but that’s a
deceptive trick from Peele, but the ending is quietly brilliant. As it
percolates beneath a louder surface. you might say that it’s in “the
sunken place.” He leads you to believe for much of the film’s runtime
that the Armitage family (Keener and Bradley Whitford) is brainwashing the black people who work at their estate (played with great oddball detachment by Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel) and probably the young black “lover” (Lakeith Stanfield) of one of the Armitage’s much older white friends (Geraldine Singer). But Peele expertly keeps the question of why?
in the back of your head without feeling the need to hammer it home
explicitly by the end. But he’s peppered in many clues throughout the
film’s runtime to give us the answer without having to scream it. In
this way, Get Out is a great entertainment with subversive
elements just below the surface. Like Keener’s hypnotic method of
choice, drop in a teabag and let it steep for a few minutes and the
contents will be revealed and (and it’s also a heated swallow).
Before we get to the racially charged Being John Malkovich meets Oldboy plot additions, let’s go back to what we know. We know that Stanfield’s “Andrew Logan King,” a fellow who dresses like Mr. Rogers, wears a straw hat and won’t fist bump, is actually the body of Andre Hayworth a young black man we saw abducted in an affluent neighborhood to open the film. Hayworth has been missing since January 2016. And when Chris takes a photograph of “Andrew Logan King” at the Armitage’s annual party, the flash causes Andrew Logan King’s nose to bleed and Andre Hayworth briefly appears in a rage telling Chris to “get out” of there as soon as he can. Mrs. Armitage takes Andrew into a back room where we assume that he is hypnotized again and then he apologizes for his behavior, blaming a seizure from the camera flash.
Previous to the Andrew Logan King encounter, we’ve got to talk about Chris’ first night in the Armitage house. Rose tells Chris—who’s concerned that she hasn’t told her family that he’s black before he came—that although she’s never taken a black man home, her parents are not racist and indeed her father will just be glad to say aloud that he would’ve gladly voted for a third term of Obama. Indeed the patriarch of the family does tell Chris this in a gazebo while he observes his plantation-like estate and boasts that there isn’t another property for miles. Although the Obama line is predictably funny—due to how Obama is always used as a deflection for accusations of racism still existing by people in denial—Peele uses it after setting up two huge pieces of information.
First, while receiving a tour of the house, papa Armitage shows Chris a series of photos of his father, who competed in the 1936 Olympics but came in second to Jesse Owens. Owens won four gold medals in Berlin that year, in all four competitions he was slotted in (the 100m and 200m dash, the 4x100m relay and the long jump), which defiantly defeated Adolf Hitler’s desire for Aryan genetic superiority to be solidified on his own home turf. (For those who want the facts, the runners who came in second to Owens in each dash were indeed American, but both silver medalists, Ralph Metcalfe and Mack Robinson, were also black.) Chris says that his father shouldn’t have felt bad about losing to one of the all-time greatest American athletes. And Armitage responds, “He almost got over it.”
Then, before getting to the gazebo for the required Obama line, Armitage says that it must look strange to have two black servants working for them, but since they took care of his parents he couldn’t stand to let them go because they felt like they were family. The Obama joke follows and in storytelling, it’s perfect, because the rule of three makes you focus on the final bit of information that’s being told and try to remember the other two when you retell it. Ultimately, in rewinding, the previous two bits of information are the most important pieces to the puzzle of why the Armitages are offering a service that allows their friends, at a price, to inhabit the bodies of black men.
So that brings us to the Oldboy-esque, basement scenario,
where Chris is held captive and relayed messages through the television
after he discovers a box of photographs that shows Rose with many
different black boyfriends (and one notable girlfriend) previous to him.
A blind art curator (Stephen Root) informs Chris, via
television relay, that he’s won the prize of becoming Chris by
out-bidding all the others. The surgical process that the grandfather
Armitage (who lost to Owens and never quite got over it) has perfected
is that Chris’ being will be suppressed except for the motor functions,
and the art curator’s brain will be transplanted to overtake
Chris’ consciousness, rendering him completely powerless and
paralyzed, yet it seems that there’s just enough of a sliver of the
previous owner’s consciousness there that can temporarily come out if
the proper stimulus is provoked.
After receiving this information, Chris thinks back to the eugenics-like talk directed at him when he was meeting the Armitage’s friends. For instance, the woman who felt his bicep and commented on how “strong” he was, before asking Rose whether sex was really different with a black man. The fetishized physical traits of the black male physique are further represented by the white couple that say, “black is in fashion!”
Before we get to the racially charged Being John Malkovich meets Oldboy plot additions, let’s go back to what we know. We know that Stanfield’s “Andrew Logan King,” a fellow who dresses like Mr. Rogers, wears a straw hat and won’t fist bump, is actually the body of Andre Hayworth a young black man we saw abducted in an affluent neighborhood to open the film. Hayworth has been missing since January 2016. And when Chris takes a photograph of “Andrew Logan King” at the Armitage’s annual party, the flash causes Andrew Logan King’s nose to bleed and Andre Hayworth briefly appears in a rage telling Chris to “get out” of there as soon as he can. Mrs. Armitage takes Andrew into a back room where we assume that he is hypnotized again and then he apologizes for his behavior, blaming a seizure from the camera flash.
Previous to the Andrew Logan King encounter, we’ve got to talk about Chris’ first night in the Armitage house. Rose tells Chris—who’s concerned that she hasn’t told her family that he’s black before he came—that although she’s never taken a black man home, her parents are not racist and indeed her father will just be glad to say aloud that he would’ve gladly voted for a third term of Obama. Indeed the patriarch of the family does tell Chris this in a gazebo while he observes his plantation-like estate and boasts that there isn’t another property for miles. Although the Obama line is predictably funny—due to how Obama is always used as a deflection for accusations of racism still existing by people in denial—Peele uses it after setting up two huge pieces of information.
First, while receiving a tour of the house, papa Armitage shows Chris a series of photos of his father, who competed in the 1936 Olympics but came in second to Jesse Owens. Owens won four gold medals in Berlin that year, in all four competitions he was slotted in (the 100m and 200m dash, the 4x100m relay and the long jump), which defiantly defeated Adolf Hitler’s desire for Aryan genetic superiority to be solidified on his own home turf. (For those who want the facts, the runners who came in second to Owens in each dash were indeed American, but both silver medalists, Ralph Metcalfe and Mack Robinson, were also black.) Chris says that his father shouldn’t have felt bad about losing to one of the all-time greatest American athletes. And Armitage responds, “He almost got over it.”
Then, before getting to the gazebo for the required Obama line, Armitage says that it must look strange to have two black servants working for them, but since they took care of his parents he couldn’t stand to let them go because they felt like they were family. The Obama joke follows and in storytelling, it’s perfect, because the rule of three makes you focus on the final bit of information that’s being told and try to remember the other two when you retell it. Ultimately, in rewinding, the previous two bits of information are the most important pieces to the puzzle of why the Armitages are offering a service that allows their friends, at a price, to inhabit the bodies of black men.
Image via Universal
After receiving this information, Chris thinks back to the eugenics-like talk directed at him when he was meeting the Armitage’s friends. For instance, the woman who felt his bicep and commented on how “strong” he was, before asking Rose whether sex was really different with a black man. The fetishized physical traits of the black male physique are further represented by the white couple that say, “black is in fashion!”
That itself is all very subversive and much more sinister
than the brainwashing we were originally thinking; white people wanting
to become black to experience what they consider to be superior traits.
But it’s what’s said and seen that’s not repeated that make it even
more unseemly and perverse. For instance, when we learn that the help on
the estate are actually Rose’s grandfather and grandmother living as
their black servants, it re-contextualizes Walter’s night runs
(potentially faster than he was in his own body) and his statement that
he isn’t “asked to do anything [he] wouldn’t want to do” while Chris
points out that they work him really hard. Rose’s grandfather, who was
beaten by a black athlete during the Olympics that were held in Germany
at the height of Aryan Nazism, desires to test the limits of his new
black body and no longer feel inferior.
Now, it’s not just the perceived superior athletic makeup and sexual virility that makes “black in fashion” in this neighborhood, the key to understanding that is Andre’s missing person. When Chris’ friend Rod (LilRel Howery) discovers that many black men have disappeared near the Armitages estate and goes to the police, the detective (who is also black) brings in her colleagues to laugh at his story. Now, his theory does indeed sound outlandish and ridiculous and Peele does play it for laughs (they’ve got a sex slave den!), but this scene also shows how the police can be given information about multiple black men disappearing in an area and shrug it off due to preconceived notions of young black men dying or going to prison at a much higher rate than the rest of the population.
This scene, followed by Rose’s Google search for promising NCAA
prospects as she “scouts” her next potential body to snatch (which
speaks to both physical traits and largely focuses on black athletes who
often hail from neighborhoods that are perceived by the police and
media to be less safe) gives us the sense that the Armitages abduct
young black men because American society has already discarded and
arrested so many, they have a higher probability of going undetected.
Perhaps that’s why the Armitages started with their parent’s caretakers
as their first victims, if they already had two black strangers living
with them, it would be easier to excise them from society.
Peele tests the audience’s endurance with two police encounters. The first one, Rose sticks up for Chris when she has an accident but the policeman wants to see Chris’ ID anyway. The audience likely views this scene as unjust and agrees with Chris when he says Rose’s handling of the situation was “hot.” But the second time we see sirens, after Chris has broken away from the compound and is standing over a bloodied Rose with a shotgun nearby, Peele holds onto the flashing red and blue lights long enough to make us feel the awful awareness that this scene that we’d find so comforting in a standard horror movie, is all the sudden chilling because it’s a black man standing over a bloody white woman and we know who the monster of the movie is but we don’t trust the policeman to. (It also plays up the awareness that we never see a black person survive any mainstream horror film.) That it turns out to be Rod in a TSA vehicle (do those exist? And can an agent take them away from the airport undetected?) shows that Peele was setting us up for a gut punch moment and in a way, to put the audience, which no doubt will have a lot of white people and woke people in it, in the shoes of a young black man. Because we’re rooting for him, because we’ve discovered this ridiculously elaborate eugenics experiment with him, we are in his shoes about to confront something completely unjust and it’s devastating. #BlackMindsMatter
Rose, who is not yet aware that it’s Rod, knows the situation, too
and she plays up her poor white woman who’s been attacked by a black man
routine with relish (think to the recent open wound that Emmett Till’s accuser admitted to making everything up;
he was tortured and shot, she lived on for decades). Although, it’s a
little too convenient that Rose has a box of pictures of her with her
previous black male victims just sitting on the floor of her closet,
Peele and Williams delight in showing her true colors. Ever heard of the
subgenre of exploitation films involving Nazi prison guards under the
title Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS? Well Get Out is “Rose, the She Wolf in Woke Clothing.”
(Sidebar: Rose’s methodology is perhaps the most imperfect thread in Get Out, raising a few more questions than answers. Such as, how frequently does this auction happen? She has about a dozen selfies with black men who we assume are victims, but she’s only 26 years old and looks the same in all the photographs; the yearly event does seem like a fraudulent line of dialogue, but still, Rose appears to have to many trophies for the romantic timeline.)
However, despite all the revelations that the Armitages and their friends desire to be black for certain societal reasons, Peele isn’t telling us that they’re right to want that. Instead, through Rose’s shenanigans, her insane brother’s (Caleb Landry Jones) dinner table utterance of wanting the “beast” of Chris to emerge through a wrestling match, and the Armitage’s protecting of the family heritage they’ve placed inside black bodies, Peele isn’t showing us that one race is superior to the other. He’s showing us that ideas of racial superiority are learned and passed down in families. It’s not natural. And anyone who says that should get out, right now.
Now if you really wanna get floored, think of how Peele got Chris out of the basement. By panic-scratching at a leather chair, his established reflex to hypnosis, he produced a fluffy cotton-like stuffing. He then placed that stuffing in his ears and was able to silence the further hypnotic attempts and thus was able to beat the man who earlier called him a beast and get back upstairs. Now what does cotton, the substance that freed him, represent to the American experience other than the subjugation, exploitation and terror of slavery? Here that substance is produced by his terror of a new type of enslavement and it saves him. GET OUT!
Now, it’s not just the perceived superior athletic makeup and sexual virility that makes “black in fashion” in this neighborhood, the key to understanding that is Andre’s missing person. When Chris’ friend Rod (LilRel Howery) discovers that many black men have disappeared near the Armitages estate and goes to the police, the detective (who is also black) brings in her colleagues to laugh at his story. Now, his theory does indeed sound outlandish and ridiculous and Peele does play it for laughs (they’ve got a sex slave den!), but this scene also shows how the police can be given information about multiple black men disappearing in an area and shrug it off due to preconceived notions of young black men dying or going to prison at a much higher rate than the rest of the population.
Image via Universal
Peele tests the audience’s endurance with two police encounters. The first one, Rose sticks up for Chris when she has an accident but the policeman wants to see Chris’ ID anyway. The audience likely views this scene as unjust and agrees with Chris when he says Rose’s handling of the situation was “hot.” But the second time we see sirens, after Chris has broken away from the compound and is standing over a bloodied Rose with a shotgun nearby, Peele holds onto the flashing red and blue lights long enough to make us feel the awful awareness that this scene that we’d find so comforting in a standard horror movie, is all the sudden chilling because it’s a black man standing over a bloody white woman and we know who the monster of the movie is but we don’t trust the policeman to. (It also plays up the awareness that we never see a black person survive any mainstream horror film.) That it turns out to be Rod in a TSA vehicle (do those exist? And can an agent take them away from the airport undetected?) shows that Peele was setting us up for a gut punch moment and in a way, to put the audience, which no doubt will have a lot of white people and woke people in it, in the shoes of a young black man. Because we’re rooting for him, because we’ve discovered this ridiculously elaborate eugenics experiment with him, we are in his shoes about to confront something completely unjust and it’s devastating. #BlackMindsMatter
Image via Universal
(Sidebar: Rose’s methodology is perhaps the most imperfect thread in Get Out, raising a few more questions than answers. Such as, how frequently does this auction happen? She has about a dozen selfies with black men who we assume are victims, but she’s only 26 years old and looks the same in all the photographs; the yearly event does seem like a fraudulent line of dialogue, but still, Rose appears to have to many trophies for the romantic timeline.)
However, despite all the revelations that the Armitages and their friends desire to be black for certain societal reasons, Peele isn’t telling us that they’re right to want that. Instead, through Rose’s shenanigans, her insane brother’s (Caleb Landry Jones) dinner table utterance of wanting the “beast” of Chris to emerge through a wrestling match, and the Armitage’s protecting of the family heritage they’ve placed inside black bodies, Peele isn’t showing us that one race is superior to the other. He’s showing us that ideas of racial superiority are learned and passed down in families. It’s not natural. And anyone who says that should get out, right now.
Now if you really wanna get floored, think of how Peele got Chris out of the basement. By panic-scratching at a leather chair, his established reflex to hypnosis, he produced a fluffy cotton-like stuffing. He then placed that stuffing in his ears and was able to silence the further hypnotic attempts and thus was able to beat the man who earlier called him a beast and get back upstairs. Now what does cotton, the substance that freed him, represent to the American experience other than the subjugation, exploitation and terror of slavery? Here that substance is produced by his terror of a new type of enslavement and it saves him. GET OUT!
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