A Horror Film That Spoke Beyond Screams
When the movie “Get Out” came out in 2017, many people thought it was like any other psychological thriller in the cinema. Little did they know, the movie was much more than that. It was an extremely clever satire of modern-day racism all wrapped up in a thriller. It tackled racism head on in a way that made the audience think deeply, all the while keeping them frightened. The reason the movie had such a deep impact was the fact that the characters lived out similar experiences in real life.
The Plot That Unraveled like a Nightmare
The movie episode starts when Chris Washington, a young black photographer, enters into a love relationship with a white woman called Rose Armitage, who comes from a rich family. The couple comes to a vacation place owned by Rose’s family. At first, everything looks bright and Rose’s father, the head of the family, tries to joke and relax while acting a bit too liberal by saying that “if it was possible, he would vote for Obama for the 3rd time.” Rose’s mother, who is a psychiatrist, does not leave the chance to excuse Chris’s life and tries to help him to stop smoking by hypnosis.
Yet, Chris starts observing strange behavior – the Black workers across the estate act oddly of monotonous, and dialogue at times assume a strange undertone.
“Lured, hypnotized and had the conscience of other wealthy, white people implanted,” Chris realized was the sad and terrible reality about the Armistadge family.
In desperation, “[he]… not only escapes, but can be seen to metaphorically emerge from a structure as well known and ancient as the world that has long denied freedom to and controlled the bodies of Black people.” This view is what the ending of the movie presents and has emotions of freedom and relief, however, what is bone chilling is the fact that they will not have the freedom from the harsh attack of racism.
Intended to represent the survivor of the film, Chris had put in a performance that was greatly influenced from the pain and sufferings. Just like in the movie, during the time the film ‘Get Out’ released, Daniel Kaluuya was not very well known in America. Black Mirror was the first exposure to him for most of the audience, especially in the US of A.
That feeling of being “looked at but not seen” was also the feeling of isolation Chris had in the Armitage home. In the case of Kaluuya, his big monologue where he describes not being able to save his mother due to an accident, was not antagonistic at all. Rather, he did so because of the sadness he was carrying from the struggles of his childhood. His emotional frailty in that moment was so palpable that even Peele, if only for a moment, admitted that it was the one moment that in fact, stunned the crew.
Strangely enough, there field in Hollywood even before the shooting commenced. In it, there was the notion that Kaluuya was unable to “align with the African American audience” due to his Anglocentric background. Peele snubbed the idea, stating that Daniel had actually lived the reality that the film was attempting to critique. That decision changed the voting in the Academy Awards, with Kaluuya being nominated for his role.
Aside from that, there was also the case of Allison Williams.
For he role, she was granted the opportunity to play a completely different person from whom she was used to playing in the series Girls. In it, she acted the role of a perfect girlfriend, who, much to the audience’s surprise, ends up mutilating her partner’s body. Such a drastic change to the character was fulfilled in her performance because she claimed to be frightened by the role the most.
In real life, Williams was the daughter of distinguished American news broadcaster Brian Williams, which meant she grew up in a privileged environment. In assuming the role of Rose, she was compelled to examine that privilege, particularly the boundaries of innocence and complicity. The capacity to transition from a display of warmth to one of bone-chilling menace was a contradiction that the film sought to unravel — the way in which cold, unadulterated racism could maintain a disarmingly smiling façade.
The Armitages and the Subtle Power of Casting
Catherine Keener as the mother and hypnotist Missy, and Bradley Whitford as the father, a hopelessly liberal Dean, both professionally and for the world, have relied and drawn from the experience of a lifetime of coddled, layered roles. In the hypnosis scene, Keener has admitted that she was teacup bound and filmed the scene, the gentle control of another mind resonating with how society stereotypically pulls the strings of control behind a mindless façade.
Whitford, on the contrary, relished in his own discomfort of trying to sound the least bit progressive. His Obama line, while an attempt to impersonate, has ironically become an archive, memoir, and a classic, for the world and his audience to unearth and discover, nostalgically.
The SHIFT – Peele’s gamble.
Before the movie Get Out, Jordan Peele was recognized as one of the comedians from the show Key & Peele. A horror movie was the last thing that anyone expected from him. While growing up, Peele described himself as “a horror nerd” which gave him the dream of one day using the horror genre to talk about race.
Not many people know that Peele had a hard time getting funding for the film. Studios rejected the proposal saying a “race-themed horror” was too much of a gamble. Contrary to the accusations, the movie was greenlit with a budget of only $4.5 million which, while still small for Hollywood, was a huge difference from the expected budget. Peele was able to use his vision to turn the movie into a $255 million global phenomenon.
One of the parts of the movie that people remember the most is the “The Sunken Place” where Chris’s consciousness is trapped during hypnosis. Chris’s hypnosis Peele described as his own fear of being a Black man in America. He said “the feeling of screaming at the top of your lungs and can no one hear you”. That metaphor resonated with many people and especially to the people that the whole world was deaf to.
A storm of controversy that hinged upon the very cultural aspects of the film and The Novel of Get Out didn’t just stop at entertainment. It triggered dialogues. Black people who viewed the film understood it as a reflection of their everyday microaggressions and the latent form of “polite racism.” It was a shocker to many as it revealed how systemic oppression works behind a well-decorated smile.
In my case India was also the only other country to receive Get Out, only critically though. The film was lauded for attempting to deal with caste-like hierarchies in a Western context. They understood the discomfort of Chris in the Armitage home as emblematic of the experiences of many who are outside of and attempting to make sense of the complex and highly stratified societal order of class and caste in India. It was a lesson that horror does not need to be defined in relation to the supernatural “other.” Society is a monster.
Where the reel and the real intersect is in the theory of Get Out. It was beyond just the journey of Chris. It was also that of Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams and of course, Jordan Peele. Kaluuya grappled with the challenges of his identity, Williams was uncomfortable with her privilege set, and Peele was living in his terror which he breathed into life as his debut film.
It was a seismic bombshell for Hollywood that won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, fundamentally changing the world of horror. Most importantly, it earned the audience the right to produce a primal scream, not just for what occurs in the dark, but for what occurs in the unforgiving searing light, in refined discourse, in civilization.
This is the reason Get Out is still, to many, a memory, a mirror, a warning. And more importantly, it is not unquestionably a single movie.
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