Get Out: The Unrealistic Reality Film — Heavy, Unanswered Questions About a Madness
Jordan Peele's Get Out as a horror film about the most polite racism. Why "post-racial" liberalism can be its own form of violence.
Get Out (Dir. Jordan Peele, 2017)
There is a specific kind of discomfort the film engineers in its first thirty minutes that almost no horror film manages: the horror of excessive politeness.
Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) meets his white girlfriend Rose's parents for the first time. They are relentlessly, enthusiastically, consciously non-racist. "I would have voted for Obama a third time." "Some of my best friends are..." The performance of racial tolerance is so thorough it becomes suffocating.
Peele's insight: this is not a film about overt racism. It's a film about what happens when the dominant culture decides it has solved racism by being very enthusiastic about Black excellence — while still wanting to possess it.
The Body Horror
The film's central mechanism — wealthy white families bidding to inhabit Black bodies, keeping the original consciousness imprisoned in a mental "sunken place" — works as horror precisely because of how recognizable the dynamic is.
The sunken place: consciousness fully intact, able to observe, unable to act or resist. The body performing perfectly, the self trapped watching.
Peele has said the sunken place represents the experience of Black Americans who can see clearly what is happening to them but find themselves structurally unable to change it. The horror is not the monster. The horror is the helplessness.
The Liberal Problem
What makes the film genuinely uncomfortable for certain audiences is that the villains are not racists in any conventional sense. They are educated, progressive, well-meaning people who have convinced themselves that their desire to be associated with Blackness is a form of admiration.
The argument is: a different kind of objectification is still objectification. Treating someone as a resource to be appropriated — even if the resource is talent or coolness rather than labor — is a form of violence.
Released in 2017. Watched it again in 2023. The questions it raises still don't have good answers.