Get Out: An Unreal Film About Reality — A Heavy Question That Still Has No Answer
How far can difference be accepted? A film that borrows the genre of horror-thriller to pose a deeply serious question.
Plot Summary
Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), a promising photographer, is in a relationship with his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams).
Invited to Rose's family home, Chris goes despite his apprehensions — and is surprised to find that Rose's parents receive him warmly. They give him a tour of the house and introduce the housekeeper Georgina and the groundskeeper Walter.
The title Get Out carries meanings beyond just "escape" or "flee" — it also means to be revealed. The film can be read as carrying the sense that the ugly, hidden face of anti-Black racism and envy is being exposed and brought to light.
Racial Hierarchy
The white residents of this enclave covet Black bodies — stronger, healthier, more vital. To access them, the entire community has been turned into a kind of tool for living longer. Rose's role is to lure Black people in from outside. Once brought to the estate, a Black person's brain is surgically replaced with a white one. We eventually learn that Georgina the housekeeper now carries Rose's grandmother's brain, and that Walter the groundskeeper carries her grandfather's.
This is a longstanding paradox at the heart of Western, white-centric worldviews. Step outside the Black-white frame and the same logic appears elsewhere. Adolf Hitler was consumed by a mania of Aryan supremacy, and his anti-Semitism produced the Holocaust.
Ending (Spoilers)
To pick up where the plot summary left off:
Georgina and Walter speak in ways that suggest they don't understand contemporary Black slang, and instead use older, predominantly white speech patterns.
When Chris tries to escape, he discovers in Rose's luggage photographs of her with many other Black people — posed like couples. Georgina and Walter, her previous "partners," had all been brought here from outside. The person who lured them all was Rose.
Tied to a chair, Chris is forced to watch a video showing the procedure: a white brain being transplanted into a Black body. His own body had been reserved for a blind white party guest.
Chris manages to stuff cotton from the chair padding into his ears, blocking the hypnotic trigger, and escapes just before the surgery. But Georgina and Walter block his way. He fights through them and flees. Rose, armed, tries to stop him; using his phone's flash to break her hold, he shoots her and attempts to strangle her. At that moment police lights appear — Chris nearly takes the fall — but in a dramatic turn, he survives, and his friend Rod arrives to drive him out. Rose and her family are all dead, and Chris looks back at the burning house as he escapes.
The film ends there, but there is actually an alternate ending to Get Out. In it, Chris is arrested by police after strangling Rose and sent to prison. His friend Rod presses him on the truth, but Chris refuses to speak.
Director Jordan Peele created this alternate ending to reflect the reality of racial injustice. In reality, Black men are often convicted of crimes they didn't commit. At the time, in the US, police were frequently using excessive force against Black people — and in some cases firing on them in non-threatening situations. This was the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement.
According to the Washington Post, Black Americans have been killed by police at a rate of roughly 1,000 per year since 2015, regardless of whether they were armed. As recently as last July, an unarmed Black man was shot sixty times by police, sparking renewed outrage. Get Out earns the label of a real unreality film precisely because of this context.
The reason I'm writing about Get Out now, albeit late, is that in recent years our own society has accumulated its own narrative of madness and desire. Financial manipulation and speculation, get-rich-quick schemes. The grotesque cult fanaticism on display in the recent Netflix documentary In the Name of God. Gender conflict and mutual hostility no less intense than racial conflict. The age of extremes — that is the era we are living in now.