Abstract
This essay provides some secret messages about Jordan Peele's film, Get Out that revealed racism in American culture. The author argues that Peele's Get Out illustrates the protracted terrorism that is whiteness and the concomitant objectification and utilization of the black body for white survival, accumulation, and pleasure. The film challenges those audiences to consider how anti-blackness operates within schools and education policy. More specifically, those audiences should challenge longstanding inequities that foreclose the present and future of black youth. The film also depicts the lack of attention on missing black Americans compared to missing white females. Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed low-budget shocker became a surprise hit and showed viewers a terrifying look at the fractured myth of a post-racial US. This film uses the modes of horror to make viewers feel what daily life is like for real black men and women.
Keyword: Get out the film, racist film, black American movie
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Introduction
Horror movies are commonly upcoming in cinema, we often watch some horror movies that just challenge our adrenalin by bringing up ghosts and mystical figures or characters. Then, how about horror movies that have a big message revealed about a country’s society and culture that indirectly bring up some racist attitude in their social environment?
Get Out is an American horror film that was written and directed by Jordan Peele. This film was theatrically released in the United States on February 24, 2017, by Universal Pictures. It grossed $255 million worldwide on a $4.5 million budget, with a net profit of $124 million, making it the tenth-most profitable film of 2017. Peele has dealt with race in America in a refreshing, funny, and unflinching manner. The number of things Peele manages to reference is stunning: the taboo of mixed relationships, eugenics, the slave trade, black men dying first in horror films, suburban racism, and police brutality. In one legendary Chappelle’s Show skit, comedian Paul Mooney wearily relays to the camera: “The black man in America is the most copied man on this planet, bar none. Everybody wanna be a nigga, but nobody wanna be a nigga.” His words are just as true now as when they were filmed over a decade ago, and I was reminded of them while watching Get Out, a movie that broadcasts the unique horror of the black experience in a white America. Get Out ingeniously uses common horror tropes to reveal truths about how pernicious racism is in the world.
How’s Get Out storyline
Get Out has a general narrative structure borrowing from predecessors of horror, mystery, and psychological thrillers. In its exposing of racial tensions, the film has been, referred to as “an example of ‘horror vérité’, because it uses the mechanics of the horror genre to expose actually existing racism, to render newly visible the very real, but often masked, the racial landscape of a professedly liberal post-racial America.” (Landsburg, 2018, paragraph 1). Watchers receive the mystery of the hypnosis, but also the leery music of the scariness.
Actually, at the beginning of this movie plot look like American culture in general which is bringing your boyfriend or your girlfriend to meet your family for some approval. A photographer named Chris (played by Daniel Kaluuya) joins his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), on a weekend trip to meet her family. Chris’s meet-the-parents anxiety is amplified when he learns that Rose, who’s white, hasn’t told her family that he is black. But after they arrive Chris’s worries fizzle. Missy and Dean, Rose’s parents, are pretty nice — albeit over-eagerly so. Jeremy (Rose’s brother) seems to be suffering from some sort of personal aggression issue, however, and the family’s black maid and black groundskeeper are just plain weird. At the first, Chris look likes very welcomed by Rose’s family, but then he discovered something weird with his girlfriend’s family. He felt anxious and wonders what really happened with all of the stuff about this family because he feels weird about Rose’s family's welcoming attitude toward him such as a black man.
Rose’s family, it turns out, runs an underground transplant operation where the brains of white people are inserted into the bodies of blacks. The black people are reduced to vessels — unable to control any movement or form of speech — as they helplessly observe their white captor carry out their former life. In the movie this stunted state of being in which the black person is forced to live the remainder of his or her days is called “the sunken place.”
The man who ultimately purchases Chris’s body is Jim, a blind art dealer. Jim doesn’t just lust over Chris’s eyes, he wants his black vision: The invaluable tool forged through a lifetime of black experiences, black struggles, and black joy. It is the final step in this dystopian allegory of appropriation, where a black body is assumed, but the histories of the black being are left to erasure. Jim explains his decision this way: “What I want is so much deeper: Your eye, man. I want those things you see through.”
Prefer being silent about racism for politeness
Chris’s white girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), invites him to spend the weekend at her family’s house in suburbia. Everyone there, from her parents to her parents’ white friends and neighbors to her family’s black servants, is acting strangely. Increasingly suspicious and scared, Chris eventually falls victim to a community-wide plot to abduct black men and women and fuse their brains with those of older white men and women in a horrific eugenics experiment. His only option becomes escape by any means necessary — which in Get Out’s case means open violence.
As we know that black Americans mostly get labeled as people who often use their strength for violence, but in the fact not all the violence from black Americans. Mainstream American culture considers violence heroic in certain socially sanctioned contexts — “just” wars, certain sporting events, self-defense, etc. This view extends, for the most part, to our pop culture, too: Our heroes from movies, television, and video games are often loners standing up to an unjust system, using violence to accomplish whatever they need.
But when violence is used as a means of resistance by minorities or the disenfranchised, culture and pop culture tend to take a different view, it becomes something to be avoided at all costs. Because has labeled with a bad attitude, black Americans prefer that must have high education to prove that they are not different from white and also have politeness.
Chris is strategically silent while enduring a fusillade of casually racist behaviors, and it’s clear he’s learned this maneuver through countless social interactions. Chris’s silence is deliberately designed to avoid hostility and create an appearance of politeness and compliance. He remains nonviolent until the last possible second, to his peril.
The film emphasizes Chris’s rising levels of fear and his patient attempts to remain calm and be on his best behavior in order to contextualize the escalating, life-threatening danger of his situation. In real life, the dominant narrative about black struggles to coexist within white society is that the black individual is the troublemaker, the source of agitation, and the problem to be dealt with. But because we’re so conditioned by horror as a genre to the trope of the “guy trying to convince himself everything’s fine when things are clearly not fine,” the audience remains on Chris’s side, even as his pushback against white suburbia escalates.
When Chris finally does resort to violence, it’s a cathartic and empowering moment, and there’s no platitude about peacemaking to be found. In Get Out, black violence isn’t a temporary step to harmonious assimilation with white people; rather, white people are intensely racist and need to be stopped. By making audience members — including white ones — relate to this feeling of desperation so clearly, Get Out challenges views on real-life black resistance and protest.
White feminism in a racist culture
According to Wikipedia White feminism is an epithet used to describe feminist theories that focus on the struggles of white women without addressing distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking another privilege.
In America, white feminism seems like being toxic to some people, especially black women. Black women, feel that there are some differences between feminism between white and black women. White feminism seems racist because there are some cases where feminism didn’t work properly for black women. But this movie shows feminism with black men.
In this movie Rose (Chris’s girlfriend) seems warm, progressive, and awake to the realities of racism. She seems like the perfect kind of person to support Chris in surviving and fighting the white racist community he finds at her parents’ house. But Rose is the embodiment of “white feminism,” which prioritizes what white women want and need while ignoring social issues faced by minorities. Rose is consistently dismissive of Chris’s concerns about her family, asserting that her family is not racist in the least, citing her father’s love of Barack Obama as evidence. And when she defends him against the suspicions of a racist local police officer, she does so by speaking for him and over his objections. In one scene, she professes to be baffled by her family’s apparently oblivious racist aggressions toward Chris, which shows how well she recognizes and pays lip service to the act of being a good ally, even as she secretly uses that knowledge to further her family’s racist agenda.
A common criticism of white feminism is that white women want to be seen as supportive of minorities as long as their interests align, but when crisis moments arise, they support their own interests at the expense of minority groups. Rose’s behavior in the film is consistent with this critique, and when the crisis moment arrives in Get Out, this pattern is made crystal clear: She’s only been superficially supportive of Chris in order to manipulate him into aligning his interests with hers. When push comes to shove, she betrays him. Worse, she never had his back, to begin with. Beneath her winning exterior, she’s just as complicit in Chris’s oppression as the rest of her family. This twist reflects a larger, longstanding argument that white feminism has never prioritized racial equality as part of its agenda and has often actively worked against the cause. Rose’s feminism might be a more polite version of racism, but it’s still racism.
Racism is as American as pie. In order for the feminist movement to truly be progressive and intersectional, white women must face this fact and begin to take on their load of work. We are long overdue to dismantle this system, which, if it is not intentionally and aggressively addressed, will defeat us all in the end.
White microaggression as making dehumanization in one of the British cultures
According to Wikipedia Microaggression is a term used for brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative prejudicial slights and insults toward any group, particularly culturally marginalized groups. of women and minorities and other marginalized people. The power of a microaggression is that it’s often framed as casual ignorance — so if you get mad about it, you look like the oversensitive one. It’s used to consistently wear down and dehumanize your identity, while creating plausible deniability that can be used to make you look, well, crazy.
In Get Out, as in real life, white people’s seemingly innocuous comments on Chris’s race are not innocuous at all, though at first they’re presented that way. Chris endures a social nightmare: a garden party full of rich white people who invade his space, touch him without permission, prod him, and explicitly objectify him physically and sexually. They do all this while expecting him to approve of their benevolent approval of black people.
On the other hand, there is a British culture garden party that is a set for this microaggression. This is an American horror-mystery movie but its looks like Peele included some part of British culture in this movie. A Garden party is one of the British cultures that in the US is called a lawns party.
Back to microaggression that appears in this movie, All of this is initially portrayed as well-meaning, if annoying; as one film reviewer wrote in her review of the film, “These clueless white people are trying to be cool in front of Chris, whom they just sort of think must be cool because he’s black, and he’s indulged it.” But this is how microaggressions are calculated to come across, they’re statements and actions made with the intent to pass for clueless behavior while masking deeper forms of racism. Christ was very welcomed at that garden party which is held by Rose’s parents, but in fact, he has some microaggressions that are racist in that situation.
The comments Chris endures in good faith don’t attempt to genuinely interact with him; they’re buyer inquiries from a horrific parade of consumers inspecting new merchandise. Get Out portrays the partygoers’ “benevolent” racism as what it actually is: a cover for a system of dehumanization.
In conclusion, Get Out has a few secret messages about racism in America, in case prefers silence for politeness is all about how black people react against some people that intimidate them. Because in fact, in American culture there is little microaggression against them directly or indirectly. And also Jordan Peele’s Get Out illustrates that the physical space in which black people exist is not truly accepted, included, or beloved. A sociological and cultural analysis of this film demonstrates that liberal ideology and color-blind rhetoric in addressing racism is at its best perceived as a perpetuation of microaggressions and at its worst. And in addition, he inserted some British culture in that movie, which in my opinion it was unique, besides this is such a horror-mystery movie that in fact had a big message about racism in America.
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Out#Themes
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Out
- https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a22717725/what-is-toxic-white-feminism/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_the_United_States
- https://www.thecut.com/2017/03/what-get-out-gets-right-about-american-culture-and-blackness.html
- https://www.looper.com/143902/get-out-ending-explained/
- https://medium.com/the-base-line/get-out-the-little-movie-with-a-big-message-3152f34cd6d6
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