The pre-title scene encapsulates the film. An African-American man is puzzled by the “crazy” layout of the fancy suburb. An expensive white sports car trails him. With classical music on its radio it stops. The driver overpowers and abducts him. “Run rabbit run” now takes over the sound track, supporting the advice of the title: Get Out. This polished, witty horror film is a parable for post-Obama American racism. Not in redneck land, note, but among white liberals.
The central couple is the liberal dream. The young white beauty Rose Armitage brings her handsome black beau Chris to meet her wealthy intelligent parents. Mom Missy is a psychiatrist, dad Dean a neurosurgeon so -- despite Rose’s assurance -- we know they are going to mess with his head. Chris feared his unannounced blackness might mess with theirs.
Missy hypnotizes him with the tinkle of her delicate tea-cup, ostensibly to stop his smoking. Gentility disarms. Dean starts to transplant Chris's brain into the skull of a blind art dealer. That mad science exposes the liberal dream as a delusion. Rose's wacko brother Jeremy — a replay of Annie Hall’s Duane — was the abductor in the opening scene. His specialty is the head-lock, a brutish partner to his parents' head-work.
Missy hypnotizes him with the tinkle of her delicate tea-cup, ostensibly to stop his smoking. Gentility disarms. Dean starts to transplant Chris's brain into the skull of a blind art dealer. That mad science exposes the liberal dream as a delusion. Rose's wacko brother Jeremy — a replay of Annie Hall’s Duane — was the abductor in the opening scene. His specialty is the head-lock, a brutish partner to his parents' head-work.
That revelation is set up by the family’s arch friends and servants. All but one of the friends are liberal whites who transparently strain to seem to accept the black guy. The golfer knows Tiger. A portly gent evokes Colonel (finger-lickin good) Sanders. One old wreck’s wife feels Chris’s body hungrily. Their "acceptance" is vulpine.
The one exception is the black Brooklyn jazz musician who was earlier abducted, to be made a much older white woman’s sex slave. He responds to Chris's fist bump with a handshake. No more bro, he. The Armitages’ maid and groundskeeper have already been reduced to smiling subservience, just like on the old plantation. The new Northerners are on a Tara of their own. All the blacks have been drained of their difference, their character, reduced to functions. Worse, they're content to stay that way and object violently to Chris's intrusion into their "peace."
As Dean repeats, he would have voted for Obama a third time had the law allowed. Best pres of his lifetime. But this cheery liberalism is a deception, a lure to enslave another generation of suppressed and exploited blacks. Turns out Rose is a serial seducer for this collective. Before Chris is done with, she’s already on-line trolling for a black NBA prospect. The community uses Rose's sexuality and liberal pretence to attract both genders. She makes the blacks' legendary prowess their vulnerability.
The African American community is tricked by its impression of progress not to band together. Chris’s security guard friend (Rod!) is sufficiently paranoid (aka realistic) immediately to suspect the sexual enslavement plot -- at first a joke, then harrowingly real. But the three black cops who hear him out erupt into laughter. They’ve come a long way, baby, so they’re not about to believe the ancient prejudice persists.
Spoiler alert: It does. In spades. So to speak. As the election campaign and first month of Trump’s supposed presidency confirm. It turns out Obama's election did not signify a post-racist but a neo-racist America. That's this film's point.
Spoiler alert: It does. In spades. So to speak. As the election campaign and first month of Trump’s supposed presidency confirm. It turns out Obama's election did not signify a post-racist but a neo-racist America. That's this film's point.
The film is written and directed by the COMEDIAN Jordan Peele. Like the classic horror, it bodies forth our desperately suppressed fears. Horror and comedy are closely related, as Hitchcock often observed. The child laughs at our scary "Boo!” and we laugh at our adult nightmare films ever after, however nervously. This is an excellent film, both entertaining and chillingly prescient.
The film’s last suspense is the flashing police car. We assume it’s the white cop whom Rose earlier cowed with her fake liberalism. Here she calls out to him for help, clearly prepared to hang the killings on Chris and to deny his story. But it’s Chris’s friend so all’s well. The police lights like the camera flashes earlier snap the deadened blacks back to life, from their trance back to reality, from passivity to aggressive survival. Despite its appearance of reform, America remains locked in its insane bigotry.
The film’s last suspense is the flashing police car. We assume it’s the white cop whom Rose earlier cowed with her fake liberalism. Here she calls out to him for help, clearly prepared to hang the killings on Chris and to deny his story. But it’s Chris’s friend so all’s well. The police lights like the camera flashes earlier snap the deadened blacks back to life, from their trance back to reality, from passivity to aggressive survival. Despite its appearance of reform, America remains locked in its insane bigotry.
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