02/05/2017
Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2016) is a film that does not deal in subtleties - visually or politically. In this essay, I will be discussing the film and its relation to genre – in equal parts examining the hybridized genre of ‘black comedy’ that it could be classed as, the way in the film is changing what could be classed as the black film genre - films made by black people - through ‘black aesthetics’, an aesthetic philosophical approach to lived blackness, and how these hybridizations or adjustments can push the boundaries of our currently constrained filmic landscape into greater inclusivity, which in turn reflects back on to our social and political lives.
Get Out was 2017’s first low-budget sleeper hit, noted for near unanimous critical praise. The plot centres around a reasonably simple narrative – a young photographer, by the name of Chris, is embarking on a trip into the affluent suburbs at the behest of his white girlfriend, who wants him to meet her family. He tentatively inquires as to the awareness of her parents of his race – a suggestion that she quickly and jokingly dismisses. She asserts that her parents are not in any way racist, and that her father ‘would have voted for Obama for a third term’, a fact that she implies he will surely bring up in conversation. Chris is wary, still, and his wariness can be felt by the audience in part because of the attentive expressiveness of the actor, Daniel Kaluuya, who plays Chris – his huge eyes are constantly watching and constantly alert (Fig. 1).
Figure 1
They arrive at the house after a disturbing incident, the couple hit a deer on their way in - Chris watches, with his penetrating gaze, as it expires in front of him - and they then must deal with the overt racist profiling of the small town cop who takes their 911 call after the incident. Chris’s girlfriend defends him avidly – which he admires. Chris himself is too aware of his own position, too weary of societies ills, to become angered by the policeman – this weariness and tired acceptance of his difference is a key feature to the work as Chris often ignores danger because he dismisses it as familiar racialised pettiness. They arrive at the house, a beautiful Rockwell-esque country spread, and Chris notices immediately, as does the audience, that something is slightly amiss. The family has two black hired hands, a maid and a gardener, and their hardened but soulless stares disturb Chris and the frame – the film freezes as they gaze with aimless threat towards us.
It is revealed that the mother of the family, a therapist, is also a skilled hypnotist, something the family suggest could help Chris quit his smoking habit – a frowned upon vice. Dry humour is derived from their distaste towards the habit, as they seem more disturbed by how the habit could affect their daughter than how it could affect Chris – already hinting at their priorities and also conforming, in a subtle way, to the stereotype that a black man can defile a white woman. He politely declines, suggesting that he is not keen on the idea of someone messing around within his head. In the night, Chris, feeling stressed, goes out for a smoke and witnesses some strange happenings. The black gardener, whom he had previously encountered through his soulless stare, runs at full pelt towards him from the pitch-black darkness of the surrounding forest, seemingly without any intention to stop or any notice that he had seen him. At the last second he veers off, running back into the night. Chris is then accosted by the matriarch of the family, who tricks him into entering a hypnotic void by delving into his personal trauma and striking a spoon against a porcelain tea cup, an important audio motif within the film.
The situation begins to devolve even further in a scene in which the family hosts a massive yearly party, apparently for friends of their recently deceased grandparents. The gathering is bizarre, with the guests clamouring to endear themselves to Chris with out-dated references to Tiger Woods and even suggestive winks towards his assumed ‘larger’ manhood – it is a satirised jibe at the way in which liberal white people may attempt to ingratiate themselves to the restrained chagrin of their black associates. At the back of the party, which Chris finds excruciatingly uncomfortable, there is another black man. He eagerly approaches him, only to find that this man is dressed like a Caucasian senior citizen, and behaves with a polite but strange, inhuman and definitely un-black, detachment (Fig.2).
Figure 2
Feeling like he might recognise the man in question, Chris attempts to snap a quick picture and send it to his friend, who works as airport security and serves as the films main comedic relief, not realising that the flash is on. The flash startles the man and he flips, screaming at Chris that he must ‘Get out!’ whilst bleeding from the nose. Not lost is the irony of the use of a phone to record crimes in an era of rampant police brutality, where black communities are often forced to record their suffering as proof that cannot be denied.
Whilst Chris is focusing on this strange outburst and his friend’s assertion that they do indeed know the missing person who became the man that Chris encountered, the party guests gather for a strange game of bingo/an auction in which Chris’s photo takes pride of place. A blind man whom Chris had spoken to earlier about his photographic work wins the top prize. Chris is now becoming extremely suspicious and wishes to leave. He begins to pack his things and notices, with horror, a box of photographs kept by his girlfriend in the closet. Despite her claim that he was her first black boyfriend, Chris leafs through a mountain of photos of her in romantic tableaus with countless other black people. Not deterred, he readies his bags and begs his girlfriend to leave – but she is not, and never was, on his side. Of course, the action devolves further as Chris is strapped to a chair and forced between an instructive TV guide to his involuntary lobotomy or a journey into the ‘sunken place’ of immobilised hypnosis. With quick wit, he manages to escape, murdering the family in an over-the-top brutal spectacle, and is finally rescued by his loyal, comedic, friend, who ends the film with a hysterically abrupt one-liner about the dangers of white people.
There is a reason as to my close recounting of the events of this film within this essay and it relates to the huge importance of the effect of this film on its cinematic audience. I am recreating the experience that the audience underwent and is still undergoing in the poring over of important motifs and moments within the film – the wider cinematic audience has similarly dissected this film to a very close degree, either in conversation, via text message or most popularly on the Internet and the signs and symbols put forth within the film are important to its aesthetic. It is a black film, for black people but it is also a film that everyone should be advised to watch if they wish to understand the current state of race relations within the USA.
The most important feature of Get Out as a blockbuster film in the 21st Century is the way in which its intended audience received it. For black viewers, the film is intended to provide an antidote against recent attempts at globalized horror, which either prioritize whiteness or insert a few token characters, which, most commonly in the horror and action genres, are quickly disposed of in early deaths. This can be seen in the extremely popular action/horror television series, The Walking Dead [1], which seemed to very rapidly ‘kill off ‘ black characters then systematically replace them. It is rare to have a black protagonist in a film, even, let alone more than three black characters and a black director and even then, the specifically black ideology of the film makes it quite a unique cinematic experience.
An interesting piece of popular new media criticism in the form of a gif heavy Buzzfeed article was circulated about the film. Titled ’22 Secrets Hidden In "Get Out" You May Have Missed’ [2], the authors carefully dissected the film, observing every symbolic use or piece of double entendre inserted purposefully by the director for the satisfaction of his audience. Not surprisingly, a black audience member more easily identifies many of these features. The article emphasises many uses of symbolism that a white viewer may not have noticed, such as the motif of spoon banging on the side of the tea cup to induce a hypnotic stupor, which was apparently a common technique that slave owning ladies would use to call their slaves to attend them in the pre-abolition south. Not only did Buzzfeed list these astute observations, they were swiftly embellished by many other observations made in the Facebook enabled comment section by members of the public, who added their own opinions as to what the meaning behind specific occurrences really was. This involvement is strikingly rare for a film of this kind, with Internet forums in the kind of fervour usually only as inspired within the sci-fi or comic book community.
In an age where many media giants clamour for internet attention, often employing young, digitally savvy people to create internet content, Get Out achieved what many have found impossible – it was the inspiration for an organic, audience generated ‘meme’. The meme, perpetuated by young black people on mediums such as Snapchat and Instagram, has been called the ‘Get Out Challenge’[3] and consists of the filming of people racing up to the person who is holding the camera in a manner very similar to the black, lobotomized gardener within the film, only veering away at the last second (Fig.3). This, of course, often has hilarious consequences as people slip and fall in their efforts. There is an interesting social commentary at play here, as appropriation across the medium of social media, as well as in general culture, is rife and has often been critiqued by black creators who have started social media trends without deserved recognition. For example, the young woman who started the trend of calling things ‘On Fleek’[4] did not receive any compensation from the phrase – despite its use being used to market many consumer items – whilst the creators of the rather contrived (by comparison) ‘Damn, Daniel’ meme were invited on to Ellen and grandly awarded for their efforts. The unequal nature of recognition for trends is something that is being reflected not only in the film Get Out but also in the subsequent audience response – a white content maker would be hard pressed to become involved in this particular meme without significant criticism.
Figure 3
Although the Get Out meme may have sprung organically out of audience appreciation for the films, the clever appeals to the black experience are very intentional. Jordan Peele, the director of the film, has stated that the film is exactly what it appears to be – a film for the black audience. It pays head to every nuance not only of the everyday black experience, but also the black experience of watching film. In an interview with PRI [5], Peele acknowledges the legacy of a famous skit by Eddie Murphy, a black comedy pioneer who skirts a similar line between frightening and funny and has made similar waves in hybrid action/comedy genres in roles such as Beverly Hills Cop (Martin Brest, 1984), that some could see as an inspiration for the film. In this skit, Murphy bemoans the stupidity of white couples in horror movies who ignore all the signs in their haunted house, continuously repeating the phrase ‘Get out!’ as the punch-line of this piece of observational comedy. The message that Murphy was crafting – that white people often lack the cultural awareness to identify a dangerous situation in the same way a black person is accustomed to is fundamental to Get Out.
In the PIR interview, Peele, originally a comic himself, states that the film not only introduces representation into the hybrid genre but that a piece of that representation is the sensibility of black people. According to Peele, for once for the black audience, if the lead does not make the smart decision you understand the reasons why as they generally arise from racial sensitivity. In this way, the film is a smart comedy of manners. Peele also remarked that he was inspired by the way in which films like The Stepford Wives (Ira Levin, 1972) and Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968 tackled politicised genre. As a man, Peele does not feel persecuted by these films in a similar way that a white person should not feel offended by Get Out. Peele refers to the adjacent genres of horror and comedy as ‘the shining twins’ of genre and explains that if the audience relates to Chris’s journey, they will feel refreshed by the representation, but if they don’t then they are being given the opportunity to experience, both cognitively and physically due to the affective body-genres of both horror and comedy, this viewpoint, which promotes empathy amongst an audience.
Regarding the aforementioned ‘shining twins’ of horror and comedy, Peele seems to have capitalised on their uncanny union. The work is definitely a horror, as demonstrated by the proliferation of jump scares and gore scattered within the film, but what is more difficult to define is whether it is, in fact, a comedy. It has a wry, ghastly humour that can surprise the audience when inserted into the least expected scenarios, almost ‘jump-laughs’ of a kind. Noel Carroll has described this phenomenon in his work Horror And Humour in which Carroll situates the similarities in their shared body affect and incongruity. He writes “For, as noted previously, it appears that these two mental states-being horrified and being comically amused-could not be more different. Horror, in some sense, oppresses; comedy liberates. Horror turns the screw; comedy releases it. Comedy elates; horror stimulates depression, paranoia, and dread. Though these feelings, insofar as they are not propositions, are not contradictory in the logician's sense, they are at least so emotionally conflictive that we would not predict that they could be provoked by what to all intents and purposes appear to be the same stimuli. Yet that counter- intuitive finding is where the data point us.” [6]
By comparing BLACK COMEDY to ‘BLACK COMEDY’. I am not simply engaging in wordplay, there is in fact a conjoined ideology between the two spliced genres, conflated as a means to engender discussion and empathy. Black comedy, by definition is that very transgressive intersection between the Horror and Comedy genres – it is comedy that deals in the dark, the evil, the shocking, and the grotesque. The Surrealist Andre Breton, who created the term by curating The Anthology Of Black Humour, first formally categorized black comedy as a sub-genre of comedy[7]. Black comedy is comedy that makes one uncomfortable and frightened, that makes one laugh but at the cost of considering ones mortality and ones subjectivity. It is gallows humour. It is the humour of those who are reckless, of those who push boundaries, who are not afraid of the horror that regularly faces them.
Could the intersecting of genres, including horror comedy, conform to the paradoxical mix of being/being thrown that is present in black aesthetics, and furthermore could this mean that genre splicing could be interpreted as a way of successfully creating modern black films? Consider the Scary Movie (Keenan Wayans, 2000) franchise – not particularly elevated but financially highly successful and crossed demographic boundaries into mainstream. Robin R Means Coleman has written extensively on what she terms as ‘Horror Noire’[8] – exclusively black created horror fair. According to Means Coleman, there are two kinds of representation seen of black people in horror and this representation depends entirely on the race of the director or creator. Black people in horror films are often subject to stereotyping, either as a ‘magical negro’ character or as the comic relief. In black-made horror films, the narrative thrust is typically surrounding black culture. There is no orientation provided for these films, it is begins with a presumption that you understand both black life and culture. Means Coleman claims that these often low-budget horror flicks, citing Blacula (William Crain, 1972) as a prime example, allow the film to take risks that other genres might not and can interrogate the things in society that are generally frightening for a black audience.
Why is there a unity between the ideologies of ‘black comedy’ and the common aims of the black comedy feature? Irony – a key chord within ‘black comedy’ – is one that chimes heavily within not only black comedy films but through a black cultural existence. Consider black twitter, both a source of comedy and of ripe political activism and education. Sarcasm, irony and a disjunction between image and inference are key features of the humour of black twitter.
Of course, black creative ownership is highly important to the changing definition of genre. Some of the most successful black entertainers have been comedians like Kevin Hart or Jordan Peele, the director of Get Out – suggesting that the easiest path to acceptance for a black entertainer is through comedy. Robin R Means Coleman wrote in her book African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor about the phenomenon of acceptable black television for a white audience being firmly rooted in the realm of comedy, remarking that ‘the genre of comedy has lulled Hollywood into a formulaic, comfortable sleep that is not only tried and true but profitable.’[9] Nevertheless, it seems that if black entertainers want to gain a foothold in Hollywood, comedy is required to make politics more palatable.
In her work on the qualities of black aesthetics within the visual arts, Rizvana Bradley[10] states that there must be a conceptual distinction made between the black body (or the black body as concept) and black corporeality due to the overarching trope of the black body in pain. Drawing on the work of Sadia Harman’s work ‘Scenes of Subjection’, Bradley infers that emphasis upon the black body is down to the necessity of white empathy – the white body must be put in a place in which the pain of the black body can be made intelligible – to turn the eye towards the black body as biological universalises the pain and entrenches the black body within this milieu.
Bradley’s work on the ‘transgression’ of the boundary in the works of artists such as Glenn Ligon, who intersects lettering, performance and painting (Fig.4) is connected to Get Out, although the stages of these works are set very differently. The importance of these works is the quasi-linguistic quality of the paintings of the artist Glenn Ligon as a ‘transgression of the boundary’. Through genre confusion, through the refusal to follow the traditional rules of either of the genres by which it is influenced, Get Out is highly transgressive. With this transgression, classification can be overturned.
Figure 4
Returning to thoughts on the making work about the black body today there is a danger as there exists a difficulty of describing experiences of black embodiment through language – the experience insists on opacity. This opacity creates and interesting convergence with the invisibility of whiteness. An interesting paradox is created via white and black visibility – if the white is ideologically ‘invisible’ as in, it is all encompassing, no other viewpoint can be seen or explored, then does that mean that blackness is visible? Or, if whiteness is the only visible racial option – is blackness invisible, unseen? It is this paradox exactly that is explored via black aesthetics. [11]
The art experience, both the looking and the reading becomes a means of achieving immersion of aesthetic inhabitation. It is an atmospheric inhabitation. A similar inhabitation is achieved in Get Out as the audience literally inhabits not only Chris’s viewpoint, but also his sensibility and his blackness.
The issue with blackness in the visual aesthetics in that there is a paradox. Hyper visibility meshed with the invisibility or opacity of the experience creates optical dissonance. On the black image, Keeling, a film theorist, cites ‘ones object hood becomes subject hood’. Black aesthetics, according to Bradley, must always carry some form of transposition. There is an exteriorisation of black interiority due to the burdens of unequal representation. There is a Heidiggarian thrownness of black people as the convergence of being and being problematic – black ontological opacity is itself a dilemma as being/being problematic is both phenomenological. There is being that problem and performing that problem. Black ontology is that violence of being thrown. Blackness is an aesthetic that is not reducible to a black/white opposition. Therefore, the focus on blackness as a sensibility put into comparison with an apparently liberal sensibility in Get Out exposes this very paradox. Chris’s dilemmas are the same faced by the black body in the aesthetical realm.
What is the meaning and purpose of the intersection of genre within the film Get Out and how does this particular careful, politically ripe hybridisation constitute a certain type of black aesthetics? Also, how can a film like Get Out serve to transform the film landscape on a larger scale than merely disrupting genre? The answer to the first query is that black aesthetics can often be most easily understood as a balance of paradox or a strident stance over a rupture – it lives in the instability of western categorization, on the friction between belonging and rejection, on the Heidiggerian cusp of being in the world and throwness. Black aesthetics live in the space between the black visible body as object, as subject and as the strained relationship of being the both at once. Therefore, that paradoxical duality enjoying a symbiotic relationship can be seen strongly in the use of both horror and comedy within the film – as horror and comedy, though producers of different emotion, share many of the same physical affects and nerve triggers and force the audience to experience an almost physical inhabitation of Chris’s role. By both satirising a frightening subject for a black audience and letting a white audience experience the terror of such a position, empathy is grown. Therefore, the combination of horror and comedy to create a nuance ‘black comedy’, simultaneous with that very denial of stereotypical racialised genre trappings whilst still being a film for black people, marks Get Out as a highly important political film in this era.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ali, Rasha. "What the Hell is the ‘Get Out’ Challenge? A Short Explainer." The Wrap. March 6, 2017. Accessed March 23, 2017. http://www.thewrap.com/get-out-challenge-explanation/
Bradley, Rizvana. "The Dematerialization of the Book in the Event of Black Aesthetics ." Lecture, Transpersonal: Rizvana Bradley, Institute Of Contemporary Arts , London, March 15, 2017.
Breton, André, and Mark Polizzotti. Anthology Of Black Humour. London: Telegram, 2009. August 15, 2014. Accessed March 25, 2017. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8C8hBQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Carroll, Noel. "Horror and Humor." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 2 (April 1999): 145-60. Accessed April 14, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/432309.
Chack, Erin. "22 Secrets Hidden In "Get Out" You May Have Missed ." Buzzfeed. March 03, 2017. Accessed April 3, 2017. https://www.buzzfeed.com/erinchack/things-you-may-have-missed-in-get-out?utm_term=.xtpvRP7KY#.kiZx54Lkg.
Dyer, Richard. WHITE: Essays On Race And Culture. London And New York: Routeledge, 1997.
Ellis, Emma Gray. "Want to Profit Off Your Meme? Good Luck if You Aren’t White." Wired. March 1, 2017. Accessed March 14, 2017. https://www.wired.com/2017/03/on-fleek-meme-monetization-gap/.
Hornaday, Ann. "‘Get Out’ shows how genre can address serious issues. Why can’t serious drama?" Washington Post , March 23, 2017. Accessed April 4, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/get-out-shows-how-genre-can-address-serious-issues-why-cant-serious-drama/2017/03/23/d5e3be1c-0fcd-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html?utm_term=.63a3b11592eb.
Hughey, Matthew, “The Saviour Trope and the Modern Meanings of Whiteness” in The White Savior Film: Content, Critics and Consumption (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014) 1-17.
Kirst, Seamus. "#OscarsSoWhite: a 10-point plan for change by the hashtag’s creator ." The Guardian, February 25, 2016. Accessed April 22, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/25/oscarssowhite-10-point-plan-hashtag-academy-awards-april-reign.
Lipsitz, Geogre, The Possesive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 1-23.
Means Coleman, Robin R. Horror Noire Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2013.
Means Coleman, Robins R. African American viewers and the Black situation comedy: situating racial humor. New York: Garland, 2000.
Peele, Jordan, and Robin R. Means Coleman. "'Get Out,' with its genre-bending critique of racism, took cues from thrillers about sexism." Interview by Adam Wernick. PRI. March 25, 2017. Accessed April 03, 2017. https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-03-25/get-out-its-genre-bending-critique-racism-took-cues-thrillers-about-sexism.
Smith, Troy L. "A history of 'The Walking Dead' killing off its black characters." Cleveland.com. March 16, 2015. Accessed April 27, 2017. http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2015/03/walking_dead_black_characters.html.
Taylor, Paul C. Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy Of Black Aesthetics. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2016.
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[1] Troy L Smith. "A history of 'The Walking Dead' killing off its black characters." Cleveland.com. March 16, 2015. Accessed April 27, 2017.
[2] Erin Chack, "22 Secrets Hidden In "Get Out" You May Have Missed ." Buzzfeed. March 03, 2017. Accessed April 3, 2017.
[3] Rasha Ali. "What the Hell is the ‘Get Out’ Challenge? A Short Explainer." The Wrap. March 6, 2017. Accessed March 23, 2017.
[4] Emma Gray Ellis. "Want to Profit Off Your Meme? Good Luck if You Aren’t White." Wired. March 1, 2017. Accessed March 14, 2017.
[5] Jordan Peele, "'Get Out,' with its genre-bending critique of racism, took cues from thrillers about sexism." Interview by Adam Wernick. PRI. March 25, 2017. Accessed April 03, 2017.
[6] Noel Carroll. "Horror and Humor." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 2 (April 1999): 145-60. Accessed April 14, 2017. Pp. 147
[7] André Breton, Anthology Of Black Humour. London: Telegram, 2009. August 15, 2014. Accessed March 25, 2017.
[8] Means Coleman, Robin R. Horror Noire Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2013.
[9] Robin R Means Coleman, African American viewers and the Black situation comedy: situating racial humor. New York: Garland, 2000. Pp.4
[10] Bradley, Rizvana. "The Dematerialization of the Book in the Event of Black Aesthetics ." Lecture, Transpersonal: Rizvana Bradley, Institute Of Contemporary Arts , London, March 15, 2017.
[11] Richard Dyer. WHITE: Essays On Race And Culture. London And New York: Routeledge, 1997.