At one point the film dares to say what can't be said. "When there are too many white people around I get nervous." The film posits that the American experience for many black people is one of horror. It's a pill many audiences won't want to swallow.
I imagined many things when I went into Get Out. I imagines bigots spewing racist epithets attacking our hero. I imagines nazi or klan imagery (terrifying enough on its own). I imagined more bloodshed. But none of that is what Get Out is getting at. Get Out's villains, the film's threat, the film's terror, isn't in outright bigotry. The film magnificently sidetracks that expectation by addressing a far more insidious and dangerous terror. The villains of the film fetishize black folks and focus on assimilating black people. This isn't about cross burning or lynchings, it's subtle microagressions, the use of black people for the majority's purposes, the degrading of people for not fitting into the anglosaxon mold. It is about the betrayal of "allies." It is more upsetting than one imagines a horror movie to be because it implicates its audience, or a part of it's audience.
Horror movies tend to ground us, the audience, in the hero's place. We feel their fear because we identify with them and are put in their place. Often smart horror will upend that a bit or invert it. Here the audience isn't necessarily allowed into that role easily. Chris isn't the universal "everyman" he is explicitly a black man and the film doesn't let us forget it. To be let in to the centre of the film we have to live that experience. His line about being nervous is one that will throw much of his audience away., the part of the audience who doesn't understand what that feels like. And instead that audience is left to struggle with how they identify with the rest of the movie, the villains. I imagine there will be quite a lot of discomfort with how that will make people feel.
Film maker Jordan Peele's critique of American liberalism is crafted slowly and brilliantly using the horror movie tropes we are all familiar with but to tell a story differently. We aren't building to a killing moment as much as we are building to something more deeply upsetting. But he uses the horror genre as a tool to get us to understand the fear that people live with every day.
And it works in so many ways. It works as straight up horror (very much in the Valley of the Dolls variety). It works as comedy. Peele doesn't give up his comedic history. And it works as smart social commentary.
Get Out
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Alison Williams, Lil Rel Howery
Writer/Director: Jordan Peele
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