Get Out (3/5 Stars)

Perhaps you have heard this horror plot-line before: A group of white settlers/tourists/explorers head into the desert/woods/jungle where they meet indigenous rednecks/savages/headhunters that proceed to torture and kill them. It’s a staid subgenre of horror that has rightly been deemed racist because the indigenous people are represented as one dimensional villains. As far as I know, this sub-genre has always steadily produced movies, but those movies have never been mainstream, at least not in the last fifty years when it is fair to say that mainstream movies started going out of their way to not be racist.

“Get Out” is an installment to this subgenre, the twist being that it is about a black man who travels into the suburbs where he encounters a nefarious group of white liberal elitists. Also unlike the rest of the subgenre this movie is mainstream, written and directed by Jordan Peele, and hitting No. 1 at the box office. That essentially makes it is the most blatantly racist mainstream movie I have ever seen in a movie theater.

Obviously as a person who has seen many old movies, I have seen more racist movies than “Get Out.” The most obvious is “The Birth of a Nation.” That movie is enlightening in the sense that it gets one into the mind of a true racist, D.W. Griffith. You can’t learn anything about black people in that movie. You can however learn quite a bit about the insecurities and fears underpinning the racist ideology of the white people. The same can be said inversely about “Get Out.” You won’t be able to learn anything about white people from this movie. The characterizations are absurd and contradict themselves. You can however get a really good glimpse into the insecurities and fears of writer/director Jordan Peele, and maybe judging by the popularity of the movie (“The Birth of a Nation” too was very popular) the insecurities and fears of the modern black person. Like the insecurities and fears of D.W. Griffith, its a rather pathetic portrait and like “Birth of a Nation”, “Get Out” should go down in history as a pitiful document of its times.

Spoilers abound here: The movie concerns Chris Washington (played by Daniel Kaluuya) who is traveling to the countryside with his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (played by Allison Williams) to meet her parents for the first time. Unbeknownst to Chris, Rose has dated black men before, about ten of them in fact. She chooses them for their physical prowess, seduces them, and takes them into her family’s mansion in the woods where her family brainwashes them and sells them as slaves to the highest bidder. This bidder, a frail physically inept white person, through elaborate brain surgery, comes to inhabit the body of the physically adept black man. The black man stays in the neighborhood but his “blackness” has essentially been removed. He wears slacks and fedoras and speaks in a calm eerily comfortable tone with no slang at all, just like a white person. (This particular character, a disappeared black man from Brooklyn who has been ‘turned white’ by the evil suburb may stand in for such disappeared black men like Ben Carson. I suspect black people may feel that such people are brainwashed tools that aren’t really black anymore.)

There is a lot of psychology to unpack here already but what is most striking about this movie is its caricature of the nefarious white people. They are actually really nice. They vote Obama and go out of their way to be polite to Chris. They are obviously meant to be stand-ins for the polite white people of the real world who are aware of racism and make an effort to be tolerant. We already knew that angry violent racists are bad people, but this movie goes further: All white people are bad and have conspiratorial motives against black people no matter how nice they seem on the surface. I expect Jordan Peele, a mixed-race college graduate with a successful television and movie career, has met a lot of nice white people in his life. Like a total asshole, he is essentially stating here that he does not trust them and holds them in contempt.

It really saddens me when people make the argument that this movie is important because it shows how black people feel. Feeling something does not make it right. Tribalism is a natural thing and may feel correct, but that does not mean that racism is justified. This movie does not make the argument that “racism is bad,” it makes the argument that “white people are bad.” There is a distinction here that is sadly lost on many people who ascribe to the identity politics of our day. In their view, black people can’t be racist because one needs to have a position of power in order to effectuate racism, and black people do not have power. (Obviously, I hold a different view as to what racism entails and whether black people have enough power to be responsible for their actions.) Through that view, this movie can be justified as some little ‘payback’ for all the racism in the past. Enjoy yourself in your revenge, Jordan Peele, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that this sort of shit helps solve the problem.