SPOILER DISCUSSION

1. At the very start of their road trip, Rose and Chris run into a deer which sets up both the motif of movement and the deer. This initial situation is traumatic for Chris because it reminds him of the way his mother’s body laid on the streets – the deer coming initially to stand in for his mother. The way he reacts to the road kill situation sets both ideas in motion. From the crash itself, the scene cuts to a shot of Chris’s feet (this is important) establishing contact with the ground wand walking towards the body. He looks at the deer and his expression is haunting; it’s clear that he’s thinking about his mom.

As we learn from his session with Missy, Chris was watching television when his mother was out. His feet were non-active, sitting. Therefore, the importance on his feet moving towards the deer is meant to demonstrate his movement towards overcoming his trauma. This motif of movement is brought full circle through the visualization of the sunken space which amplifies the lack of agency Chris felt as a child. The sinking feeling of sitting in his bed goes to its nightmarish extreme as he sinks into an abyss – a void that negates his subjectivity in favor of a white vision. In many ways this is the full realization of Frantz Fanon’s arguments in Black Skin, White Masks where he talks about how black subjects view their skin as bad once they come into contact with a white world and as a result want to become “whiter” to be “better”, except in the case of the movie the psychological damage that would lend one to make such a decision is given a corporeal form in Armitage’s and their communities procedures to make the discussion of the issue easier.

In the context of the deer, they come to become a larger stand-in for black peoples. Dean’s monologue about them seems off-kilter but harmless at the start as he goes on and on about how he wants to see them all eradicated, but the puzzle starts to connect when we realize that his disgust of the creature doesn’t stop him from proudly displaying his slain deer trophies. Black people might be pests but that doesn’t mean they can’t become trophies when possessed by non-black consciousness or so the analogy would go. This idea is made even more explicit when the movie cuts to Rose at the end, showcasing an array of black “trophies” – framed photos of her previous victims.

These connections come full circle in the final act where we see a trophy proudly mounted in the room where Chris is shown the “Coagula” video before operation. He’s trapped and is forced to sit, unable to move. He’s forced to watch a video explaining how he’ll lose his agency forever while under the view of a deer – his trauma about to be transformed into a permanent fixture as he’s unable to do anything. The beauty of then having him take the deer head, move out of the seat, and kill Dean with the horns is poetic justice at its finest. The racist is killed by the stand-in for black people as the black person simultaneously moves past their trauma (as evidenced by Chris making the decision to save Georgina). He’s now in control.

2. I love the establishing shot of Chris and Rose finally coming to the Armitage house. We see them from afar getting to the front and then slowly moving in as they’re greeted by Dean and Missy. The whole time the two couples are moving about and getting acquainted the camera continues to dolly backwards until finally it’s revealed that this neutral shot was actually a shot from Walter’s (Marcus Henderson) POV.

The reveal on first glance is disturbing because we initially believe that the Armitage’s have black servants which directly set off alarms in our head because of the previous warnings we’ve received from the introduction. The fact that the neutral scene is revealed to be from Walter’s purview suggests that something heinous is going to happen. However, the true nature of the shot becomes even more terrifying once we realize Walter is actually the Armitage patriarch inhabiting the flesh of a young black man. We’re actually watching the owner of the house watching his newly acquired “slave” get shuffled into his property. Thus, the neutral scene becomes the spiritual successor to a slave plantation.

3. Speaking of The Shining references, one great one happens near the end of the movie when Chris acquires a yellow ball from the stack of pool balls when choosing a weapon to bash Jeremy’s head in. In The Shining, a yellow ball comes from nowhere and interrupts Danny as he’s playing with his toys. There’s no perceived source for the ball and its presence causes Danny to investigate Room 237 which is immediately followed by Jack’s nightmare dialogue (and the presence of the infamous red jacket) and the start of the violence in the movie.

Peele flips this scene slightly; the yellow ball still signals the start of violence, but this time from the position of the oppressed as opposed to oppressor. Chris is the one who chooses to use the ball as opposed to having the ball thrown to him and takes full control of the situation aft wards.

4. I mentioned in my review proper that on one level Get Out is a meditation on the place and value of black artistry. At the surface level of the narrative, he’s a photographer who’s selected for the procedure because Jim (Stephen Root) wants Chris’s “eyes”; Hudson believes that the physicality of Chris’s eyes is what separates the two as opposed to the experience and skills between them. Obviously Chris can capture shots because he knows what to look for; passions coming through a frame – a moment captured and celebrated. Stripping away his consciousness strips away that ability rendering the physical act of just finding shots just as difficult for Hudson as before.

Chris’s subjugation is rendered via a screen – a fixture from his childhood that kept him occupied while the death of his mother happened outside of its boundaries; black suffering pushed to the periphery as post-racial ideology tells us equality is here. The sunken place forces a black subject to watch white consciousness as cinema – a damning statement on how the media reinforces patterns of subjectivity by claiming a monopoly on what is and is not proper behavior. If cinema is meant to be an escape, the sunken place’s 24/7 white movie marathon is the ultimate form of slavery, forcing black bodies to literally give up their consciousnesses.

This is made more explicit by the events Chris undergoes before the “procedure” is meant to be done. He’s made to sit in front of a television – both a callback to his childhood trauma and a reference to being forced to consume cinema that excludes his voice. He’s shown both the hypnosis procedure (Missy stirring a cup) which traps him back in the sunken place and the “Coagula film” that explains what’s going to happen to him. The cherry on top being that this film within the film also uses the same blue The Shining font.

Finally, the way Chris gets out of the situation is with the use of his phone camera. His status as artist and his artistic tool, the camera, are what let him get out. When he first snaps a picture of Andre, it’s made clear that the flash of the camera allows the subject hidden within to come out. The camera reveals the subject, frames an encounter, and allows meaning to come forth. By letting the black “director” let their black “actors” speak, new meaning is allowed to come forth, in this case an authentic black subjectivity. Instead of being forced to watch cinema, they become the “stars” of their own movies.

5. I love the scene near the end where the little closet in Chris and Rose’s room is left ajar. At this point we’re suspicious of Rose but, like Chris, we maintain some hope. However, once we see the door ajar and see the red box containing all the pictures the sick truth of what’s happened fully sinks in. We know that Rose is complicit in whatever’s happening and that Chris is doomed. The charade for the keys afterwards is just sick humor on the part of the Armitage’s.

Rose’s façade made me wonder if she’s the one who left the door open for Chris to find. The door was never opened before and is conveniently left ajar with Rose’s images only when the two are planning on leaving. Given that Rose knows that they’re not leaving, it seems in character for her to almost flaunt to Chris that it’s not going any further. The fact that Peele makes us piece this together makes the impact of the moment all the worse.

6. One of the small things the movie does to make it feel so much larger is the subtle worldbuilding done in relation to the Armitage’s and their procedures. In the same vein as John Wick in relation to its subtle buildup of its assassination world, Get Out does a great job building up the order the Armitage’s are following/work for. The knight mask that Jeremy dons at the start hearkens back to the crusades/ obsession with nobility which would correspond with what the ideas the movie’s dealing with. However, the stand out moment for me is the actual procedure which is shot in ritualistic fashion. Shots are centered and the chanting suddenly intrudes the soundscape; the moment feels like a cult ritual sacrifice out of a Lovecraft movie (think The Void).

7.I love how Peele subtly includes one Asian character (Yasuhiko Oyama) at the Armitage’s party. The character’s inclusion is definitely meant to draw attention because he’s the only person who’s not white or black. His inclusion on the “white” side is a commentary on the way that one doesn’t have to be white to engage in anti-black behavior. In this case, systemic racism is all about co-option. Including other minority groups on the racially powerful side (white society) gives them a reason to assimilate as opposed to teaming up with other minorities to tear down structures of power.

The use of an Asian in particular draws specific connection to the myth of the model minority – the idea that Asians are a “good” minority because of their cohesion with “white” notions of success both perceived and literal . This is the reason he’s the one to ask Chris about the “African American experience”. It’s a rhetorical move that directly positions him in the opposite camp; there’s the African American experience and the opposite of that experience, which he perceives himself as belonging to.

8. The ending is truly powerful and demonstrates both the cemented nature of anti-black violence at a social level but also the ingenuity of Peele in relation to genre. Police forces in traditional horror movies are slightly inept, but their presence is usually celebrated by the end of the movie (sans the famous example in Night of the Living Dead which Get Out definitely conjures up in the way the finale is executed) because we so desperately want the hero to make it out okay.

However, we already know given the context of the movie, police are not a force for Chris’s good. The first interaction we see Chris have in the movie outside of his girlfriend and friend is with a cop who tries to bully him, Chris, into acquiescing to arbitrary demands. This plus our own ideas of what interactions between police officers and black people look like on top of the way the movie has established its logic make the presence of the police at the end heart-wrenching. The optics of a black man over a bleeding white women in the heart of carnage is “he was a threat” into SHOT without even thinking. We imagine the terrifying end of the movie without watching it as Peele lets the blue and red lights linger on Chris’s face just long enough to make his end feel certain. It’s precisely at that point of imagination that Peele subverts expectations, and our subconscious, to imagine a new future where things are better. It’s not cheap or undeserved because we know that Rod is intelligent, knows where Chris is, and will not let Chris die without a search. However, its brilliance stems from the fact that we’re primed to expect the opposite of it. That’s powerful cinema.