After I watched this movie I read some reviews that lauded it for an opening the authors had never seen before.  Countless movies have placed characters in danger by sending them out to the middle of nowhere or plunking them down in an inner city por­trayed as a war zone, but here the threatening environment is an affluent suburb⁠—because the focal character is African-Ameri­can, and pretty soon a car is creeping alongside him as he hur­ries down the sidewalk.  The murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 had shown how dire an outcome such a scenario might have, but I had encountered a similar scene in a book published fifty years earlier: The Man in the High Castle.  But that book was about a world in which the Axis won World War II, the Japanese were at the top of California’s racial hierarchy, and the man viewed with suspicion due to his skin color was Robert Childan, an American of European ancestry.  One of the ideas behind stories like High Castle is to make the invisible visible: all the little racist slights that might go entirely unnoticed by readers whose flesh matched the old “flesh” Crayola crayons might suddenly become obvious when directed at a character who looked like them.  Does that trick actually work?  I was surprised to find that, when I taught the book to my sophomore classes, it did!  I wrote about this last year:

But back to Get Out.  So our initial focal character gets jumped, choked out, and thrown into the trunk of the car.  We then jump to another story thread and meet a new set of characters:

…and his girl­friend Rose, who looked strangely familiar to me, which was explained when I looked up the cast after the movie and discovered that she is played by the daughter of former NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams.

And for a while, the movie shifts into “mild satire” mode, as the two of them head up to the tony country estate of Rose’s par­ents.  (Dad’s a neurosurgeon, Mom’s a psychiatrist.)  It turns out that this is the weekend that they’re holding their annual party for their circle of friends and extended family, which, Rose groans, is terrible timing: “They’re so white. Like so white.”  And while they all profess to be progressive, we see all those little slights, as one eagerly declares to Chris that he would have voted for a third term for Barack Obama, another announces that he knows Tiger Woods… clearly viewing Chris through a racial lens.  And then there are those who go straight to what Duncan Black calls “breaking out the caliper set”: talking about the physical advantages of his “genetic makeup”, feeling his muscles without permission, asking Rose whether he’s better in bed than her previous swains.  There are a few clues that this is more than just the writer/director’s return to sketch comedy, though.  One is that the African-American servants seem off, somehow, as if they’ve been brainwashed.  Another is that Rose’s mother hypnotizes Chris without his consent, ostensibly to help him quit smoking, but the experience involves spinning him off into a terrifying void.  And then, about forty-five minutes in, the initial focal character does resurface⁠—acting entirely different, and seemingly the kept man of one of Rose’s parents’ elderly friends.

Obviously, for centuries the possibility of being abducted and forced into servitude by people of European ancestry was central to the experience of people of African ancestry.  Get Out seems to be playing to that historical anxiety.  serious spoilers
    start here The problem is the setup and the payoff do not cohere⁠—and at this point you’ll want to mind the sled.  So it turns out that the kidnapped African-Americans are not being brainwashed⁠—rather, the cerebral cortices of the elderly people are being transplanted into their skulls, so that they can continue to live on in younger bodies.  The abductees keep their brainstems, which in the world of the movie equates to a lifetime as a prisoner in that horrible void, watching someone else control the body you share⁠—much like the mental imprisonment in Being John Malkovich.  (Catherine Keener, who plays the evil hypnotist, is a Malkovich alumna.)  This raises the question: why is it specifically people of African ancestry who are invariably the vessels through which the members of this secret society find a new lease on life?  “Why us? Why black people?” Chris asks.  Good question!  And the answer he receives?  Literally, it is: “Who knows?”  And, like, the writer probably should know!  It really seems like he had this centuries-old anxiety he wanted to play upon, and this chilling idea for a horror movie premise, and welded them together even though it leaves this head-scratcher of a question.  This secret society could be kidnapping anyone⁠—so why would a bunch of old coots who’ve spent their lives at the top of the social hierarchy deliberately seek out new bodies that, in what is still a racist society, would give them significant disadvantages?  I’ve seen reviewers try to answer this on their own⁠—“Oh, you see, the police would be less likely to investigate the disappearance of black people!”⁠—but they’re doing the writer’s job for him.  The movie itself is very handwavey about the answer and, to the extent that it does go beyond “Who knows?”, offers up the mystifying explanation that the old coots think that the social hierarchy is about to be upended and that African-Americans will soon be on top.  “The pendulum has swung back⁠—black is in fashion!”  The sociological statistics don’t really bear you out on that one, old-timer.

Another thing that had me scratching my head about this movie is that it seems to have a very regressive message.  One item on the politicalcompass.org quiz reads, “All people have their rights, but it is better for all of us that different sorts of people should keep to their own kind”⁠—and the film seems to agree with that!  See, Rose is 100% in on the whole scheme: she has seduced doz­ens of African-American men in order to lure them to Westches­ter and subject them to brain transplants.  “White girls⁠—oh, they get you every time,” remarks one character, and at least for the African-American men in this movie, “steer clear of interracial relationships” does seem to be the ultimate takeaway!  Obviously I am not on board with that, being the product of multiple gener­ations of miscegenation myself, and being inclined to think that many more generations of miscegenation would be one of our best bets if we’re ever to escape the scourge of racism⁠—it seems like it would be harder for racism to maintain its hold when ev­erybody’s a member of every race.  Given what I know of Jordan Peele, and his parents, and his wife, it is more than a little diffi­cult to believe that he endorses racial separatism either.  So where’d this story come from?

I was also not super thrilled by the way that the movie turns into amygdalar cinema at the end, complete with head-stomping straight out of Brawl in Cell Block 99.  Like, yes, Jordan Peele successfully comes up with a sufficiently horrific scenario to make the head-stomping seem entirely justified.  But… do we really need a whole industry devoted to devising fictional scenarios that justify head-stomping?

The Florida Project
Chris Bergoch and Sean Baker, 2017
#8, 2017 Skandies

I see that Get Out won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.  On my first viewing, The Florida Project seemed so improvisational that I wondered whether it had a screenplay at all.  I watched it again with Ellie, and this time it felt like it had a script made of finely tuned clockwork.  The scenes still held that documentary realism, but I could see how each one contributed a piece of the puzzle.  The kids spit on a new resident’s car, get forced to clean it up, and in Tom Sawyer fashion make it look like such a good time that the new resident’s granddaughter wants to join in?  “Hey, guys, you’re having too much fun, and it’s not supposed to be fun,” the grandmother scowls⁠—and that’s one of the central themes of the whole movie!  These are kids on the edge of home­lessness, but they don’t know that they’re not supposed to be having a good time.  When Moonee sits in a patch of dirt on lawn at the edge of a parking lot and declares that she’s making a sandcastle, on the one hand it’s a sad scene, but on the other, she really does seem to be as cheerful as if she were building her “sandcastle” at the beach.  When Moonee is sitting on the motel stairs playing on a tablet and Scooty tries to get her to open a particular game, and Halley interjects, “Let her do whatever she wants”⁠—she’s summing up her parenting philosophy!  When Moonee tells Jancey what she likes about a particular tree… she’s actually describing herself!  And when there are scenes that don’t seem to have any point at all, like Moonee playing with her toys in the bathtub, well, the second time around I knew what those scenes were for.  Rolling out clues before we even know there’s a mystery… always a nifty trick when you can pull it off.  All in all, this second viewing brought me from “this is the best movie I’ve seen from the 2017 list so far” to “this is the best movie I’ve seen in at least the last ten years”.

"Get Out" (Faith No More, 1995)

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