By Sarah Chawla, Courier Staff Writer
Jordan Peele, an American actor, comedian, film director, and screenwriter, recently broke records with a thriller titled “Get Out”.
In the movie, which is riddled with symbolism, the main character Chris is visiting his girlfriend Rose’s family. He seems to worry about how her parents will react to their interracial relationship, but easily dismisses this concern. In the beginning of the movie, on the drive up to the family’s country house, Rose hits a deer while driving. When they stop and call the cops, the cop asks for Chris’ drivers license even though Rose was driving. Rose seems to defend her boyfriend against the cop, saying there’s no reason they need Chris’ license. While in the moment it seems like Rose is simply not giving in to the racial bias that the cop had, it’s actually an insight into Rose’s real motivations. She wanted to avoid a paper trail showing she was with Chris before his disappearance that she planned. Additionally, Chris was empathetic enough to check on the deer that they hit while Rose showed no regard for the deer, hinting that she wasn’t as kindhearted as she seemed in the earlier scenes.
The couple finally makes it to the house and Chris meets the parents. Rose’s dad, Dean, is a neurosurgeon and mentions how his dad lost to Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. Her mom, Missy, is a hypnotherapist who offered to help Chris quit smoking using hypnosis.
The family has two black servants, a maid named Georgina and a groundskeeper named Walter. While pouring Chris some iced tea, Georgina zones out for a minute and almost spills some. This is because Missy clinked her spoon on her glass which put Georgina into a trance because she’s hypnotized, as we find out later in the movie.
While going out for a smoke at night, Chris gets hypnotized by Rose’s mom and she tells him to enter “the sunken place”, which is a metaphor for the paralysis black people feel in daily life. When he wakes up, he dismisses it as a bad dream but has vague suspicions that he was hypnotized.
The family has a party with all their wealthy white friends. While there, Chris meets a blind art dealer named Jim Hudson who recognizes and praises Chris’ photographs. He also meets the only other black guest there, who’s a young man married to an older white woman. He tries to connect with him but is faced with stiff and unnatural behavior. Later, Chris tries to discreetly take a picture of him, but didn’t realize the flash on his phone was on. The man suddenly changes and charges at Chris, yelling at him to get out while he still can. Dean dismisses it as a seizure caused by the flash, but Chris doesn’t believe him and wants to leave.
Just before escaping, Rose reveals herself as a part of the family’s plan. After a struggle, Chris eventually ends up bound to an armchair in a room with a TV in front of him. Upon him waking, Chris is faced with a video explaining the family business of switching the brains of old, disabled white people into the bodies of younger, stronger black people. With this, Peele wanted to convey that “the exotification and the love of the black body and culture is just as twisted a form of racism as the darker more violent forms of racism”. Many people use this as a misguided attempt at a compliment, but Peele thinks that any time one is categorized as a race, they’ve lost “a part of what being human should mean”.
Jim Hudson, the blind art dealer that Chris met before explained in the video that he was the one who was going to take over his body because he wanted the ability to see again. Chris is then put into a hypnotic sleep with a video and the sound of a spoon clinking a cup. After he wakes up, Chris realizes that the video kept playing until Dean was ready to perform the transplant. Chris realizes that he could pull out the cotton from the chair he was sitting in and put it in his ears to avoid being put into another trance with the sound of the spoon.
When Rose’s brother comes to Chris’ room to bring him to the operating room, Chris bashes him over the head until he becomes unconscious. Next, he tears the head of a deer which was mount on the wall to bring to the operating room to kill Dean. After the success, Chris moves on to escape. While this is happening, Rose is unaware in her room shopping for her next victim while eating cereal in one glass with milk in a separate glass, which is a metaphor of never mixing white and nonwhite things. Before Rose exits her room, Chris kills Missy and exits the house. Rose emerges with a gun and Walter tackles Chris to the ground. Rose gives the gun to Walter to shoot Chris, but Chris takes a photo of Walter with the flash on his phone and while he’s no longer in a state of hypnosis, Walter shoots Rose then kills himself, allowing Chris to escape.
The main criticism that people have about the movie is that the ending is too bland. Peele explains how an alternate ending would have a cop pulling up the the house at the wrong time and arresting Chris for the murder of Rose and her family. He felt that this ending really completed his message about racism in America, but he ultimately decided to go with the ending that he did because he wanted to give the audience a hero and an escape.
Another notable criticism comes from Samuel L. Jackson. He thinks that the movie should’ve starred an African American actor instead of British-born Daniel Kaluuya. Jackson explained how an American would understand the situation better, since America and Britain are different environments with different views. Kaluuya dismissed Jackson’s opinion in a tweet and left it at that.
With over $113 million in box office sales, the movie made Jordan Peele the first black writer-director to achieve a $100 million dollar debut. Peele took to Twitter to acknowledge his achievement by saying he’s “the first of many”.
