Get Out (2017)

The film starts with us following a black man walking around a neighbourhood at night, he’s got confused between two similarly named roads and is struggling to find where he’s supposed to be going. A car starts trailing him, and figuring it’s because he’s a black guy in a posh suburb he decides that confrontation isn’t worth it and begins to backtrack only to be grabbed from behind, subdued and placed in the boot of a car.

We’re then moved forward six months where Chris and Rose are heading to Rose’s parents house for the weekend. It’s Chris’s first time meeting them and he’s concerned to discover Rose hasn’t told her parents that she’s dating a black man. She tells Chris there’s nothing to worry about as her parents are quite liberal and her dad was a big fan of Obama so he can’t be racist or anything.

After settling in and the usual awkward introductions, it seems that Chris has impressed Rose’s parents Dean Armitage, a neurosurgeon, and Missy, a psychiatrist. Rose’s brother Jeremy on the other hand is belligerent and seems to want to prove that he’s better than Chris physically.

As well as the Armitages the large residence is also home to grounds-keeper Walter and housekeeper Georgina who act rather strangely around Chris. Dean apologises that it must look a certain way that the family have two black servants but he explains that they were employed to take care of his elderly parents and after they passed he kept them on as a thank-you for all they did for the family.

If Chris thought that the only problem he was going to have this weekend was trying to impress Rose’s parents and not getting on the wrong side of Jeremy he was sorely mistaken. The weekend Rose chose for the visit coincides with the Armitages hosting a large party as it was something Dean’s father used to do every year and they’re keeping up the tradition.

Feeling stressed, Chris sneaks out at night to have a crafty cigarette but he’s caught by Missy and she offers to hypnotise him to cure him of his nicotine addiction. Before he knows what’s happening he’s falling into what Missy calls the “sunken place” and then next thing he knows it’s morning and he can’t remember getting to bed.

What Chris does realise is that he no longer feels like smoking so the process looks like it was successful, which is a good thing considering how stressful the party is. The guests are wall-to-wall rich white people who view Chris as an oddity to be examined as opposed to a guest on their level.

Finally seeing another black guest, Logan, Chris goes to speak to him relieved he’s got someone to talk to about the old white guests, but Logan behaves oddly just like Walter and Georgina. Something isn’t seeming right to Chris, and he also feels like he knows Logan from somewhere so he snaps a photo to send to a friend of his, but when the phone flash goes off Logan starts to get violent toward Chris, screaming at him to “Get out!”

Chris sends the photo to his friend Rod who recognises him as a mutual friend called Dre who went missing 6 months ago, he’s the guy from the start of the film! With more and more odd things happening around him, and Rose seemingly not being concerned about people’s attitudes towards Chris he decides to leave.

Rose seems willing at first but then begins to stall and, as memories of his hypnosis session start to bubble up, Chris realises he is in deep trouble.

What do the Armitages want with Chris? What is Rose’s place in all of the strange goings on? And is Jeremy just trying to look better than Chris to impress his parents or is there something more sinister at play?

When You’re Told To “Get Out”, Get Out!

🎃Warning! Spoilers for Get Out ahead!☕

I wasn’t sure what I was letting myself in for when watching Get Out as I hadn’t seen much about it but boy was this a wild ride!

While on the surface level the film doesn’t portray racism directly, it’s so insidiously integrated in to every scene it’s skin crawling and disturbing.

While Dean Armitage says that he would have happily voted for Obama for a third term if he could, he’s also definitely the type of person who would wheel out someone like Logan and say “See! I have a black friend so I can’t possibly be racist!”

Comments dropped here and there by all of the white characters show the undercurrent of distaste that they have for black people: Dean mentions that black athlete Jessie Owens beat his father to win a place at the 1936 Olympics; Jeremey mentions Chris’s physical build and how that gives him an advantage athletically; Art dealer Jim Hudson compliments Chris on his artistic eye.

They all compliment Chris’s physical attributes but not one of them compliments his mental acuity, a racist trope that all black people are good for is physical work, not thinking.

Microaggressions are everywhere: from the cop asking Chris for his ID even though it’s not required, to all of the guests feeling as though they can ask Chris any question and that he doesn’t have (or deserve) personal boundaries.

I get that Chris wanted to stay at the house with Rose as he loves her, but given everyone’s awful attitude towards him (despite how polite it is on the surface), and Logan snapping and telling him to get out, I would have taken that as a sign to leave immediately and not hang around, politeness be damned.

But then if Chris did that then he would be playing into the stereotype of angry young black man — one who can’t keep up intellectually with the white people surrounding him, proving their racial superiority.

Nefarious DEI

When Chris looks through Rose’s hidden stash of photos and finds dozens of images of her with a variety of men (and one woman), they’re all black. Now you might think that she has a type, but it’s obvious she’s targeting members of the black community for a reason.

Serial killers will often take those from marginalised communities as they are less likely to be missed: the unhoused, sex workers and drug addicts for example all lead transient lifestyles that make it difficult to know whether they are missing or have just moved on.

The Armitages though aren’t targeting this group of people, in fact they don’t even seem to care who they target as long as they are black.

At the start of the film, when Jeremy takes Dre off of the street, he doesn’t know whether he has a family that will alert the police and create a ruckus or if he won’t be missed at all.

But then this film is also a damning indictment of the police as well with their treatment of anyone that isn’t white middle class. We saw this with the cop asking for Chris’s ID, racially profiling him for no reason, and we saw this with the police officers at the station when Rod tried to report Chris missing — despite one of them being a black woman — you have to fit in some how even at the expense of your fellow black Americans I guess.

So the Armitages pick black people due to Roman’s (Dean’s father) feelings that black people were better physically, and perhaps still harbouring a grudge from 80 years previously when he, a white man, lost a running race to a black man.

The perceived athletic prowess of black people makes them a target of Roman and Dean’s scheme in some kind of perverse “DEI hiring” process.

What Was The Goal Of The Order Of Coagula?

Roman spent his entire life trying to become a superior being, all because he lost a race to a black guy.

He felt that while he was intellectually superior to black people, they had an unfair disadvantage over white folk because their genetic makeup makes them physically superior. So what better thing to do than to combine the two by taking out part of the brain of the smart white person and putting it in the body of the strong black person?

But they really didn’t think this plan through, did they — typical white arrogance over their supposed intellectual superiority strikes again.

What happens when all of these old rich white people are in the bodies of black people?

Do they think they can just walk around society unchallenged? That they won’t be asked for ID just for sitting in the passenger seat of a car? Or that they won’t get looked at in a suspicious way when they’re walking around their posh, mostly white, neighbourhoods?

The level of audacity among the members of the Order Of Coagula is off the charts, thinking that just because a small part of their white brain has been put into a younger and more athletic black body that this will overcome systemic racism and the inbuilt biases inherent in society.

In a way it would be nice for them to experience what minorities and the oppressed have to deal with every day but we all know they wouldn’t understand what they were experiencing and would use their wealth to insulate themselves from it in a private community or similar.

Get Out is a thought provoking piece of cinema that tells the audience to examine what they’re witnessing and ask themselves whether they perceive it as “normal” behaviour, whether the way that Chris is spoken to is acceptable or it they find it uncomfortable. If they do, would they challenge it no matter who it was coming from, and if they don’t then can they realise that they are part of the problem?

I wouldn’t class Get Out as a horror horror film, but it is a horrific look at American society and how the poor treatment of black people is still normalised even in “modern” times.

Watch Get Out if you want to see a film that reminds you why you shouldn’t smoke and think that you’re probably immune to hypnotism.

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