hello and welcome to a simple apocalypse finings carol welsh and i'm the moderator for tonight's show and i'm very pleased to have with me two of our regular panelist janet stern and marilyn campbell tonight we're going to be talking about the movie get out which is a hard comedy by jordan peele and it's that rare movie that's both god and critical acclaim and tremendous box just stop shaking this is the story of a young man named chris who's african american who has a white girlfriend played by allison williams who is extremely white actually and they're going up up state to see her parents for the first time you want to meet the parents and he asked her as they're packing if her parents know that he is a black person go up and on the way they hit a deer on this rural road which sort of is a premonition that things are not going to be right for this weekend and in fact the family is kind of welcoming and the next day is a big party with a lot of white people there's also two african american servants in the house who are extremely creepy and robotic and chris begins to wonder whether he's being paranoid or with this something really really wrong in this household and eventually he found that there is something the south held jordan peele has said that he was inspired by the stepford wives so i think that people who have seen the stepford wives or read the novel the original novel by i really love and will kind of get the idea of what's going on in the house but there are of course i think that it wasn't so much scary as the last as you warn me the last fifteen minutes are very intense yes not you know if there's a sort of intense bloodbath finale which was disturbing but not particularly scary to me i mean is that why you didn't want to i didn't know you didn't want to go i don't  horror movie i'm very susceptible i think i don't like them either and i didn't think this was something that i would like or go to but i heard nothing but raids and about the sort of the profound symbolism in so meant much of it and i thought well that sounds intriguing and i have to say that by the end this didn't strike me so much as or as you want to jabber with the door knob be my guest you know i mean i was  it with him with the hero because it was so hard to watch in so tense it's terror not tower but it's terror that i ended up not caring about ha the blood that pushes an artist for me no i think you're you're right at that point it's a method seems to be a matter of of survival and and the people are engaged in such a nefarious activity that we don't want them to win a great i know jordan peele has talked about this as not only a horror comedy but also commenting race relations yes a social satire social satire do you think although i think it plays very well as as a thriller or and comedy there's actually some i think a lot of comic bits in it do you think this movie saying anything serious about race relations or my god carol then i went to see it with my husband and my mother we we've talked to you for hours and we were constantly digging up more and more things and i think that ultimately what it says is that the genre of horror has been appropriated to actually show it's a metaphor for what race was for what slavery was that's its time that ha ha or film was used as a metaphor so the very do you think that always hard movies are trying to get at something else or at least there's symbolic of of greater harm because our movies i channel are not speak to that because i don't see as as a discussion of mccarthyism and people being paranoid about what their neighbors may not be what they seem and anything like some happen and the stepford wives was originally the original novel in the first iteration of the film were made a right at the time of women's liberation when the idea that there would be a backlash against women's liberation to return women to a sort of u you would be a fool not to take that metaphorically as as something that that was really felt this film i think many people have said that it's not it was made it was made before the election it was made before trump one and that it was in fact a satire on people who think they're liberal and think that their post ra and yet to a sensitive black person are constantly saying things that are a little off key but also on that point about the liberals i think it's a it's  is the real paranoia and comes from you know like you say never knowing what to think who saying what what is it coded for and then to have everything about you be desired by someone else but not quite enough to elevate you to that level although there's a line in the film where the protagonist chris says to one of the villains why black people and he doesn't get a really good answer  that intrigued me and i wonder what you think the film is saying why black people is it is it no entry to slavery i think it's analogy to slavery and slavery's analogy to sexual slavery and i think that there's  we tribute that to them and it's it's such a double edged sword i mean the whole i mean even when you think about well i read something interesting lately and because we have we have seen that the all the wonderful documentaries that were made this year not before the civil war not during slavery during slavery all the all the slave owners were only too happy to say that everyone was docile it's only when they weren't docile anymore that they had to do some the eyes of people who have been victimized but their luck is initially kind of docile and robotic and yeah i wonder about the whole slave owners thinking that the inside and well taken care of by their benevolent masters which as you say doesn't mean that when they're what we're rumors of slave rebellions that they weren't put down with great a fear for for good reason because the slave owners knew better well maybe to some extent they believe their own b s but maybe not a hundred percent because they know they know how  brutal the system was do you think that well then most afraid of people that were limb know that were educated for it because most of the slave people led slave rebellions like denmark vesey and were somewhat more educated than the average player they they both of them knew how to read in denmark vesey was a preacher right so they in this film th the young men is a totally middle class young man he's a photographer he's not he's not a he's an artist he's an artist he's not he's not he's not not a great athlete and he not defined by his physical prowess he's defined by his artistic prowess so and as some of the other were also some of the other victims of this process were not chosen for that so it's it's it's interesting that because that's where the stereotypes met some resistance is that family is all saying well what's your sport and he's gone well you know jujitsu which is asian for one thing right and and as as the brother at the table said it's a more of a mental it's a mental thing rather than a physical thing that is you dominate your opponent by outflanking them not by by being brutally overpowering them which is what works for our protagonist true chair do you think that the move the  movie clearly targets white liberals as opposed to white maybe white people who are more overtly racist do you think maybe the movie would have been made differently if it had been made in the era of trump i can only say that jordan peele specifically in an interview said that he was reacting to people's love supposedly love of rather than what has happened more recently that the movie was made in reaction to people saying oh we're a post racial society no one sees color anymore look we have a black president who has a great doing a great job happened which happened since is a sort of a backlash to that where where many people who were trump supporters said well everyone was thinking just the opposite but everyone was afraid to say so because of political hypnosis and she uses a silver's which is here she's pretending to be or think she is this incredibly gracious white liberal but she's using the dominant you know born with a silver spoon in your mouth and that's really what it was fun about the film is finding all those little references i'm going to say one which is i'm not going to give the context but picking cotton is actually what saved i but there's so much of that you know i think and it's circular too because you know he had a terrible experience with his own mother the protagonist and that ends up actually well when i can't do it i can try to revisit i can't say wanting to tell the hero get out and ok the title of the movie is jordan peele said well i think he's done a great job of having both chris the hero and you in the audience say well it could be ok he he had heard a stand up bit by eddie murphy who said well first that what really prompted the film was eddie murphy stand up about dating a white woman and then the and so forth but he said that eddie murphy did a video about why black people never can star in our films and the reason is because they would come into a place that i'm not s and so and so actually that's a very excellent way that jordan peele did this balance yeah and when chris christie's friend is saying all the things that chris might be thinking like you gotta get out yeah and we saw this movie with a fairly large african american audience and they did exactly what i heard they did you know and there's one point where he's trying to skate for his life he's in a car and a drive that jordan peele was also trying to make a good horror movie because he says in one interview i read that he if he could have make a horror movie that had twenty think that when you're making a movie of terror you don't have to load it with incident because people think the horse themselves that's right yes that's right and it is it only has one fault i think if things get creepy too soon oddly not even to mention the servants who acted stream really oddly so i think for if he was trying to lure you into thinking that chris was paranoid and this really nothing wrong here he didn't spend enough time  or us to say chris is being paranoid chris seems to be not paranoid doesn't play it doesn't play the ambiguity card enough in that way that there's yeah yeah but i think there's other generally what i would call creepy moments like when he opens the closet and find something in the closet that is unexplained or rather that says that this girlfriend is alive to him and in fact lied to him in a big way so and but just that opening of the door way shot in totally classic horror movie style from the point of view of the dories looking in and then looks and you know opens the box and that's you know classic sort of harra thing and it was built up in a very very nice way and even even when he's trying to escape the house and his girlfriend says she can't stand by you kino and i think that this is the one thing that they kind of withhold in that she still acts very supportive and loving and she doesn't deny his feeling she's saying you know my parents are very awkward you know this is kind of very hard for you i understand and so you you're never sure about her that when she ca n that's a really really tense moments very thoughtful and this is very suspenseful and you're also questioning then her is she in on this and you're not sure and i think the casting of allison fire where he also reminded me of something when you say that which is that he's sort of an outsider in every way including in our estimation because we don't know him as an actor and then jordan peele had said that when he was a young man when he was a kid and growing up he was biracial he is biracial so when he had to pick his ethnicity he always had to pick other and others at the bottom and this really drilled into him the his inferiority and his outsider status until obama got elected and then there was some kind of a sanction for being other yes well i think but but to your point it's a good one the actor is also an outsider strong and it's still in all the commercial theatres and now it's come to the garden you know what i would love to know why it's popular i mean it's very funny it's got harder it's risk it's a combination of a lot of things but what i would really like to know and here we are here i am being really elitist to people who see it in a you know mass as opposed to the garden but more you know and really do they do they are is everybody getting the messages i think that people people are much more sensitive to what i think people are calling micro aggressions now because it's talked about it it's talked about certainly in the black community whether or not your average middle american who lives in an area without a lot of black people has heard about it but i think certainly in urban areas where there's been this discussion of it doesn't that that there's pain there are painful times and there is on conscious bias in white people that makes them not notice that what they're saying is racist that but that but that black people can very easily detect that and it's very difficult to fight against because there's nothing overtly mean about it there's nothing overtly discriminatory about to say oh i really admire your muscles because you know who jenny owens was my favorite athlete right right it's very very difficult to to to to to when you're not sure that the person means to be hostile it's just that they're not sensitive but is that being picked up by oh i can always pick up i don't think you could watch this movie without i mean maybe not knowing all the subtle symbolism that you're talking about but i think the feeling of being uncomfortable in a place where you're the only person of race i think i think half of the servants except for the servants  completely weird i think it gets across and i think this gets across i think it gets across but the other reason i think it's popular is because it's it's a little bit like scary movie in which the weigh ins brothers have made i think four of them now where it's just it's it's it's got harada it's got shocks but it's also god jokes and so you can be scared and then you can be relieved by something that funny element ask you something it depends on the the focal length not so much how wide it is whether or not everything is in focus from that big from the from the foreground to the background or whether or not the background is fuzzy and apparently it's typical in harm movies that you use the wider i said that i don't it does if you if you're seeing things in the background it's got several meanings because first of all then there's some scar sort of truth that might be reasserting itself that you're not seeing in the  i think actually it suffered a little from trying to be too too many thing to too many people trying to be a popular movie and trying to be a social so i treasure that way because you just saw it give yourself a day ok all right ok really enjoyed this movie so much i thought it was funny i thought it was i had thought i didn't particularly like the bloody parts but i thought it was fascinating movie and maybe it helps you do a little bit