Not So Black and White

Rating: 10/10 (16 November 2018)

Spoilers Warning Elaborated: Brief mentions in the second paragraph below (i.e. not counting this one) of "Being John Malkovich" (1999) and adaptations of "The Stepford Wives" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" may contain spoilers for those films, as well.
On one level, "Get Out" is about societal race relations. This is the gist that almost everyone grasps, and it's quite successful in tapping into the zeitgeist of such anxieties in the U.S. at the end of the Obama administration, of a lampooned liberal and affluent sort of bigotry where blacks are coveted for their athleticism and coolness, to the point that the mostly-white characters seek to dominate their bodies by inhabiting them--cultural appropriation taken to the extreme. The beginning and ending scenes, especially, allude to real news stories, with a black man walking in a residential community where he's stalked and attacked recalling the killing of Trayvon Martin to start, and the, at first, seeming appearance of the police at the end posing an additional threat to the protagonist in the form of real-life police violence against African Americans. If that were all there were to "Get Out," it'd be fine, but I think there's a deeper level--even, perhaps, subconscious. It's about the representation of race: photographic and cinematic. It hints at the spectre of past and current racism of motion pictures haunting us, but turns those very devices--creating a horror genre movie--to deliver its doubled anti-racism message.
Some have compared this to "The Stepford Wives" (adapted to the screen in 1975 and 2004), but unless you're film critic Rex Reed and misbelieve that all the black men are turned into robots, then I think that comparison misses the mark. Personally, I was originally reminded more of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (adapted in 1956 and a few times thereafter), which also centrally featured a psychiatrist and involved victims being attacked in their sleep--and especially regarding the original colonialist bent of the book. The cocoon metaphor reminded me of the pods, and, of course, the black bodies are quite literally snatched and their bodies replaced by another mind. But, Drew Grant of the "Observer," among others, get more to the point in that "Get Out" shares similarities with the quirky self-reflexive indie film "Being John Malkovich." Although it's concerned with celebrity, the death of the artist and artistic creation, as opposed to race, there's a conspiracy to extend and better life behind it, as in "Get Out." Plus, there's the little door exposing the mystery in both, the orientation videos on TVs, the "sunken place" is similar to one being trapped in another's body in "Being John Malkovich," and there's Catherine Keener in both. Here, she plays the pivotal part of the psychiatrist who hypnotizes Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) into the sunken place.
The clever part of this methinks is the self-reflexivity. From the sunken place, Chris sees a mise-en-abyme--a framed image within a frame, like a movie--a film-within-a-film. Moreover, it's one that marginalizes and subjugates him, as it has other African Americans. This parallels Chris's story of the night his mother died, when he remained inactive, tellingly, while watching TV. The TV is further paralleled when Chris is both physically and hypnotically restrained during the orientation and hypnotic teacup videos. He's a deer caught in the headlights, and, indeed, there's a motif comparing Chris to a deer. Outside his subconscious, the rest of the narrative of whites body snatching blacks recalls, as well as slavery, an extreme form of the blackface employed in film and theatrical history. Although, in reality, it's black actors playing white characters written and directed by a black man, Jordan Peele, except there's no whiteface, but blacks acting as whites acting black and who still have traces of their black selves buried within, spectators of a screen image of their misrepresentation.
Notice how Chris challenges this cinematic white supremacy. He's a photographer, with black-and-white images adorning his apartment and gazing upon fellow African-American bodies through the viewfinder of his camera. The blind art dealer (Stephen Root) desires this quality of Chris specifically, which is attributed to his eyes, and the art dealer fancies himself not to be a racist like his cohorts, but he's more than literally blind in this respect. As with the rest of Hollywood history, race is part of the ideology of the cinematic gaze, and who controls that gaze controls racial representations--and shares that gaze with the spectator. In effect, when we're viewing a movie, we're in a sunken place, following a gaze that we don't control. Furthermore, to awaken his racial brethren, Chris snaps pictures of them with his cell-phone camera--although it's specifically the flash of light that's given credit. Chris does within the movie exactly what writer-director Peele tried to do in making it, to awaken the spectator from a sunken place, not only of societal racism, but also the cinematic sort.
P.S. I'm glad there's no white savior trope here, either. It's depressing reading complaints of there being no redeeming white characters. Reverse that and see how many movies where there are no redeeming black characters--or any other character of a racial minority, for that matter. Besides, the white cop requesting Chris's ID was no worse than the detectives of other races mocking the abductions of African Americans. Anyways, "Get Out" focuses on a man entrapped by a cult. The only major outside contact is with his friend employed with the TSA (Lil Rel Howery)--the role that might've been occupied by the white savior in a lesser scenario. There are no good white people assuming the bodies of the racial other here; that movie is called "Avatar" (2009).