Posted on May 17, 2020

Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror

Dawn Keetley

I am very happy to announce the publication of the edited collection, Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, just out from Ohio State University Press (2020) in their New Suns Series , edited by Kinitra D. Brooks and Susana M. Morris. It has a stunning cover design by Black Kirby.

I have a long introduction that explores Get Out within the political horror film tradition and that takes up, among other things, the way that the politics of blackface work in the film. But I wanted to excerpt, below, my description at the end of the introduction of the wonderful chapters written by my contributors so you can see the scope of the collection and the wealth of varied interpretations they offer.

“While the horror film and the horrors of the real world have always been thoroughly interwoven, and certainly are in Get Out, the two sections of this book mark different emphases in this relationship.

The first section considers Peele’s film within the horror tradition, exploring how Get Out employs the conventions of both gothic and horror to shape its (political) meanings.

–Looking back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, Jonathan Byron and Tony Perrello read Get Out through Shakespeare’s Othello (including suggestively positing Missy Armitage as Iago), arguing that the psychological suffering in tragedy becomes the bodily destruction of horror.

–Linnie Blake then takes up the Female Gothic tradition, with its origin in eighteenth-century British literature, provocatively exploring how Chris “signifies” on the classic gothic heroine.

–Robin R. Means Coleman and Novotny Lawrence position Get Out within the black horror film tradition, going back to 1915’s The Birth of a Nation. They argue that Get Out inverts the notion of the “whitopia” as safe, reclaiming the black urban space after decades of its vilification as a place of crime and danger.

–Taking up a particular subgenre of the horror tradition, the zombie film, Erin Casey-Williams traces Get Out’s roots to Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), with its central plot of stolen consciousness and appropriated will; she then goes on to position Peele’s film alongside the modern zombie narrative.

—Bernice M. Murphy locates Peele’s film within two other horror subgenres, the suburban and the rural horror film. She argues that Get Out emphasizes the violence lurking under suburban life not least by portraying the Armitage family as a version of the “bad white trash” clan of backwoods horror.

—Robyn Citizen then reads Get Out in light of yet another horror subgenre, the “body swap” film, arguing that Get Out finds an unexplored predecessor in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), as it explores the inevitably racialized concept of Cartesian dualism.

—Adam Lowenstein takes up two specific horror antecedents of Get Out, Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, in order to offer a distinctive argument about the horror genre more broadly. Levin’s novels and Peele’s film, Lowenstein claims, embody horror’s ability to express the experience, specifically the real pain, of social minorities (in this case both Jews and African Americans) as opposed to merely transforming that experience into monstrosity.

–Finally, Sarah Ilott argues that Get Out exemplifies the way in which contemporary gothic functions as systemic critique, specifically a critique of neoliberal capitalism as it shapes racialized hierarchy and inequality.

The second section takes up the politics of Get Out more directly, exploring the film’s sustained critique of racist institutions and practices. Peele’s progenitors in this section are traced to the real world rather than the literary and filmic traditions.

–Setting up the section’s political readings, the first chapter, by Todd K. Platts and David L. Brunsma, explores the racial divide in twenty-six early reviews of Get Out, a divide that emerges around the deeper political commitments of reviewers of color.

—Sarah Juliet Lauro then reads Get Out as a film about slave revolt, with a focus on Nat Turner’s infamous 1831 insurrection. Lauro traces how the film is shaped specifically by the tropes of the slave revolt narrative: migration, plantation, rebellion, and storytelling. (Indeed, many of the chapters in this section identify how Get Out illuminates the persistence of slavery-by-other-means in the twenty-first-century United States.)

–The next set of chapters all take up how Get Out articulates specific racial identity formations. Mikal Gaines shows how Get Out extends W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness,” making clear, through Chris, the catastrophic costs of a lifetime spent with a divided sense of self, specifically the “crippling immobility” that it induces.

—Robert LaRue then reads the “teacup scene,” in which Missy Armitage sends Chris to the sunken place, in order to argue that Get Out brilliantly dramatizes the ways in which the black male psyche has been injured when men are interpellated as boys and boys are interpellated as men—an injury spectacularly on display in white police officer Darren Wilson’s explanation of his fatal 2014 encounter with Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

—Kyle Brett continues the discussion of the sunken place and shows how Chris’s underexplored occupation as professional photographer actually implicates him in the “assaultive gaze” of the sunken place, as he seeks to capture especially black bodies (Georgina and Logan) with his camera. The end of the film, however, with Chris’s spontaneous shot of Walter’s face, offers a more liberating kind of photography, one aligned, for instance, with street documentation of police violence against black bodies.

–Shifting the focus from black to white identity formation, Laura Thorp argues that Peele’s film, like James Baldwin’s 1965 short story “Going to Meet the Man,” takes up the ways in which white identity is predicated on the violent colonization of the black body, which represents both sexual desire and a fearful finitude.

—Cayla McNally also explores how white racial formations have been dependent on the colonizing of the black body—specifically through an ostensibly “objective” science. She then argues, in a slight divergence from Kyle Brett’s argument, that Chris’s “gaze,” in part through his camera eye, is ultimately a means of liberation from the grasp of a racist science.

Finally, Alex Svensson’s chapter moves from Get Out’s textual politics to the real-world political implications of the film’s paratexts, specifically the “Do You Belong in This Neighborhood?” billboard ad. Like Jordan Peele’s film itself, advertisements for Get Out, as Svensson shows, have generated a multiplicity of meanings, intervening specifically in political fights over housing in California.

Taken together, the essays in this collection explore the ways in which Jordan Peele’s Get Out revolutionizes the gothic and horror tradition at the same time that it unmasks the particular politics of race in the early twenty-first-century United States. Among the many things for which Get Out became known in 2017 was the way in which it began conversations—and so, in the spirit of the film to which this book is dedicated, we hope that these essays continue the conversations, popular and academic, that have already begun. We are confident that there are still more gothic fictions and horror films that Get Out echoes, still more political implications to discern. Jordan Peele is now established, moreover, as one of the preeminent filmmakers of the twenty-first century, and this book is no doubt only one of many that will explore his particular brand of horror, his unfolding series of “social thrillers.” After the release of his second feature, Us, Peele rather cryptically claimed that Us “proves a very valid and different point than Get Out, which is, not everything is about race. Get Out proved that everything is about race. I’ve proved both points!”[1] Peele’s work—both Get Out and Us—is indeed a profound exploration of race, but it is an equally profound exploration of human nature. Get Out is about the human condition as well as about race, just as Us is about race as well as about the human condition. We hope this book proves useful in both conversations.