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Rife with symbolism and social commentary, Jordan Peele's debut feature effectively employs and subverts well-worn horror tropes, constituting a work that is as entertaining as it is politically charged. As ANTHONY CAREW explores, the film functions as both a scathing satire of liberal racism and an evocation of the everyday fears that African-American people must endure.
'Do they know I'm black?' That's what Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) asks his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), early on in the first act of Jordan Peele's hugely successful debut film, Get Out (2017). He's black, she's white, and they're about to embark on that classic newrelationship milestone: meeting the parents. This narrative set-up isn't new - think of the landmark 1967 film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer) - but Peele takes a familiar story to unfamiliar places, his film a slow-burn horror movie interrogating race and racism in contemporary America. It's a film, says Peele, where 'society is the monster'.1
Though it was released - and, eventually, won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay - in Donald Trump's America, Peele penned Get Out as a response to Barack Obama's presidential reign, during which the election of the first ever president of colour, in 2008, had been hailed as a symbol of a nation shaking off its racist past. 'We were in a period where a lot [of] people [were] saying racism was over,' Peele explains. 'I was writing during the Obama era, the era of the post-racial lie.'2 Here, Peele dismantles this post-racial myth in both comic and horrific ways: from social settings full of microaggressions - those tiny faux pas that speak of greater prejudices - to his grand gambit, in which Rose's family turn out to be masterminds of a wealthy cabal that transplants the brains of ageing white people into young, black bodies. Rose's father, Dr Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford), proudly boasts that he would've voted for Obama for a third time if he could, all while participating in an inhuman plot with grand racist echoes. He's a poster boy for self-satisfied white liberals, the chief proponents of the post-racial myth.
'I felt like there was this void in the way we talk about race [...] like racism was not being called out sufficiently,'...