Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Challenging Hegemonic, Heteronormative, Horror
Canadian film theorist Robin Wood writes in The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70’s, “The definition of normality in horror films is in general boringly constant: the heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support and defend them” (2003, 31). Wood’s formulaic description of the horror genre contends that the monster serves to disrupt normality, however normality is ultimately restored at the finish of the film with the killing of the monster. As Wood explains, this process is psychologically cathartic because the monster tends to embody repression and societal oppression of the Other. “It is the horror film that responds in the most clear-cut and direct way, because central to it is the actual dramatization of the dual concept of the repressed/the Other, in the figure of the monster,” writes Wood (28). Therefore, the genre allows for a process of de-sublimation followed by a return of repression.
The impending release of Jordan Peele’s Get Out fundamentally challenges this conceptualization of normality that Wood describes. Peele turns the genre on its head by portraying the abject fear of being black in America, creating an unprecedented reality within the horror world. The film follows Chris, who sets out with his white girlfriend, Rose, to meet her parents for the first time. At first it seems like the trailer is for a lighthearted romantic comedy that will challenge your ideas about race. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll feel good in the end. “Don’t come back all bougie man. Come back you got your damn pants up to your damn stomach,” says Chris’ friend as they call him from the car. Chris and his girlfriend laugh at the friend’s warning about the dangers of white suburbia, but suddenly a deer appears not running, but supernaturally flying at their windshield.
Terrifying music creeps in, and we know that this isn’t a rom-com anymore.
The police officer that is filing a report for the accident asks Chris for his license, despite the fact that he was not the one driving the car. At this point the only spooky/supernatural event is the flying possessed devil deer that comes out of left field. A racist cop, however completely matches reality in America.
Our point of identification clearly lies with Chris in the film. We feel uncomfortable as his girlfriend’s family scrutinizes him. We pick up on the strangeness of the zombie like workers that tend to this family’s household. Historically, there has been a connection with black people and zombies within the horror genre. The term in fact derives from the zombi, a reanimated corpse figure in Haitian folklore. As Annalee Newitz points out in her book Pretend We’re Dead, “stories about the undead are best understood in the context of anxieties about many kinds of race relationships that develop in the wake of colonialism” (2006, 90). Many earlier zombie flicks depict Caribbean black voodoo magic as the source of fear. The trailer for Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With A Zombie shows a white woman walking around mindlessly at night, coming in contact with a stoic black man. The narrator speaks over this depiction “and out of their West Indian Island comes a tale of terror and voodoo, of witchcraft and zombies, and all the weird black magic that the white man seldom sees.” Newitz highlights that these films represent miscegenation fears and the destruction of racial purity when black and white cultures mix.
Get Out flips the switch by portraying the perils of a black man in an interracial couple, rather than focusing on the “plight” of the white woman. These perils involve micro-aggressions such as white people attempting to assume African-American vernacular: “How long has this been going on, this thang,” says Rose’s father upon first meeting Chris. Simultaneously, forced assimilation and complete erasure of black culture becomes a major threat as first evidenced by the lighthearted joke that Chris will come back “bougie” and later by a second call and more serious warning from Chris’ friend: “So look I go do my research, apparently a whole bunch of brothers been missing in this suburb.” We find out from the trailer that the zombie-like black characters that Chris encounters have been subjected to hypnosis and are under the spell of Rose’s mother. This hypnosis causes the black people trapped in the suburb to either perform whiteness or act subservient. White hypnosis becomes the form of terror in this horror film replacing the racist trope of black voodoo magic.
Peele’s film therefore defies hegemonic conceptions of normality and shows fear from the point of view of the Other. The trailer ends with Chris fighting back against Rose’s family. He refuses to be assimilated into a normality that is not his own. However, since it doesn’t hit theaters until February, we can merely guess at how the film ends. Will it follow Wood’s formula in the sense that Chris’ own normality will be ultimately restored? Will the white threat cathartically be destroyed providing satisfaction and hope for its viewers that this form of oppression can be overcome? Or will it represent that sad truth that we see today, especially with the transition from President Obama to Trump, that the looming threat of whiteness constantly reasserts itself.
This is what happens in the end of Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s zombie film with a black protagonist. Ben is a levelheaded black man who assumes the role of leader within a house full of white people attempting to fend off zombies. He ends up being the sole survivor in the house and makes it through the night. An organized group of men with guns find the house and begin to kill off the surrounding zombies. They lump the very much alive Ben in with the rest of the zombies and shoot him. This ending is jarring and painful, especially because the film came out only a few months after the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
We will have to wait until February to see what message Jordan Peele will send to empathetic black viewers and white America. Nevertheless, Get Out challenges politics of fear by utilizing the horror genre to reclaim the notion of what can be deemed as safety and who is allowed to be afraid.