Do not read this until after you’ve seen Get Out. Wait, why haven’t you seen Get Out yet? RETHINK YOUR LIFE.
“There is a saying – and I would be happy to attribute it if I could remember who to attribute it to – that perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.” – Stephen King
Jordan Peele’s Get Out leaves you with much to discuss (and, based on this past weekend’s box office haul, a lot of people are having those discussions). It’s a grower. Conversation topics could range from the film in general, to the various twists and turns of the devious plotting, to the mysteries the film leaves open or only hints at, to how shocking it is that the dude who used to play Obama every Wednesday night on Comedy Central turned out to have a master’s touch for horror in his debut outing, or to the racial politics that course through the picture with an openness and a boldness that is shocking in today’s cultural climate.
But if you’ll permit me, I’d like to talk about Get Out as a horror film. Specifically, I’d like to talk about how the film fits into the larger genre of paranoia-driven horror/thriller films, and how devoted horror nerd Jordan Peele twigs that familiar structure to stunningly satisfying ends.
Just to use one example, I don’t think it is talking out of turn to call Rosemary’s Baby a massive influence on Get Out (mostly because, in interviews, Peele has said that Rosemary’s Baby is a massive influence on Get Out). Both films center on one half of a young couple being brought to an unfamiliar setting (the gothic nightmare Bramford Hotel in Rosemary, the chillingly banal Armitage Estate in Get Out) and almost immediately put on edge by the oh-so-slightly off-kilter behavior of the locals. The protagonist wanders deeper into the trap of which we, the audience, have only a slightly larger awareness, building up to the final revelations of the grand scheme. Both films even have the other half of the couple be complicit in the plot for an extra twist of the knife.
We’ve been telling stories about repressive societies devouring outsiders for as long as we’ve been telling stories, but this particular form developed an extra-nihilistic kick in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Whereas films of years past would probably feature the evildoers defeated or at least have a hero or two survive to keep up the good fight, a cultural pall settled over writers and directors during the Vietnam and Watergate.
Suddenly, the problem wasn’t just that the bad guys might win. The problem was that the bad guys had won before the game even started. You were fucked from jump street, and all your attempts to extricate yourself only resulted in the web closing in all the tighter.
So whereas the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers ended with Kevin McCarthy howling that you might be next, a desperate warning before it was too late, the 1978 remake’s twist ending reveals that hero Donald Sutherland has been converted into a pod person, sounding the alien screech to alert the others about the last vestige of humanity. Game over, people.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Wicker Man, The Stepford Wives. If you wanted to expand the margins of what ‘horror’ can encompass, we might even add in the likes of The Parallax View or The Conversation, all films that end with our ambassadors of decency, modernity, and morality either snuffed out like candles or utterly broken beyond any hope of recovery.
And uniting these films is a key revelation that adds an extra note of night: EVERYONE IS IN ON IT.
The kindly gas station worker? He’s just as shit-house crazy as the lunatics with the skinned-human-face mask and he will happily turn you over.
The adorable little moppets who just want to sing and play? They’ll sing and play while their parents haul you into the Wicker Man and roast you alive in the name of their heathen god.
Leonard Nimoy? YOU’RE GODDAMN RIGHT LEONARD NIMOY’S IN ON IT.
This story-form reaches its apex with Rosemary’s Baby. What brilliant filmmaker/rape-y creep Roman Polanski does so perfectly is submerge you absolutely into the point of view of Mia Farrow’s Rosemary. We experience the encroaching dread at the same pace that she does, and if our omniscient perspective as filmgoers gives us any edge over her, it’s only that we know before she does just how monumentally fucked poor Rosemary truly is.
Stephen King talked a great deal about both the film and Ira Levin’s original novel in his terrific nonfiction work, Danse Macabre. King wrote extensively about how the horror genre can act as a release valve for our own psychic damage we accumulate throughout our days and lives. Horror allows us to indulge ourselves in every imaginable “worst case” scenario, all within the safe confines of a book or a movie.
King wrote, “Before we have reached the midpoint in Levin’s tale, we suspect everybody [emphasis Uncle Stevie’s]-and in nine cases out of ten we have been right to do so…in this book there really are no nice people next door, and the worst things you imagined about that dotty old lady down in 9-B turn out to be true. The real victory of the book is that it allows us to be crazy for a while.”
Which brings us back to Get Out.
If this was Ira Levin’s victory in 1967 when Rosemary’s Baby was published, and rape-y creep Roman Polanski’s victory when the film hit in 1968 (damn, they cranked shit out FAST back in the day), then Jordan Peele can lay the same claim to victory with Get Out in 2017.
Because what Peele has captured, with the same razor-sharp specificity that helped make so many Key and Peele sketches so indelible, is an All-American nightmare, a “Worst Case” scenario for every black man who has ever found themselves alone in a white neighborhood.
I’m going to be presumptuous and assume that Jordan Peele does not actually believe that all white people are aligned in a secret cabal to transfer the consciousness of old white assholes into the bodies of young black people (or, I guess if he DOES believe this to be true, Thanksgiving is probably pretty awkward at Chelsea Peretti’s house). But Get Out posits a world in which every-day-occurring social horrors (The wealthy, middle-aged white liberal proudly declaring, apropos of nothing, “I would’ve voted for Obama for a third term.”) give way to total pulp lunacy, and because of the nature of the film’s reality, both these intimate and grandiose terrors are given equal weight.
Get Out’s premise is insane, yes, but it’s an insanity founded in very painful reality, and by crouching those truths in a funhouse horror ride, Peele has gifted his audience with a space to, as King put it, go insane for a little while, to indulge in a worst case scenario.
There’s one area where Peele differs from his cinematic progenitors, though: He ditches the nihilism. Get Out sure seems like it’s driving towards the same sort of twisted, Twilight Zone-style punch that marked that era of film and genre (my sold-out audience palpably groaned when the police lights showed up) but instead of having the hero (Daniel Kaluuya, who is terrific) have his hopes dashed at the last possible second by the system (embodied by Allison Williams, who somehow makes eating Fruit Loops and drinking milk into a FUCKING NIGHTMARE), he is saved by a devoted friend (Lil Rel Howery, who needs to be in ten movies a year, starting now).
It would have been easy for Peele to hit the cynical note to cap out the film. Given the state of race relations under Orange Fuckhole in Chief, no one could’ve blamed him. But while Peele may be playing with existing rhythms, he’s answering to no one’s voice but his own. And in his story? Those same-old, same-old systems of supremacy and subjugation? They don’t get to win.
Not this time.