By Maurice Mcleod 

(spoilers only in the links)

Good horror, just like good satire, isn’t built around the bizarre, it’s built on the familiar.GET-OUT-2.gif

There are few things more familiar to black people in the West than being the outsider in social or professional circles. Answering dumb-ass questions about your heritage or sporting prowess are just tiresome hurdles to navigate when dealing with large groups of ‘well-meaning‘ white people.

Jordon Peele’s comedy/horror Get Out hit UK screens this weekend after smashing the box office and the comment pages in the US. The film stars British actor Daniel Kaluuya as Chris Washington, a young black photographer invited to meet his white girlfriend’s family for the first time – in itself that’s a pretty scary situation. When his girlfriend, Rose Armitage, played by Allison Williams from Girls, tells him she hasn’t told her folks that her new guy is black, a more savvy hero would have cut the trip right there. But then that wouldn’t have made for a very long film.

Mixed relationships come with their own challenges, and a lack of awareness from the chris and rose.jpgwhite partner of the reality of their black partner’s life is a millstone that runs the risk of turning every social engagement into an act of betrayal. If Rose really didn’t think it worth mentioning to her parents that her new boyfriend was black, she’s either ridiculously blinkered or just plain stupid.

Travelling while black is fraught with danger in the US and when the couple are pulled over on the way to her family’s country estate, Rose shows she hasn’t learned to look beyond her own privilege by mouthing off to the police officer while Chris tries to placate the situation.

I’ve been with my white partner for almost 18 years. Some of the scenes from Get Out seemed to have been plagiarised directly from my life experiences. Awkward garden parties where people mistake you for ‘the help’ or networking events where strangers randomly tell you about their love of Bob Marley are just minor annoyances that are common to many black people in the UK.

Jordon Peele is half of comedy double act Key and Peele, and his directorial debut shows all the skills he has honed over the years producing tight comedy sketches. Not a moment is wasted in building the tension making the film worthy of at least two viewings to catch all the inside jokes and hat tips.

Get Out brilliantly taps into feelings of discomfort and then ratchets them up gradually to breaking point. Arriving at the Armitages’ home, the young couple are first greeted by a waving black gardener in a hat before meeting Dean and Missy, Rose’s liberal parents. Even the over-familiar way that Dean greets Chris is totally on point. He already hug.jpgthinks he knows this young man and can’t wait to tell him that he would have voted for Obama three times if he could have. I’ve heard people describe this ‘instant buddies’ phenomenon as a positive thing, ‘what’s so wrong with people being immediately at ease?’ they ask. The problem is they are only really connecting with the two-dimensional version of you that they have already prepared in their heads.

The Armitages have two black staff, who are the very definition of house negroes but when Chris does the natural thing and reaches out to them for connection, he gets nothing but strangeness back. In a scene that has already spurred online craze the Get Out challenge, Chris sneaks out in the middle of the night for a cheeky fag and is faced with Walter, the weird black gardener, running at him full pelt only narrowly avoiding crashing straight into him. Any black person who has started a new job in a predominantly white company knows the feeling of being blanked by the other black face you see in the building. Chris’ attempts to reach out to both Walter and Georgina, the off-key maid who keeps unplugging his charging phone, leave him feeling even more out of place and alone.

The local wealthy white folk turn up and Chris is the star of the show as he runs the gauntlet of inappropriate comments and touches with the fixed fake smile we sometimes have to wear to get through these social ordeals. In real life, the threat is subtle and the danger is to your self-esteem, but for Chris the threat became more and more real, and the danger was to his very being. The thing that the film gets so right is that this group is not overtly racist, they are not Trump voters, they are Obama-supporting liberals and that is where the real terror lies.

If there is a criticism of Get Out, which cost just £4.5m to make, it’s that the story arc is fairly predictable. We know where it’s going we just don’t know how it’s going to get there. This didn’t spoil the film in any way for me. Peele had planned a darker ending but I wonder if that would have been a step too far. He picked the scab, he didn’t need to rub pepper sauce into the wound.

As the micro-aggressions turn macro and the perceived threat manifests into something much worse, the story manages to adeptly walk two paths. It is designed to be a shout-at-the-screen, throw-your-popcorn romp and does not disappoint for a moment. It also manages to contain metaphors for white liberal supremacy ‘Behold the Coagula’, the paralysing effect of racism ‘the Sunken Place’ and even takes a swipe at the NBA’s draft process. Camera flashes and stirring teaspoons are both likely to enter pop culture as signs that someone has either been bamboozled or woke.

Oh and this film needs to be seen in a large cinema with lots of black people.

Maurice Mcleod is a social commentator with Jamaican/Swazi heritage. He is director of his own communications company, Marmoset Media, and writes regularly for The Guardian and The Spectator among other titles. He is also vice chair of campaign group Race on the Agenda. Maurice often appears on Sky News as a talking head and writes about social issues, race or politics. He tweets as @mowords

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14 thoughts on “Get Out: If I’m around too many white people, I get nervous”

  1. Yes, I to am a racist black person like yourself! Thank god we made a movie about evil whitey! Evil whitey mc white white whiteington whiterson. Just the other day I robbed some white bitch and when he only had a 50 in his wallet I felt like I was being racially oppressed.

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  2. Great write up. The movie was awesome, but the ending drove me crazy. I would have much preferred he stuck with his original ending, depressing as it might have been. After the movie, I kept thinking he’d get arrested anyway. Imagine the world Chris lives in and escapes into is 100% real.

    *Major Spoiler Alert*

    When he’s picked up by his TSA savior Rod, he’s not only murdered an entire family of ‘well-to-do’ white folks as well as their two servants, but he’s also called the police and told them his name and that he was AT THE HOUSE! Not only that, but I assumed the fire destroyed any evidence of the weirdness that was going on at the house.

    I’m glad he was able to get away, but it drove me nuts thinking about what will happen next for Chris. Yes, WE all know that he did everything in self-defense, but being citizens of this world, we also know what kind treatment black men suspected of violent crimes against white people receive. I couldn’t help but think that Chris will get executed by the police and his TSA friend as well whenever they get pulled over for Driving While Black and then connected to the brutal crimes. At best he gets a ”fair trial’ in America, right?

    This all really killed the movie for me. It was after that my girlfriend said, “It’s nice to see the black guy get away,” and I think that’s true. It was a great twist to see Rod pick him up and the two of them drive off together, but I couldn’t help but think that the biggest problems for Chris are yet to come.

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    1. When I say “killed the movie,” I mean it took me to a place where we saw Chris stand up for himself and save himself from this evil group of fucked up white people, only it left me with the knowledge that Chris isn’t safe at all. In fact, he’s in more danger than ever. This is why it was so dissatisfying, because I wanted Chris to get away and be able to clear his name as opposed to how it actually played out.

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      1. Yo are right Jonathan. In the real world, he’s in for a whole world of trouble. But there really is only so much gloom the audience can be expected to take so I’m glad it finished as it did.

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  6. Great piece about a fantastic movie! Gotta say regarding the first comment (Timbowp), you’re pretty much denying the fundamental reality on planet earth regarding skin color throughout history. Also you toss aside the risk of being shot by a cop like it’s not a huge part of the equation. I’d much rather be pulled over and be shaken down for cash then be pulled over and worry that my life will end when I try to pull out my ID.

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  7. “If I’m around too many black people, I get nervous?”

    I’ve lived around 10 years in an insular non-white culture, one where it’s relatively common for local and government organisations to charge one price for a citizen, and perhaps more than 2x that for someone who is assumed to be non-native. I’ve endured many of the experiences you highlight above – thankfully not including the danger of being shot by a jittery policeman, although they do target non-natives deliberately, knowing the chances are that we have access to greater funds for roadside “donations”

    One of the first things you have to deal with while settling in a different culture, is people from your own culture who avoid you by default. They might be doing it because they have gone “Jim Crow”, but since they are not in a position of authority over me, the only plausible explanation is that they do so in order to validate their internalised commitment to “cracking the code” and qualifying their credentials of being one with the culture they have chosen to integrate with.

    the thing is, if you visualise yourself of the back-foot, then you’ll react to your circumstances defensively. that’s not to say genuine opposition you encounter is imagined, but it does mean you’ll interpret events through the prism you view them. therefore your prism must be calibrated to critically test its interpretations.

    would your experience be any different in a Latino or Asian context? is it possible that a white person living in a black environment would encounter the same?
    almost certainly most of the issues you raise could be replicated in one form or another. therefore it’s more accurate to identify that the cause of the problem is not the “whiteness” of your environment, but that the hegemony of the culture leaves many therein, ill-equipped to deal appropriately with alternative experiences.

    “If I’m around too many people who have lived insular lives, I get nervous?”

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    1. Well in the context of this film and those minds behind it the problem is the whiteness as not simply normative in the culture but predominant. One interesting aspect of the film is the presence of an Asian man at the garden party, and the reason that is so significant is due to how whiteness has exported anti-black racism and prejudice. When we think about the power of colonization of both lands and of media the tendency to place all but a few select black faces in a specific set of roles and ways of being has had many of the same effects in other cultures which consume western media. So is the problem whiteness alone? No. Prejudice is a universal problem and when you move form one ethnic area to another roles can reverse even within the U.S or U.K that can happen from individual place to individual place, but does that ultimately change the global political, social, and economic scales of who holds power and who does not? Does that change how imagery has been exported to other places? Does that change the legacy of western white nations whose people created an ethnic and racial hierarchy that was still hard line enforced in many placed if not by de jure then by de facto order until recently? The answer is no. The historical legacy of whiteness as a construct is complex, and in the context of this movie whiteness is brought to task…but it isn’t alone because we have a world that has been educated to believe the worst of many black people.

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    2. You are dillusional. White people have never experienced the genicdal racism which creates that tension in black people.

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