Ryan Darling
Journalism
Blog Project 2
Get Out
Get Out
By: Ryan Darling
It is very rare for a directors first movie to become a smash hit and even more unlikely that they would win any awards for it. But with his award-winning debut of his first film “Get Out” Jordan Peele shocked the whole world with his directorial talents and his writing chops.
Get Out, which is a horror/thriller movie was written and directed by Jordan Peele, who you may know from his YouTube channel Key and Peele or his comedy central show of the same name. Get out stars a Black photographer named Chris Washington, who is dating a white woman named Rose Armitage. She takes him home to meet her family. The first half of the movies portrays white liberals trying to have meaningful social interaction with a black man, which does not go so well. The second half of the movie turns out that Rose’s parents are running a slave action with Chris as the new target. An old white man wants his brain implanted into Chris’ body.
As this was Jordan Peele’s first movie there is nothing to compare this to but in the past, he was and still is a comedian who often does comedy shorts on YouTube. So, in comparison to those they are worlds apart. Where this movie is well crafted and is easy to see how it took a lot of time to make, his comedy shorts look good but took a lot less time and are lighter hearted. Get Out has so many different Easter eggs that many people have tried to find the meaning. Such as the skeleton deer at the end of the movie. What did that mean? Here is a link to some ideas other had. https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3425931/coolest-get-out-scenes-missing-jordan-peele/. (That part of the movie made me jump when I saw it.) But on his other comedy works there is no need to leave any questions unanswered because the goal is to entertain and not to leave the audience with a mystery. This movie was unlike any other horror/thriller movie I have seen in a long time. All the other movies that I have seen have been written very lazily and all the scares have been mostly predictable. What “Get out” did right that many others did wrong was the creepy aspect. Many horror movies go for the scary factor such as “It” and “Friday the 13th” but what those movies do not have is the creepy factor. What I call the creepy factor is something that sticks with you long after the movie is over that is not necessarily scary but it leaves you with chills when you think about it. Get out was written in such a way that it acts less like a horror movie and more like a thriller. But when you dive deep into the philosophy of the story the horror aspects start to reveal themselves. You can see this in the way that the actors talk and interact with each other. It doesn’t feel normal, they ask Chris questions that no normal white person would ask a black person such as “you must be good at basketball?” this was asked by Dean, who is Rose’s father.
What this movie is trying to show in the first half is how not racist white liberals are trying to be in this movie. You see many instances in this movie of the white people trying to show to Chris how they are not racist by saying how they like black people things that are often found to be stereotypical. Such as when Dean Rose’s father stays to Chris that he “would have voted for Obama for a third term, best president in our lifetime.” While the intention of these comments is to be able to relate with Chris they come off very disingenuous and are seeming to further isolate Chris from the family and making him feel more and more of an outsider. It seems disingenuous because any actual racism that slips through the cracks is to them “OK” because in the end “they can’t be racist if they are cool with black culture.” It reminds me of the phrase that has been said by politicians “I’m not racist my good friend is black.” The scene that involves the family reunion shows all the white people fascinated with Chris because he is black and even ask what it is like to be black. Which comes off a bit racist. What ends up happening is that the white people are using the black people to “satisfy their own desires”. Wisecrack did a great video about this linked below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gQP4ffowCY
They state that what is going on “In Get out” in the first couple acts are called “negrophilia” which is the obsession that white people have of black people and their culture. “Negrophilia is not truly understanding black people and their culture it’s about using them to satisfy you own desires. Which is what we see in this movie when they attempt to use black people’s bodies to advance the white person’s life. The target audience of this movie in the first half in my opinion is, white people. I think this is because what Jordan Peele is trying to tell us about Negrophilia is that they notice when you try to relate to them by saying things that are stereotypical black thinks such as voting for Obama or liking Tiger Woods. The critics gave “Get out” an eighty four out of a hundred score. Here are some responses “Get out is very creepy, very funny and as pitiless as a surgeon’s scalpel.” (peter Bradshaw, The Gradian) “Peele succeeds where sometimes even more experienced filmmakers fail: He’s made an agile entertainment whose social and cultural observation are woven so tightly into the fabric that your laughing even as your thinking, the vice-versa” (Stephanie Zacharek, Time). Full list of reviews - http://www.metacritic.com/movie/get-out/critic-reviews
I do not follow the creator of this movie on any social media but Jordan Peele. But Jordan did have a really interesting idea that he used to promote “Get out” and that was twitter meme’s. He used a few memes such as Nicki Minaj and other well known “gifs” that state the phrase “get out”. I think these were much more effective than the commercials could be because these people saw multiple times a day with each tweet getting at least 3000 likes and close to 1000 comment that would mean people are engaging in what he set out to do which was promote his new movie. Jordan Peele has a following on twitter of over 1 million and close to a million on Instagram. I am not a fan of most horror movies so when this came out I was skeptical on how it would turn out, so I did not go see it in theaters. I did however get it on DVD as soon as it came out because many people were saying how good of a movie it was. I watched it with a few of my friends who did not appreciate it as much as I did. When asking them about it later why they did not like it as much as I did, they said “I did not find all those things you had mentioned such as the Negrophilia. I just went into it thinking it was just another ordinary movie” (Alex).
Get Out is a well written and well directed horror/thriller movie that speaks on a very touchy topic in today’s society which is racism. It shows how casual racism is often used but the people who insist they are not racist because they are “down with black culture” so to say. The movie is depicting negrophilia which Is the white’s fascination of the black culture so much so that they attempt to collect black experiences and later real-life people. Ultimately this is a story about how Chris overcomes being marginalized and used his own masters tools to bring down his master’s house.
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