Jordan Peele and Ira Levin Go to the Movies: the Black/Jewish Genealogy of Modern Horror’S Minority Vocabulary ADAM LOWENSTEIN 101
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JORDAN PEELE’S GET OUT NEW SUNS: RACE, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY IN THE SPECULATIVE Susana M. Morris and Kinitra D. Brooks, Series Editors JORDAN PEELE’S GET OUT Political Horror Edited by Dawn Keetley THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2020 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Keetley, Dawn, 1965– editor. Title: Jordan Peele’s Get out : political horror / edited by Dawn Keetley. Other titles: Get out | New suns: race, gender, and sexuality in the speculative. Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2020] | Series: New suns: race, gender, and sexuality in the speculative | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Essays explore Get Out’s cultural roots, including Shakespeare’s Othello, the female gothic, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and the zombie, rural, suburban, and body-swap subgenres of the modern horror film. Essays make connections with Nat Turner, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019045485 | ISBN 9780814214275 (cloth) | ISBN 0814214274 (cloth) | ISBN 9780814277812 (ebook) | ISBN 0814277810 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Peele, Jordan, 1979– —Criticism and interpretation. | Get out (Motion picture : 2017) | Horror films—History and criticism. | Racism in motion pictures. | United States—Race relations—21st century. Classification: LCC PN1997.2.G46 J67 2020 | DDC 791.43/72—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045485 Cover design by Black Kirby Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Palatino The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. CONTENTS Introduction Get Out: Political Horror DAWN KEETLEY 1 PART 1: THE POLITICS OF HORROR Chapter 1 From Tragedy to Horror: Othello and Get Out JONATHAN BYRON AND TONY PERRELLO 23 Chapter 2 Burning Down the House: Get Out and the Female Gothic LINNIE BLAKE 36 Chapter 3 A Peaceful Place Denied: Horror Film’s “Whitopias” ROBIN R. MEANS COLEMAN AND NOVOTNY LAWRENCE 47 Chapter 4 Get Out and the Zombie Film ERIN CASEY-WILLIAMS 63 Chapter 5 Place, Space, and the Reconfiguration of “White Trash” Monstrosity BERNICE M. MURPHY 72 Chapter 6 The Body Horror of White Second Chances in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds and Jordan Peele’s Get Out ROBYN CITIZEN 87 vi ≈ CONTENTS Chapter 7 Jordan Peele and Ira Levin Go to the Movies: The Black/Jewish Genealogy of Modern Horror’s Minority Vocabulary ADAM LOWENSTEIN 101 Chapter 8 Racism that Grins: African American Gothic Realism and Systemic Critique SARAH ILOTT 114 PART 2: THE HORROR OF POLITICS Chapter 9 Reviewing Get Out’s Reviews: What Critics Said and How Their Race Mattered TODD K. PLATTS AND DAVID L. BRUNSMA 131 Chapter 10 Specters of Slave Revolt SARAH JULIET LAURO 147 Chapter 11 Staying Woke in Sunken Places, or the Wages of Double Consciousness MIKAL J. GAINES 160 Chapter 12 Holding onto Hulk Hogan: Contending with the Rape of the Black Male Psyche ROBERT LARUE 174 Chapter 13 The Horror of the Photographic Eye KYLE BRETT 187 Chapter 14 The Fantasy of White Immortality and Black Male Corporeality in James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” and Get Out LAURA THORP 200 Chapter 15 Scientific Racism and the Politics of Looking CAYLA McNALLY 212 Chapter 16 “Do You Belong in This Neighborhood?” Get Out’s Paratexts ALEX SVENSSON 223 Cast List 237 List of Contributors 239 Index 245 INTRODUCTION GET OUT Political Horror DAWN KEETLEY RELEASED ON February 24, 2017, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which he wrote and directed, was by any standards a game-changing film. It has been acclaimed by critics, accruing almost unanimously positive reviews—a vir- tually unheard of feat for a horror film. (It has 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, with 345 positive and only six negative reviews.)1 Peele’s film was not only a suc- cess with critics but also with audiences. Produced on a mere $4.5 million budget, Get Out has grossed over $255 million worldwide. It was nominated for four Academy Awards (again, unusual for a horror film)—Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Daniel Kaluuya), and Best Original Screenplay. Peele won the award for best Original Screenplay, becoming the first African American writer to win in this category.2 Get Out centers on an African American man, Chris Washington, who takes a trip to upstate New York to visit the wealthy family of his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage. The off-putting family visit immerses Chris in a world of microaggressions that get progressively more unnerving, even sinister, culminating in the terrifying moment when he realizes he has been 1. “Get Out,” Rotten Tomatoes, June 15, 2019, https://www.rottentomatoes. com/m/get_out. 2. “Get Out,” Box Office Mojo, June 15, 2019, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/ movies/?id=blumhouse2.htm. 1 2 ≈ INTRODUCTION seduced into a deadly trap. Knocked unconscious, Chris wakes up in the family’s basement strapped to a chair and watching a video that tells him he will be undergoing an operation, the Coagula procedure, that will transplant a white man’s brain into his head, divesting him of almost all consciousness and rendering him a mere passenger in his own body. Both a horror film about race and a parable about contemporary racial relations told through horror tropes, Get Out has been at the center of a storm of controversy over genre. It was infamously nominated as Best Picture in the Musical or Com- edy category at the Golden Globe Awards in 2017, a designation that sat well with no one, including Peele himself, who publicly entered the fray by tweeting somewhat tongue-in-cheek that Get Out was actually a documen- tary.3 Get Out has also—and equally controversially—been dubbed an exem- plar of “elevated horror,”4 a term at which horror fans tend to take umbrage since it presumes that any horror film with artistic and cultural merit must have a qualifier—that it can’t be simplyhorror. Get Out in the Political Horror Tradition While virtually every interview Peele has given positions Get Out as a “hor- ror film,”5 he has self-consciously chosen to designate it a “social thriller”—a film, as Peele describes it, in which the “monster” is society itself. As Peele explains the genesis of this term, he was trying to figure out how to catego- rize Get Out and felt that neither “horror” nor “psychological thriller” cap- tured exactly what he was doing, so he thought, “social thriller,” because the “bad guy is society.” Peele continued, “I coined the term social thriller, but I definitely didn’t invent it.”6 Peele has elaborated to Business Insider about the central tenet of the “social thriller,” which certainly defines the particular brand of horror in Get Out: “The best and scariest monsters in the world are 3. Jordan Peele, @JordanPeele, Twitter, November 15, 2017, https://twitter.com/ jordanpeele/status/930796561302540288?lang=en. 4. John Krasinski dubbed Get Out an example of “elevated horror” as he was talking about his own The Quiet Place (2018). See Olsen, “How John Krasinski.” See also Knight, “There’s No Such Thing,” for a powerful refutation of the term “elevated horror.” 5. For instance, as he describes writing the screenplay for Get Out and then making the decision to direct it himself, Peele says, “I have seen so few horror movies where a black person has been given the director’s chair that I realized, Why not me? I know this thing.” Yuan and Harris, “First Great Movie.” 6. Yuan and Harris, “First Great Movie.” On Peele’s comments on the “social thriller,” see also Harris, “Giant Leap,” and Weinstein, “‘Society.’” There is now an entire Wikipedia entry on the “Social Thriller.” See Wikipedia Contributors, “Social Thriller.” DAWN KEETLEY ≈ 3 human beings and what we are capable of especially when we get together. I’ve been working on these premises about these different social demons, these innately human monsters that are woven into the fabric of how we think and how we interact, and each one of my movies is going to be about a different one of these social demons.”7 For Peele, then, the distinctive terrain of the “social thriller” is that its monster is intractably human, the “demon” inextricably part of the very real fabric of society. Debate over the exact rela- tion between a “social thriller” and a horror film is likely to continue, as Peele intends to direct four more social thrillers; indeed, his second feature, Us, released in March 2019, has been dubbed both social thriller and also “more unabashedly a horror film” than Get Out.8 Acknowledging that the social thriller has a long tradition, Peele curated a series of films for the Brooklyn Academy of Music called “The Art of the Social Thriller” to coincide with the opening of Get Out, and most, not sur- prisingly, were recognizably horror films—Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Shining (1980), Misery (1990), The People under the Stairs (1991), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Candyman (1992), Scream (1996), and Funny Games (1997)—along with a few nonhorror films that amplify the “social” part of “social thriller”—Rear Window (1954), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), and The ‘Burbs (1989).9 Peele’s insistence that the monster of the “social thriller” is unambiguously human does stand at odds, though, with some of the prevailing definitions of horror. Noël Carroll, for instance, has posited that “art-horror” is distinguished as a genre by its explicitly nonhuman and “impure” monster—“categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete or formless” and “not classifiable according to our standing categories.” Carroll has rather notoriously claimed that films with human “monsters” (including Psycho) are not horror.10 As useful as Carroll’s definition is, however, it does not account for what has been the longstanding tradition of the political horror film, which is indeed driven by very human monsters.