Anger translator: Jordan Peele's Get Out Michael Jarvis Science Fiction Film and Television, Volume 11, Issue 1, Spring 2018, pp. 97-109 (Review) Published by Liverpool University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/686936 Access provided by University of Portland (30 Jan 2019 03:58 GMT) Review essay Anger translator Jordan Peele’s Get Out Michael Jarvis Get Out (Jordan Peele US 2017). Universal Pictures 2017. Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Region 1. 2.40:1 widescreen. US$10.00. WELCOME WAGON LADY: Have you heard? Just spreading like wildfire. A black family’s moving into town. Think that’s good? I think it’s good. Well, I don’t know if I think it’s good so much as I think it’s natural, considering, well, I mean, after all, we are the most liberal town around. JOANNA EBERHART: Stepford? – The Stepford Wives (Forbes US 1975) In a 2007 analysis of the campy millennial remakes of The Stepford Wives (Oz US 2004) and Bewitched (Ephron US 2004) for Journal of Popular Film and Television, Sherryl Vint updates Susan Faludi’s ‘backlash thesis’ in order to point to a disturbing trend in the discourse of contemporary cultural production. Building on Faludi’s diagnosis of a popular cultural reaction to second-wave feminism, one illustrated by narrative portrayals of career-minded women who come to regret missing out on the more meaningful pleasures of domesticity, Vint argues for a more insidious contemporary ‘new backlash’: In [Faludi’s] old backlash, feminism was vilified as a false ideology to which women sacrificed their personal happiness (in marriage and motherhood) for the sake of abstract ideals about work and independence. In the new backlash, women’s equality is treated as a fact that no sensible person would deny, but feminism is made to seem ridiculous and passé in its insistence on still talking about gender discrimination when we all clearly live in a postfeminist utopia. (162) Instead of attacking the discourse of feminism by overtly espousing anti-feminist ideologies, texts associated with this new backlash attempt to Science Fiction Film and Television 11.1 (2018), 97–109 ISSN 1754-3770 (print) 1754-3789 (online) © Liverpool University Press https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2018.9 98 Michael Jarvis render the question moot on the surface while advancing the subtextual thesis that women’s self-actualisation occurs primarily via traditional (heterosexual) coupling and domesticity – that is, it espouses anti- or pre-feminist dogma via the cultural logic of post-feminism. The deceptiveness of this approach is further illustrated through both its jettisoning of the surface signifiers of misogyny/intimidation marking anti-feminism and its appeal to what is presented as an a priori universal good: New backlash motivates not through fear as in 1980s backlash culture, but through love. By making the right man the solution to the dilemmas of gender discrimination, new backlash texts make feminism comedic in the present and imply that even in the past feminism must have been mistaken or exaggerated problems because love is real, natural, and unchanging, preventing us from ever imagining a world in which most men treated women badly. (163) In other words: things are fine now (not that they were ever that bad, really), so what are you worried about? I revisit Vint’s critique of popular post-feminism at length in beginning this DVD review of Jordan Peele’s satirical horror film Get Out (US 2017) not just because of the director’s clear affection and for and pastiche of the original The Stepford Wives – unlike the 2004 camp parody remake, a horror film with a clear second-wave feminist polemic – but because in updating and racialising the Stepford-trope, Peele works within the terrain of an analogous cultural backlash, mainstream post-racialism, which similarly constitutes a covertly reactionary structure. Get Out critiques a fantasy of post-racialism that functions in much the same manner as the post-feminism that the Stepford remake champions, a post-racialism that overtly disavows the anti-blackness/ white supremacy that is its proper subtext and which appeals, like the postfeminist new backlash’s emphasis on companionate love, to the consensus good of universal humanism in order to justify its disregard for an actual progressive racial politics. In post-racialism the problems which necessitate an anti-racist praxis are safely displaced onto a cultural fantasy of the past, i.e. ‘the racist era’, whose only bearing upon our present is as an unrecognisable ‘before’ photo to which the contemporary image of our post-racial ‘after’ can stand in stark, self-gratifying contrast. (White) Americans do not see colour these days, and equality is the law of the land; things are fine now (there were problems, sure, but that was then), so what are you worried about? Get Out is the story of Chris Washington’s (Daniel Kaluuya) weekend visit to the country estate of his girlfriend’s family. Chris is young, handsome and black, while his lover, Rose Armitage (Ashley Williams, of HBO’s Girls (US 2012–17)) and her family are prototypical ‘white liberal elites’, enlightened folk Anger translator 99 of education and means.1 ‘My dad would vote for Obama for a third term if he could’, Rose reassures Chris before they arrive; later, her father, Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford), insists the same to Chris almost verbatim. The familiar ‘black-boyfriend–white-family’ dynamic immortalised in founda- tional works like Sidney Poitier’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Kramer USA 1967) thus provides the film’s initial conflict, but this is a far cry from the overt anti-blackness evinced by the iconic image of Katherine Hepburn’s open-mouthed astonishment/horror at first meeting Poitier in the context of her daughter’s interracial relationship. Rather, the family is effusive in their greetings (‘We’re huggers!’ says Dean as he embraces Chris), and their missteps seem at worst clumsy though well-intentioned (moments like Dean’s jocular address of Chris as ‘My man!’, or affably referring to their relationship as ‘this thang’ are cringeworthy rather than malevolent). At no point is Chris completely settled in, but he is not made to feel unwelcome, at least not in any way that he can put a finger on. Initially, the film’s tense, uncanny mood is primarily generated by the Armitage’s two black servants, Walter (Marcus Henderson) and Georgina (Betty Gabriel), whose unsettling affect disrupts the smooth sociality of the visit. Dean is quick to bring up race in order to disavow its relevance: ‘I know what you’re thinking: white family, black servants. It’s a total cliché’. They had helped take care of his dying parents, and now they are like family, explains Dean. ‘But boy, I hate how it looks’, he shrugs. Georgina and Walter stare openly at Chris in a way that disturbs him, each both friendly yet somehow off. Perhaps, he suggests to Rose in private, Walter dislikes him because he secretly fancies her. She finds the idea absolutely hilarious, an impossibility; she similarly mocks the idea that Georgina might not approve of a black man dating a white woman. Walter and Georgina smile too broadly, in the uncomfortable manner of children with a secret they want you to know they are keeping from you. The actors’ intensely uncanny performances become even more praiseworthy upon repeat viewings, when we understand precisely how they fit into the Armitage household. This is a film of faces – what they reveal, what they conceal – and in key moments Peele’s camera lingers excruci- atingly upon faces that show much but explain nothing. The unease becomes more pronounced when Rose’s mother, Missy Armitage (Catherine Keener), a psychiatrist, hypnotises Chris in the middle of the night 1. Peele, excited about the Armitage casting choices, refers to actors Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener as, respectively, a ‘liberal elite god and goddess’ at one point in the director’s commentary. 100 Michael Jarvis without his consent. This is ostensibly a means of curing his smoking habit, which she paints as in the best interests of Rose, whom they both love. But the moment soon turns much more sinister. Forcing him to relive a traumatic memory, the death of his mother, she sends him to ‘the sunken place’, a state of paralysis Peele depicts as a surreal, yawning void that Chris falls into as his visual perspective hovers above him like a trapdoor, or a television tuned to real life. It is horrifying yet beautiful, a statement scene of technical mastery for the CGI-less film. The next day, he does not remember being hypnotised, though he picks up on Walter’s hints to that effect. The parents then throw a party for a few dozen of their friends, who come up the driveway in a parade of jet-black luxury sedans and SUVs. They are all elderly, overwhelmingly white and well-to-do; further, they seem to take an especial interest in Chris. In a series of vignettes, the guests make small talk with Chris, placing an indecorous emphasis on his blackness. ‘I know Tiger’, an ex-pro golfer tells him, while another opines that while, historically, ‘[f]air skin has been in favour … now the pendulum has swung back. Black is in fashion’. Chris soldiers through it all, putting up with what he imagines is merely a clumsiness around race characteristic of older white folks.2 ‘Good to see another brother around here’, Chris says to Logan King (Lakeith Stanfield), a black man about his age. But King seems utterly nonplussed by the comment, sharing Walter and Georgina’s uncanny affect.