Movies and shows, old and new, have helped us to live vicariously through them. They have allowed us to travel far and wide at a time borders are shut and people are restricted to homes. In our new column What's In A Setting, we explore the inseparable association of a story with its setting, how the location complements the narrative, and how these cultural windows to the world have helped broaden our imagination.
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As Rose Armitage’s (Allison Williams) car pulls up on her parents’ sprawling upstate New York house, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), her Black photographer boyfriend, takes a long, good look around.
His gaze hovers over the opulent white mansion that sees the Armitage couple walk down, greeting the youngsters sedately. They smile, he smiles back; they exchange pleasantries as Chris gives a passing glance to the Black gardener and house help. Perfectly poised, they go about doing their assigned duties. As he enters the house, Chris ought to be happy, but all he feels is a sense of deep unease.
Director Jordan Peele’s 2017 psychological thriller Get Out warns its audiences of the dangerous territory they’re about to enter; only that they’ve no idea when the warning packs a sucker punch.
Peele’s idea behind his debut film was simple – Black people telling Black stories. The world he creates is anything but straightforward. Injected with subtle subtexts throughout, Get Out is hailed as a guide to modern-day racism, if you will. Peele dissects his protagonists and their need to be ‘woke’ (the film in fact opens with the refrain from Childish Gambino’s 'Redbone': “Stay woke”) but with an exacerbating precision.
Peele’s lens captures the deep-seated hypocrisy that first-world, white supremacists casually pepper their conversations with. No one in Get Out’s universe understands racism. In that, they’re certain it’s a thing of the past, and are almost blind to the concept of a world where margins do actually exist. Rose’s father Dean (Bradley Whitford) proudly proclaims that he would’ve voted for Barack Obama a third time had he opted to be US president. The film uses popular horror tropes to expose realities about how pernicious racism is in the outside world. Peele refuses to dial down the spunk or bowdlerise the biting commentary by introducing any ‘white saviour’ character at the end, which could well be a step towards pacifism.
Get Out is unforgiving in its indictment of the privileged, and how they abuse power to disenfranchise the already marginalised.
Not to my surprise then, the film brought back personal memories of an exhaustive European trip in the autumn of 2014. Elated about my first venture into a world beyond the Mediterranean, I was more than prepared to consume multiple histories and cultures neatly tucked away in the museums of Rome, the Vatican, Vienna and the like. After our (honestly) underwhelming tour of the Sistine Chapel and St Peter’s Basilica, the motley crew needed to rush back to Rome city for the night. Always ones for local travel, we hopped on to the public buses plying every half hour.
Slightly confused about the Italian instructions, one of us walked up to the driver and asked if we were on the right bus. The answer was just angry, disgruntled silence. A second attempt produced no better (or polite) results. For the first time, the meaning of being ‘different’ struck us, and we looked around helplessly. The passengers stared apathetically, unwilling to involve themselves in our banalities. My annoyance notwithstanding, I approached a suited gentleman standing across from me. “Would you please help us?” I asked, and he replied with a hand gesture that could essentially be summed up as a palm flick.
I had been rebuffed, and that was that. Stifling our surprised gasps, we were about to get off when a young man took pity on us and guided us towards a cab stand – “It’s more comfortable,” he added, almost as a reminder that we ought not to ‘experiment’ with the local scenes.
It was the day I realised how gazes take on new meanings when two parties (with an obvious disparity in privilege and agency) interact. It was the day I understood that being ostracized for something as inconsequential as skin colour was not only a commonality, but an accepted one at that.
Decades of evolution, change in socio-political spaces, and humanitarian events later, it was still the deciding factor for social acceptance. Despite merit, struggles or consumerist capacities, those with a 'different' skin colour were almost always doomed to experience these ‘realities.’
Get Out’s silent viciousness resonated with a deep-rooted sense of vulnerability in me, a never-experienced-before fear that I may not be enough, that I can’t fix this oddity as much as I tried. Peele’s narrative too brings Chris’ hapless protests front and centre of its satirized storytelling.
In fact, Peele addresses the dualism behind the use of violence, and how it is essentially used as a tool of resistance as long as it benefits the white. Peele does away with the concept entirely During the first two-thirds of Get Out, Chris is seen as civil, even reluctantly accommodating of the flurry of casually racist jibes he is subjected to, a tact he’s learnt after years of social conditioning. Chris’ violence however is saved up exclusively for the climax. By altering the ending and bringing in a happy ending, Peele endorses Chris’ rebellion wholeheartedly.
For that matter, Chris’ escalating scepticism against white suburbia does not alienate audiences at all because Peele ensures that Chris be empathised with. Long considered ‘troublemakers’ in society, Black people have often found little space to channelise their pushbacks in an out-and-out showdown. Marked by silent protest marches and candle-light vigils, the history of Black protests has been a peaceful setup of non-cooperation. Peele wants to have none of that in his film – he purposefully evokes through Chris, a modern-day Black man, self-aware, educated, and ‘fit’ for society. That he resorts to his baser instincts by the end, is never ridiculed or admonished, but catharsised and empowered.
Peele masterfully uses set design to bring about this change. In the scene which depicts Chris picking the cotton padding off his chair's upholstery, the filmmaker positions the trope of Black slavery and its practice of working tireless hours in cotton plantations, but only subverts it (since that simple act wins Chris his freedom).
The irony behind this is that though heroic, the act is in complete contrast with its slave-era counterpart which signifies a rebranding of a practice of oppression. Other significant clues in Get Out's setting include how Chris uses the Bocce ball and deer trophy as aides in his escape. He essentially repurposes these 'white' objects as murder weapons against them. This, in turn, harks back to parallel exercise of hatred that white supremacists 'bestowed' on the Black and coloured. But in Peele's world, it signals the Blacks' attempt to resort to the precise means that subjugated them in order to survive modern-day racism.
The reference to a “sunken place” as an abyss of ennui may well be Peele’s direct analogy of tactful marginalisation that coloured (especially Black) people are subjected to, often needing an external, privileged element to aid them out of it. In an interaction quoted by Variety, Peele said the sunken place stood as a metaphor for “this state of marginalisation that I’ve never really quite had a word for… it is the prison-industrial complex, it’s the dark hole we throw Black people in.”
This crippling sense of paralysis is akin to the inability one may feel in calling out racial undertones in everyday behaviour, or even recognise the need to take stringent measures against it.
Peele’s film created a safe space through phantasmagoria and excessiveness. He chose to imbue the bizarre, so that he may spotlight the obvious.
Get Out spoke of horrific facts; facts that were veiled under beautiful promises of liberal ideals and inclusiveness. Very much like the Italian travel brochures that guarantee a place for everyone at the Vatican, Christianity’s seat of power and religion. Come to think of it, maybe t’was a no-brainer that it was unwelcoming of the exotic outsider/s.
Read more from the What's in a Setting series here.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/in-get-out-jordan-peele-constructed-a-world-without-racism-gradually-closing-in-on-the-black-outsider-9847981.html
