Get Out

“Get Out winks at centuries of painful history and honors it with an absurd, no-bullshit de-pantsing of race in America.”

Title: Get Out (2017)
Director: Jordan Peele 👨🏽🇺🇸
Writer: Jordan Peele 👨🏽🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 5/5

Get Out lives up to the enormous hype. A plethora of traditional film reviews can speak to the nuances of the writing, directing, genre-bending, and historical and social contexts, so I’ll just leave you with a succinct quote from Paul Whitington’s review in the Irish Independent:

Get Out is so clever you could write a thesis on it the length of War and Peace.

Gender: 2.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

While portrayals of women aren’t offensive, their screen time, number of speaking roles, and levels of sympathy are dwarfed by those of the male characters. Look, Get Out has no interest in discussing feminism or gender equality. But that isn’t a bad thing. On the contrary, a tightly-executed film with a narrow focus is often stronger than a film that tries to do too much.

In this vein, similar to my feelings on Donald Glover’s TV series Atlanta or Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, I might love and support Get Out wholeheartedly but would be remiss to score it above a middling grade on its representation of women.

Race: 5/5

Peele points his finger at American society and lets us know that, dammit, the emperor has no clothes on. Underneath all of our country’s self-congratulatory noise about racial progress—hello, Green Book’s Best Picture win—Peele makes the convincing case that white Americans have craved ownership of Black bodies for the entirety of our country’s violent history and continue to do so.

He challenges the notion that we’ve made any headway at all. Is today’s coded control of Black communities via rigged legal systems, disproportionate levels of incarceration, and cultural appropriation actually any better than literal slavery? It’s a topic few are able to unpack, especially in less than two hours, yet somehow Get Out winks at centuries of painful history and honors it with an absurd, no-bullshit de-pantsing of race in America. No sin is left unturned—every small microaggression hints at entire tragedies such as police brutality or sexual objectification, and Peele even finds time to comment on Asian participation in anti-Blackness through a single line, as detailed by Ranier Maningding on NextShare.

Meanwhile, one of the most complicated and internal struggles minorities face, cultural appropriation, gets an onscreen embodiment as well. As Amandla Stenberg explains:

Appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated, but is deemed as high fashion, cool, or funny when the privileged take it for themselves.

For Black communities, this could look like Miley Cyrus wearing cornrows and twerking, profiting immensely from the controversy. For Asian Americans, this could sound like studios who say they are “paying homage” as they profit from Asian stories (Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon) without its originators seeing much, if any, returns themselves.

Cultural appropriation is so insidious because of its blurred lines between “inspiration” and “theft” which are especially difficult to navigate for those in societal positions of power. All the more reason Get Out feels so necessary; it finds a way to bridge this disconnect, giving viewers a peek behind the curtain of what it feels like to be a minority in a group, where they can feel for themselves the horror of having one’s identity and agency robbed from them for profit, victims able to do naught but watch on helplessly from the Sunken Place.

Mediaversity Grade: B+ 4.17/5

Jordan Peele sows the seeds and we water, nurture, and let bloom our own ideas of what Get Out means to us. Are we the oppressed, like Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), who just want to live our lives without being interrupted by the crime of existing? Or are we the oppressors, awkwardly code-switching when we meet Black individuals? More interestingly, are we both? For an Asian American such as myself, I relate to the experience of being used and erased by white America, yet I also recognize my economic privilege and the generational wealth I received from my parents—positions that gentrify and therefore, sustain systemic oppression against under-resourced communities.

Get Out is the mirror held up to our faces that forces us to to pause and think about our own culpability in contributing to cultural tensions. The virtuosity with which Peele weaves together this complex social commentary with genuine comedy alongside eerie, horror-flick thrills, is impressive to say the least.

Like Get Out? Try these other titles delivering new narratives for Black men.

Grade: BLiMarch 24, 2017Great for: Race, Great for: Technical