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HellCopter posted:I don't understand. That is explicitly what happens. The point is that the whole part where a cult of white folks abduct POC in order to control their bodies like robots is a facile horror movie concept - and that the film doesn't hide from this. This is why Rod is there: to immediately and unceremoniously open with the proposition that white people are not merely well-meaning idiots, but actually evil psychosexual devils; so that we can revel in the dark comic anti-irony that Rod's off-the-top-of-his-head diagnosis was correct all along. The film is very direct about this scenario, so in an ideological sense to ignore it in order to avoid the obvious paranoid reading is actually to discredit the filmmakers, like they didn't know what they were doing when they made a movie about mad science, brain transplants, hypnosis, etc. That Get Out really is just the story of a man who gets invited to an awkward party and then goes home is what informs the meaning of the extraordinary horror scenario, not the other way around. Otherwise, we end up beating around the bush of what it means that this white devil goes through the trouble of taking a queer black woman's body just so she can hang around the house and serve tea, being talked down to by her daughter-in-law. Even from the perspective of the villains, their whole cult is goofy and stupid. It only matters insofar as Georgina is evocative to Chris, like all of the black characters he meets at the party, because she is specifically not in on the joke, i.e. that these rich white people are goofy cultists and that Chris (as with Rod) is supposed to be able to identify with Georgina through this shared experience. The specific absence of this is what generates and accelerates the paranoid fantasy. It's no longer a joke, so it becomes literal.
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Mar 16, 2017 16:25
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The critique is not that Chris has not experienced overt racism and been manipulated. The point is that it's a psychological horror movie. Chris finds himself once again being 'hypnotized' by an blinding white source, and then the next day the coven of weirdos comes over and does a bunch of stupid things like have a silent auction, and he himself is expressing attitudes he never felt before, like how smoking is gross now and it's his own fault that his mom/Georgina died. This is not a mistake or misreading, this is what happens in the movie. The 'sunken place' is presented overtly as a monolithic sense of being trapped and watching one's life play out as a distant farce beyond one's control. The solution that Peele chooses is very overt and nuanced, but it requires understanding critical scholarship about the coding and representation of 'blackness' through American popular culture, particularly cinema. The choice to have Chris slay Dean with the buck's head is both a callback to the latter's casualness in despising deer, as well as a fulfillment of Chris himself embodying a 'Buck'. The character performs this action because of another overtly coded contrivance: To block out the hypnosis, he stuffs cotton in his ears.
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Mar 16, 2017 18:53
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Groovelord Neato posted:rosemary's baby and stepford wives weren't "it's all in their head". That's not the reading. The reading is that all of these films fundamentally portray social and domestic pressures as horrific, clandestine conspiracies. Whereas those two cited influences portray the collective pressure upon a '60s urban creative class and '70s upwardly mobile suburban class wife respectively, Get Out deals with Chris's persistent sense of being 'evaluated/appraised' in the post-Obama world.
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Mar 16, 2017 22:45
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i am the bird posted:I don't think I've ever heard anyone summarize Rosemary's Baby from Guy's point of view. Your statement is very confusing. Could you clarify what this means? How do the words you've quoted have anything to do with "Guy's point of view," or whatever?
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Mar 16, 2017 22:59
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i am the bird posted:I guess I'd ask you to clarify what you mean by "collective pressures on the urban creative class" because that sounds like you're framing Guy's pursuits as the focal point as opposed to Rosemary and the exploitation of women's bodies/denial of female autonomy. I wrote urban creative class in juxtaposition with suburban upwardly mobile class wife, I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. I at no point mentioned Guy.
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Mar 17, 2017 01:42
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Martman posted:If the movie has anything meaningful to say about racism, shouldn't that message be true without needing to rely on the literal truth of brain-stealing (something that doesn't actually go on in the real world)? It should, and, as someone who enjoyed the movie, I believe it does.
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Mar 20, 2017 00:04
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UFOTofuTacoCat posted:The scene at the beginning when Andre got abducted is a representation of his bachelor party. The scene at the beginning with Andre is overt evidence that the white devils don't need elaborate, fake-romantic melodramas in order to abduct black people. There doesn't need to be this 'silent auction,' they don't need Grandma and Grandpa playing along and 'making it real,' they could have just been told to hide and immediately drugged his wine. The narrative of the film is a unique expression of Chris's particular confrontation with the shared experience of white supremacy and classism, but which is explicitly anti-rational. This is the whole point of the 'T.V. imagery' - Chris, rooted in a deeply traumatic moment of his development, perceives the events of the film as an all too deliberately overt artifice, a narrative which is preventing him from performing some obscure act, which, in the end of the film, proves to be, like, exactly as reactionary as Django Unchained.
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Mar 20, 2017 18:04
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Ignoring intersectional readings of Get Out is discrediting to the filmmakers. There was absolutely no reason to pair Andre with an older white woman - He could just be married to, like, Armitage's niece or some poo poo. The choice was not a dry, 'rational' attempt to express the terror of what Darko talked about, which is that these black folks don't 'drop the act' around other black folks. It is, overtly, a scenario that plays upon ageism and sexism. This was not a mistake.
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Mar 20, 2017 19:18
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JawnV6 posted:It's not a "black mask," you've used that descriptor twice now: That's KKK imagery in the same way that carving an upside-down cross in your skateboard is Satanic. This is a type-A costumed impotency. The black leather costume, dark black gun, and darkly lit and color-timed 'iron mask' simultaneously calls up connotations of The Road Warrior but also more generic imagery ranging from medieval fantasy to contemporary 'Trenchcoat Mafia' bullshit. The connotation is that Jeremy imagines himself both as a Dark Knight and an imprisoned 'Man in the Iron Mask' figure. He further juxtaposes this feeling of being a 'prisoner' onto the abstract, essentialist identification with 'urban youth.' It's the same pathology you see playing out in Larry Clark's Bully and Nick Cassavetes' Alpha Dog. This is contrasted with the 'reveal' of Rose in her 'true form,' with no mask, hair tied back, lily white costume which nonetheless molds her as a hunter, and thus the inheritor of her father's prejudice against 'useless people.'
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Mar 21, 2017 02:37
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Magic Hate Ball posted:He's definitely got a torrent of Funny Games on his laptop. Kid imagines that he's Paul, but really he's Peter.
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Mar 21, 2017 03:21
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Goreld posted:Looked like a flat topped heaume to me. Like the kind the Black Knight wore in the Holy Grail- dunno if that was the reference it was going for. Maybe a Knights Templar thing? That's the thing. The helmet is just vulgar and motivated enough to be extrapolated as an 'authentic racist-terrorist' costume, but that has more to do with plot, which is that Jeremy is being ordered specifically to round up black folks. But it is also necessarily obscure and generic enough that it would not be out of place in any scenario that did not uniquely involve self-conscious/ironic racism. It's the same disconnect we get into when Darko rightfully brings up that political and social conspiracies against black folks is totally a real thing. Whereas these 'real conspiracies' are always predicated on the inviability and disposability of the black body, framed in essence as worthless at best and degenerative at worst; the imagined conspiracy of the film is predicated on the exact opposite essentialism. Obviously, you could argue that this is the classic, archetypical duality of black bodies in white supremacist cultures, but I think it's just as necessary to apply this dualistic understanding to the level of characterization. To wit: The expression of Jeremy's costume is both that he self-consciously models himself after the antiquated 'crusader' figures that his parents have abandoned, while he also frames his imprisonment as rendering him 'culturally black'/a 'white friend of the family.'
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Mar 21, 2017 15:24
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To re-state: The oppositional interpretation is not that Chris is delusional or hallucinating. It's that the film is a spontaneous, projected illusion, which fundamentally stands not for an 'objective story,' but a symbolic order produced within a collaborative, commercial context. The reading is not that 'Chris imagined it all' - It's that the movie is, per the exploitation tagline, "only a movie," that Peele et al. imagined it.
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Apr 6, 2017 23:27
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King Vidiot posted:But you can apply that to literally every movie, even to documentaries because no matter how hard a doc tries to be totally impartial it's always a reconstructed reality. I fail to see the "but" side to this. Without that qualification, what you have written above is a truthful and accurate statement. With the case of Get Out, we have an independent horror film that has been both economically and critically successful, lauded for its engagement with topical political subject matter. Once we move beyond the superficial content of popularity, however, it is necessary to actually engage the politics of the text directly. In which case, it is imperative to recognize the basic structural reality that films are spontaneous, rhetorical fictions. The problem that Get Out fans have encountered with the oppositional reading of the film is that it takes too seriously the invective to "stay woke"; to not take the projected events within the space of the cinema as literal, but to perceive them as fundamentally ideological, speaking to more than merely the intent of the auteur. In response to this, the effort of fans is then to betray the 'secret meaning' of the stay woke meme, and double-down on the apparent psychological realism of the black comic sci-fi/horror movie. Stay woke becomes co-opted within consumer fetishism to actually mean 'keep dreaming,' a counter-cultural invective bent back deliberately towards the security of reactionary ideology. Suddenly, you have stopped writing about the fraught ideological space that the film occupies, to expressing concern that we would be behooved to extend our critical lens to all films.
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Apr 7, 2017 04:48
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ThePlague-Daemon posted:He's asking why the conceit of Chris imagining the conspiracy is even necessary when it just seems to explain something that's not only already intuitive, but also applicable to films in general. Why is the knee-jerk reaction to criticism of these critiques usually accusations that the person is against ideological critiques? Again, nobody has claimed that Chris imagined the conspiracy. The claim is that the conspiracy is imagined, an extraordinary/absurd symbolic order standing in for the ironic banality of racism. Like Trash Fire, The Invitation, and You're Next, Get Out is a love story about a couple that trepidatiously attempts to 'move on' with their lives - to achieve a comfortable normality - only for it to blow up in their faces, when it turns out the conflict is irreconcilable. King Vidiot posted:The "but" is that it doesn't need to be used to create some kind of theory for what Get Out is really "about". It's not a statement that's unique to Get Out, it goes without saying because it applies universally to every single movie. You are the one claiming that a critique of Get Out needs must be unique to Get Out in order to clarify some "profound" meaning within it. But nobody engaged in the oppositional reading has claimed that they are doing so to uncover what the film is 'really about,' or how profound this would be, or how this is unique. I am not under the impression that a critique of Get Out needs to be unique, profound, or whatever. It merely needs to be truthful and accurate, and to deal frankly with the ideological and rhetorical functions of cinema.
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Apr 7, 2017 17:18
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It should be the ending to Thriller, with Chris comforting Rose, suggesting they go get something to eat, then turning around to reveal reptiloid eyes. Ya-a-a-a-as
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Apr 12, 2017 14:45
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Bill Dungsroman posted:That's because it is. That entire anti-police harassment exchange wasn't really about Rose taking issue with police harassment. She didn't want the cop to see or run Chris' ID and then have a paper trail of him traveling out that way, so that he can disappear all that much easier. They should have just hit him over the head and threw him in a trunk, then.
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Apr 21, 2017 14:03
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Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:The movie is really all a metaphor for how stressful it is to stop smoking. Pre' much.
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Apr 25, 2017 20:50
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