Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” as an example of a modern masterpiece with an inherently intersectional message - a Case Study

The Integration of an Idea

My hope is that this analysis shows the reader an example of a film narrative that runs on the terms of power and privilege versus systematic oppression and fleshes out again how insane our reasoning for violence and isolation of power is. The possibilities for a whole library of film analysis based on feminist narrative theory remain virtually untapped and such work could lead into the creation of an art form that does not repeat propaganda and cash in on human suffering, but depicts the existing mentality truthfully while transforming it’s audience with knowledge of defects and presenting the view point of a character we, unlike "the heroes", are accustomed to.

Defining a so called feminist film narrative, an alternative to the classical Hero’s journey, that encompasses the demands of fourth wave feminism, is a task riddled with dangers. To think there is a gender specific quality to any narrative, a measurable difference between a Hero and a Heroine, means we have to assume gender norms to a certain extent and validate certain claims about gender hormones - just to understand the preceding tradition, no matter how unenthusiastic we might me about repeating it's mechanism.

To this day, most of the world’s film schools base the narrative on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and Christopher Vogler’s The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers (1992). Campbell was an anthropologist, who made the white, post-enlightened reader once again aware of the Monomyth and its ritualistic mechanisms. Vogler is a screenwriter and a development executive, who commercialized and mass produced Campbell’s teachings. His practice has lead to the formula becoming wildly successful around the world. Supposedly using the paradigm is so effective because it is based on our ancient heritage. We are doing something that we always have done. This is then rewarded with commercial success.

Being entertained by cinema is not an empty objective. Cinema closes in on fine art when it lingers in you. You enter a realm, where you are transformed to another stage, whether you appreciate that analogy or criticize the desecularization of the phenomenon. Before you enter the cinema, you pay for your ticket, you give a sacrifice, you commit to the cause. The hope is that when you go back home, it will happen with an emotion or a thought, an idea that you will want to integrate into your life. This is the reason we re-watch films, to go back to that certain place. These powerful experiences are what makes film making a good business.

Aiming for the universality of a story aims to maximize profits. Film industry, just like any other capital-intensive system, can be seen to be subjected to this effort. This is why we must remain vigilant about human rights, because capitalist rule creates a justice system that protects capital, and not people. While it seems we have evolved to accept that women are just as worthy as men, matter of fact, such realization was an after-thought to harnessing cheap workforce. In Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future (2015) Paul Mason establishes that when men left for the World Wars, women took their place in factories and in agriculture and because they were not educated or experienced, their salaries were just cents of the dollar. Deskilling the workforce is a rouse of the capitalist, that they sometimes have to use in order to inject liveliness to a stale system, but this time, the idea was conceived by a natural occurrence in the workforce. What seemed to be the one good thing to come out of the world wide crises was a perfect way to cut cost. The capitalist cannot afford the workforce, and the gender, or the color of the skin of the worker, even their educational background, is just an excuse not to hire them.

Paul Mason of course writes about the history and future of capitalism and not about human rights, women’s issues or the black movement – it all delves in the background. It cannot be seen or heard, it’s rather a taste in the air. Audre Lorde said it best: ”In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people and women.” As women, gender minorities and people of color gain equity, they also have more power as consumers. Stories written for the oppressed, or just the privileged but benevolent consumers, are now making profits, but the consumer’s power is still rather purported. When the sole action you can take towards change is to decide how you will spend your money, you are a mere cog in a neo-liberalist machine.

Maureen Murdock, a jungian psychotherapist, wrote her groundbreaking book The Heroine’s Journey in 1990. Her incentive for this work was in part due to her interview with Joseph Campbell’s and his stance about women and The Hero’s Journey. While interviewing him in 1981, she learned that according to Campbell, women have a part in the mythological tradition as the ultimate boon, the price, the bargaining chip, the highest reward. A woman’s need to identify with the hero on a personal level means she is confused about her gender and in fact they do not personally need to make the journey at all. Murdock’s theory is supposed to work as a counter word for Campbell, so her theories clearly attempt to match his.

It can be said that women are instructed to be servile in a way that acquires and includes identifying as inferior in relation to men. The patriarch teaches that truly feminine women do not want civil rights, or to educate themselves, or work up to a career of significance. The image of a perfect American housewife, who has found fulfillment in raising children and helping her husband, is what Betty Friedan refers as the core of “feminine mystique”. Friedan published her book The Feminine Mystique in 1963. The title refers to the endlessly mysterious origin of what explains why women are the way they are, while coincidentally being what men want them to be - their inferior, that is. ”Nobody argued whether women were inferior or superior to men; they were simply different.”

This feminine mystique was supposed to be the reward for women, but as Friedan concluded, it turned out to be their problem, and source of their unhappiness. The creator of the American housewife image was a man, returning from war, hoping for someone to take care of him and secure his cosy domestic bliss. Aspiration for said image was to ensure the need for consumer goods, such as household appliances and beauty products. This was not just a million dollar business, but propaganda, that worked simply because “women no longer know who they are.” Friedan’s book revolutionized at least a certain margin inside the U.S. society, completing the task of second wave feminism, which set on to argue that a woman’s need to express themselves freely does not pose a threat to femininity, nor does her need to identify through her actions and work destroy masculinity. Women are not envious because they are not like men; women are envious because they are enslaved. Friedan writes, ”I think women had to suffer this crisis of identity -- simply to become fully human.”

Does this bring something to mind? What does it mean to start off from a place of ignorance, complaisance and immaturity, to realize it, accept it to be true, move on to disposing, disarming it and finally acquiring your identity as the ultimate boon? Does this in fact suggest that the Hero’s journey is actually not men’s journey at all? That it is actually the female’s journey? And perhaps the men do not make the journey at all, because, in all seriousness, what’s their problem? Nothing is stopping them from getting exactly what they want! Except if they are gay, people of color, or workers... Meaning: unless they are somehow systematically oppressed.

Helen Jacey gave me the most important tools that I needed in order to write about men and women in film narrative, or rather the ostensible definitions of heroes and heroines. In her 2010 Journal of Screenwriting article, The hero and heroine’s journey and the writing of “Loy”, Jacey notes that Murdock too uses problematic terminology in her writing as she states that women have an innately feminine nature due to biological difference, while simultaneously claiming the model to transcend gender. Vogler also claims that his paradigm for transformation journey is “beyond gender differentiation” - but then contradicts himself by suggesting that women make the journey inwards, to themselves, before emerging to the world as whole people, rather than separate from the community and lead a quest for the one boon, returning as masters of life and death. Vogler attempts to present an “universally applicable” paradigm for screenwriting, but also admits that readers will benefit from reading Murdocks and Estes’s books that are written by women about women, and are specified to a ”woman’s point of view” . Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes about mythical characters, the friends and foes of one’s psyche, and while she heavily addresses “women’s internal journey” in her book, according to her these ancient stories can resonate with “both genders.” While Estés writes about women being wild and intuitive to a point of exhaustion, on the other hand her message can be empowering when considering what it means to be “civilized”. A civil person is a member of society, who lives according to the laws of the state, follows a rule. Does not think for herself or question the iniquities she witnesses. Who wants to be civilized anyway?

The whole trouble with all this literature is that it is based on a belief that I do not share; I do not believe there is any inherit difference between a feminine or a masculine journey. Instead of leaving her community to attain a magical boon that needs to be integrated to life back at home, the Heroine stays within her community, aiming for greater communion with the people around her instead of separating from them, striving for more agency that is deprived of her in order to harness her body and mind to serve men. In a male-orientated cultural setting, these processes are codified by gender. It is possible to decode them. What there is, is power and oppression. These are things that are actually assigned to us when we are assigned gender or race. The narrative becomes specific when it fleshes out the point of view of a person who is being persecuted by a beast stronger than themselves, for reasons they cannot control, due to attributes they were born with. Reni Eddo-Lodge addresses a similar issue in her 2017 book Why I no longer talk to white people about race. When power and privilege is bestowed on certain race, class and gender and not on personal merits and traits, insisting on one paradigm for all without acknowledging said variables will do nothing to deconstruct an unjust or inaccurate system.

Reading Campbell or Vogler, or Murdock or Estés, reveals our psyches archetypes and myths to us, making one aware of things that already affect us, whether we personally ascribe to Jungian mentality or not. Most of the books I referenced in this thesis are not written about film narrative, for example Murdock and Estés write about their findings while working as psychoanalysts. What psychoanalysts do attain in their work is the oral history of being mistreated in one’s community. Researching these books offers a new perspective to what feminist cinema can be, while disregarding biological reasoning for brutalization from the discussion is still left for the reader, since these theorists start from re-qualifying assumed gender.

These books, and also film making for that matter, are not only about telling a story, but repeating a mechanism. Repeating, possibly, a mechanism that is rooted in our society so deeply, we don’t even notice it. A feminist screenwriter has a life long career ahead of her as she starts telling women’s stories and correcting misconceptions that we have of women. The patriarchal monolith, an era of measurable consistency of men’s power leading up to today, has governed for five thousand years. Respect for life and natural limits has been secondary to production-orientation and male domination. A lifestyle that somehow manages to be separate of this rule is uncharted, difficult to imagine. Feminist research reaches back to prehistorical times in order to imagine elements of mythology that existed before the Greek division of power into multiple gods. This was a time when the role of woman was to protect human life and the sacredness of nature. We trace our steps back to the beginning in order to be free from men’s demands of us, and we find agency. We find more than one mission to be attained in a single lifetime. We become the Heroine that all of the world looks up to, listens to and respects.

The predator resides in power, which his forefathers took and passed to him. He is not trained to think, because he never had to justify himself. It might take him a lifetime to see that what was committed long ago was a crime and that he is not above the rest of us. He might never admit this. We cannot wait for his temperance. The predator does not deserve to be forgiven - but we deserve to heal. The system that produces our pain remains unchanged. The white american capitalist will never establish universal health-care, outlaw guns or allow abortions because it would lead to creatures he deems lesser than him living longer and happier. Women like myself indulge in all the essential privileges of our brothers and while we are entitled to it all, our comfort doesn’t automatically amount to a truly good world. To consider the feminist mission completed is a perceptual illusion as much as it is an illusion that capitalism has created more wealth than inequality in the world.

I still chose Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s mythology as my primary tool for analysing Jordan Peele’s Get out as my case study purely because it personally produced more original thinking than any other theory, even if Estés writes about specifically female psyche’s archetypes. Get out again seemed to be a perfect subject of research, especially when comparing the female orientated theory to a male character’s story, and the pairing of these variables enabled me to fulfill the definitions of intersectional feminism that will not uphold any questionable social system, just like Reni Eddo-Lodge insisted. As Audrey Lorde writes, ”as a tool of social control, women have been encouraged to recognize only one area of human difference as legitimate, those differences which exist between women and men.” And not race or class.

The Sinister Message

In Get Out, a young black man, Chris, has fallen in love with a young white woman, Rose. Chris is a sensitive, kind and open minded person, aware of prejudice and still ready to open his heart. His perfect girlfriend turns out to be the worst possible psychopath, a white supremacist and a legionee of a monstrous, family-run effort to enslave black bodies to be used as implant vessels for aging white people. She is the Bluebeard, the gentile seeming predator who lures her prey in a seductive, lulling manner.

Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” explains the Animal Groom’s cruelty as a merciless curse, a snap punishment for a moment of cruelty. As the prince, turned beast, learns to treat his female prisoner with love and affection, she also falls in love with him despite his monstrous appearance, and love breaks the curse. The sinister message seems to be that women will be rewarded if they accept abuse and attempt to heal evil with their love. Clarissa Pinkola Estés is a psychiatrist and the advice of her book is directed for a reader who is looking to win over their inner demons and put their formerly negative energy into proactive use. Estés does emphasize that irredeemable evil does exists and it serves to be dismantled and not embraced.

Chris does manage to dismantle the Armitage terror on screen, but not in the original script. Peele has been open about his writing process and how he wrote many versions of the story in order to estimate the production realities of the film in a white society. As I break down the final script version in comparison to the finished film, I aim to present Peele’s process as an example of powerful film making that is rooted in the feminist tradition while achieving the demands for intersectional practise. The analysis is composed of referencing the script and the finished film and then observed in relation to introduced theorists, mainly Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey and the Bluebeard-chapter of Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

Introducing the Unstrained Predator

On screen: Andre Hayworth is abducted by a masked person, who the audience later learns to be Jeremy Armitage. The scene is truthful to a black person’s experience of uneasiness in a white suburb, where they are either ogled at or straight up harassed. The scene functions not only as an enticing kick-off, but also as an effective use of dramatic irony. The audience knows now that everything is wrong as long as this abduction is not addressed.

As Andre is transported to the Armitage house, we only see the trees passing by a car window. The opening credits run to an ominous title song. The song is written in swahili, and translates to: Listen to the ancestors. Run! You need to run far! Listen to the truth. Listen to the ancestors. Run! Run! To save yourself, listen to the ancestors. This can obviously be seen as a warning about the heirs of white colonists and their violence, and also beautifully ties the film narrative to ancient stories.

We get to know the main character Chris Washington first through his artistic skills. He is surrounded by his artwork, a young artist, a capable man. Photography is his strength that comes to both burden him and help him throughout the story. The essential first dialogue is Chris’s conversation with his white girlfriend Rose Armitage about their upcoming trip to her parents house. Has Rose told her parents Chris is black? Rose’s response is what you could describe as ‘perfect’. She kids about it and expresses how bad she feels that Chris has to worry about it. She calls her father a ‘lame dad if anything else’, who is going to want to talk about voting for Obama for the third time.

In the script: The film starts with a dinner scene of a white family that we do not meet again on the pages that follow, so no wonder it was not realised/included in the edit. The scene exhibits Peele’s poetic artistry but basically serves no other purpose. The Shaw family discusses Disneyland, and how Mickey Mouse lives there; but also, that there is someone inside the Mickey costume, and how Mickey is always happy because he never ages. This scene, if embedded in the film, might have been disappointingly ineffective. It focuses on painting a picture of age neurosis, break out of white self involvement. It is true that white people are ignorant to racism-fueled offenses on their backyards and the powerlessness felt in the black community. That is a problem; white people not wanting to age is an absurd horror curiosity, that would blend out this message.

The script states Rose to be a nurse, and also that she acted on stage as a teenager, which explains why she is playing her role so perfectly. Preying on black men and submitting them to her father’s devilish implantation schemes is way for Rose to enact both her passions and skills. The whole Armitage family can be seen as the antagonist force of the film, but Rose is the face of her family operation and Chris’s planned demise. In the film, Rose’s profession or inner passions are not mentioned. The exposition of her background does not really heighten the horrible revelation of truth about the Armitage family - pointing out her acting skills might actually make us suspect her more and harm the creation of suspense.

In relation to theory: Jeremy and Rose Armitage both represent the same murderous predator, that Chris needs to restrain in order to survive. The predator “desires superiority and power over others” and must work in secret, since what they aspire is unnatural and were they to practice openly, they would be outcast from the general community. Their “fall” has already happened before Chris’s story begins and it explains why they hate the “light of others”.

The Unsuspecting Prey

On screen: While driving up to the Armitage lake house, Rose snatches and throws Chris’s cigarette out the window. The whole family are health care professionals, Rose is a nurse (well, on the page anyway), her father and brother are doctors and her mother is a psychiatrist. Chris’s bad habit is a perfect excuse for them as they pursue him as prey and convince him to subject to hypnotreatment. During the drive Chris calls his friend Rod, who takes care of his dog, Sid. Rod works as a transportation security administration agent at the airport. Rod is a joker and humorously warns Chris about going to a white girl’s parents house. Thus far this is just silly banter about the interracial relationship of the two.

Then comes the real warning. A deer runs to the road and hits Roses windshield. The animal is not instantly dead and cries in agony. We later learn about Chris’s mother, who died in a similar way when Chris was young. She was a victim of a hit and run, who laid by the side of the road for hours before she died. Now, if Chris was at all superstitious, this could be reason enough to feel warned and turn back. But we do not live in a magical, symbolic world. We live in a reality where nothing means anything. It’s not sensible to get hung up on signs like this.

They call the police to report the accident and the police officer asks for Chris’s identification. Chris has not been driving the car and there is no apparent reason to ask for his ID. Rose stands up for Chris and stops Chris from submitting his ID needlessly. She is the epitome of a perfect white girlfriend, who is at the same time supposedly unaware of Chris’s discomfort for his skin color upon the trip in a manner suited for her own obvious white privilege, but also woke about societal discrimination.

At the drive way they pass Walter, “the grounds keeper”, one of Rose’s earlier victims who is now inhabited by Rose’s grandfather, the inventor of the Coagula procedure. Chris is obviously not privy to this knowledge by now, and neither is the audience.

In relation to theory: In the Bluebeard myth, Rod’s character can be seen as the projection of both the big sisters and big brothers of the naive bride of Bluebeard, parts of the characters psyche who are more cautious of Bluebeard and in the end come to her rescue. Chris is an unmothered child. The naive bride of the tale is either unmothered or taught to submit by the mother. The mother colludes with Bluebeards intentions and “goes along the ride”. Chris tries to tell Rose the inquiry of the officer is no big deal. As a black man, he has been taught to act politely in order to avoid danger, and thus override his intuitions and plain understanding of what civil rights he has. Chris appreciates and admires Rose more than ever for standing up for him as they arrive to the Armitage house.

Ignoring the Lack of Security

On screen: Chris meets his apparent future in-laws and Rose tells them about the accident with the deer. Dean and Missy are completely pleasant, but Dean especially is sick of deer and is grateful for Rose for accidentally killing one. Chris tells Dean he and Rose have dated for four months, and Rose corrects him it has actually been five months, to what Chris admits to. ‘Atta boy, better get used to saying that’, Dean jokes. The whole family is actually joking and talking about Chris’s abduction the whole time when they welcome him, introduce the house and their family history.

Dean gives Chris the tour of the house. Rose’s brother Jeremy is presented first through his picture on the wall, along with grandpa Armitage, who used to be an Olympic athlete. Actually, he was beaten by African American athlete Jessie Owens in the qualifying rounds of the 1936 Olympics, where Owens later won the race in front of Hitler. ‘He almost got over it’. This event obviously was the starting point for the racist idealism of the family, where they were humiliated to recognize the physical superiority of professional black athletes. They do not hate black skin tone, but envy what they see as fundamentally race related physical qualities. They want to abduct it and harness it for themselves. This is a very accurate analogy for today’s racism, where white people might have black friends, but still insist on having “the N-word pass” (white people wanting to use a degrading word affectionately).

‘My mother loved her kitchen so we keep a piece of her in here.’ Dean introduces Chris to the housekeeper Georgina, who is actually a host for Dean’s mother. Georgina, much like Walter, acts very odd, but not odd enough for Chris yet to be alarmed. When they are alone, Dean apologizes to Chris for his white family having black servants, and what a cliché it is and how it must look. Dean also expresses his wish to vote for Obama for the third time if that would be possible. His white guilt is awkward but harmless. Meeting the white parents could not have happened in a more civilized fashion than this. (In the script: There are few differences in the way information is exposed in this sequence of the film compared to the script, but in accordance to theory it is of no great significance.)

In relation to theory: Dean is actually the main predator, who is presenting Chris with all the keys to the castle, all but the one: the basement is sealed off for ‘black mold’, and must remain locked. “The deceitful promise of the predator is that the woman will become a queen in some way, when in fact her murder is being planned.”

Maureen Murdock would refer the scene with Chris and Dean strolling together by the lake as the road of trials. According to Murdock, it manifests itself in a series of occurrences that attempt to undermine a woman’s need for equality and respect alongside with men and her attempts to abandon the subordinate role assigned to her by patriarchy. “As they learn to anticipate others’ needs they consciously or unconsciously expect that their needs will be anticipated and taken care of as well.” When they discover that their needs are not being considered, they give up so that the other may gain self. While Dean admits to seeming old-fashioned in order to cover up for his actual crimes, he knows that Chris has been trained to sacrifice his dignity and self-worth so that the person in power will leave him at peace. As Murdock writes, a person whose needs are not being met in any relationship have “the right to get out”.

The Nagging Truth

On screen: Later Chris, Rose, Missy and Dean are having ice tea on the porch. It is now mentioned for the first time that Chris’s mother has died. Missy clicks her glass three times with a spoon, establishing the audio cue for hypnosis. Chris seems a tad nervous, and they talk about Chris’s smoking. Missy’s hypnotreatment for smoking is ‘ a service they provide’, if Chris happens to be interested. They also tell there will be a get together this weekend, Deans fathers ‘shindig’. Georgina is serving more tea and almost pours it over, in an attempt to draw Chris’s tension and warn him about staying, obviously to no avail.

Jeremy arrives and they all gather for a family dinner. At first it seems like a nice time, but something is clearly wrong... Georgina stands in the kitchen statuesquely, Jeremy wants to wrestle Chris and praises his ‘frame and genetic make-up’. Missy puts a stop to this since it is in the family’s interest to keep Chris unharmed. On the surface even these continuous tacky comments of considering the pros and cons of supposed genetic tendencies are forming a string of stereotypical examples of things ignorant white people say to black people when justifying their supposed differences. This movie is a revolution. All these comments strung together like this, the depiction seems sadly more accurate than ever. When Rose and Chris retire to their room afterwards, Rose apologizes to Chris, slamming her whole family for their awkward, spuriously tolerant behavior. Chris just thinks Rose’s ‘racial flow’ is cute.

They go to bed, but Chris is having a hard time falling asleep. He thinks of the deer in the forest, and the whining of a mosquito in the room amplifies to resemble the cry of the wounded deer. The door to Rose’s closet is seen hanging open, and while Chris looks at it, he is still unable to understand that his subconscious is warning him. Chris sneaks outside, supposedly to smoke, and runs in with both Walter and Georgina. Walter is running in the yard, Georgina is posing in front of a reflecting window glass, both are definitely acting bizarrely. At this point, the film uses clear horror manners, and Chris is obviously freaked out.

Right after, Chris finds Missy in her psychiatrist office, all set and ready for him with her tea. Missy treacherously hypnotizes Chris with the tea cup as a focal point, and then she turns conversation swiftly from smoking to death of Chris’s mother. Even when he doesn’t want to, Chris starts to talk about the night it happened. It’s raining, the TV is on. He doesn't call after her mother, does not inform anyone that she is late. It’s Chris worst memory, a defining event that has made him who he is. He blames himself, hates himself for not being able to move. While he relives the events of the worst night of his life, the nervous tick - anxiously scratching the bed post - starts up again. Our birther, our Mother, is our link to our ancestors. To our lineage and our reason for being here. Chris’s complex relationship to his mother is his weakness that enables him being preyed upon by Misty, but later on, this symptom of scratching becomes his strength that enables him to espace. When Missy asks Chris to sink into the floor, he is unable to resist her. The nightmare is realized, fully and completely. Missy has the power to completely control him and submit him to the will of the Armitage reign.

In the script: The closet door in Rose’s bedroom is swung open by a howling drift. The closet is a twin to the Armitage basement, and behind these doors lies to truth about the monstrosities planned and later committed against Chris. A door functions as a psychic barrier, and the key to opening any door to the truth is to ask the right question. In the script, Chris also sees the actual cellar door hanging open as he sneaks out to smoke - the whole house is coming alive and trying to tell him the truth, but Chris is nowhere near ready to hear this truth and just closes the door. He hasn’t been smoking all day, and his withdrawal symptoms are distracting him at this moment when he should listen to his inner voice.

It is interesting that the door is already hanging open on screen. Perhaps it is prudent to refrain from any sort of “haunted house” logic which would not better the message about what is actually frightening about the Armitage household. Still, it can be assumed that Rose did not think it to be important to close her closet door, meaning, she is in no way guarding her secret. This should not be seen as sloppy behaviour on her part, though. In a predatory manner, she is arrogant, for she thinks she is so superior in regards to her prey. On the page, as they visit her room for the first time, she tells Chris openly how there are a lot of things he does not know about him. On screen, the only one expressing there could possibly be something wrong, is Dean. Rose again never says anything that could be seen as possibly threatening.

In the script, while Chris is being hypnotized and falls into the ‘sunken place’, he is impaled by a wounded deer’s antlers. This is not pictured in the film, perhaps in order to save the effect for when Chris wakes up in the house basement in the finale of the film, and sees the stuffed deer on the wall. Hitting the deer with Rose’s car was not a part of the Armitage plan, and it does not make sense for it to appear to Chris in the sunken place, that is controlled by Missy. The deer represents prey, represents Chris, and he should not be harmed by the deer.

In relation to theory: The hero must slay the Holdfast, the keeper of the past. In very much the same tradition, Murdock claims that the heroine’s first task is to separate from the mother in order to achieve individuation. The act of separation, no matter of the factual role the mother has played in preserving or fighting the patriarchy, shows the heroine that the mother is not the cause of feelings of inadequacy. We cannot blame out mothers. We have to take responsibility for our lives. We must forgive our mothers. Murdock points that in many myths the mother has already passed away, is absent or is actually so vengeful and villainous she cannot be considered to represent any sort of mental home that must be abandoned in order to become a whole person. This is due to the deep connection between mother and child. A mother’s love and approval is mystical in a sense that it is holy, unconventional, total and sacred. It’s too much to handle. It’s easier to close it out than to use it as a starting point. It’s too complex. It is impossible to abandon. This is why Missy perhaps is able to get under Chris’s skin so effortlessly. Even if she is not his mother, Chris respects her as the mother of his loved one.

At the second act of the film, Chris cautiously starts to look for an explanation for all the bizarre occurrences at the house. In the Bluebeard myth, the key to the cellar starts to bleed, and will not stop bleeding until the truth is availed.

Learning to Trust One’s Abilities

On screen: Chris wakes up back in his bed to the sound of running water as Rose is taking a shower. Chris leaves his phone to recharge and goes out to take some pictures. His camera, his eye, is what makes him special, what makes him Chris, just as much as his mother’s tragic passing, so it is very natural for him to try to find his balance and self-esteem after the horrifying night he has. At the yard, he again sees Georgina by the window, fixing her wig. Under her wig, and under Walter’s cap, hides their operation scars. Georgina notices Chris and his camera, so Chris turns away. Chris curiosity and his instinct to take photos will come to his rescue in the end, but not yet. Chris also meets Walter in the yard who apologizes for his ‘exercising’ at night and asks about whether the anti-smoking treatment worked. The encounter is profoundly weird and uncomfortable, and not least by the fact that Chris only remembers the events of the previous night after Walter mentions them. Back at the house, Chris tells Rose about Missy, his nightmares and the encounter with Walter. Rose is apologetic, but also jokes about Chris’s concerns.

Cars start pouring into the yard; it’s time for the get-together of family and friends who have arrived to the auction of Chris. Rose parades Chris around and the guests have a hard time keeping up the pretense that this is nothing but a social gathering. Gordon and Emily, Nelson and Lisa, April and Parker all ask inappropriate questions about Chris’s good looks, physical form and sexual performance. Chris soon finds an excuse to stop mingling and Rose grants him that, very understandingly.

Now, while he is coasting alone, Chris meets Andre, a man we saw abducted in the beginning of the film. Andre acts and is dressed in a very different way and recognizing him is not a given at first and introduces himself as Logan. Chris meets Philomena, Logan’s spouse, who is much older and pretty bourgeois. While it certainly explains Logan’s own appearance, it does not make sense to Chris. Logan gives a little twirl to his friends, who applaud his looks. Chris does not understand what he is looking at. Chris then stumbles upon Jim Hudson of Hudson galleries, a blind art dealer. He expresses that he is a fan of Chris, compliments his ‘eye’, that he thinks is melancholic and powerful. He is himself a failed artist, turned art dealer. ‘Life can be a sick joke’. ‘Shit ain’t fair’. Jim believes they ‘could do wonderful things together’.

While this encountering could be seen as a promising work opportunity, Chris is now officially antagonized, measured by a man who is actually there to purchase him. Chris retires back to his room and all the guests quiet down as soon as he gets upstairs. Clearly the whole thing is a vacant parade, just for show. Upstairs Chris finds his phone unplugged and out of battery, and can’t call Rod. Rose is there to sympathize with him, but this time does not seem able to say the right thing to Chris. She leaves and Chris calls Rod. Chris recalls the events at the house to Rod who is immediately sure Logan is a sex slave and Chris is about to become one too. It is mostly a joke between them, but in fact Rod is absolutely correct. ‘Black people out here like all them missed the movement.’ ‘They’re probably hypnotized’. They hang up for now and Chris meets Georgina. Georgina apologizes for unplugging Chris’s phone, and even when she’s still acting very strangely, Chris still confides with her about becoming nervous with too many white people around. Georgina, the real Georgina, who is locked inside her own body, in the sunken place, tries her best to fight her way to the surface, to warn Chris, but obviously can’t. Georgina assures Chris that the Armitage's treat her well, smiling but with tears flowing to her face.

Chris joins the party and is now attempting to sneak a snapshot of Logan for Rod. One of the guests, Hiroki Takana, asks Chris about whether it’s more advantageous or disadvantageous being African American. Chris asks Logan to reply to this question instead of him. While Logan tells the crowd of his pleasant African American experiences, Chris snaps a photo. He curses as his flash accidentally goes off and Logan freezes, his nose starts to bleed… Andre has woken up by the sudden flash and taken back his reigns - he charges at Chris and begs him to ‘get out’.

Amazingly, Dean is able to explain the incident with all his neurosurgeon’s authority. He says Logan had an epileptic seizure, which triggered anxiety and led to Logan attacking Chris for causing it. Missy ‘talks’ Logan down, and he seems to be back to normal as he returns to the party. He apologizes for his behavior and leaves with Philomena to get some rest.

While the rest of the crowd continue with sparkles and bingo, Rose takes Chris out for a walk, which she probably would have done at this point no matter what. Chris tells Rose he does not believe Logan had a seizure, that he feels like he recognized Logan to be someone else when he changed, blames Missy’s hypnotizing for bringing him all these bad thoughts… and begs Rose to leave with him. Chris talks about his mother once more and admits to Rose, apparently for the first time, how he knew that he should have called after her, how he found out later that she survived the initial hit and died alone, bleeding in the side of the road, with nobody looking for him. Rose embraces him, and Chris promises to stay with her. They kiss. Then, Rose agrees that maybe in fact they should leave together. ‘This sucks, let’s go home, I’ll make something up’. Meanwhile, Dean auctions Chris back at the house, and Jim Hudson makes the highest offer.

In the script: The second act of the film is realized on screen very much according to the script, not to say that most of the film wouldn’t be, but the more the story advances, the cleaner and tighter the script gets. While Chris and Rose talk however, in the script Rose pulls out the pregnancy card, and tries to distract Chris by letting him know she has missed her last period. Thankfully, this has been left out of the scene. Rose is not manipulating Chris by the usual, hateful and stereotypical measures the femme fatales of cinemas usually do, which would indeed be lazy. She manipulates him by being perfect, as always.

In relation to theory: In the tale, Bluebeard’s bride is stuck with her bleeding key after nosing around according to her big sisters encouragement and attempts to stop the bleeding with horse hair, ashes, heat and cobwebs - and nothing helps. Her initial reaction is to hide her own fouls and continue her life with her Animal Groom. Chris is so bewildered by his own past stirring up that he does not recognize the true source of his uneasiness.

The Snare Snaps Around

On screen: While getting packed to leave, Chris sends the snapshot of Andre/Logan to Rod, who calls him right back. Rod has recognized Andre, and as he learns his name, Chris remembers him too. This seems to proof Rod’s theory about sex slaves and Chris is finally convinced of the theory too, and Rod begs him to escape. Chris looks about him in the room one more time - and finally, goes on to check out Rose’s closet. Chris finds a stack of photos, pictures of Rose on stage, acting... and then all the pictures of previous black boyfriends… There are so many, while Rose claimed he was the first black man she dated… and among the pictures, there is Walter… and Georgina… Rose’s spoils.

Rose walks up to the scene, catching Chris in the act, but still acts like there is nothing out of the ordinary. Chris manages to hide his terror. Rose is looking for the car keys, they are nowhere to be found. Misty offers tea, she has her cup and spoon ready. Rose plays her part to the very end. She finds the keys but she cannot give them to Chris. He can’t leave. He can’t get out. Missy clicks her cup three times with the spoon. It’s over. The audio cue drops Chris right back into the ‘sunken place’, and he is unable to fight as Dean and Jeremy carry him to the downstairs basement.

Chris wakes up in the basement, tied to a chair. On the wall there is a stuffed deer head with antlers. His initial warning. Chris is terrified. And then the TV comes on… ‘Is there anything more beautiful than the sunrise?’ Grandpa Armitage walks him through the upcoming procedure. Coagula procedure is a man made miracle their order has developed for many many years. Behold; they’re all there.... Grandparents, Dean, Missy, and little Jeremy and Rose… With a click of the spoon on screen, Chris again loses his consciousness.

Rod can’t get a call through to Chris. He searches the web for Andre Hayworth and finds out that he has been missing for months now. Rod goes to file a missing person’s report to the police, to an African American female detective Latoya. She appears to agree to listen to him when she hears Chris is missing after dating a white girl. Rod explains his theory as best as he can about the Armitage family abducting black people, brainswashing them and making them work as sex slaves. The detective gathers two colleagues to listen. Rod talks about his own TSA detective work, evidently further harming his credibility. After he is done, all three officers laugh at him, straight to his face. ‘Oh white girls, they get you every time’. Even if they are members of the minority personally, a police once again cannot be trusted to help a brother out.

Rod calls to Rose and tries to pry information from her. Rose lies about Chris leaving two days ago, paranoid and upset, leaving his phone behind. Rod starts to record the call, but Rose is onto him and starts to accuse Rod for harrasing her, saying he wants to fuck her - Rod hangs up and has to admit that Rose is genious for pulling that one.

Tied in his trap, Chris’s nervous tick is back on, as he anxiously scratches the arms rest. He has clawed through the cover and the stuffing of the chair is coming out. He leans in to take a look of the stuffing and then has the idea to stuff his ears so that the focal point will not hypnotize him the next time he is submitted to it. At this point, his rouse is not revealed to the audience. A pre-operation video chat with Jim is broadcasted to him next. Jim says he couldn’t care less about race, who is superior, who is not, and tries to comfort him. ‘You won’t be gone. -- You’ll live --’, and Chris continues his sentence, ‘in the sunken place’. 'Why us? Why black people?’ ‘What I want is: deeper. I want your eye, man. I want those things you see through.’

Dean in preparing for the plantation surgery, Jeremy as his aid. Dean cuts away Jim’s scalp and removes the back of his skull. Jeremy takes a wheelchair and goes to get Chris. When the moment is perfect, and he is untied, Chris gets up behind Jeremy’s back and smashes his head with what appears to be a pétanque ball. He removes the cotton from his ears, looks at the deer on the wall… Sikiliza…. Chris goes upstairs and pierces Dean to the antlers of the deer. In effect, Chris uses the prey of the hunter as a weapon against him. Dean is dead.

Georgina sees Chris covered in blood and runs. Next, he runs into Missy, and breaks her cup, so she can’t hypnotize him. She fights him with a letter knife, but Chris soon overpowers her. He apparently stabs her in the eye with her own knife, but we don’t see this on screen. It’s clear what happens to her, even if she is not brutalized on screen. Jordan Peele deserves a thank you for that choice.

Jeremy attacks Chris once again, and Chris now takes him out properly. Meanwhile, Rose is upstairs, in her domain, with all the pictures of his victims now on the wall, planning on new ones. Chris gets into Jeremy’s car and while phoning for help he accidentally drives over Georgina. He can’t help but think of Georgina tearing up, desperately trying to rise above the sunken place, reminding him of the faith of her mother, so he picks her up while she is unconscious. Rose has now noticed the noises and goes after Chris with a shotgun. Grandma/Georgina becomes conscious and attacks Chris, who crashes the car. Walter races up to Chris and crashes him to the ground. Chris still has the phone, and he snaps a picture of Walter. The flash makes him snap out of his hypnosis, like Andre did before. Rose fails to see this, so when Walter asks for the shotgun, she gives it to him. Walter shoots Rose in the stomach and immediately turns the shotgun to his own head and kills himself. Chris tries to strangle Rose but is somehow unable to do it. He doesn’t buy Roses pleads or assurances for love… but as she stares him while strangling her, she manages to get some kind of hold over him. Hypnosis? Love? And at this most excellent hour - blue and red lights flash. And the audience is devastated… Chris, with blood all over him, on top of a white woman, begging for help, a shotgun by his side. This is not going to end well for Chris. Who would believe him? But… It’s not the cops. It’s Rod. In his TSA car. ‘I told you not to go into the house’. Rose watches them drive off and the life escapes her eyes. The Era of the Armitages is over.

In the script, everything does go wrong. ‘Get Out’ premiered in 2017, after the most fatal yearly numbers of black casualties of unnecessary and lethal force used by the U.S. police. While the audience is certain at this point that Chris will be killed, he does survive on page, but the whole house and the evidence burns, and Chris goes to prison. Either due to some sort of amnesia from all the mental suggestion he has been through, or simply the sheer exhaustion of the whole event, Chris can’t even give Rod the names of the people in the party. He is jailed for life, but is at peace with his deeds. Gladly, this is not the way Peele finished his film. Chris’s escape is a bit different in the script, and he is strangling Rose already in the basement where is also helping to prep him for the operation. In the script, she is depicted as psychotically smiling, enjoying being strangled by Chris before passing out.

In relation to theory: Chris looking into Roses’ closet parallels with Bluebeard's bride using the forbidden key to open a door to her groom’s cellar and discovering the bones of previously murdered brides. Chris is figuratively bled to death, decimated. The horse hair not stopped the key from bleeding, it has made it bleed even more. The truth is out, but it only hurts more and helps nothing. The blood the key bleeds can be seen as the endless river of blood of all who came before him. Because Chris himself is played out, Rod takes the stage, and he leads the story in the following sequence. In the mythology of the preyed, Rod equals now to the big brothers of the naive bride, whom she cries out for aid as she prepares to die. The bride has no other choice but to submit to her death, and she asks her groom if she can have a moment to pray and ready herself for her death. The predator admits this to her, not because he is merciful or even pities her, but because he is arrogant and knows his superiority. Chris is in a boiling point, where is a victim of violence but also aware of his own naivety. As the bride’s life force bleeds out, severe fatigue sets in, but “to go to sleep now is certain death”. His ‘genetic make-up’ aids him as he physically fights his abductors one by one, but in the end, he is saved by Rod. Rod represents a force that is more wise and cautious by default and able to act when it comes time to “kill off malignant impulses.”

I cannot help but applaud Peele for the writing of Jim Hudson. A story which relates to racism in today’s Western civilization, Peele manages to create an imaginative and surprising psychosis to explain Hudson’s complicity. Jim wants Chris’s artistic eye for photography, and means to steal this from him along with his physical body, because the eye, along with the rest of the brain is the organ that works as a gate between the physical world and the immaterial mind. Peter Godfrey-Smith writes about the intelligence and possible consciousness of animals in his 2018 book Other Minds, and considers it to be a sign of intelligence that the ”octopuses are also interested in objects that they pretty clearly know they can’t eat.” Godfrey-Smith also suspects that the last known ancestors of humans and octopuses might have had, among other qualities, ”simple eyes, or at least light-sensitive patches” and goes on to point out how ”an octopus’s eye is similar to ours. It is formed like a camera, with an adjustable lens that focuses an image on a retina. -- Light, for a living thing, has a dual role. For many it is an intrinsically important resource, a source of energy. It can also be a source of information, an indicator of other things.” This scene, the way it was written and realized on screen, where light and the art of photography is the highest reward and the pillar of one’s individuation for both Chris and Jim, in my opinion is why Peele won the Oscar.

Notes on Brutalization

Roxane Gay writes about about Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) in her book Bad Feminist (2014). Tarantino’s film can be seen to be the director’s tour de force of western genre cinema, and while the lead actor is black skinned, it’s very much a film made for white people, by white people. The revenge for slavery is a curiosity. As Gay proclaims, a satisfactory revenge in her opinion “would involve the reclamation of dignity on my own terms and not the ”generous” assistance of benevolent white people who were equally complicit in the ills of slavery.” Gay also critiques 12 years a Slave, while admitting it ”is remarkable because it is the only film to date that is based on a slave’s own account of his experience” and ”is also the first major studio-backed slavery film helmed by a black director.” Nonetheless, Gay calls out for films that are ”beyond the struggle narrative.” We are taught that assembling powerful men and weak women on screen we create contract, raise the stakes without much effort. Gay defies the normalizing of the narrative. ”I am worn out by broken black bodies and the broken black spirit somehow persevering in the face of overwhelming and impossible circumstances.”

With this in mind, I go back to experiencing Missy’s execution in Peele’s Get out. We didn’t even see it happen on screen, not really, and while I applaud that, I don’t know if I would have been broken up about it if I had seen it realized. I am white, she is white. She had it coming. I would have done it too. I can appreciate her being killed off screen on an intellectual level. But I am not broken up about it. I don’t feel exhausted by it. I’m even a worse feminist than Gay claims to be, far, far worse. This tells me about my privilege. Even though the white female’s are often brutalized on screen, I do not shy away from it on a personal level. I am part of the problem in a way that I have allowed my personal experience as a woman and a subject of violence and harassment to harden me to an extent that I cannot no longer acknowledge a problem that is normalized. Chris is de facto a victim that rises to rival his enemies and defeats them, protecting himself, but has no chance to really feel empowered or safe, or to be seen - not in the course of his story anyway. We only wish and assume that everything will be alright with him after the story ends. He didn’t overuse power or violence, so we know his spirit is uncorrupted, even when he is brutalized in all other possible ways.

The Dissipation of the Mechanism

When feminism is the frontier of the privileged, it cannot be said to be functioning properly, the way it was meant to. Were the underdogs to form a weighing front, it would be considered as a legitimate threat to the existing societal order. There really is no place for men’s men and exceedingly feminine women in the contemporary world. There is also no quantifiable threat to the status quo of biological nuclear family. The definite existence of the hetero norm on the expense of everything else again does threat diversity. Science or art that fortifies hetero fundamentalism amputates thinking and dehumanizes people who do not identify accordingly. Feminism and the black movement is charged with reactive distress, that is easy to dismiss by the ones who do not feel it.

The assumption, that masculine means something active, while femininity means something passive, is exhausting, and I find it endlessly uninteresting to research it’s origins. I have a feeling it is explained once again with biology. I understand that breeding for men requires knowing action, while gestating their seed is indeed possible for women without taking any action at all. This ignorance of considering this analogy as relevant lies in the core of our narrative tradition to this day. The assumption of women as lesser creatures has been challenged provably since 1792, when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The whole layout for the conversation about two genders is ineffective, as Murdock argued already 29 years ago, that the masculine is actually not a gender at all, but an archetypal force. The masculine nature resides in all things, but it has been robbed and ripped out of the rest of us who are not men. It is wounded, unbalanced and has become destructive. Women have been taught to comply not only to serve men but to save their own lives. When we assume these inherit human qualities are defined by our gender, we create a world based on individual beliefs rather than common ground and fact.

Peele won the Oscar for best original screenplay in 2018, an award that on an occurring occasion is given to someone who’s primarily a director, rather than primarily a writer - and in this case, justly so. Get Out is a film that is written so well it restores all faith to the future of narrative cinema that is stirring, on-point and provocative. It takes a subject that needs to be addressed - the looming reality of today’s racism - and enforces it on full blast. Basically all possible criticism that sensitive white people might have for the dramatizing of this story proves a status quo that exists to benefit not all, but the white skinned. The compatibility between the film and Clarissa Pinkola Estés's book can be quantified whether Peele himself knowingly worked with the book or not. It is also meritorious in regard to the feminist analysis that the main character of the film, Chris, is an assumed hetero sexual male. Even if Chris is not a woman, he is black skinned, a specification that is in no way a coincidence in a horror film about white supremacy. It is thus fair to imply in this context that feminist ideology can serve all people, despite their gender.

Note: This essay is a snippet of my Master's Thesis on Screenwriting from Aalto University (November 2019).