March 01, 2017
Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out
Get Out, a remarkably racist kill-the-white-people horror movie that makes Django Unchained seem like My Dinner With Andre, is the box office and critical smash of the winter.
Made for less than $5 million, this film about vicious whites plotting to enslave blacks by implanting their cunning brains into superior””stronger, faster, cooler””black bodies brought in $31 million its first weekend. And it earned a 99 percent thumbs-up from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
While Get Out, which was written and directed by Jordan Peele of Comedy Central’s Key & Peele black humor sketch show, may sound like satire, it eschews 90 percent of the opportunities for laughs. (Peele and his former partner Keegan-Michael Key both have black fathers and white mothers, just like Barack Obama, with whom they strongly identify. They are best known for their skit “Obama’s Anger Translator“ in which Peele plays Obama while Key acts out the former president’s id.)
Get Out could have been a very amusing movie, but Peele correctly perceived that in this era there is big money in supplying audiences with their politically correct racial hate uncut with much in the way of wit. People don”t want intelligence in 2017, they want antiwhite animus.
Sure, Get Out does offer a few sly winks to those of us in the know about how bogus the Black Lives Matter media frenzy really has been. For example, in Get Out our black hero is knocked cold by his white girlfriend’s creepy brother using an implausible weapon, a lacrosse stick. This is presumably included as a nod to the 2006 Duke lacrosse team hate hoax in which a black stripper accused white jocks of rape. (By the way, speaking out against this fraud launched the career of Donald Trump’s speechwriter Stephen Miller.)
But mostly Get Out plays it straight in sticking to its popular message: The reason white people are scary is because they are evil and dangerous.
After all, why should amateur hate hoaxers like Durham’s Crystal Mangum and UVA’s Jackie Coakley have all the fun of making up stories about how hateful white people are when talented professionals like Jordan Peele can do it so much better? Blood libels against whites are much in demand at present, so why should America have to rely upon teenagers lumping together plots from Law & Order with dialogue from Dawson’s Creek when experts could furnish us with well-crafted originals like Get Out?
I would guess that Get Out originated in funny stories Peele would tell about going for Thanksgiving weekend to his white grandparents” or his white in-laws” house, and his mother or wife making him promise not to bring his beloved drugs.
But withdrawal induces paranoia and pretty soon you are thinking that every awkward conversation is a prelude to the white people grabbing you and making you into their yard-work zombie.
Get Out is clearly modeled on the funny scene in Woody Allen’s Oscar-winning Annie Hall where Alvy Singer has an Easter ham with Annie’s ultra-WASP family. Soon Alvy is imagining his hosts imagining him as a bearded Orthodox rabbi. Catherine Keener plays the girlfriend’s mother in Get Out, perhaps because she’s a dead ringer for Annie’s mother, while Caleb Landry Jones re-creates Christopher Walken’s role in Annie Hall as the creepy brother.
Of course, Alvy didn”t ultimately slaughter Annie and her entire family as racial revenge. The anti-gentilic movies of the late 1960s and the 1970s that Get Out is drawing upon, such as The Graduate and The Stepford Wives, generally stuck to comedy, or at least offered metaphors to cover up their underlying ethnic hostility.
I wouldn”t be surprised if Get Out also originated as Key and Peele riffing over whether they could have come up with a better excuse than O.J. Simpson’s.
Here’s the situation: The police car rolls up, you”re covered in blood, and there are butchered white people all over the ground. You are in a tight spot, so what do you say? O.J. has already worn out the it-was-uh-drug-dealers theory. You need something more creative, like…you were lured to this country mansion by your white girlfriend as part of her family’s hobby of harvesting black bodies.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
