Discuss Get Out
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Will this help race relations?
posted by RaySTAFFMOD on March 1, 2017 at 12:38 PM
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. …
Get Out could have been a very amusing movie, but Jordan 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 anti-white animus. …
Reply by Ray
on September 18, 2017 at 3:13 AM
Did you cheer when Charles bronson killed that black family in Death Wish?
Reply by HEYitzED
on September 23, 2017 at 5:19 PM
Never seen it.
Reply by drjekel_mrhyde
on November 4, 2017 at 11:36 PM
Did you even watch the movie? If any conservative actually watched it, they would have a huge boners about rich white Ultra Liberals being the bad guy. Anybody that brings up race about this movie, I immediately know they didn't even bother to watch it.
Reply by Kylopod
on November 8, 2017 at 5:45 AM
I don’t think there’s any contradiction between saying it’s entertainment and saying there’s some social commentary in it. The horror genre in particular has a long history of incorporating topical social themes. That shouldn’t be surprising, given that the genre is all about the things people fear.
There are many examples. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a thinly veiled take on the red scare of the ‘50s. Night of the Living Dead can be read as a commentary on the Vietnam War and nuclear annihilation (and possibly racism, though George Romero denied that’s what he had in mind). The slasher movies of the ‘80s frequently toyed with themes about the values of suburbia. In the original Nightmare on Elm Street, it’s hard not to notice that Freddy’s first murder gets blamed on the only Latino kid in a mostly white neighborhood. Silence of the Lambs deals with the treatment of women in male-dominated fields. And, of course, Stepford Wives, probably the foremost influence on Get Out, is clearly a satiric take on the plight of women in society.
To recognize all these themes isn’t to take these films more seriously than they were intended. These films are entertainment, and they aren’t Aesop fables designed to make us learn lessons. But they do draw upon social themes to construct their stories, and we shouldn’t be embarrassed about recognizing them.
What I found most interesting about Get Out was its fundamentally black point of view, which is somewhat of a rarity in Hollywood films—even ones with black stars like Will Smith. For example, there’s no shortage of movies featuring scenes where white people behave awkwardly in an attempt to impress black people or appear nonracist. It’s practically a cliche. But usually, the perspective of this humor is that we are invited to feel embarrassed for the whites. In Get Out, the focal point of these scenes is how much it makes the black protagonist, Chris, feel alien and out of place.
Does this make it a great film? Of course not. I happen to think it’s a decent, well-made horror movie apart from its social themes. And none of what I mentioned would be noteworthy if there were more films being made with these qualities. Nevertheless, it is something interesting about the movie, which made me think about it a little longer after I finished watching it, and it relates to what this particular story is built on. Yes it’s entertainment, but it’s entertainment constructed from social themes, and that’s something worth discussing even after the lights go on.