Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
For one of my university modules I had to watch this film - my second time - and I am still reeling. I now I see it as something so impregnated with symbolism, teeming with a politics and psychology achingly present though unavoidably beyond my complete understanding.
Get Out is a film in which spectatorship is used as an instrument of its horror. Peele constantly grapples with ideas of perception and the act of looking, reconfiguring it in all its horror and peril. Through Missy we can see how ideas of psychoanalysis are employed as a tool to mediate this spectatorship - she is in a position of power as both a white mistress and as a medical professional and this institutional power allows her to penetrate and colonise Chris’s unconscious thoughts through his past trauma. In the sunken place, Chris is suspended, his screams silenced. The sunken place is both psychic and societal, a terrain of darkness, an abyss. Here, societal pressures encoded within racial dynamics manifest in Chris’s literal paralysis. And the positioning of this sunken place as configured through a tv screen conjures further questions of spectatorship and agency as a crucial matter of survival. Here, forced to confront past traumas, Chris relives his mother’s death. She died cold and alone. And I was watching tv. The concept of the tv as an object of blind conception reinforces these troubles of spectatorship and blindness.
The gaze is grappled with throughout, interrogating the idea that the black subject is historically denied the right to gaze. But cinema may afford a space through which to gaze - cinema as a politically engaged opposition to racial dynamics. And yet the black female spectator is doubly marginalised - Peele points to the perpetuation of misogynistic archetypes through Georgina’s character. She is a haunting robotic domestic presence, internally fighting both white and patriarchal colonisation. She protests against her own marginalisation as a spectator and of the internal politics of identification this has caused. Her gaze turns inward and outward onto the act of cinema itself. And yet she is a zombie - shackled by the psycho surgery she has undergone, forced into becoming the ‘Other’ in her loss of Self. Phase 1 is hypnosis, phase 2 psychological pre op, phase 3 transmutation.
Georgina, having struggled through the phases, has lost herself to an existence as a passenger, a zombie. The very etymology of the term ‘Zombie’ is rooted in African and Caribbean religious tradition - a symbol of resistance after the Haitian slave rebellion- zombie is coded racially, expressing the subversive fear of the dark ‘Other’ that conjures anxieties of oppressed masses returning to wreak havoc on civilisation. The psychoanalytic intervention as a catalyst for the production of zombies signifies a greater cultural anxiety. In their brainwashed state, they adopt the language of white supremacy. We’re just very happy that you’re yourself again.
Is there chance of a rupture of this state? Technology appears to be some kind of bridge between awakening - Chris's camera causes a rupture between the white consciousness inhabiting Andre's body and his sense of self - a momentary reawakening. When he came at me it felt like I knew him. Not Andre but the guy that came at me. Here, there is a sense of a multifaceted self, a necessarily contradictory mass- here, there are always traces of the self in the other. Chris’s telephone, too, is a kind of bridge- one that the family persistently strives to disfigure. It is an instrument for information, a lens. And art- in the cinematic sense- can also be seen to dispel the fantasy of racial equality in everyday life.
Teetering dangerously before phase 3, Chris is shackled and paralysed in a chair staring at a screen, unable to block his ears and resist the hypnosis. You were one of my favourites, they tell him from above. The very interior in which he is imprisoned drips with a haunting symbolism; the deer head above the screen is a morbid echo of the deer they had run over in the opening. It functions as a warning and as a sinister reconstruction of his own status as the hunted. The blind artist tells him, I want your eye. Those things you see through. Perception, the gaze, spectatorship is a haunting, powerful, exceedingly dangerous thing. And the very act of transmutation- the psychosurgery- is a physical representation of Hegelian self-other dialectic. There are always traces of the self in the other. It is essentially immortalising. And by the end, Rose smiles as Chris’s hands close around her throat. She recognises his perpetual entrapment; he is out of the house but not out of the wider institution of racism. The police will see the dead white bodies and him as the sole black survivor. Here, Peele preserves the body as sacrosanct, working to transform black protagonists into white ones, subverting Hollywood conventions of horror to generate a critique of racial politics. Chris’s struggle for survival is a resistance to horror and by extension Hollywood's commercialised whitewashing.
Get Out forms a profoundly disturbing interrogation of the behaviour of white anti-racism allies or warriors. Given that Rose is revealed as a psycho/sociopath, Peele reconstructs thinking about race as something sociopathic, as inescapably rooted in institutional power. It is a disquieting thought, a disturbing anxiety that we can never truly move beyond imperialism, or breach these institutional powers that shackle and enslave ad infinitum.
Fire is a reflection of our own mortality. We’re born, we breathe, we die… We die someday but we are divine. We are gods trapped in cocoons.