American Horror GENRE AND THE POST-RACIAL MYTH IN GET OUT
'Do they know I’m black?’ That’s what Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) asks his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), early on in the first act of Jordan Peele’s hugely successful debut film, Get Out (2017). He’s black, she’s white, and they’re about to embark on that classic new-relationship milestone: meeting the parents. This narrative set-up isn’t new – think of the landmark 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer) – but Peele takes a familiar story to unfamiliar places, his film a slow-burn horror movie interrogating race and racism in contemporary America. It’s a film, says Peele, where ‘society is the monster’.1
Though it was released – and, eventually, won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay – in Donald Trump’s America, Peele penned Get Out as a response to Barack Obama’s presidential reign, during which the election of the first ever president of colour, in 2008, had been hailed as a symbol of a nation shaking off its racist past. ‘We were in a period where a lot [of] people [were] saying racism was over,’ Peele explains. ‘I was writing during the Obama era, the era of the post-racial lie.’2 Here, Peele dismantles this post-racial myth in both comic and horrific ways: from social settings full of microaggressions – those tiny faux pas that speak of greater prejudices – to his grand gambit, in which Rose’s family turn out to be masterminds of a wealthy cabal that transplants the brains of ageing white people into young, black bodies. Rose’s father, Dr Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford), proudly boasts that he would’ve voted for Obama for a third time if he could, all while participating in an inhuman plot with grand racist echoes. He’s a poster boy for self-satisfied white liberals, the chief proponents of the post-racial myth.
‘I felt like there was this void in the way we talk about race […] like racism was not being called pitch-meeting premise (one Peele was sure he would never be allowed to actually make: ‘On paper, what you have is something inherently unpleasant – the victimization of black people, the villains being white people’ ) turns the horrors of racism into a horror movie, its key manoeuvre being the literalisation of black fears in a white world. ‘I’d never seen my fears as an African-American man onscreen in this way,’ Peele offers.
