We’ve had a run of good movies over the last couple of weeks here in Morris. Well,
“good” in the sense of thought-provoking and well made, but actually they were both reduced to simple, small-scale ideas executed terrifyingly.
Get Out has been getting all these rave reviews, and they’re deserved — it’s a horror movie that races along, and actually is horrifying. However, if you’re expecting an innovative story, you’re going to be disappointed: this is the old degenerate-family-in-remote-location-murdering-people story. You’ve already seen it in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, even crappy cheap ripoffs like that House of Wax movie with Paris Hilton. The only twist here is that the evil family is white — wait, no, they’re always white. The twist here is that they’re not inbred redneck hillbillies, they’re nice, normal-on-the-outside prosperous upper-class white professional people who live in a lovely, tasteful mansion in the country. Also, there is no Final Girl, but instead, a Final Black Man. Otherwise, it’s a perfect fit to the standard template for this kind of movie.
It does its job, though. There is a gradual build up of tension, the progressive reveal of just how awful the situation is to the protagonist, the bloody climax. It’s completely predictable. What takes it a step above, though, is that it also maps to American race relations — you begin to see well-off white families as parasites desiring black bodies. That adds a layer of discomfort to the whole.
There are flaws in the premise, though. Spoiler altert! Stop reading now if you don’t want a major plot point exposed!
The idea is that this family has achieved a kind of immortality by luring in black people, and then surgically transplanting a chunk of their brain into the skulls of their black victim, animating their strong new bodies with the will of the degenerate old white parasite. They literally auction off their victims to family members. There is no way any of this could work from a scientific perspective, but I’m not going to quibble with the science…it’s with the logic.
This is a family of horrible smiling racists who treat black people as property, so why are they trying to insert their minds into black bodies at all, to become black people? There’s a metaphor there, too, but it breaks down when you learn that Grandma and Grandpa White Monster are there, living on in possessed black bodies, but they’re now doing menial labor, chopping wood and cooking and cleaning. Why? I suspect it’s a bit of a cheat, because if the results had a logical progression, all of the family members would be black on the outside but wickedly white on the inside, but then the movie would be visually confusing — it would be a superficially black family luring other black people to a remote location for destruction.
John Wick: Chapter 2 has bigger flaws, but it has an advantage: it doesn’t have a story that needs to make sense. There is no plot, other than that John Wick kills everyone — it’s more of an exercise in world building for paranoids.
I also caught on to a framework that makes the whole thing hang together. John Wick is dead and is in Hell. There are Lords of Hell running the whole show, and everyone is in on the paradigm: chase John Wick, hurt him, make him bleed, but oh no, you can’t kill him, because that would end his torment. Everyone shooting at him is a lesser demon, which explains why they bother pursuing him at all, because normal mortals would simply turn and run at the prospect of facing this guy with a near infinite supply of guns and knives who will shoot you in the head. It explains why anyone would ever leave the Hotel Cosmopolitan, the only sanctuary in the world. They have torture missions to run.
Wick is oblivious. He doesn’t stop to wonder when he gets in a brutal knife fight in a subway train, and the other passengers just quietly go about their business at the far end of the car. A Demon Lord just has to put in a call to a central switchboard, and cell phones start ringing all around him as everyone gets their assignment. At the end, the King Demon meets Wick in public, and with a gesture, everyone in the plaza stops to stare at him — they’re all under his control.
The whole movie is a paranoid ballet in which John Wick has to kill his enemies who have endless hordes of disposable gunmen, and in the end, he discovers how vast and numerous his enemies are, as he runs away. The End. Chapter 3 is presumably in the works, in which the entire universe pursues John Wick, so he kills everyone in the world.
It’ll be easy to write, at least. It’s going to take a lot of stunt men and prop guys, though, and more epically decadent sets.
I almost never go to movies —I think one may have to learn the habit when young and I grew up 50–60km and close to an hour’s drive from the nearest cinema.
With movie reviews like this, I am motivated to head to the local library immediately. They just got some interesting new books.
I wondered that too after seeing Get Out. From what I could tell, while they viewed black people as inferior, it was from an intellectual, emotional, and cultural standpoint. Physically they seemed to regard blacks as superior- or black men, at least, since there was only a single black woman in the movie that I remember. Their plan seemed to be our mind + their bodies = world domination, or something like that.
The conversation between the protagonist and the blind art gallery owner who has “bought” his body covered that nicely, I thought. The specific reasons vary: some want to be strong and athletic, some think that it’s “fashionable” to be black or that blacks “have it easy” in today’s society. Some, like the art gallery owner, don’t actually care (or claim not to): he just wants the photographer hero’s artistic eye,* and presumably doesn’t what color his new body is.
Most American racists have never had a problem conceding that blacks may have physical gifts equal to whites, and in fact, the stereotypes are usually that their physical gifts are greater. That’s part of the reason why black athletes took over the playing positions in the NBA and most of them in the NFL long before they were accepted as quarterbacks (the supposedly intellectually challenging “field general” position) or coaches in either sport. Even today you still hear echoes of it in sportswriting: black athletes get praised for their talent, white athletes get praised for cunning and grit and character. And note that the girlfriend character begins researching her next victim by googling for top basketball prospects….
Most of the things the gallery owner says echo back to some of the seemingly just tactless things said by white characters earlier in the film. The obnoxious drunken brother’s rant about how the hero would be an absolute “beast” at martial arts if he could combine the hero’s physicality with the training and discipline of someone like himself. The old white woman’s question about whether black men are better in bed. The old guy who claims that black is fashionable now. Etc.
The other things, which I don’t think is explicitly mentioned in the film but I think we can infer, is that it’s just easier in our society to make black people disappear without too many questions getting asked.
*– (which seems a little dodgy to me — does the “eye of an artist” literally lie in the eye, or isn’t it just a metaphor for something happening in the brain of the artist? But then, we don’t know exactly which brain systems “carry over” during the process, so in the spirit of horror movie science I can let it slide).
It didn’t look to me like grandma and grandpa were working that hard, really. Is anything they did out of line with what retired grandparents might do around the house? My parents are grandparents, and she still cooks and cleans, and my dad chops wood every chance he gets.
The grandfather in particular seems to be enjoying his youthful body, hence the midnight running sessions. That part read to me as a standard “old person gets youth back” scene that was probably in films like Cocoon also.
Eventually that’s probably true. But it seems like so far it’s been old white people who are bidding at the auctions, and we don’t know how long this has been going on. It’s at least a few years — the former acquaintance at the party disappeared a few years ago, and the stack of photos of the girlfriend with her previous victims suggests she’s been doing this for a few years at least — but I don’t think we have reason to think it’s been a matter of decades.
Even from the rich white person perspective, there’s still some downside to the procedure. Presumably there’s some risks inherent to such dramatic surgery, so maybe not everybody makes it through alive. We see that the submerged personality of the black victim can occasionally assert itself, so it’s not an entirely peaceful existence. You probably have to give up any of your friends or family members who aren’t in on this scheme, which also likely means giving up your career if you have one.
The parents, played by Brad Whitford and Catherine Keener, are still attractive middle-aged, seemingly healthy individuals. They’re likely in no hurry to go through the process until they have to. The brother is probably enough of a psycho to want to do it immediately, but the rest of the family may not want to have to explain that yet. And the girlfriend character is played by Alison Williams — since we’re already talking about bodies as commodities, I’ll just say that it would be pretty hard for her to “trade up” from a physical beauty standpoint.
I’m trying to remember the last horror movie I actually enjoyed.
I think it was Evil Dead 2. I really don’t care much for the genre.
I have NEVER watched a horror movie, and I know what I ain’t missin’!
It’s been a while since I went to the cinema but …
sounded like a movie title.
So I gooogled…
I still don’t get it..
……..
…
chigau,
yeah, I was kinda disappointed it wasn’t a movie title too. It sounded like it had potential.
How is TWO mediocre sounding movies a ‘run’ ???
Reminds me of when my school ended a football season 1-9, and everyone ran around yelling, “One in a row! One in a row!”
Jeremy Shaffer and screechymonkey have already made most of the points that occurred to me, but I couldn’t resist chiming in. My take is exactly that it’s about the idolization of black bodies and the devaluing of black minds — there’s a sense that black minds aren’t worthy of superior black bodies. Thus the brother implying that Chris is wasting his physical talent and potential to be a “beast”, and the art critic’s seeming attribution of Chris’s talent as a photographer to his physical eye and not to the mind behind it.[*] And thus the father’s lecture that begins with the question (paraphrased) “What is your place in the world?” This family has carried to its logical end the dream of a specific strain of racism — putting superior white minds in direct control of superior black bodies. Parasitism, yes, but also the perfection of slavery.
As far as the grandparents go, it’s also important to realize that we only see them under a fairly artificial set of circumstances. There’s no reason to suppose that they act as domestic servants when there are no victims around to be lulled into a sense of security. For me, one of the most chilling aspects of the film is watching Chris realize that he hasn’t been surrounded by well-meaning by oblivious white liberals, but that instead he’s surrounded by psychopaths who have been playing a game of cat and mouse with him from day one. Seeing him slowly and reluctantly come to grips with the fact that this includes Rose was agonizing.
[*] Of course, maybe that’s just intended as a pun — it’s possible the art critic is well aware that he’s not going to get the artist’s metaphorical eyes, but he doesn’t care as long as he gets the physical eyes.
I’ve encountered racists who think they can mitigate their racism by saying positive things about broad groups of people, i.e., “Asians are good at math” or “Black people are just better runners.” This seems consistent with that.
Also, I think the story in the movie is that Grandma and Grandpa were doing chores not as a normal routine, but as an act to stave off suspicion. The crying act happened because the original occupants of the body occasionally fight for control from “the sunken place.”
“Get Out … a horror movie that races along, …”
The unintentional puns are the worst.
There’s another aspect of _Get Out_ that was brought up: The black experience regarding discrimination compared to how white’s think discrimination happens. More specifically, what’s the point at which you say, “Get out!” What is the moment that you say that all of those little suspicions you have about what’s really going on are sufficient for you to say that enough is enough?
You will notice that the black people in the film are suspicious immediately: What do you mean you haven’t told them I’m black? What do you mean you’re going out to the middle of nowhere? All the little signs. Those who are part of a subjugated minority tend to view situations and scenarios differently, picking up on things that the majority don’t see. Is this racist? Is this sexist? Is this homophobic? Etc., etc. That’s part of the way horror movies work: The audience knows things that the characters don’t. But this movie makes that connection to the social awareness of the minority more explicit. The way in which the dominant people excuse and explain away things. Notice how even when the white person is decrying the racism, they are overriding and discounting the black person’s opinion. Now, in the case of the police incident, there is a bit of a hidden motive (the white people are going into the bodies of black people and thus, they can sorta see the injustice and seek to have it put down), but it is still done in the patronizing sense that the white person knows better than the black person.