There may be only one challenge to my self-identification as a cinephile. I do not like watching horror films. Not because the horror trope has exhausted itself and not because there is always something else to be watched. I am fairly certain that I do not like horror because even though I can internally rationalize a horror film, even though I can break down its constituent technical elements to predict exactly when and how I am going to be frightened, my body remains unable to turn the process of my intellect into action. I jump, or twitch slightly at those moments that everyone else does, those loud bangs and sudden movements, and my shield of film theory knowledge (which protects me from all other genres) fails.
The night that I saw Jordan Peele’s directorial debut film Get Out (2017) it absolutely blew my mind. The mere fact that I went to see it should, I think, stand as a testament to this particular film’s importance. For the weeks that it was in theaters, it was the focal point of every moviegoer I encountered. During that time no one, it seemed, was discussing anything else that was in theaters. The film’s reputation, at this point, certainly precedes it. It has been turned into memes, discussed in Snapchat stories, analyzed in trending Facebook posts, and reacted to in mass texts. This is a film that people are going back to the theaters to see again. But really, it should be emphasized that this film is getting people into the theaters in the first place based on its reputation alone. Sure, there are some familiar faces in the film, but they are not stars. Jordan Peele directed it, but how many people could tell you which one is Key and which one is Peele?
This is a film that demonstrates the horrors of being a Black person in a white space. As a Black man who had been in a long term relationship with a white woman, I knew this film was going to be one that I would connect to on some level. I did not realize how deep that connection would run. In this film, Peele has generated an ultra-realistic diagram of some apprehensions that have been extant in Black communities for a long time. This film demonstrates that even in a climate of passionate liberal exteriority, the racial history of our nation and our unwillingness to engage with it in a manner that moves beyond the superficial has created an underlying foundation of prejudice, misunderstanding, and indeed violence. With that in mind, the fact that so many people are willing and even eager to engage with this content is astounding. This movie is about race relations. I would be willing to bet on the fact that not a single person who buys a ticket to see this film is unaware of this fact. If you did not know that that’s what you were getting yourself into at first, you would have been told as I was, through a conversation occurring behind you in the ticketing line. And then reminded again, as I was, in the line to get popcorn that this film was “terrifying, but so real”.
The theater was absolutely packed when I went in, just about a minute before the lights dimmed. I sat down with a group of friends and tried to find a seated position in which I felt the most grounded so that when I was inevitably startled, I would move as little as possible. My attempts to compose myself however, were entirely in vain. Though I did not jump at as many moments as I expected myself to, I found myself entranced by the film’s continual and cyclical stream of anxiety, fear, terror, and comedy. From the first shot to the last, this film was enthralling. People in the theater were audibly emotive: we gasped, we yelled, we laughed, and at the end we all clapped. This film, I noted, had created an instance that one finds with decreasing frequency in the modern age: we had all experienced the same thing. Apart from an in class lecture, I could not recall the last time that I had sat with a group of people from a variety of backgrounds and felt as though everyone had gotten the same thing out of our gathering. I believe that in Get Out, Jordan Peele has utilized film as the mass medium of communication that it has always been intended to be. Every moment, every look, every shot that we (being the live audience) see upon the screen is a word, a sentence, a chapter, all thoroughly discursive. Using the language of the mass-produced horror film, Peele is able to situate us within a lexicon; by so clearly drawing on the tropes of a classic horror film, Peele allows us to engage with a filmic vocabulary. The sudden noises, the gore, the creepy smiles are all familiar terms of dis-ease.
Where this film truly succeeds, however, is in the way that it uses this language of horror to create a semiotic chain of understanding that relays a message about racial relations in the United States that moves entirely beyond the simplicity of another box office horror production. Through the speaker, we hear a noise, we see an attacker advancing, internally we create a composite of these inputs in our mind. Synchronously, we see that the attacker is white, we see that the victim is Black, and the fear is tinted with the socioogical realities of racial apprehension within the United States. In this way, Peele moves us through a landscape of terror that is at once removed from, and connected to, contemporary reality. But again, it was not horror alone. The comedy sequences employed the same linguistic depth, moving us from terror to relaxed humor in a matter of moments while still incorporating the same racial undertones. This film spoke to us all. It did not simply tell us what it wanted us to take away. It did not show us either. It demonstrated its philosophy constantly through a mode of communication that we all knew. Reflecting back on the experience of watching this film, I can only hope that there will be more films similar to it in the coming years. In its ability to generate such sociological reflection, this film, to me, is the embodiment of the intrinsic value of cinematic art.
The lights came up and I scanned the audience for other Black people. There were few, but a knowing nod from a man in the back row was enough to put me at ease. What a wonderful time to be a moviegoer. What a pleasure it is to be able to see yourself on screen.
A Cinema of Substance 