95. Get Out (2017)
Another film at joint 95th on the 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll, Jordan Peele's excellent debut continues to resonate in a politically and racially divisive America.
Welcome to the latest instalment of my journey through Sight & Sound’s Top 100 films of all time. You can read the rest of the series published so far here.
[Contains spoilers]
Time – albeit relatively little of it – has been kind to Jordan Peele’s zingy directorial debut, such that it’s now ranked as one of the 100 greatest movies ever made. Its place is perhaps hard to reconcile when one thinks of the films it has usurped.
Are we really supposed to believe it’s a ‘better’ picture than The Seventh Seal or Aguirre, Wrath of God or Wings of Desire? Probably not. But then we get into a spurious meta-debate about the value of such lists, which leads us nowhere fast.
Its inclusion, like many other films, is political. But then this is a political film. And a very good one at that. If you sense a degree of reticence, it’s only because I’m trying to square its politics with its horror. And I’m not sure how successful it is as a horror picture. I’m not even sure it’s intended to be one.
What it really is – and Peele has said this himself – is a very dark satire, somewhat in the mould of The Stepford Wives, but replacing that film’s sexual politics, circa 1970, with a scalpel-sharp twist on the racial politics of 2017.
Everyone in the film is excellent. Especially Daniel Kaluuya, Alison Williams, and Lil Rel Howery. The atmosphere it conjures is pitched to perfection, as unsettling as it needs to be, but leavened by a sort of sage, ‘I told you so’ humour, stitched into the narrative via Howery’s genius turn as TSA officer, Rod Williams. And it needs this comic relief given its troubling theme, which is about Black bodies (and souls) and who gets to assert power over them.
It’s a terrible question that shouldn’t need asking because the answer should be obvious, except that in this world, which daily stakes its claim to be the worst of all possible, it’s depressingly relevant. For everywhere one looks, bodies and souls are controlled, not by their rightful owners, but by other human beings and the inhuman systems they have created – a grim occupation that goes back millennia, concentrated in certain cultures at certain times, including right now, in the very country that claims freedom as its birthright and its promise.
And the place to go when trying to think about such brutality visited upon Black bodies in this land, and about such soul-crushing injustice imposed on a people, from the transatlantic slave trade to Jim Crow to the prison industrial complex, is W.E.B. Du Bois, who, back in 1903, wrote this of the African American experience:
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
Here that ‘double-consciousness’ is taken to a kind of hideous metaphorical extreme, the eyes of others similarly internalised, the result of a kind of grotesque White need to own and occupy everything relating to Black lives, which is something like an innate colonial impulse born of despotism, greed and false notions of superiority, but also to do with a lack or a brokenness at work within the oppressor himself.
No less a writer than Baldwin drew our attention to the damage such evil does to all those who call themselves American, which brings us back to the idea of bodies and souls, oppressed and abused, and to why this film is so outrageously pertinent to our own times, because we know that this malign poison is still at work within the political, economic, and social fabric of the United States (and the global north more generally), and that there are still those who can somehow live with this derangement.
In Peele’s movie, we witness a body horror inversion of MLK’s ‘shared garment of destiny’, where the arc of justice bends not towards utopian ideals of equality and equity but gets lost and corrupted in the luxury basements of the careless rich, who seem incapable of curbing their mania for the possession and debasement of others, which is what makes the titular command of this picture so relevant. A message for all those who live under such occupation; for all who exist at the mercy of the sinister sociopaths who steer the fate of this benighted planet. Get out.