Marlize Duncan
Professor Lasmana and T.A. Nicole Richards
ASMT 274-10390
27 October 2019
The Hidden White Supremacy in Get Out
In America, there has always been a long-standing hierarchy of supremacy between races. Ever since the beginning of slavery to the current day, there are many white people who believe that their black peers are lesser than. This was due to the many stereotypes, connotations, and associations that white people garnered during and after the enslavement of black people by the white majority. As time progressed though, black people were able to further themselves in society and found that white people wanted the advantages seemingly associated with being black such as looks, physicality, etc. The movie, Get Out directed by Jordan Peele, explores this idea with a process, later introduced in the film as the “Coagula Procedure” where the consciousnesses of white people are placed into the bodies of black people. The film uses visual, musical, and dialogue-based symbols to foreshadow the racially motivated killings and white supremacy conducted by the white people with the “Coagula Procedure” in the film and harkens back to history’s handlings with race.
The film’s use of visual symbols was one of the methods to push the narrative further. One of the most important visual symbols used in the film was the use of the deer. The deer took on many different meanings throughout the film, but most distinctly was a representation of black people. This symbol is first introduced towards the beginning of the film when the main characters Chris, a black man, and Rose, a white woman, are pictured driving and then abruptly hit a deer in the road. After making sure that Rose was okay, Chris goes to the side of the road to evaluate the deer. He sees that the deer is hurt, bloodied, and whimpering. Chris stares at the deer deep in thought and later decides to leave it on the side of the road to die. Once the couple arrives at Rose’s family home, they decided to tell Rose’s father, Dean, about the incident. He responds by saying, “‘One down, a couple hundred thousand to go. I do not like the deer. I'm sick of it. They're taking over. They're like rats. They're destroying the ecosystem,’” (Peele), indirectly comparing deer to those of the black population. After the emancipation of slaves, many white people wanted to remain superior and to control the black population. Writer, Banu Subramaniam best expresses this with the phrase, “The ever-resilient specter of overpopulation continues to re-invoke xenophobic white anxieties of the black and brown hordes that knock at the West’s doors”. As the film further progresses, Chris is pictured in therapy with Rose’s mother, Missy, detailing the events of how his mother passed away. Chris explains that his mother was killed in a hit and run and left for dead by the side of the road, while he sat at home watching television trying to convince himself that it did not occur. Her death was much like that of the deer that Chris and Rosie had hit earlier in the film. One of the later instances where the deer is present is toward the end of the film when Chris is held captive strapped in a chair awaiting his death. He looks up and across from him on the wall is a dead deer’s head taxidermied and mounted on display. The deer, in this case, is a representation of Chris’s relationship to Rose. Rose had been hunting down black men to manipulate and display to other white people so that they could see the advantages the black men had and may want to later possess through the “Coagula Procedure”. The black men that Rose manipulates are much like deer; hunted and used as trophies.
The next use of symbolism as an act of foreshadowing is done so musically within the soundtrack of the film. The first song that had a symbolic meaning was “Run Rabbit Run” by Noel Gay and Ralph Butler. This song was heard in the opening scene of the movie, when Andre, a black man, is walking down a dark street alone. A car is then shown following him and proceeds to pull up to next to him. The car is playing the tune “Run Rabbit Run” and the following lyrics are heard, “Don't give the farmer his fun, fun, fun. He'll get by without his rabbit pie. So run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run,” which can be initially be interpreted as a warning to Andre to just run away, but can be more deeply connected to the operation on the Armitage property. The farmer mentioned in the song’s lyrics is personified as Dean Armitage and the ‘rabbit pie’ would be the black bodies Dean uses as vehicles for white consciouses to reside. Andre was another black man to be manipulated and harvested for Dean to use in the “Coagula Procedure”, and the song references how the farmer would “get by without his rabbit pie” because there would be other means to lure more black men into the trap that the Armitage family had created. This song foreshadowed Armitage’s plans which later in the film were seen to come to fruition when Chris had met Logan, a companion to a white lady twice his age and one who wore clothes usually worn by white men. It was revealed that Logan was actually Andre after undergoing the Armitage’s brain transplant process, and a man Chris actually knew prior who had gone missing for six months. Another song used for the purpose of symbolism and foreshadowing is, “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga,” composed by Michael Abels. This song is heard at two points of the movie, first when Chris and Rose are on their way to her family home and secondly when Chris escapes from being held captive by the Armitages. The song is in the Swahili language, so most do not understand the words, but recognize it’s eerie minor tone and melody that is sung in hushed whispers. The song, unbeknownst to most, actually translates to “Brother, listen to the ancestors. Run! You need to run far! (Listen to the truth) To save yourself, listen to the ancestors.” This composition is more literally a warning for Chris to listen to his intuition and to run away from the Armitage home. There are many moments where Chris’s friend Rod tells Chris to not go with Rose to meet her parents, yet he refuses to listen to Rod’s warnings and still goes. This song is first used as a general warning for Chris to not go with Rose at all when they are in the car driving to the home. In the second instance, once he escapes his captivity, the song acts as a motivation for him to run and save himself like the song insinuates. These songs also harken back to songs used during slavery to help slaves navigate life. These songs are known as “counterveillance songs” as dubbed by Simone Browne in "Introduction, and Other Dark Matters" where music was used as warnings like “the folk tune “Run, Nigger, Run,” which warned of approaching slave patrols” (Browne 22). This idea of escape from dangerous white environments in music is also found in map coded spirituals, similar to counterveillance songs. The aforementioned folk tune, “Run, Nigger, Run” which acted as a warning was different to map coded spirituals because these spirituals had instructions that led slaves to freedom. An example of this kind of spiritual would be the song, “Follow The Drinking Gourd,” which used the “metaphor of the drinking gourd to symbolize the constellation of stars known as the Big Dipper, containing the North Star” (Brankley) to tell people escaping from slavery what direction to travel when making their way to freedom. This information provides insight into the idea of coded music being used hundreds of years before the current era, pointing to Get Out’s plot based in history. The choice of music for this film was not meant to only act as a way to fill the silence in each scene, but it drove the plot further with it’s deeper meanings to warn and to motivate.
Another means of symbolism that the film uses is dialogue-based and is focused on specifically what the characters in the film are saying and the meaning behind it. In the film there are many moments when someone makes a statement about something and in doing so, are symbolizing topics from race to specific matters like the “Coagula Procedure”. A lot of this dialogue is performed by Dean Armitage when speaking with Chris. This can be seen in the scene where Dean is giving a tour of the house to Chris. Dean points to the basement door in the hallway of the home and says, “‘We had to seal it up. There's some black mold down there,’” (Peele), which seemed like a harmless fact about the home, but later the audience finds out that the basement is where the Armitages had been disposing of parts of black bodies after the brain transplant procedure. Another example of symbolic dialogue occurs when Dean senses that Chris is uncomfortable with the fact that a white family lives on a plantation-style home and only have black servants, Georgina and Walter, working for them. Dean defends his choices by stating, “‘We hired Georgina and Walter to help care for my parents. When they died I just couldn't bear to let them go,’” which also foreshadowed another discovery Chris made. This discovery being that Rose’s grandparents are actually controlling the bodies of Georgina and Walter, so Dean never lost his parents, they were just present now in the bodies of black people. These phrases were so well executed by Dean that when first heard, Chris along with the viewers of the film took them for as they were, but as the film progressed most of what Dean had said in the film was insinuating something else. These insinuations found in the film are not just clever euphemisms needed for charcter development, insinuations of this type are still found in the United States. In 2008, an email was uncovered that was sent by Harris County, Texas assistant district attorney, Mike Trent, who “used the word “Canadians” to describe blacks on a jury” (Popplewell). This email was sent with the hopes to congratulate a junior prosecutor and was met without any challenge from other colleagues who also received the email, yet there were never any Canadian jurors in the jury. After the uncovered email was released, the use of “Canadians” was corroborated with an online database for racial slurs that defined it as “a masked replacement for the N-word” (Popplewell). Get Out’s reference to white people using indirect language was used to present the way some white people can be insincere when conversing with or about black people, which can, in turn, lead to harmful events. This way of foreshadowing with symbolic language in the film was executed greatly because it was so well masked by the innocent conversation that was also present.
The movie, Get Out, uses different types of symbolism to foreshadow the abhorrent acts of violence that Chris will almost go through at the end of the film, but it also worked as a way to prove to audiences that the film had always had an underlying sinisterness. This is mainly due to the viewers' realizations that the characters and scenes in the film were always hinting at the terrifying use of black people for their bodies. With the many cultural contexts that this film also brings to light, it also displays the larger idea of how white supremacy can easily be masked by perpetrators. Whether it be the use of deer throughout the Armitage home or the phrases that Dean uses when speaking to Chris, the supremacism was always there, it was just hidden from the black protagonist. This film gives a glimpse into how many black people in America battle with the trust of white peers, especially because of many moments in history where black people were manipulated and unscrupulously influenced.
Works Cited
Brankley, Sarah. “Spirituals and Their ‘Coded Messages.’” Music In The World, Music In The World, 7 Mar. 2012, blogs.longwood.edu/musicintheworld/2012/03/07/spirituals-and-their-coded-messages/.
Browne, Simone. “Introduction, and Other Dark Matters.” Dark Matters, 2015, pp. 1–29., doi:10.1215/9780822375302-001.
Butler, Ralph, Noel Gay. “Run, Rabbit, Run.”
Peele, Jordan, director. Get Out. Get Out, Universal Pictures, 2016, digitalcampus-swankmp-net.libproxy2.usc.edu/usc281266/#/play/95399.
Popplewell, Brett. “Is Term 'Canadian' Used as Racist Word?” Thestar.com, 26 Jan. 2008, www.thestar.com/news/gta/2008/01/26/is_term_canadian_used_as_racist_word.html.
“Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga.” Get Out Soundtrack, Back Lot Music, 2017, Track 2
Subramaniam, Banu. “‘Overpopulation’ Is Not the Problem.” Public Books, 27 Nov. 2018, www.publicbooks.org/overpopulation-is-not-the-problem/.