Analysis: Get Out

It's a bit rare in fiction to mix SF and horror--that is a tale whose telling has fear as its modus operandi, but at its base, the speculative conceit hinges on a scientific concept. When it comes to movies, they don't shy away: the Alien franchise and look-alikes and zombie movies come to mind. Often a scientific disaster or mad scientist is the cause.

The trailer here makes the movie sound simpler than it is. It seems to have laid out its entire poker hand, which made the film seem less interesting, which explains my only getting to the movie now. Luckily, this is not the case. It mixes SF and horror well although it leaves a number of head-scratchers.

Get Out summary

Chris, an African American photographer, is headed out, with his girlfriend Rose Armitage, to visit her parents. He thinks it's a mistake not to tell her parents that he's African American, but she assures him that her dad would have voted a third time for Obama.

Rose, driving, hits a deer and she calls the police, who informs Rose that she needn't have called them. The cop asks for Chris's I.D., and Rose defends Chris, saying that an I.D. is unnecessary, creating a tense moment. Chris hands over his ID, anyway, and the cop lets her belligerence go.

When Chris meets the family, there seems to be a string of microaggression incidents where the members say a series of racially off-putting things. He meets their African American servants, who put on a show of being happy if a bit vapid.

Chris thinks he dreams that he sees the African American servants behaving strangely (running at him, staring in the mirror and adjusting her hair) and that Rose's mom puts him under hypnosis, using tea cup and spoon, to get him to stop smoking. But also she uses his feelings of guilt about his complicity in his mother's death (he didn't call right away when she didn't come home, and since she was involved in a hit-and-run accident, it was possible he could have saved her life if people had searched for her in time). The hypnosis works. He doesn't want to smoke. He later finds out, through Walter, that none of it was a dream.

Things get worse when at a party, the party-goers make more and more racially odd statements. They seem to compliment on the one hand but stereotype on the other. The movie's title comes when Chris tries to take a surreptitious photo of an African American he thinks he knows, Andre, who is a spouse to an older white woman. The photo flash starts Andre's nose to bleed (a common but unexplained motif in movies), and he rushes at Chris to tell him to "Get out."

Get Out spoilers + analysis

Chris is unnerved, but the Armitage family take the gentleman into a back room, and he's back to normal. Chris sends the photo to his TSA friend, who tells him that the guy in the photograph has been missing. Maybe they're some kind of sex slaves, he suggests and tells Chris to leave. Chris agrees and tells Rose to pack up to go. She seems to go along with this.

However, Chris finds a stash of photographs in a tiny closet that shows Rose in what appears to be relationships with the former servants. She seems to be the lure.

This appears to freak him out, but he somehow still trusts her. How the Armitage mother is privy to his guilt about his mother's death should have at least have made him wary before now--all of these data points leading to distrust. Instead of running, though, he yells at Rose to find the car keys, and she can't seem to. This doesn't seem to make him distrust her, either; he just yells more. Maybe he's in denial. Or maybe he can't drive himself. After all, when asked for his driver's license, he said he had a state ID, which suggests that maybe he didn't know how to drive or that he lost his license. (He does drive later and seems competent at it despite the accident, so maybe he just lost license.)

Mrs. Armitage taps her tea cup twice and he's under. They drag him downstairs and strap him to a big chair. Here, I wondered if he could have worked his limbs loose from his bonds, but maybe we're to assume he cannot. Or maybe he never gets the opportunity as the videos keep putting him under.

The series of videos indoctrinate him into what will be happening to him. That is useful to him and us the audience, so that we know what's going on, but I'm not sure what that gains the Armitages to reveal their hands. But the one guy who was reasonably nice to him at the party--a blind guy--plans to use Chris's eyes.

Chris, meanwhile, finds enough armchair stuffing to apparently dull the hypnotic effects of the video, and when the Armitage brother unstraps Chris, he goes on a killing spree of his captors. (The father may not need to be killed to make an escape, but one can hardly fault this. The weapon is unusual: a deer head. The antagonistic brother and the mother, who holds his hypnotic jailer keys, do seem critical deaths to make an escape.)

Other people also bar his escape: Two are the African American servants, which Rose reveals as Grandma and Grandpa. Chris accidentally runs into "Grandma" and feeling guilty (remembering his own mother), he backs up to take her with him in his getaway car. However, she wakes up and forces him to drive into a tree.

Next, "Grandpa" (or Walter) comes after Chris, but Chris uses his cell flash to bring back his true consciousness and shoots Rose with her rifle and then himself.

Did Walter need to shoot himself? It depends on how Grandpa is riding inside him. My first thought was that it was a radio connection, and Grandpa was an invalid, stuck in bed. If that were the case, I would think that 1) Grandpa would rather get healthy and be himself unless this is terminal (but then if it's terminal, he probably wouldn't be conscious much, leaving Walter to control his own body), and that 2) Walter could just run outside of radio range and be free of Grandpa's influence. Since the earlier photo-flash moment with Andre had to be corrected by the family, it would seem that Walter had the opportunity to escape if the mother isn't around to re-hypnotize.

Another possibility is that Grandpa is otherwise dead and has taken over Walter's body via hypnosis and brain surgery. Dr. Armitage did say that Grandpa had died. So we're talking a living consciousness transferred and uploaded into a living brain. While this technology seems improbable now, perhaps it will be possible in the future although one might suspect a hundred years down the line--if we ever figure out what consciousness is. But this would explain why he kills himself since Grandpa might at any point take him back over.

On the other hand, what if there's a procedure that could cure him? The blind guy said Chris would still be there, just not at the wheel. I'd think these guys might have been hatching escape plans if they ever got the chance. Why does Andre, when freed by the flash, come at Chris instead of running away himself? On the other other hand, it is possible to demoralize a person into inaction.

Another difficult thing to wrap the mind around is Grandma and Grandpa. Have they lost interest in each other? Why aren't they seeing each other like a couple? Also Grandpa Armitage looked to be the family patriarch in the video. Why were he and Grandma made into servants? This suggests an even stranger family relationship. You'd think they, too, would want out of this situation.

There are interesting parallels involving hit-and-runs.

1. Chris lost his mother due to a hit-and-run. 
2. Rose hit a deer. One might think that the deer hit was designed to have happened, but it'd seem a formidable and fortuitous accident to create. However, that might have intended to put Chris into a more suggestible frame of mind. There's an alternate ending where Chris ends up arrested when he's caught choking Rose. This might mean that a larger conspiracy was intended at one point. This event seems to have haunted Chris as he dreams about it, so there may be more to unearth here. Dr. Armitage does call them an ecological problem, so he's glad they're gone. If significant, does that make the Armitage the deer or the car? Maybe the car, and Chris the deer is enacting his revenge. 
3. Walter, jogging, almost runs over Chris, but swerves.
4. Chris runs over Rose's dad with a deer. This could be poetic justice if the deer were intended and was part of the greater conspiracy.
5. Chris runs over a woman whom he tries to save but ends up killing, given her Grandma trying to kill him. 

There may be more. I haven't formulated anything overarching for this. Just intriguing.

What kind of people would get wrapped up in such a conspiracy? These people admire and maybe are jealous of African Americans. They want to be them. So they aren't your garden-variety racists, who would probably look down on being African American. They may be racist in the sense of seeing African Americans as the superior race and eager to become or marry one. Unless the Armitages are using Liberalism as a cover, they claim to be Liberal. Perhaps these people met online somehow and congregated. There were a lot of them at the bidding war--enough that you'd expect there to be more than one lure trying to satisfy their desires. This suggests territory for a sequel, especially since there are so many unanswered questions.

In terms of drama, the alternate ending would have amped up the drama, but it would have probably added too many extra complications. 

"Cinema sins" does this "Everything Wrong with ..." series. Although they apparently do it whether they like a movie or not, this is one they seem to like. They make a few salient points, and a lot of minor ones, like whether or not Chris is a hipster with a lot of lamps. I did notice an interesting photo with a child in a mask that I might have noticed otherwise, but I'm unsure how to load it with meaning. Who is the masked child: Chris or his antagonists?

If you've read this far, I'm assuming you watched the movie, but this video has a lot of spoilers, too.