What to Read Next

 

  • That Ending: What Was and What Could Have Been

We Really Need to Talk About That Get Out Ending

In fact, speaking of poor “Andrew Logan Hill”—the dude who was kidnapped in the beginning of the movie, and then popped back up as arm candy at the party—he’s presumably still stuck in the Sunken Place, stuck with someone else’s name (message!) and watching life through a tiny screen, unaware that he’s dressed like a rich white woman’s antebellum fantasy. And there’s no reason to think that everyone else in Rose’s photo box isn’t out there suffering a similar fate. Just because one lucky guy got out doesn’t mean everyone does—and in Peele’s super-smart directorial debut, that might be the scariest thing of all.

 

https://diversemovies.tumblr.com/post/157967775952/get-outs-ending-was-originally-a-lot-darker

 

  • Get Out: More (and more) Moments and Symbols to Notice

22 Things You May Have Missed in Get Out

  • The Victimization of White Womanhood
    • Timothy Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

How Get Out Positions White Womanhood as the Most Horrifying Villain of All —Slate.com

The famous last line of King Kong is telling: “It was beauty killed the beast.” Chris joins a long historical line of black people, both real and fictional, who have had their lives threatened or complicated by white women’s lies and/or the cultural perception of white womanhood as unfailingly virtuous and true.

Allison Williams: What White Audiences can Learn from Get Out —ABC News

Williams acknowledged the idea that “Get Out” is also a representation of white liberal elitism and the co-opting of black culture.

“Like the idea that … a woman can just go up and feel [Chris’] muscles. That transgression of privacy and personal space is just somehow entitled to her by the virtue of their different races. The idea that you’re the object of voyeurism, that white gaze,” she said.

 

  • On Racial Profiling, Police Violence, and Mass Incarceration
    • Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
    • Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
    • Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
    • Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
    • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

 

  • White Liberal Racism in the Post-Obama Era
  • Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past. Barack Obama and the Burden of Race

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/get-out-and-the-death-of-white-racial-innocence

The power of “Get Out” and “I Am Not Your Negro” resides partly in the films’ ominous whispers and parallel reveals. We’ve hit a turning point; so much trauma has gone down in the last eighteen months that even the most delusional white person can no longer credibly strike a pose of white racial innocence. Here, film viewers should heed Baldwin and behold the haunted Armitage mansion: white racial innocence is not just a form of racism; rather, it’s a belief that no longer advances the self-interest of whites, to the extent that it brutally backfires.

 

 

Part One: This Shit Ain’t New.

This section of the syllabus examines both the intimate history of racial violences initiated and perpetuated by white women, cultural and racial cannibalism, and the sexual objectification of Black bodies. Each book in this section focuses on a specific incident in the film, and attempts to address multiple questions.

 

Part Two: But I Got Questions

This section of the reading explores the erasures and omissions that must be examined in the film. The most glaring of which is the unquestioned dehumanization and erasure of Black women in the film. While there was graphic exposition of the violence and disregard of Black Women’s pain by the detailing of Chris’s Mother’s death, and the visual death of Georgina, the camera pans away from violence against Missy. Not to mention the ending with Rose and the implications of “mercy” vs “savagery”. Why were Black women dehumanized and erased? What is the context surrounding Black resistance and violence in this film?

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