Hypnosis

Chris entering The Sunken Place

Missy Armitage hypnotizes Chris with the repetitive scraping of her silver spoon on the bottom of her tea cup to condemn him to The Sunken Place– a place of paralysis.

  • Chris doesn’t realize that he is being hypnotized because stirring tea is a common action, just as sometimes one does not notice the oppressive nature of political and social systems because they have been so engrained in daily life that few have stopped to question their structure.
  • Exploiting the perceived failures of his past (his mother’s death) to coax him into paralysis just as the media exploits negative black stereotypes for entertainment value resulting in the infectious idea that failure is inevitable– that minorities cannot escape their statistics and their destiny, just as Chris cannot escape The Sunken Place.
  • Upon returning from hypnosis, Chris has an inexplicable feeling of uneasiness regarding the situation. Instead of questioning the Armitage’s abnormal behavior, Chris ignores his uneasiness and carries on with his visit because he’s supposed to be safe, nothing is supposed to be wrong and he’s supposed to just be visiting his girlfriend’s family. Just as sometimes, minorities aren’t fully aware of the extent of their inequality because they’re supposed to be equal, they’re supposed to have the same rights.

Missy Armitage stirring her tea to hypnotize Chris

 

Connections to the Readings

Denise Ferreira da Silva identifies the way that all political and societal structures have been manufactured with the influence of Western imperialist ideals of a hierarchy of rationality wherein subjects are ranked by their degree of variation of the phenotypical universal. Get Out alludes to this underlying, almost undetectable oppressive nature of current political and social structures with the banal, yet fatal, nature of the tea stirring. Hancock explores the negative outcome of the media’s consistent exploitation of defamatory generalizations of minorities. In Get Out, the only way to reach The Sunken Place, wherein your destiny is no longer decided by you, is to be reminded of your failures just as the media reminds minorities of their shortcomings contributing an inevitable repetition of history. “Feminist Theories of the Body”, as published by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, explores the way in which certain big subjects remain generalized and unquestioned as a result of being so embedded in society. Get Out utilizes Chris’ ignorance of the abnormal behavior as a metaphor for they way society doesn’t question the inherently oppressive nature of the systems in which we live in (capitalist system, patriarchal system, law enforcement system, etc.)

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