Chris bound in the cotton chair

When Chris is tied up in the Armitage’s basement, he pulls out the cotton stuffing from the armchair he is strapped into and uses it as an ear plug to keep him from falling under hypnosis. Initially, we connect Chris’ original trauma (when he allowed his mother to die in a hit and run while he sat at home and watched tv) to his ability to get free. We see in the many flashbacks to his mother’s death that Chris is largely paralyzed–except for a frantic clawing at the bedposts. Flash-forwarding to Chris’ restraint in the basement after being tied down at the basement by the leather binds, the hypnosis backfires, as the saving grace of being hypnotized is that it sends him back into the moment if his mother’s death, which is what forces his hands to frantically claw–this time at the leather chair, revealing the cotton underneath. In resisting the family’s hypnosis, Chris picks and stuffs cotton into his ears, a racial irony that touches on the notable role that cotton picking played in the enslavement of black people. As Chris’ arms and feet are bound, much like slaves were shackled, this imagery of literally picking cotton to drown out the noise of the oppressor subverts this historical trope and is how Chris manages to survive.

Cotton fields on an American plantation

Chris’s hands in the cotton chair

“This might be the only time where a Black man picking cotton has been a lifesaving task.”

The phrase used to describe American economy in the 1830’s and 1840’s was “cotton is king.” It became the first mass consumer commodity and its production turned millions of black human beings themselves into commodities, particularly in Southern United States.

Black slaves processing cotton on an American plantation

The connection to cotton picking gives the movie a much deeper historical and racial relevance that ties the experience of African Americans to Chris. The deeply-embedded trauma of being the descendants of slaves is inherent in all African Americans. That it is what ultimately comes to save Chris’ life is an allegory that many African Americans can appreciate as they struggle with present-day conditions. Perhaps this might be Keele’s way of suggesting that white people cannot keep African Americans trapped in their historical trauma and that it is the very fact of that trauma that will ultimately liberate descendants of this traumatic history. Thus, plugging his ears with the cotton becomes symbolic of how the memory of past enslavement becomes protection against re-enslavement.

Connections to the Readings

In tying these to a contemporary framework, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism” narrates a turn in critical theory towards the animal. Her intervention and iterations of animal studies and posthumanism aim to address how the fields of animal studies and posthumanism would be altered if the work and activism of people thinking about race and racism circumscribed the boundaries between human and animals within a posthumanist framework. To that, she articulates how we risk denying people’s humanity and how by ignoring history and centuries of colonization, we risk perpetuating this notion. In other words, ignoring the histories of slavery, colonialism, and racialization and how these play into the human, re-run into the risk of replicating the same violent epistemological assumptions that feminism is supposed to work against. While the goal of posthumanism is to decentralize the human so that we get a sense of how we are all connected, it can be harmful because it ignores how colonialism and slavery never gave the chance to some groups of people to be humans themselves.

Thus to ignore colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, as white characters in the film attempt to do, would mean blinding ourselves to the heteronormativity that underpins our legal system and most other aspects of our lives. Jackson articulates that the idea to move beyond the “human” comes from a place of privilege (a luxury that only white people have because their humanity is already acknowledged due to the Eurocentric historic domination of the world) while minorities are seen as irrational (therefore less than human) and their history of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and conquest is erased by post-humanism. In subverting the trope of cotton picking and the symbolism it serves in present-day, Keele confronts this erasure and brings to the forefront the legacy of slavery and imperialism that continue to manifest in present-day and inform the day-to-day experiences of black people in modern-day America. In teasing out this parallel, the film links the ubiquitous trauma of both past and modern-day enslavement to essentially push against the idea of a ‘postracial America.’

A Black Buck

The symbol of the deer is present throughout the film, beginning with Rose hitting one that was crossing the road in one of the first scenes in the film, sending it to its death. In this scene, we see a police officer arriving at the scene, requesting to see Chris’ ID without cause. It is evidently white privilege in a situation that has seen black people shot to death. However, as we see unravel the rest of the film, we see how the deer becomes symbolic in its connection to the recurring theme of abandonment. After the deer is hit, close-ups are intercut with shots of Chris’ transfixed face, hinting at something potentially more significant than merely the deer’s death. Later, during his first trip to the “Sunken Place,” Chris reveals his greatest childhood shame to Rose’s hypnotherapist mother, Missy–that he didn’t act quickly enough to save his own mother in the hours after her hit-and-run accident, and thus felt responsible for her death. Chris suffers from this childhood trauma of his mother’s death, feeling that had he called 911 when she didn’t return home instead of watching TV all night, she could have been saved. Immediately after Rose hits the deer, he gets out of the car to check on it because it reminds him of his mother’s death. (We see the theme of abandonment reemerge as he is finally escaping from the Armitage home when after he accidentally hits Georgina with his car, he stops to pick her up despite her body being inhabited by Rose’s grandmother, because he sees the parallels to his mother).

Chris looking at the black buck

Chris as a child in his bedroom

However, the deer serves as an important motif in Get Out in other instrumental ways. Deer are also known as “bucks,” a term used to sometimes represent Black men. The deer killed by Rose at the beginning of the film foreshadows the fact that Chris in danger set to meet his end.

Dean and Missy Armitage

The deer offers commentary about race and resistance in other ways. The biggest indicator that the deer means something more is most apparent when Chris first meets Rose’s father, Dean. His reaction to the deer story is notably odd. He praises Rose for hitting the deer and goes on to rant about the entire species and how they ruin the local neighborhoods, thus according to him, eradicating them would be of great service to the community. This scene not only sets an odd tone for the rest of Chris’ interactions with the family, but it also prepares the audience for what is yet to come. The deer serves as a motif for black men, in representing how they are perceived to ruin neighborhoods, how unassimilated they are and how they need to be locked up (or worse) for everyone’s safety.

Later in the film, it is revealed that the Armitage family has been appropriating black bodies for the convenience and use of wealthy white society, and this is justified as being for the greater good or, in other words, as a service to the community. Dean’s out-of-place tangent earlier in the film, then, is not just referring to the deer, but what — or whom — it represents to him in the form of black bodies.

A buck on the walls of the Armitage home

At first, it seems peculiar that Dean speaks so lowly of deer, considering he has the imposing head of one mounted on the wall of the recreation room where Chris is later held against his will. It is not just a deer head mounted to the wall, either; the antlers indicate that the deer is likely male, also known as a buck. Again, historically, the “black buck” was a racist slur in post-Reconstruction America for black men who refused to bow to white authority and lusted after white women. However, that in itself is not enough to make one pause, since it was clear early on that Dean was a hunter, and procured many exotic souvenirs during his travels abroad. During the grand tour of the house, he casually showed off his trophies from far-off African locales, including statues, instruments, and tapestries. All of these many elements he had cherry-picked to display in his own come came from black culture representing the pursuit of black appropriation. Like the black people Rose hunted and seduced, Dean’s favorite bits of blackness were given new life as decorative trophies. The biggest trophy of all is displayed in the recreation room. To the Armitages, Chris and the deer are mirror images of each other. The Black men and women Rose has dated were hunted and immortalized as trophies, just like the deer hanging on the wall in the room Chris is being held captive.

Later, it is no mistake that Chris escapes the recreation room the way he does. He resists the family’s hypnosis cues by picking and stuffing cotton (from the armrests on his chair) into his ears. After Rose’s brother, Jeremy, comes to collect Chris and Chris strikes him, he finds his way to the operation room where he strikes a shocked Dean with the antlers of the very buck that loomed over him moments ago. The antlers are both a literal and a metaphorical implement of resistance, and their indication is clear: Chris is not a wild beast to be tamed, and he will not be yet another ‘ethnic’ trophy for the Armitage estate. With the prior knowledge of Dean’s awkward raving about the deer population needing to be kept under control, it becomes especially emblematic that a physical token of the dehumanization of black people becomes a tool for subduing him down and, by extension, the nuanced oppression that he represents.

The imagery in Get Out is saturated with the imagery with subtextual power, using the deer as a symbol for Chris’ past trauma, the animalization and appropriation of people of color, forced deference to the white man and, finally, as an instrument of defiance.