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.)

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.’

“It was hard not to watch that scene without thinking of how important camera phones and video recordings have been for many African Americans experiencing police violence—especially in light of an earlier scene in which Chris is the apparent target of racial profiling by an officer. Cameras, Get Out suggests somewhat plainly, have the power to reveal.” -Lenika Cruz, “In Get Out, the Eyes Have It”

Throughout the film, the role of sight and photography is developed with a sense of critical urgency. At the Armitage house, Chris views whiteness through his camera lens. His camera is an extension of his eye and his physical sight becomes commodified. Jim Hudson, the blind art dealer, tells Chris, “I want your eyes, man. I want those things you see through.”

In the film, the only thing that has the power to revive the small traces of the real inhabits of those bodies is the flash of Chris’s camera. In this instance, they literally “see the light,” which is what it takes for all of them to realize their blackness. Ultimately what ends up saving Chris is ultimately the flash from his camera phone. The flash from Chris’s camera phone jolts Logan back into reality. His nose bleeds and he warns Chris to “get out” after he comes into contact with this flash. Toward the ending of the film, Chris shines his flashlight on Walter as he attempts to choke him. Walter then uses the rifle to shoot Rose and then himself. Over the past few years, police violence is being documented more frequently with cell phone cameras. With the push of a button, these videos are shared globally–posted as “live” Facebook or Instagram videos. The killings of Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling among so many others were
“shot” by bystanders who used their camera phones to document the violence they saw.

“We have been talking about police brutality for years and now because of videos, we are seeing just how systemic and widespread it is” -Deray McKesson, Black Lives Matter activist

In “No-bodies: Law, Raciality and Violence,” Denise da Silva describes how raciality is mapped onto certain bodies. To be a no-body, she describes, is to be a body that can exist in the world but does not exist as a marker of rationality. These no-bodies are obliterated with no ethical outrage. They are neither the subjects nor objects of justice as the law itself conceals this original violence.

The camera phone has been used to bring anti-black police violence into the center of collective, national attention. In Get Out, the flash of a camera phone is a flash back into the actuary fear and terror of living under white supremacy as a black body. It is a warning to reject colorblindness, to “get out” of post-racial ideologies, and to resist the normalization of racialized violence.

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.

While hypnotized by Rose’s mother, Missy Armitage, Chris is condemned to “The Sunken Place”. The Sunken Place is essentially a black hole of nothingness that strips Chris of his ability to control his body and allows him only to watch the life his body remains living as a passenger. As he is falling backwards aimlessly through the recesses of his mind, Chris experiences an out-of-body experience that represents the greater narrative of Black America. It is a theme that has been played out throughout American history – from slavery to the Tuskegee experiments all the way to present-day mass incarceration; the idea that terrifying and denigrating things come from white ownership of Black bodies. Chris is immobilized, powerless and vulnerable in the grips of Missy’s trance, which all originated from the lie that hypnosis would cure his nicotine addiction. From a big picture standpoint, there is a lot to be said for the fact that Chris is “sunken” anytime he entrusts his well being to the white people in this film.

Chris falling into The Sunken Place

The Sunken Place serves as a symbol for the systemic racism that “steals the agency” of Black Americans today. This systemic oppression of Black people has placed invisible chains on people where they cannot just dig their way out. We cannot dress, dance, talk our way out of it because it is bigger than all of us. And it is deep and all encompassing.

• The sunken place represents the helplessness and powerless feeling many Black Americans experience day-to-day, in a society controlled by whites where they are used for what they offer but never allowed to embrace who they truly are.
• The way in which statistics of failure (higher rates of incarceration, higher rates of poverty etc.) contribute to the feeling as though a future of failure is inevitable.
• Feelings of being a passenger in your own life: This speaks not only to the inevitability of failure as touched on above but also to the lack of influence of black communities on changing their situation. Or as put more, concisely by the director, Jordan Peele:

Or in the words of Daniel Kaluuya, who plays Chris, it can bebe read as a metaphor for the way black people are sometimes forced to resist reacting to what they see around them:

“Just feeling, that’s how being black sometimes feels like. You can’t actually say what you want to say because you may lose your job and you’re paralyzed in your life. You know? You’re paralyzed in your life, you want to express an emotion, and then it comes out in rage elsewhere, because you internalized it, because you can’t live your truth, and that’s what I’m trying to say is so amazing.” -Daniel Kaluuya

Or as referenced in this episode of Black-ish:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFuJmSC5LB0

Thus, The Sunken Place becomes allegorical to to the actual paralyzing state of being when you are unable to defend yourself against racism in certain settings like the workplace.  The hypnosis is a satirical/extreme example of the psychology associated with enduring racism of all kinds.  One is aware that it is happening, but the need to keep one’s job, or not go to jail prevents them from being able to react. The mind of the actual black person in the film is trapped in ‘the sunken place’, and while they are aware, they are unable to react. Ultimately, this state of being becomes the suspended animation of how we look at race in America, a nation that has bound to the increasing belief that once Obama was elected President, the nation had overcome racism and had become “post-racial,” as mentioned at several instances throughout the film.

Georgina attempting to reassure Chris

The trope of The Sunken Place is unpacked in different ways in the film. The development of Georgina’s character is one that bears notable significance. She tried to stay woke from the depth of the darkness, and she gives a valiant fight. When the Armitages and Chris sit on their back deck, Georgina comes to pour them all iced tea but at one point, she zones out and spills tea around Chris’ glass. It was the first sign of the fact that she had some fight in her. In another scene, Georgina’s single tear and forced smile, exemplifying her suppressed emotions as a black person having to hide her pain and come off as strong and solid at all times, is indicative of the experiences of black individuals throughout all of American history. However, what is significant is her experience as a presumably queer black woman (who has had relations of some sort with Rose). Unlike Logan and Walter, who apparently needed a camera’s flash to “wake up,” Georgina was the only one whose black consciousness broke through without an external trigger. She is also depicted as seeming to have the greatest internal struggle when she was in close proximity to Chris, indicating that she was fighting the hardest but it was not even for herself (something that has been the case throughout black history in the relationship between black men and black women).

Georgina represents the characterization of how black women have often had to put up a valiant fight on behalf of the black family throughout American history. However, also importantly, it is evident in the film that Rose has been able to scheme up to a dozen black men, perhaps even more. The fact that Georgina is the only black woman that has been taken under the Armitages’ control perhaps embodies the notion that black women are more careful to not be lured into the sirens of white womanhood. Nevertheless, her capture itself still represents the fact that despite black women knowing better, the are still quite vulnerable. And the most vulnerable of black women, perhaps, is a queer black woman.

Connections to the Readings

Da Silva argues that political and social ideals are founded upon Western European imperialist ideals that rationality can be derived from one’s physical characteristics (race, ethnicity etc.). Get Out builds off da Silva highlighting the paralysis of The Sunken Place as a metaphor for the way political and social structures today are created on the basis of inequality and serve to essentially paralyze marginalized individuals from changing and achieving within the system. Hancock identifies the ways in which popular culture holds the power to influence society’s perception of itself and in profiting from reinforcing these defamatory stereotypes, popular culture influences society to view racial minorities negatively and two-dimensionally. In Get Out, Chris is only able to reach The Sunken Place after being repeatedly reminded of his shortcomings just as the amplification of negative statistics and stereotypes can result in a sense that failure is inevitable based on the amount of melanin you may possess.

In Elizabeth Bernstein’s “Carceral Politics as Gender Justice? The “Traffic in Women” and Neoliberal Circuits of Crime, Sex and Rights,” she discusses how state to use incarceration as an apparatus of control, removing those it deems threatening to society and reinforcing the patriarchal structures it thrives on. Additionally, Sune Sandbeck’s “Toward an Understanding of Carceral Feminism as Neoliberal Biopower” suggests that feminist advocacy moves away from relying on the threat of incarceration to address women’s issues since this feeds into the state’s use of prison as a method of control. The articles shed light on the authority of the state power to render blackness as the Other, who is denied protection but is often exploited by the state in order to generate surplus value.

In Treva Ellison’s “The Strangeness of Progress” and “The Disorder of Law and Order” Ellison draws on concepts of hierarchies of value and ethical outrage to develop their own framework of neoliberal multiculturalism, racial capitalism, and carceral geographies. The nation-state creates carceral geographies, which refer to the “formal institutions, processes and developments such as prisons and jails” (Ellison 326) and the knowledge and representational forms that are used to dominate and control, through racial capitalism and a mask of progress in order to further its own agenda. Based on difference, the nation-state creates a realm of relevance, in which those who belong are subjects of legal and ethical concern. At the state’s convenience, those who fall in the space of ethical absence are either protected or not protected. As disposable beings, these bodies are actively hurt when laws, such as Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, that promote mass incarceration are passed.