The Silver Spoon

Georgina pouring Chris a drink

In the film, the first step in the hostile, forceful takeover of Chris’ body involves hypnosis–a means of suppressing his consciousness–which Missy successfully accomplishes by casually stirring her tea in a teacup without Chris realizing he is slowly being plunged into “the sunken place.” Ultimately, the steady, repetitive sound of the spoon hitting the sides of the cup serves as the perfect instrument for inducing hypnosis and keeping Chris under the Armitages’ control. However, the casual stirring of the silver spoon in a tea cup not only develops into a centrifugal force of terror but bears important symbolic meaning. For one, the teacup is symbolic in that during the U.S. slavery era, white wives of slave owners would use a gentle strike to their teacup to summon house slaves. This imagery presides over other interactions Missy has with her black house servants, including Georgina who she frequently summons for house chores and other domestic labor (particularly in the scene where Missy clinks her spoon in her iced tea glass to call Georgina to serve Rose and Chris some iced tea).

Moreover, the use of the silver spoon is allegorical for the privilege that is passed down through generations, hence the term “born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth,” which is indicative of the Armitages in that they are protected by both their wealth and their whiteness. Despite the horrific things that the entire family has done, these have gone undetected over the years because they are all shielded by their affluence. Thus, the silver spoon, both literally and figuratively, allows the Armitages to control unknowing Black victims at their whim and without being subject to any consequences whatsoever.

Connections to the Readings

To that, we can draw some interesting connections to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism” in terms of the overarching notion of posthumanism, as projected by the white characters in the film. In her piece, Jackson critiques posthumanism, arguing that to move beyond the human is to erase the violent history of race relations and colonialism as well as to commit to the order of rationality that privileges white men. Her objective is to help the reader understand the issues surrounding posthumanism with the conclusion that scholars need to rethink what comprises “the human.” By tracing the development of posthumanism and its exclusion of race, Jackson argues that in terms of the nation-state, the law is based on the differentiation of individuals, dating back to colonialism. The notion of posthumanism evades the idea of privilege that is both passed down and inherited that allows the Armitages to assume dominance and control over black bodies. Furthermore, their whiteness allows them to continue preserving this dominance in their ability to attempt to avoid legal consequences (particularly at the end of the film where Rose calls out for help, thinking that a white cop would emerge from the car to rescue her while on the other hand, Chris holds up his hands prepared to surrender to arrest, also assuming a white authoritative figure will emerge from the cop car). Thus, it is evident that the law protects those that are deemed “rational,” with rationality being based on racialized individual identities. In this way, difference plays an important role as society is structured hierarchically, in a way that only values specific categories of individuals in society.

Jackson thus discusses biopolitics and its arbitrary coding of hierarchal rationality, and how white bodies were able to fashion themselves as ‘humans’ who had the capacity to control and repress their “animal instincts” unlike black people who were inherently animalistic and not as successful in restraining themselves in their possession of savagery. Further to that, in Dorothy Roberts’ “The Politics of Race and Science,” she discusses the idea of race as a natural division of human beings that was invented to legitimize, facilitate and bolster a racist agenda. Multiple systems of domination present in society, stemming from long-lasting legacies of categorical racism, colonialism, slavery and imperialism, elucidate the symbolism the silver spoon bears and the significance of the tea cup in preserving this white rule over the black body.

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