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The Cinematic Rhetorics of Lynching in Jordan Peele’s Get Out

JENNIFER RYAN-BRYANT

T HE PERIOD OF AMERICAN HISTORY BETWEEN THE END OF THE CIVIL War and the height of the Civil Rights Movement was marked by intense, unrelenting racist violence in many parts

of the country. People of color not only faced discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, education, and access to public facilities, but they also negotiated daily threats to the very fact of their existence. These threats sometimes took the form of lynching, a type of mob violence that sought to punish individuals for unsub- stantiated crimes without trial, jury, or consequence for the perpetra- tors themselves. W. Fitzhugh Brundage calls lynching “a southern obsession” that represented “but one manifestation of the strenuous and bloody campaign by whites to elaborate and impose a racial hier- archy upon people of color throughout the globe” (1–2). Manfred Berg argues, in addition, that lynching contains ritualistic elements and a sense of communal engagement; its vigilante mobs react against “the establishment of a modern criminal justice system” (ix– x). Finally, Ashraf Rushdy suggests that lynching arises at times of national crisis, when certain groups are dissatisfied with the limits of their legal rights and other social practices are also in flux (3). For the victims of lynching, these aggressive social practices signal a total erasure of identity and personhood, an effective rejection of their right to exist. In the years before the Civil Rights Act, persons tar- geted by lynchers could not expect legal defense of their rights or legal redress for the crimes committed against them. Instead, activists like journalist Ida B. Wells published essays and monographs docu- menting their experiences and, along with prominent voices, such as

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 53, No. 1, 2020 © 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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NAACP executive secretary Walter White and educator Mary McLeod Bethune, articulated the steps necessary to achieve real social change.

Today, we face another crisis in American identity, civil rights, and self-expression brought about by reactionary political conser- vatism and ongoing revocations of civil rights. While these reversals have been tempered to a degree by social activism, broad-based pro- gressive views, and existing laws, many people also see social media and popular culture as key forums for public resistance. Jordan Peele’s 2017 directorial debut Get Out represents a popular culture vehicle whose message specifically opposes public violence, recurring instances of hate speech, and regressions in social policy. This film, marketed to commercial audiences as another entry in the horror cate- gory, in fact presents a comprehensive view of the conflicting perspec- tives on racial identity that define twenty-first-century American social politics. In the movie, Peele constructs a paradigmatic example of a lynching narrative in which a black man is targeted by a group of wealthy white people intent on robbing him of his individuality, intelligence, and life. The film’s protagonist, Chris Washington, finds himself the target of a planned lynching, though his greatest offense is only his decision to date the daughter of Dean and Missy Armi- tage, a white couple who live on an imposing country estate in Westchester County, New York. His innocence is easy to recognize; he says goodbye to his dog before leaving his apartment for the week- end, he seems anxious to please his girlfriend, Rose, and he carries with him only a suitcase and the main tool of his profession, a Canon camera. However, these seemingly neutral elements, coupled with his gentle personality, already signal the film’s imbrication in the histori- cal realities of lynching: as Wells herself pointed out back in 1895, the vast majority of lynchings were staged to target black men who were innocent of the sexual assaults with which they had been charged. The white perpetrators of lynchings, she notes, argued that “Negroes had to be killed to avenge their assaults upon women. There could be framed no possible excuse more harmful to the Negro and more unanswerable if true in its sufficiency for the white man” (224). After tabulating the reasons given for the 159 recorded victims of lynching in 1893 as one telling example, Wells points out that thirty-nine had been accused of rape, eight of “attempted rape,” four of “alleged rape,” and one of “suspicion of rape” (235): fifty-two out

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of 159, or 33 percent. However, the majority of these victims had been guilty of nothing more than an interracial relationship: in Wells’s words, “With the Southern white man any m�esalliance exist- ing between a white woman and a colored man is a sufficient founda- tion for the charge of rape” (225). Chris’s temperament and occupation portray him from the beginning of the film as a non- threatening individual. Yet, the unmistakable fact of his blackness, set next to the “flower of white Southern womanhood” that Rose’s name implies,

1 lays him open to social condemnation before the opening credits roll.

Peele acknowledges the violent national history that has defined American race relations in Chris’s and Rose’s personal traits and in their weekend destination—which Chris’s best friend, Rod, has warned him against, stating that “You never take my advice . . . Like don’t go to a white girl’s parents’ house” (Get Out). While viewers are meant to interpret Rod’s statement here as an unneces- sary caution, particularly given its hyperbolic tone and actor Lil Rel Howery’s real-life popularity as a comedian, his reference to the dan- gers of interracial romance that haunted earlier periods in American history will resonate in the film’s later scenes. At the same time, Peele ensures that the narrative Chris inhabits is fluid enough to accommodate and even promote several different types of opposi- tional strategies. As a horror story, the film includes several recog- nizable elements, including a central protagonist whose death seems likely for much of the time, a physical threat that is revealed slowly to viewers, and an extended scene of conflict between the protago- nist and the forces trying to kill him. Jody Keisner points out that many recent horror movies are aligned with postmodernist thought because “they push viewers to consider their own notions of what is real” by depicting an existence that we can see is in some way simu- lated (416). This challenge to reality fosters an attitude of general ambivalence toward the possibility of survival in such films; while the characters are usually able to adapt some part of their environ- ment to serve as a means of defense, the danger facing them is by no means resolved at the end.

In Get Out, Jordan Peele explores this ambivalence by invoking both familiar horror movie tropes and the social context of Ameri- can racism in the 2010s. As he stated in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, “every true horror—human horror, American Horror—

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has a horror movie that deals with it and allows us to face that fear and—except race, in a modern sense, hadn’t been touched. You know, it really hadn’t been touched, in my opinion, since Night of the Living Dead 50 years ago [and] maybe with the film Candyman. And that, to me, I just saw a void there.” Horror works particularly well as a genre through which to explore the ambiguities of racial representation since, because of its reliance on sustained tension and jump scares, it functions as a “space of exception, where paranoia is always founded, though its object may be misrecognized” (Jarvis 102). In creating such a “space of exception,” the film’s narrative structure relies upon three types of rhetoric, or three means by which Peele establishes connections with his audience through care- fully chosen symbols used in meaningful, though not necessarily transparent, ways (Renegar and Malkowski 51). The three types of rhetoric that Peele employs—aural, visual, and linguistic—both por- tray the threat of lynching that Chris faces and articulate the possi- bilities open to him for resistance. Upon an initial viewing of the film, audience members might think that its horror exists primarily in his sense of entrapment, in the fact that he has found himself the unwitting object of selfish and bloodthirsty desires. A more careful screening reveals, though, that the horror really emerges from the accumulation of these three types of rhetoric, the piling of one threat on top of another until Chris himself cannot tell which aspects of his situation he is reading correctly and which are magni- fied through fear or misdirection. In order to examine the threats that are posed to Chris and to apprehend his opposition to them, this essay analyzes three key aspects of the movie: its soundtrack, or aural rhetoric; characters’ repeated use of animal metaphors, a visual technique; and the linguistically innovative phone conversations that Chris holds with Rod. In each of these cinematic elements, we see Chris both facing an immediate danger and gaining knowledge about how to defend himself. These rhetorical devices function ambivalently, containing both the problem of lynching in America and its potential solution—just as today’s actively resistant political climate not only signals a groundswell of opposition to white supre- macy but also exists in large part because of our country’s current pattern of relentless violence.

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Aural Rhetoric and National Identities

The film starts with three songs that prepare the audience for the types of conflict that will define the story as a whole. In the first scene, a young black man walks a suburban street at night, talking on his cell phone. After he hangs up, a white car passes him, makes a U-turn, circles back, and stops next to him on the street. He starts walking faster, and British duo Flanagan and Allen’s 1939 hit “Run Rabbit Run” plays from the car’s speakers. As the man tries to turn away from the car, an assailant wearing a helmet strides on screen from the sidewalk, grabs him, chokes him, and drags him into the car. As the attacker shoves the victim into the trunk, Flanagan and Allen sing, “He’ll get by without his rabbit pie, / Just run, rabbit, run”; he slams the trunk shut and the music cuts off. Next, the film’s credits begin to roll, starting with the title in all caps. Over a shot of a forest behind the credits, a Swahili singer intones, “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga,” which translates to “listen to your ancestors”; this piece was written by Michael Abels, the film’s music director. The third song in this sequence is the one perhaps best-known to its viewers, Childish Gambino’s “Redbone.” This song, which plays over shots of several professional photographs that Chris has taken, warns listeners to “stay woke” and advises, “Now don’t you close your eyes.” In an interview with GQ writer Caity Weaver, Jordan Peele notes that he “was into this idea of distinctly black voices and black musical refer- ences, so it’s got some African influences, and some bluesy things going on, but in a scary way, which you never really hear. African American music tends to have, at the very least, a glimmer of hope to it—sometimes full-fledged hope. I wanted Michael Abels, who did the score, to create something that felt like it lived in this absence of hope but still had [black roots].”

“Run Rabbit Run” is an example of mainstream white World War II-era music and lacks the “African influences” that Peele discusses here. Yet, its allusion to the “Brer Rabbit” stories sanitized for white audiences by folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, among others, suggests a kind of “absence of hope.” Although Brer Rabbit is a trickster fig- ure with West African roots, he often finds himself entangled within his own plots in modern American versions of the stories, and the form in which many Americans came to know him was through Walt

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Disney’s famously racist cartoon Song of the South. In a discussion of Harris’s storytelling strategies, William Tynes Cowan labels Brer Rabbit a “slave cognate” who “unleashes his frenetic energy upon stronger animals whom he defeats with his wit and cunning.” Brer Rabbit’s actions are defined by opposition, but Harris frames every instance of his “cunning” in the voice of Uncle Remus, whose passive acceptance of slavery undermines the characters’ potentially subversive acts (Cowan 170). The forms of resistance in which such a “rabbit” participates, therefore, may only make him vulnerable to harm. The title “Run Rabbit Run” also alludes to earlier, more insidiously racist American texts. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature includes an undated rhyme entitled “Run, Nigger, Run” that starts, “Run, nigger, run; de patter-roller catch you” (24). This poem’s structural and rhetorical resemblance to the Flanagan and Allen tune is unmistakable; its use of a racist epithet in place of the Brer Rabbit moniker points to the violent origins of much post-Reconstruction popular culture. The phrase also recalls the dream that motivates the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to pursue a more subversive approach to survival after several earlier attempts at assimilation have failed. After receiving a college scholarship and leather briefcase from a drunken gathering of local businessmen, the narrator dreams that his grandfather—whose own seditious tendencies were only revealed on his deathbed—has given him “an engraved document containing a short message in letters of gold.” It says, simply, “To Whom It May Concern . . . Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” (Ellison 33). The nar- rator’s grandfather recognizes that he will be chased by the threat of white racist violence throughout his life; he uses the phrasing of a popular jingle in order to spur his grandson on to actions that could undermine social persecution. Peele’s use of “Run Rabbit Run” evokes both the history of white repression and the possibility of resistance.

The other two songs that open Get Out offer, in contrast, access to a repository of specifically black cultural concepts. Stephen Hen- derson labels such culturally defined terms “mascon” words, or “mas- sive concentration[s] of Black experiential energy” (44). According to Henderson, mascon words “have levels of meanings that seem to go back to our earliest grappling with the English language in a strange and hostile land” and “carry an inordinate charge of emo- tional and psychological weight.” Some key examples of mascon

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words include “jazz,” “jelly,” “funk,” and “blues”; these terms, which each possess several different meanings and resonate in diverse con- texts, “form meaningful wholes in ways which defy understanding by outsiders” (Henderson 44). “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga,” the song that invokes Chris’s ethnic heritage by reminding him—and the viewers—to listen to the ancestors, provides an essential example of a mascon phrase. The song, which contains the lyrics “run far away” and “save yourself ” (Bowen), signals both to Chris and to informed viewers that Swahili possesses social power and that his cultural her- itage may protect him from threats within his current environment. Peele notes that he wanted “something we hadn’t experienced before”; Abels created a “hybrid” piece that sounded to the director “like a demonic Negro spiritual” (Gray 22). Setting the stage for the conflicts to come, this tune accompanies the film’s title and is heard three more times during scenes of heightened dramatic inten- sity. It first recurs about half an hour into the movie, when Chris, staying overnight at the Armitages’ country house, goes out after bedtime for a cigarette and runs into Missy in the living room. She insists on hypnotizing Chris to rid him of his smoking habit; she stirs a spoon rhythmically in her teacup until Chris’s eyes widen and tears stream down his face. He remembers the rainy night on which his mother died in a car accident as he seems to fall, terrified, into a black gulf that Missy labels “the sunken place.”

2 In order to underline the scene’s emotional intensity, “Sikiliza” plays in the background, accelerating until Chris wakes up in bed.

Although “Sikiliza” does not appear again until the end of the film, it ultimately signals Chris’s triumph over racist conditions. The tune accompanies his attempt to flee from the family in the film’s cli- max, when he realizes they mean to use his young, fit body as a receptacle to house an older white man’s brain. After escaping from a basement room in which Dean and Rose’s brother, Jeremy, meant to operate on him, Chris runs through the kitchen and dining room, where he spots Missy. She lunges for her teacup, intending perhaps to hypnotize him again, but he knocks it onto the floor, where it shat- ters. “Sikiliza” rises in volume in the background as Missy stabs Chris in the hand with a letter opener; he grapples with her, attempting to strangle her. This interaction provides a key example of the film’s ambivalent representations of social traits historically associated with lynching scenes. Though Chris has successfully subdued the threat of

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irrational white violence that the entire Armitage family represents, he has done so at a great personal cost: as an educated person, he knows that he risks confirming the stereotypical view of black bes- tiality that generations of racists used to justify vigilante attacks on blacks. Brundage cites, for instance, a widespread belief among white Southerners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that “blacks, particularly those members of the new generation unschooled in appropriate behavior by slavery, were retrogressing into savagery”; as a result, “the myth of black criminality was (and indeed remains) resistant to change” (53). In the present day, Chris has avoided being murdered but only by resorting to a type of physical violence that might recall that myth. “Sikiliza” also provides the background to his flight from the house at the end of the movie. After Chris has run away from the house and down the long driveway, Rod shows up in his TSA cruiser to save the day. As he and Chris drive away, the car’s lights flashing, the song accompanies their only in-person conversa- tion and plays over the final credits. In each of these moments—the opening credits, the hypnotism scene, the struggle for Chris’s life, and his ultimate escape—“Sikiliza” reminds viewers of the cultural strength that underlies Chris’s actions but also indicates that he must rely on himself in the end.

Although Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” is only heard once dur- ing the film, it serves a similar cautionary function. After the first iteration of “Sikiliza” behind the film’s opening credits, “Redbone” accompanies a series of photographs seemingly taken by Chris. These three photographs appear before the film’s primary action begins, yet their subjects anticipate the kinds of tension that define the narrative. In the first photograph, a black man in a black jacket and pants walks down a city street, carrying an enormous bunch of white balloons whose misshapen shadow shows up clearly against the building next to him; the second features a close-up of a dark-skinned woman’s pregnant belly, as, in the background, a man in a white T-shirt walks away from her toward a group of apartment buildings; and the third focuses on a man in a baggy jacket and jeans struggling to hold onto a white dog’s chain in a litter-strewn yard as the dog strains to break free, its tail pointed straight out and its muscles clearly outlined against its skin. These pictures remind us of Chris’s professional sta- tus, his insight into the social world, and the struggles between opposing forces that inspire his creativity. In terms of their visual

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structure, the photographs’ compositions rely upon contrasting shapes, sizes, light sources, and shadows. These disjunctions under- score the friction that defines the photographs, each of which captures the moment before some urgent action will take place: birth, flight, or escape. These themes are conveyed subtly through the three-photo- graph sequence, but they establish the actions that Chris will have to take later on in order to survive. The lyrics to “Redbone” that under- score these photographs signal Chris’s urgent need to “get” and remain “woke.” His creative work suggests that he already possesses a keen perception of society’s profound imbalances, but now he has to put his intuition to practical use.

This three-song sequence—“Run Rabbit Run,” “Sikiliza,” and “Redbone”—offers the film’s first example of the oppositional and even contradictory rhetorics that structure its message. People of color are under attack by white forces that intend not just to incapac- itate but to repurpose their bodies and minds. Peele argues that Chris has the resources with which to counter these attacks but, in keeping with both a long tradition in horror film and the current political cli- mate, the film’s ultimate message remains ambivalent. Will these resources be enough, in the end, to prevail against persistent white treachery? The film ends with a second three-song sequence that does not provide any clear answer. First, we see Rose in her room, sitting on her bed with her laptop, listening to the Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes song “I Had the Time of My Life” on a Walkman. This song, which Rose enjoys while dressed in a white button-down shirt, drink- ing white milk and searching for “NCAA prospects” on Bing, soared in popularity after appearing in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing. The lyrics begin, “Now, I’ve had the time of my life” but progress, in the sixth stanza, to “Don’t be afraid to lose control” (“Bill Medley”). Instead of contemplating the romantic relationship that these words imply, Rose surveys the pool of potential victims for her family to incapacitate. Next, “Run Rabbit Run” plays again from Jeremy’s car as Chris climbs in to escape from the Armitages; this reiteration con- firms that Jeremy was the masked hunter who captured the solitary man in the first scene. Finally, “Sikiliza” provides the film’s final auditory reminder of cultural identities and clashes. Although Rose’s family has been vanquished by this point, there is no telling, these songs imply, what other white families may already possess the knowledge to sustain their genocidal traditions.

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Visual Rhetoric: Beasts Among Us

In addition to the film’s use of music, Peele organizes several key sce- nes around images of animals. This imagery both evokes popular racist discourse and allows Chris to challenge directly some of the social conventions associated with public lynchings. While Chris and Rose are driving on the highway to her parents’ house, for instance, Rose’s car is struck by a deer. The camera is positioned to one side of the scene so that the deer appears to fly or to be thrown across the road before striking the car, rather than running into it. The deer knocks off the passenger-side mirror next to Chris before falling into the woods at the side of the road; it can be heard groaning in pain from off-screen. After they arrive at their destination, they describe the incident to Rose’s parents, and Dean asserts, “I say, one down, a couple hundred thousand to go . . . They’re like rats. They’re destroy- ing the ecosystem. I see a dead deer on the side of the road, I think to myself, ‘That’s a start’” (Get Out). Though this deer is not targeted by hunters, its abrupt death and unlamented life recall vigilante approaches to violence. Dean’s comments demonstrate a lack of humane feelings toward animals in general as well as his belief that he has the right to want to wipe out entire populations like so much vermin.

The one full day that Chris spends at the Armitage home includes a garden party that the family hosts every fall. The gather- ing at first appears fairly innocuous—involving the arrival of several primarily white, wealthy, elderly people in a caravan of black cars— but the conversations that take place quickly reveal the participants’ true attitudes and motivations. At one point, Chris and Rose join a white couple in conversation; the husband says, “Fairer skin has been in fashion for what? A couple hundred years? But now the pendulum has swung back. Black is in fashion” (Get Out). After pro- cessing this casual dismissal of cultural experience and identity in silence, Chris leaves the group to take some photographs and encounters Logan King, the party’s only other black attendee. When Chris is asked how he feels about being African American, he turns to Logan and says, “Yo, my man. They were asking me about the African American experience. Maybe you could take this one.” Logan, who moves slowly and awkwardly, and is accompanied by a

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white woman at least thirty years his senior, observes, “I find that the African American experience for me has been, for the most part, very good. Although I find it difficult to go much into detail as I haven’t had much of a desire to leave the house in a while.” Sur- prised at his reticence, Chris snaps a picture with his cell phone; Logan’s mouth trembles, tears fill his eyes, and blood begins to drip from his left nostril. Chris tries to apologize, but Logan moves toward him, grabs his shirt, and starts shaking him, yelling, “Get out! Get outta here! Get outta here!” (Get Out).3 Missy and Dean move quickly to quiet Logan and troubleshoot the scene, attributing Logan’s outburst to anxiety and a potential seizure. However, Chris will not accept this explanation; he recognizes Logan from some- place he cannot yet identify and is disturbed by the family’s ready willingness to handle him as they would an unruly animal. He and Logan remain on display throughout this scene, observed by a large group of white attendees who make no move to participate in the conversation but seem fascinated by their behavior.

Chris’s apprehension about both his own social status and Logan’s identity is reinforced by a conversation he has with the family’s black housekeeper. When he finds that she has unplugged his phone so that it has lost its charge, she apologizes: “How rude of me to have touched your belongings without asking.” “It’s cool,” Chris responds, “I wasn’t trying to snitch.” The housekeeper is puzzled: “Snitch?” she asks. “Rat you out,” he explains. She moves her head to one side, thinking, then says, “Tattletale. Oh, don’t you worry about that. I can assure you, I don’t answer to anyone.” As he did with Logan, Chris tries to form a bond with her, noting sympathetically that “All I know is sometimes, if there’s too many white people, I get nervous, you know?” To his surprise, her smile slowly fades, her lips begin to tremble, and tears spill from her eyes as she forces a laugh and shakes her head from side to side, saying, “Oh. Oh. No. No. No, no, no, no. Aren’t you something? That’s not my experience. Not at all. The Armitages are so good to us. They treat us like family” (Get Out). The animal metaphor that Chris employs here recalls Dean’s earlier comments about the deer, a population whose worth he feels entitled to judge. Like Logan, the housekeeper seems trapped in her situation at the Armitages’, able to voice only a contentment that her physio- logical reactions belie. The conversation that she has with Chris reveals her “rat”-like sense of entrapment.

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The film’s climax centers on two more visions of animals as, alter- nately, vermin and saviors. After he has unsuccessfully fought all four Armitages in a bid to escape from their house, Chris wakes to find his arms and legs strapped to a leather club chair in the middle of a well-lit, carefully decorated room. His chair is surrounded by lamps on pedestals, wood-paneled walls, a dartboard, and a foosball table. Unable to move from the chair, Chris faces a wall on which a stag’s head with a full set of antlers is mounted; a console TV sits just below it. When it switches on, the screen shows an older man, Roman Armitage. Approaching the camera, he says,

You have been chosen because of the physical advantages you’ve enjoyed your entire lifetime. With your natural gifts and our determination, we could both be part of something greater. Some- thing perfect. The Coagula procedure is a man-made miracle. Our order has been developing it for many, many years, and it wasn’t until recently it was perfected by my own flesh and blood. My family and I are honored to offer it as a service to members of our group. Don’t waste your strength, don’t try to fight it. You can’t stop the inevitable. And who knows? Maybe one day you’ll enjoy being members of the family.

(Get Out)

In the film, the description of the Coagula method is voiced over an image of a large moth or butterfly emerging from a cocoon.4 This moment of transformation is certainly a positive metaphor for change and growth; however, the video communicates to Chris that he no longer has control over his own body, that he will succumb to a pro- found physical metamorphosis whether he wants to or not.

Assessing his situation quickly, Chris manages to escape his bonds and turn the threat back on the Armitages: He stuffs his ears with cotton pulled from the arms of the club chair to block out Missy’s recurring hypnotic suggestions and impales Jeremy, who has come into the room dressed in scrubs to start Chris’s operation, on the antlers of the stag’s head. The objects collected in this room, the only tools with which Chris can save himself, resonate with many of the ritualistic aspects of postbellum lynchings. The chair’s cotton stuffing makes reference to the slavery and sharecropping that not only sup- ported plantation life but also enabled repeated attacks of random violence against blacks. The lamps, decorations, games, and stag’s

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head that surround Chris in this hidden room recall the souvenirs that were often harvested from lynching victims’ bodies—“body parts as trophies [that] symbolized the triumph over a common enemy” for white supremacists bent on publicly “dehumanizing African Ameri- cans” (Berg 94). As Harvey Young has argued, such a “souvenir saves the past and represents it in the present,” transforming “that which was into a material object that can be referenced and revisited over time” (642, author emphasis). Lynching souvenirs, or “keepsakes,” are always “incomplete” and so must “find a sense of wholeness in the embrace of an accompanying narrative” (Young 642). Here, the fur- nishings and decorations that surround Chris gain meaning through their imbrication in his ongoing narrative. In this case, however, he is able to use the tools of white supremacy against his captors; he redefines the stag’s head—for Dean, a symbol of cultural genocide— as a tool for resistance. He cannot transform the language that the Armitages and their fellow conspirators use to delimit his existence, but he can defy the physical trappings of their violent heritage.

Linguistic Rhetoric: Code Talking

The third type of rhetoric that Get Out employs in portraying the tension between white exploitation and black defiance is linguistic, illustrated best in the conversations that Chris holds with Rod over the phone throughout the film. Rod is the only person who correctly identifies the threat facing Chris from the beginning. Because he expresses his beliefs in the dangers that wait for Chris at the Armitage home so hyperbolically, however, it is not until the end of the film that his warnings are proven to be true. While listening to Chris’s story about Missy hypnotizing him, Rod reproaches him for not acting more circumspectly: “Bruh, how are you not scared of this, man? . . . I don’t know if you know this, white people love making people sex slaves and shit.” Chris dismisses this idea, but admits that “it’s the black people out here too. It’s like all of them missed the movement.” Rod counters, “Yeah, cause they’re probably hypnotized . . . Look, bruh, I’m just connecting the dots. I’m taking what you presented to me, OK?” Chris does not take Rod’s specula- tions seriously; the comedic manner in which he delivers them seems to position their relationship on the level of a casual buddy movie

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like Friday or Ride Along. As a result, many audience members do not give them much credence either. In fact, when Rod stops hearing from Chris and takes his worst fears to the police, the black woman detective he first speaks to and two of her colleagues react with gales of incredulous laughter. Rod has come to the precinct specifically to report Chris missing, claiming that he thinks the Armitages have been “abducting black people, brainwashing ’em, makin’ ’em work for ’em as sex slaves and shit.” In fact, he declares, invoking his own public-service authority,

I do all my research, you know, ’cause as a TSA agent, you know, you guys are detectives? I got the same training, you know? . . . So, look, I go do my detective work, right? And I start putting pieces together. And, see, this is what I came up with. They’re probably abducting black people, brainwashing ‘em, and making ’em slaves. . . . See, I don’t know if it’s the hypnosis that’s making ’em slaves or whatnot, but all I know is, they already got two brothers we know, and there could be a whole bunch of brothers they got already. What’s the next move?

(Get Out)

Peele’s script allows Rod the time to deliver this extended speech because, although it does provide some comic relief to alleviate the narrative tension, his fears ring true. In going to visit the Armitages, Chris has entered a situation in which he possesses no clear ally; as Rod notes, he has already reported several encounters in which people he just met commented freely on his physical appearance and cultural identity, and his once-regular communication has abruptly ceased. Because he understands the true nature of Chris’s predicament from the beginning, Rod’s words represent a “counter-hegemonic black paranoia” that “disrupts the dominant epistemological grounds attributed to white-centric constructions of the normative theatrical film audience” (Jarvis 102). As all the film’s viewers eventually come to realize, suspicion is a healthy reaction to Chris’s increasing isola- tion and sense of unease.

In this case, the cops’ downright mockery of Rod’s concerns ini- tially suggests that he has misconstrued the situation because he has an overblown sense of what white criminality makes possible. The detective cannot contain her laughter after his description of Chris’s experiences, saying to her two colleagues—a black man and a Latino

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man—“And don’t ever, ever say I don’t do nothing for you!” (Get Out). In spite of their own experiences as people of color, it is clear that none of these officers find Rod’s concerns viable. They analyze the seemingly exaggerated nature of his claims, the casual and exple- tive-laden rhetoric that he employs, rather than focusing on the very real dangers that a black man surrounded by a large group of wealthy white senior citizens might face. Their disbelief mirrors the range of reactions that diverse audiences are likely to have to the film; as Peele himself suggests, “I had to recognize that black people will be watch- ing this movie and having a different experience or bringing in dif- ferent baggage than white people would.” He also attributes the film’s moments of paranoia or distrust to specifically racialized experi- ences: “part of being African-American is being told we’re not seeing what we think we’re seeing” (Gross). Although viewers do not see these detectives again and therefore do not learn whether their opin- ion of the situation has changed, the movie’s final twist reveals that Rod’s suspicions are absolutely correct; his paranoia was fully justi- fied. His rapid assessment of the social inequalities that surround Chris; of the transformation of an old acquaintance, Andre Hays- worth, into the awkwardly conditioned Logan King; and of the sinis- ter effects that might result from Missy’s attempts at hypnotism prompt him to act on Chris’s behalf himself. For once, as Peele intended, the two black main characters are “the most perceptive” fig- ures in the movie; in spite of white skepticism, Peele notes, “the lead in this situation can be smart, make informed decisions, and not fall into the same old horror trap of being a dumbass” (qtd. in McDon- agh). At the end of the movie, Rose’s family chases Chris with an IV pole, scalpels, and finally a shotgun so they can turn him into their next Coagula product—until Rod shows up, just in the nick of time, in his TSA cruiser. Any viewer who has seen a crime show before, or witnessed a police officer pulling someone over on the side of the road, will feel a sinking sensation at the sight of this official vehicle, blue-and-red lights flashing, which appears when Chris is running down the driveway, Rose’s mangled body lying on the ground behind him. Rose extends an arm and whispers, “Help. Help me,” as Chris, resigned, puts up his hands. But when the door opens and Rod steps out, our relief echoes Chris’s. In spite of all the odds against it, the one person who can help him has come to stand against the Armi- tages.

5 The film’s final lines are the only conversation that Chris and

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Rod conduct in person, as they drive away from the house. Rod can- not help saying, “I mean, I told you not to go in that house.” Staring blankly ahead, Chris asks, “How’d you find me?” In the perfect affir- mation of his insight, Rod states, “I’m T-S-motherfuckin’-A. We handle shit. It’s what we do. Consider this situation fuckin’ handled” (Get Out). His assessment of Chris’s predicament turned out to be accurate; his excessive rhetoric helped him to diagnose the situation’s true dangers.

In an interview with Jason Zinoman for the New York Times, Peele notes that he wanted to explore “‘the lie’ of a post-racial America” by making a film that “acknowledges neglect and inaction in the face of the real race monster” (1L). Just before the film’s climactic scenes, Chris wakes up a second time in the Armitages’ basement and sees one of the family’s friends on the TV screen, a blind art dealer named Jim Hudson, whose work Chris had admired. Hudson offers an addi- tional explanation of the procedure:

I’m supposed to answer any questions, any outstanding concerns you may have so far. Apparently our common understanding of the process has a positive effect on the success rate of the procedure . . . Phase one is the hypnotism. It’s how they sedate you. Phase two is this. Mental preparation. It’s basically psychological pre-op . . . for phase three. The transplantation. Well, partial, actually. The part of your brain connected to your nervous system needs to stay put, keeping those intricate connections intact. So you won’t be gone, not completely. A sliver of you will still be in there, somewhere, limited consciousness. You’ll be able to see and hear what your body is doing, but your existence will be as a passenger. An audience.

(Get Out)

Chris, seen falling once more through black space into the “Sunken Place,” asks him, “Why us, huh? Why black people?” Hudson responds, “Who knows? People want a change. . . . I could give a shit what color you are. No. What I want is deeper. I want your eyes, man. I want those things you see through” (Get Out). While Chris’s question on the surface seems to address the immediate danger that the situation poses to him, the implications of Hudson’s answer are far more sinister. The white people who want to inhabit African American bodies desire specific elements to which they never should

Cinematic Rhetorics of Lynching 107

have had access. Their absolute indifference to human life and auton- omy resonates with one of the most chilling dimensions of lynching history: spectators’ frequent tendency to harvest parts from the dead. Hudson may pretend indifference to Chris’s racial identity, but his remark underlines the position of privilege that he has always occu- pied. His words also indicate that the conditions that enabled the Coagula process in the first place persist in spite of social-justice movements. As Peele’s script demonstrates, the rhetorical ambiva- lence that recurs throughout Get Out—in its soundtrack, in its animal imagery, and in Rod’s hyperbolic insistence upon Chris’s danger— echoes today’s social climate, in which important conversations are finally taking place, but the perils that motivate them are not yet at an end.

Notes

1. This popular phrase is quoted in Anderson, for example, as a marker of racist attitudes com-

mon in the 1950s United States (13).

2. Peele defines the sunken place as “the system that silences the voices of the oppressed,”

which includes “rules and unspoken understandings that are in place that perpetuate racial

oppression and specifically the taking away of expression and voices” (Joiner 26–27). 3. Judson Jeffries suggests that the film’s title comes from the most iconic line of The Amityville

Horror: “Get out!”, an imperative voiced out of thin air to the priest trying to bless the Lutz family’s new Amityville house (141). However, in an interview with Maitlin McDonagh,

Peele describes the title as “a shout-out to Eddie Murphy’s famous 1983 Delirious riff on

white folks in horror movies, the ones who persist in hanging around after the spectral voices

start intoning, ‘Get out!’” 4. The word “coagula” means “coagulate,” though it is also the secret identity of one of the first

transgender superheroes to appear in comics, Kate Godwin, a onetime member of DC’s

Doom Patrol. She can dissolve solids and solidify liquids at will (Davis); her unusual power

exists in her ability to transmute the very nature of matter itself.

5. Michael Jarvis notes that in Peele’s original ending for the film, the police show up and

arrest Chris; he is still in jail six months later. When Rod comes to visit him, Chris tells

him, “I stopped it,” but is resigned to remaining where he is. Jarvis suggests that the the-

atrical ending features Rod instead of the police because, after Trump’s election, viewers

need “something to pull them up out of the horror of the sunken place and the horror of its

institutional referents, the sick society the film diagnoses” (108).

Works Cited

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Berg, Manfred. Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America. Ivan R. Dee, 2011.

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“Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes ‘(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life’ Lyrics.” AZLyrics, 2000, https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jennifer- warnes/ivehadthetimeofmylife.html. Accessed 8 Jan. 2020.

Bowen, Shannon L. “The Meaning Behind ‘Get Out’s’ Haunting Score.” Hollywood Reporter, 20 Nov. 2017, p. 79, https://www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/meaning-behind-get-outs-haunting- score-1060508. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Vir- ginia, 1880–1930. U of Illinois P, 1993.

Cowan, William Tynes. “Dredging the Swamps: Joel Chandler Harris and the Packaging of African American Folklore.” The Slave in the Swamp: Disrupting the Plantation Narrative, Routledge, 2005, pp. 161–89.

Davis, Erik. “The Gods of the Funny Books: An Interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel Pollack.” Techgnosis, 29 May 2012, http:// web.archive.org/web/20120529061952/http://www.techgnosis.com/ gaiman.html. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. Vintage Books, 1995. Gray, Tim. “Peele’s Crew Creates Creepy Credibility.” Variety, vol.

338, no. 10, 11 Dec. 2017, p. 22. Gross, Terry. “‘Get Out’ Sprang from an Effort to Master Fear, Says

Director Jordan Peele.” National Public Radio, 5 Jan. 2018, https:// www.npr.org/2018/01/05/575843147/get-out-sprang-from-an- effort-to-master-fear-says-director-jordan-peele. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.

Henderson, Stephen. “Introduction: The Forms of Things Unknown.” Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, edited by Stephen Henderson, William Mor- row, 1973, pp. 3–69.

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Jeffries, Judson L. “Jordan Peele (Dir.), Get Out.” Journal of African American Studies, vol. 22, 2018, pp. 139–49.

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Keisner, Jody. “Do You Want to Watch? A Study of the Visual Rhetoric of the Postmodern Horror Film.” Women’s Studies, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 411–27.

McDonagh, Maitlin. “Black Out: Jordan Peele Makes His Directorial Debut with Horror-Social Satire.” Film Journal International, vol. 120, no. 3, 2017, pp. 28+.

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Renegar, Valerie R., and Jennifer A. Malkowski. “Rhetorical and Textual Approaches to Communication.” 21st Century Communica- tion: A Reference Handbook, edited by William F. Eadie, Sage, 2009, pp. 49–56.

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Jennifer Ryan-Bryant is Professor of English at SUNY–Buffalo State, where she teaches courses in African American literature, American poetry, the American novel, and women’s and gender studies. Recently, she has published articles in Radical Teacher, African American Review, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, and Modern Language Studies. Her second book, Bio-Poetics: The Shared Artistry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, is forthcoming from Lexington Books.

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