The Verge: Jordan Peele’s Oscar-nominated film Get Out now has its own webinar. It’s called “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival, and Black Horror Aesthetic,” based on the UCLA course on black horror put together by Professor and author Tananarive Due and her husband, science fiction writer and lecturer Steven Barnes last year.
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/58476209/GetOutChris.0.jpg)
2 comments:
The first paragraph of the piece identifies Toni Morrison's Beloved as a horror novel. This is incredibly interesting to me because upon watching Get Out and reading Beloved I never felt like either were horror. They seemed like slightly over exaggerated examples of what I experience in my everyday life. Beloved identifies the drive black people have to aid their families and the ghost of slavery that black Americans find themselves carrying daily. Both of these things are integral to my life especially as I expand my knowledge of the pain and trauma that my family experienced and currently experiences because of slavery. I frequently think of the 60 million and more that died on the Middle Passage. Whenever I am not being grateful or I am not doing my best work, I am reminded of the Maya Angelou quote "I am the dreams and the hopes of the slave".
Regarding Get Out, the entire movie felt like how it feels like to go home to my white family. The idea of the sunken place is something I experienced as a small child as I was taught colorist and antiblack sentiments daily. Obviously Get Out is more overtly horror but black people do indeed still get our organs harvested. We are still kidnapped and trafficked into slavery. The prison industrial complex is just a modified and legal version of slavery we had years ago.
Ultimately I think Get Out aims to be horror while Beloved aims to be a look into the PTSD all black people experience. Let us not forget though that in the words of the director Jordan Peele " Get Out is a documentary".
Get Out is one of my favorite movies of all time. Not only do I think that it is an extremely well thought out plot, but the cinematography is great. This was a thriller that evoked more than just fear within me, it made me question the current state of society. The idea of webinars is brilliant. The internet is an amazing place and the fact that anyone who is curious can have access to a course that analyzes current systemic racism in American Society through the lens of film is very interesting. The microaggressions in Get Out are more overt acts of discrimination, but it’s all an analogy for the systemic racism black people continue to experience in the United States of America. Peele’s film is highlighting a problem that is apparent in more than just Get Out, however, the current interest in the topic is awesome. I hope the course encourages people to consider the power of individualism and the ways they can act against America’s current systemic racism.
Post a Comment