Peabody Awards, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Geoff Carter
In The New Wave 2.0 series, The Pen in Hand Blog will be examining the work of today’s most provocative and influential filmmakers, artists whose filmic stylings and compelling narratives have stretched the boundaries of modern cinema. Referencing Francois Truffaut’s definition of an auteur, these pieces will be looking at writer/directors whose singular visions have transcended the art of filmmaking and expanded the boundaries of cinematic storytelling. This week, The Pen in Blog will be examining the strangely interracially connected cinematic universes of Jordan Peele.
Black and White: The Films of Jordan Peele
Although he has does not yet have the extensive oeuvre of directors like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, or Spike Lee, Jordan Peele’s works reflect a daring and wry sensibility that incorporates race, and pop culture touchstones into the horror genre with an intelligent self-awareness that is nothing if not tongue in cheek.
The intricate constructions, wry references, double entendres, social commentary, and cinematic Easter eggs dropped as carefully as a trail of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs herald the advent of a new style of filmmaking that incorporates profound racial commentary within the traditional conventions of the horror genre. And while this incorporation is not always seamless, it is accomplished with an extraordinary—although not always appropriate—sense of humor. For purposes of this essay, we will be focusing on only two of Peele’s films, Get Out and Us. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, Nope, Peele’s next directorial effort, has yet to hit the big screen.
Get Out begins with the kidnapping of a young Black man Andre (Lakeith Stanfield) on a Brooklyn street. It picks up six months later when Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), a young African American photographer, travels to upstate New York to meet his girlfriend Rose’s (Allison Williams) family, the Armitages. Her family, although showing all the appropriate white guilt and condescension one would expect from liberals—as when the dad (Bradley Whitford) says “I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could have,” Chris soon discovers something darker and much more mysterious going on. While sitting with Missy (Catherine Keenere), Rose’s psychiatrist mom, who talks him into letting her hypnotize him to help him stop smoking, Chris finds himself transported into a deep dark hole, “the Sunken Place” from which he cannot emerge. It’s not until later that he realizes Missy planted a trigger to help control him.
A young black man, who seems familiar to Chris, appears at an odd get-together at the Armitage estate. Chris takes his picture and sends it to his friend Rod who recognizes Andre, the young man who’d been kidnapped months before. Frightened, Chris begins to pack but soon discovers a box of photos with Rose with a series of young Black men that Chris recognizes as current employees of the Armitages.
He tries to escape but is confronted by the Rose and her family and—with the help of Missy’s trigger—is subdued and imprisoned in the basement where he is informed that he is going to be the next subject of the Armitage tradition of transplanting white people’s brains into Black bodies. Chris cleverly manages to escape his mind and body intact.
While the plot may seem to be a typical—though somewhat outrageous—horror film plot, in Peele’s hands, it becomes a multi-layered commentary on systemic racism and white elitism. Subtle symbolism underlines these points. On the way to the Armitages, Chris strikes a deer—a buck—and kills it. Of course, the term “buck” was a racial disparagement of young Black men, especially in the antebellum South. Later in the film, Chris kills Dean with the head of a mounted buck, signifying the victimized Black man getting his due.
Chris is able to escape by stuffing his ears with cotton that he pulls from the chair he is tied to—a visual analogy for picking cotton. References to slavery abound. The Armitages seek to own Black bodies while dominating—or eliminating—Black minds. On a smaller scale, this control is reflected by Missy’s hypnotic control of Chris and Rose’s seduction of him.
Incorporating these levels of thematic intricacy plausibly into a well-written and tightly directed thriller is no small feat. Combine these factors with the genuinely funny aspects of the film and you end up with a movie that is eminently entertaining, beautifully constructed, and deeply disturbing.
Peele’s next feature, Us, is another excursion into the realm of horror. This time, a young girl, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), wanders away to a funhouse while at a carnival, where she encounters her doppelganger. Years later, while at a vacation home, Adelaide and her family are confronted by intruder, dressed in red jumpsuits, leather half-gloves, and scissors. They are the family’s doppelgangers, beings that look like them, but who do not—for the most part—possess speech or many of the other high functions. Adelaide’s double Red explains they are “the Tethered” from below the Earth, a shadow people who share only a paltry piece of the existence of their upper-world counterparts.
Red and her family want to take over Adelaide’s place in the upper world but are stopped by the Wilsons. After they escape, the Wilsons realize that the Tethered are murdering all their doubles on the Earth in an attempt to take over the lives of their originals. Like Get Out, Us is a gripping suspense film with a wonderful twist at the end that is fantastically entertaining. It is also similar to Get Out in that the resonant thematics of race as symbolized by The Tethered and the implications of one society trying to clumsily imitate another is both deliciously ironic and hilarious. When Gabe (Winston Duke) envies his white friend Josh’s (Tim Heidecker) new boat and then goes out to get a dingy used one—a pale double, it seems to be a somewhat sad attempt to keep up with the Joneses. When his tethered double Abraham tries and fails to take over the boat, dying in the attempt, it is a just another layer of tethering. One layer of the tethered is the doppelgangers. The other is the tethering of Black culture to white.
Doubling is more than a motif in this film; it is everywhere. The Biblical text 11:11 is shown time and again. A clock shows that specific time. A real spider crawls out from underneath a ceramic one. A frisbee lands perfectly on the circle on a beach towel. Doubling, imitation, and tethering, the leashing of one culture to another, is underlined over and over again.
Peele is an extraordinarily courageous and gifted writer as well as a profoundly gifted director. His talent at melding themes, genre, and suspense into coherently thoughtful and extraordinarily disturbing works have already garnered him the status of an auteur. His next work, Nope, can only leave us hoping for more.