Movie Review: Get Out

I need to talk to my cable TV provider and complain about the terrible service I received. My wife and I sat down on movie night to rent a film that got a 99% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes, a film that critics called, “clever,” “anti-racist,” “brilliantly effective,” and “entertaining.” What we watched was banal, unfunny, angry, and unsubtle. What we ordered wasn’t what we got.

We ordered Get Out.

What the movie lacked in entertainment value it made up for in revelation: it turns out that black progressives hate progressive white people at least as much as they hate normal American white people. That’s the general takeaway, but there are other lessons this film teaches. I’m going to give away plot points, so if you haven’t seen Get Out and want to, click here and find something else to read for a while.

The story borrows elements from The Island and The Clonus Horror: rich old people stealing other people’s bodies/organs so they can live forever, or at least longer than they might otherwise. In Get Out, instead of just rich people stealing organs, it’s rich old white people stealing entire black bodies. The whole enchilada, so to speak.

You see, Rose, a white girl, invites her black boyfriend Chris to meet her parents for the first time in upstate New York. She’s never told them that Chris is black. Chris is worried about this because white people apparently hate black people. Rose attempts to allay his concerns, assuring him that her parents loved Obama, so they’ll love him, too. This is one of the movie’s biggest in-jokes: despite all the work Americans have done or at least tried to do to bridge the racial gap, white people are still racist, and voting for Obama didn’t change that even a little bit. Voting for Obama was like claiming to have a black friend: it doesn’t fly. Nothing you can ever do will alleviate the hurt you’ve caused, no matter how woke you pretend to be.

Anyway, Rose drives Chris to her parents’ house for the weekend. On the way there, a racist white cop wants to see Chris’s ID after a minor accident hitting a deer, because white cops really hate black people. At the parents’ house, the “I’d’ve voted Obama a third term” line is aired, with knowing smirks. Chris sees and experiences some strange things. Black servants act suspiciously. A silent auction of Chris’s precious black body is conducted. Chris is kidnapped and, as his new owner is prepped for surgery not unlike Dr. Hfuhruhurr’s cranial screw-top method, he escapes and kills his captors, including Rose, who has been luring black men to their doom for some time. His comic relief black friend drives him away and the credits roll.

If white people are so racist, why are they stealing black bodies to live in? Wouldn’t they want to live in white bodies? Apparently not; one of the film’s themes is slavery, or the idea of white people desiring to possess black people. This is not an unusual point of view: it turns out that professional basketball is slavery. The National Football League is also slavery. So there’s precedent for this mode of thinking. Or perhaps there’s an element of white jealousy: they hate me ’cause they ain’t me.

So now we know that white America is deeply racist, black people are constantly being victimized, and there’s no solution to any of it. That the movie was so universally loved says far more about the critics than it does about the film, which is curious: isn’t giving this plodding, overlong, unfunny movie so many plaudits the reviewer’s version of voting for Obama for a third term? Is there a single American alive today who isn’t being bombarded with racial commentary in every form of media available? Why is it suddenly so brave to discuss racial politics in horror movies when everything else in entertainment media has become politicized?

Isn’t there at least a little bit of virtue-signaling in so many universally positive reviews?

Perhaps not. Perhaps I didn’t get it. Maybe I’m not bright enough to divine the subtle nuances. Not sensitive enough to appreciate the finely-turned racial commentary.

Or it might just be that this film is shit.