“White Girls, They Get You Every Time”: Get Out 's Horror of Miscegenation and Its Conception of the Black Bro'mance
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19346018.75.2.02
ISSN1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Homelessness and Social Issues
Resumomidway through get out (jordan peele, 2017), the only reliably Black woman character, Detective Latoya (Erika Alexander), announces the conviction that I have appropriated for the first part of this article's title. In full possession of her Blackness—because unlike Georgina (Betty Gabriel), the other Black woman figure in the film, she has not been body-snatched and psychically invaded by a member of the predatory white Coagula Order—Detective Latoya assesses the situation after listening briefly to Rod's (Lil Rel Howrey) fearful theory that his best friend's white girlfriend is responsible for his sudden and unexplained disappearance.1 Although the remark is offered with wry amusement at Rod's agitation (and is heard by the audience after the movie has already dramatized the Coagula's violation of two Black men who have been entangled in sexual relationships with white women), Detective Latoya articulates the central horror of Peele's directorial debut: that the romantic and erotic space of the contemporary heterosexual interracial romance is a site of Black male wounding and destruction and is therefore one more weapon in the ever-expanding arsenal of those committed to the (re)entrenchment of white dominance and Black dispossession in the post–civil rights era.Get Out's deployment of the detective serves at least two functions. First, as another Black person, she corroborates Rod's movie-long skepticism about his friend's involvement with a white woman, thereby configuring a broader Black communal guardedness toward such relationships.Second, given Detective Latoya's role as a representative of the law, her mockery of Rod's anxieties about Black psychological entrapment and sexual enslavement, as well as her refusal to utilize the police department's resources in order to assist Rod in Chris's (Daniel Kaluuya) rescue, signals the film's proposition that Black liberation will be effected in spite of the state, not because of it.2 Get Out argues that this is especially the case if the Black people accorded some measure of authority disregard historically informed, generationally transmitted communal knowing in favor of the United States’ official narrative of already-achieved Black emancipation and racial parity. Within moments, Detective Latoya disavows her own utterance about white women's threat, because Rod's elaborated fears fundamentally challenge her own status as a representative of white law and the presumed racial progress to which her professional role attests. Her destabilization is so profound that she seeks the reassurance of two fellow officers of color who, joining her as a unit, uproariously dismiss Rod's allegations of white deception, interracial abduction, and coerced sexual relations as symptoms of lunacy and racial paranoia. For the police, it is more comforting to deride the messenger than to investigate seriously an account that undermines assertions of racial reconciliation and redemption. Consequently, they ridicule the story that gives voice to ongoing Black precarity and subordination.Yet Get Out's reframing of Chris Washington's and Rose Armitage's (Allison Williams) relationship as a tale of horror, after initially situating it as a love story, advances the film's rejection of the false promise that the “romance” of the interracial couple (and their anticipated mixed-raced progeny) can resolve the terrors of intergenerational, systemic white domination.Peele's movie executes this repudiation not by reinscribing notions of immutable racial characteristics that are dangerous when combined or by suggesting that interracial sexual relations are inherently degrading and therefore objectionable. Instead, Get Out asserts that only a deeply held political infantilism would suppose that interpersonal romantic relationships could repair centuries-long institutionalizations of white power and corresponding Black privation.The premise of the interracial romance, then, signals Get Out's awareness of a mainstream, dominant cultural desire for positive affective connections between racialized individuals—specifically, Black and white people—to remedy the complex structural legacies of enslavement, Jim Crow segregation, and continuing marginalization. The film's transformation of the couple's relationship into a horror story that reconfigures Rose's professed and demonstrated acts of “love” as tools of a racially exploitative “Order” underscores its argument that the interracial romance cannot be disentangled from a prolonged history of white supremacy and, consequently, should not be envisioned as a viable sociopolitical avenue of Black liberation. Rather, in its consistent portrayal of Black male reciprocal care, protection, and collaborative contestation in the face of organized white assault, Get Out dramatizes a model of Black homosocial solidarity—what this article calls the intraracial bro'mance—as a potentially effective strategy of preservation and survival.Get Out's construction of Chris's and Rose's relationship draws on an extensive contextual history of the prevalent attitudes toward romantic and sexual relations between Black and white people as it engages, interrogates, and revises multiple legal, literary, and cinematic articulations surrounding such relationships. While doing so, it evokes the societal permutations that have engendered the discursive shift away from “miscegenation” to “interracial romance,” even as it emphasizes that the protracted interdiction against the former constitutes an inextricable part of the relative permissibility of the latter in the modern era. Peele's film registers a deep awareness of, for instance, the history of anti-miscegenation laws that began during America's colonial period and that evolved with the formation of the United States and its era of enslavement. Significant for the production's legal contextualization, too, is the enactment of anti-miscegenation statutes as a critical mechanism in the dismantling of the post–Civil War Reconstruction and, coevally, in the deployment of lynching as a terrorizing weapon of social control against African Americans. In 1892, the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells denounced the “inhuman and fiendish lynchings” that were “meant as a warning” to African Americans who might challenge the racial and economic status quo (53). The late 1890s to the late 1920s—the “Progressive Era,” a curious designation in matters of race—gave rise to a series of anti-miscegenation laws throughout the South that, ultimately, the US Supreme Court invalidated with its 1967 unanimous decision in Loving v. Virginia. This ruling, as this article later argues, particularly informs Get Out's treatment of the interracial romance.The centuries-long literary representation of miscegenation is beyond the scope of this discussion. It is important to note, however, that this representation, too, energizes Get Out's framing of the issue. As early as the seventeenth century, William Shakespeare's Othello dramatized the putative tragic consequences of interracial desire, marking one of the earliest known instances of this theme in Anglophone literature. In the last century, the American criminalization of Black masculinity that informed depictions of miscegenation was indelibly inscribed, for example, in three novels by Thomas Dixon, his “Reconstruction Trilogy.” That literary denigration, in turn, has been signified upon by many African American writers, including Sutton Griggs, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.Most readily, Hollywood's cinematic tradition is the expressive space in which one would contextualize Get Out's attention to miscegenation. Beginning with its conventionally designated foundational film, The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915), which was based on Dixon's novels, American cinema inaugurated its horror of miscegenation when the “Pet Sister,” Flora, chose suicide rather than submission to sexual violation by the “Negro Buck” Gus. The Birth of a Nation's proscription against miscegenation between Black men and white women by defining it as rape evolved into an industry-wide representational taboo when, from 1930 to 1968, the Motion Picture Production Code explicitly banned the depiction of “Miscegenation (sex relations between the white and [B]lack races)” (“Motion Picture”). As part of their efforts to preempt legislative interference in their professional prerogatives, Hollywood executives determined that they could prescribe “correct standards of life” and not endorse the “lower[ing] [of] moral standards” or “offend good taste” if miscegenation remained outside their camera lenses (“Motion Picture”).3 The industry's prohibition ended as a result of the progressive cultural shifts of the 1960s generated by the activism of that era's social justice movements, an expanding socio-imaginary that enabled the development and release of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967), the movie that before Get Out might have been considered the ur-text of the cinematic interracial romance.4Peele has acknowledged the influence of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner on his own exploration of the potential fallout of a young white woman introducing her Black boyfriend to her parents.5 Beyond this shared premise, Get Out displays its homage to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in the naming of Chris's dog, Sid, which evokes Sidney Poitier, the Black star of the earlier movie, and by marking a basic phenotypical resemblance between the Black male protagonists in its casting of Daniel Kaluuya, whose dark brown complexion approximates Poitier's. These connections notwithstanding, Get Out, from its beginning, situates its rumination of contemporary interracial coupling more within the tradition of the horrific musings of The Birth of a Nation—from an anti-racist perspective—and Richard Wright's Native Son rather than within the generic contours of the mainstream romantic comedy or dramedy to which Guess Who's Coming to Dinner belongs. By prefacing his construction of the romance with the terrorization and abduction of a young Black man as he wanders through the “creepy confusing-ass suburbs,” Peele, who grew up during the era of sustained white backlash against the aspirations of progressive Black political movements of the 1950s–70s, lays the groundwork for a nightmarish, post–civil rights revision of the integrationist spectacle of white redemption and apolitical racial harmony that constitutes the central focus of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Hewing closely to the insights of a Black literary progenitor, Richard Wright, Get Out's departure from its cinematic predecessor proposes that in matters of American historical and ongoing racial dynamics, the tropes and themes of the horror genre—including psychological dread, masked monsters, unexpected violence, and inhospitable physical environments—carry particular resonance.6Consequently, Andre's (LaKeith Stanfield) kidnapping in the opening sequence establishes Get Out's primary generic home as it figuratively uncovers historical traumas, including enslavement and lynching, to which African Americans have been subjected. With this introductory framing, its menace amplified by tracking shots and archaic music, Peele's film self-consciously displays and expands what Ed Guerrero has identified as “slavery's sedimentations” in Hollywood productions (43), as Andre's violent abduction readily calls to mind the captivity of Africans and their fugitive descendants even as it manifests a particularly rich invocation of the post-Reconstruction era's targeting of Black people as the vulnerable prey of white predators, often during their “night rides.”7 Many of those African Americans were fatally lynched, while any who survived white torture bore both the psychic and corporeal scars of traumatization, not unlike Andre's debilitation at the auction party. His somnambulist affect and bleeding nose testify to his violent transformation into “Logan,” first by Jeremy's “wrangling” and second by the Coagula transplantation procedure that appropriates his body and evacuates his soul—his psychological and emotional plenitude. Revealed as Andre's kidnapper later in the film, Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), wearing his medieval-inspired dress and effectively masked under his helmet in the preface, evokes Ku Klux Klan members’ self-identification as “knights,” who were dedicated to the restoration of the antebellum white supremacy that they believed had been destroyed both by the Union's victory over the Confederacy and by the limited but important gains Black people had secured during the dozen-year-long Reconstruction.One of the more egregious rhetorical weapons that the Klan and its hoodless accomplices wielded to justify their rampages, incite broader white enmity, and abet Reconstruction's demise was the “Negro brute rapist” and his purported role in advancing a degenerate “mongrel” society. While Peele's movie does not explicitly exhibit this demonization of Black men in the opening, its construction of a symbolic matrix that recalls what historian Rayford Logan characterized as the “nadir” of American race relations when such denigration was pervasive (52) strongly indicates that the ensuing narrative of the interracial romance must be understood within that historical context.Get Out bridges its narrative shift from the harrowing opening scenes of the assault on Andre—scenes that encode America's nihilistic threat to Black masculinity in both its past and present—to the matutinal brightness of Chris's urbane apartment with a moment of bloodletting. This image suggests that while Black men can inhabit (private) sanctuaries in which they may evade crude brutalization in contemporary society, they cannot entirely escape wounding. That Chris's injury here is self-inflicted, as he cuts himself while shaving in anticipation of Rose's arrival, accompanied by Childish Gambino's musical entreaty to “stay woke,” indicates the film's trepidation that Black male guilelessness and an uncritical attitude toward interracial romantic involvement could lead to Black violation and self-destruction. Thus, even before Get Out brings the interracial couple together physically—but as the camera intercuts between a wounded, preoccupied Chris and a smilingly relaxed Rose—Childish Gambino's soulful voice instantiates the first intraracial fraternal admonishment against their romance that the film later reinforces with Rod's repeated warnings and Andre's desperate titular plea to Chris at the auction party to “get out!”The symbolic presence of another “brother” at this early point in the movie, however, indicates that Chris must negotiate at least two competing discourses surrounding contemporary race relations and, consequently, the ways in which they inform perceptions of the interracial romance: one that insists that unceasing Black vigilance may offer some measure of protection against ongoing white racist “shit [that] don't feel right” and another that argues for a politics of relaxed post-raciality in the wake of the election of America's first Black president, Barack Obama. Get Out inscribes Obama's presence in the first scene that brings the interracial couple together, beginning with a close-up shot that reveals Chris's residence in apartment 208, a number, minus a zero, that evokes the year of Obama's first presidential election. Moments later, when Chris expresses doubts about meeting Rose's parents without their knowing his racial identity, she reassures him that they will be indifferent to his Blackness—despite his (and viewers’) skepticism—since her father would have “voted for Obama a third time” because the “love is so real.” Not long after meeting Chris, Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford) confirms his daughter's predictions of his rhetorical liberalism when he asserts that, “hands down,” Obama had been “the best president in [his] lifetime.” With its figuration of Obama, the film underscores its scrutiny of, again, political infantilism—that is, the collective wishful thinking that individuals have the power to neutralize and repair the generational effects of institutional practices of anti-Black exclusion and oppression. In this instance, Get Out registers the emphatic longing for both the figure and the singular presidency of Obama, especially by primarily white commentators in mainstream media outlets, to redeem the racial grotesqueries of America's past and present. That said, by drawing a visual alignment between its protagonist and a figurative Obama when it shows Chris at his apartment 208 as he greets Rose, the film suggests that some Black people, too, had naively projected wildly transformative aspirations onto one man's political ascendancy—extraordinary as it was.8The symbolic presence of the former president, however, does not only energize Get Out's critique of an alleged Obama-animated post-raciality. It also facilitates the film's examination of the past's extensive reverberations into the present, particularly the historical prohibitions against miscegenation as well as the statutory nullifications that have engendered some de-stigmatization of mixed-race coupling. The latter (re)codifications have contributed to a relative acceptance of the more positive denotations of the “interracial romance” while not altogether erasing the associative imputations of “miscegenation.” The reunion of Chris and Rose at the site of the numerological substitute for Obama invites viewers to remember that Obama, though both self- and other-identified as Black, is also biracial, the son of a Black father and a white mother whose 1961 marriage in Hawaii was legal but would not have been in the twenty-one states that had anti-miscegenation statutes on their books at that time.9 The future president, therefore, was not “born a crime,”10 but the widespread statutory injunctions against marriages like his parents’ would not be nationally overturned until the US Supreme Court's decision six years later in Loving v. Virginia (1967).Together with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (also released in 1967), the Court's unanimous rejection of, specifically, Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act and, generally, what lawyers for the plaintiff couple called a manifestation of “the segregation laws and the slavery laws” constitutes a central component of the civil rights era's legacy that Get Out harnesses (United States, “Oral Argument”). The movie invokes this history both in order to dramatize the romantic affection between Rose and Chris and to frame white characters’ attitudes toward the couple's relationship. Rose's parents indeed warmly welcome him to their home, while at least one of their guests compliments the “beauty” of the young couple—which is to say, the white guest offers unsolicited approval of their relationship. In short, the improbably named Loving v. Virginia ruling, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner's advocacy for near-perfect Black men to be viewed as acceptable suitors for white women, and America's idealization of the biracial Obama together undergird Get Out's examination of white liberals’ professions of tolerance and love.11 However, just beneath this veneer of acceptance, the film asserts, festers the historical fear of—and fascination with—miscegenation; and it is this enduring fetishistic horror that the movie foregrounds through its revelations of the obfuscations, hostilities, and violence Chris encounters once he leaves the relative safety of his apartment. Peele's film proposes that Guess Who's Coming to Dinner's implicit promise of “happily ever after” for its interracial couple problematically participates in what Guerrero argues is a mainstream Hollywood tradition of “masking broad social and historical conditions by reducing them to the responsibility of the individual” (19).Despite its legal and symbolic significance, the Loving v. Virginia decision was limited in its ability to transform the range of social relations within which interracial romances unfold.For instance, in the scene in which Chris and Rose interact with the white police officer (Trey Burvant) after the deer accident, the couple correctly understands that the request for Chris's official identification signals his presumptive categorization as a likely felon. However, Rose's assertion that Chris “hasn't done anything wrong” does not explicitly address another reason behind his assumed criminality—namely, the officer's resentment of and desire to punish Chris for having taken racialized sexual license by forming a romantic relationship with a white woman. Coming from a white and male agent of the law, Officer Ryan's hostility recalls the pre–Loving v. Virginia legislation and enforcement of anti-miscegenation statutes, when states such as Virginia insisted upon their power to regulate “purity of public morals, preservation of racial integrity as well as racial pride and to prevent a mongrel breed of citizens” (United States, “Oral Argument”). Chris's positioning during the altercation indicates his comprehension of the multilayered dimension of the officer's barely concealed animus as well as his awareness of the perennial tension between de jure codifications and de facto social experiences. The camera shows him standing spatially distant from Rose, as though attempting to nullify the romantic-sexual nature of their relationship in an effort of self-protection. Loving v. Virginia and related cases may have decriminalized interracial sex and marriage, Get Out emphasizes, but they have not eradicated a lingering white antipathy against such coupling.12Along with its representation of the law, Peele's movie portrays the white family as another significant locus of this continuing hostility. The camera's wide shot of Chris's introduction to Rose's parents reinforces their hypocrisy as their faces remain remote and therefore unreadable to the audience while they croon words of welcome. Moreover, despite Rose's insistence on her parents’ indifference to Chris's race, she discloses nothing about her brother's attitudes. Get Out deploys Jeremy to rupture the Armitage family's practiced performance of genteel liberalism. When he accosts Chris at the dinner table, the scene explicitly exposes and derides his eugenicist assumptions about Black men's supposed natural athleticism, the outcome of their “genetic makeup.”13 Further, during this conversation that also focuses on sex and the transgression of sexual boundaries, Jeremy's language encodes a subtextual anti-miscegenationist dimension of his animosity toward the “fucking beast” who is “dating [his] sister.” Inhabiting the role of family storyteller, the brother reminisces about an unsanctioned high school party at their home when he “hooked up” with a girl in the bathroom and Rose bit off a piece of a boy's tongue, leaving “blood gushing from his mouth.” Jeremy's tale of symbolic castration sounds a not-too-subtle warning to Chris that his involvement with Rose is undesirable and dangerous, a menacing that is forcefully conveyed by the close framing and intense lighting of Jeremy's leering, inebriated face. His threat also echoes the timeworn racist interrogation “would you want one of them to date your sister?” and, more horrifically, evokes the actual castrations that were a routine part of Black men's lynchings.14The most virulent racists, however, are not the only anti-miscegenationists; professed white liberals, like Rose's parents, too pose comparable danger to Black people. In a segment that reinforces Get Out's examination of what might be called neo-anti-miscegenation cloaked in neoliberalism, Missy (Catherine Keener) entraps Chris in the “Sunken Place,” visualized as a nightmarish, subterranean abyss that induces both extreme psychic debilitation and physical immobilization, a crucial mechanism of Black subjection in the Coagula's process of “transplantation” and annihilation.15 Missy's psychological assault through hypnosis begins with her invitation to cure Chris's smoking habit, which he sheepishly promises to quit. She irritably dismisses his defense about smoking in Rose's presence: “That's my kid. That is my kid,” she says, punctuating her disgust. Missy's professional identity as a psychiatrist and the cigarette's phallic symbolism suggest the film's coding of maternal concern for respiratory health as a displacement of the white mother's revulsion about the Black man's sexual relations with her daughter, although she tolerates their relationship as the price that must be paid for the Coagula's predatory access to Chris's body, to his “great eye” that expresses the photographic talent they plan to extract for one of their blind members. Revealingly, once the hypnosis successfully primes Chris for the medical experimentation and secures his impotence—“I got no juice”—there is little erotic intimacy between him and Rose.16Missy's strategically duplicitous tolerance of her daughter's relationship with Chris emerges as one part of the Coagula's project of exploiting racial “intermixing” in its commitment to ensuring white domination in perpetuity, allowing Get Out a bitingly satirical commentary on white racialism. Despite Jeremy's and Missy's antagonism toward the interracial romance, the Coagula procedure itself is a miscegenationist practice; the Coagula's very name evokes the sanguinary obsessions that pervade the discourses surrounding (anti)miscegenation. The family patriarch, Roman Armitage (Richard Herd), maintains that the violent procedure of mutilation and expropriation “perfected by his own flesh and blood” fuses together Black “physical advantages” with white intellectual “determination,” a form of “miscegenation” the Coagula embraces because it negates Black agency even as it appropriates and exploits Black corporeality. African Americans will be included as “members of the family” as long as they relinquish all claims to autonomy, thereby enabling the recuperation of antebellum white power for which the twenty-first-century Armitages and their accomplices yearn. The film spotlights the Coagula's desire for such an atemporal restoration of almost-incontestable white control and Black subjugation—neo-enslavement—by presenting Roman in an antiquated video to explain the origins and objectives of the lobotomy procedure as a terrified Chris sits, shackled, in the family's game room.Get Out's anxiety about the denial of Black male agency within interracial relationships accrues amplified signification when the film shifts its lens from the law and the family to the couple itself because such a movement has the potential of offering perhaps the most straightforward opportunity for the production to return to the generic parameters of the romantic comedy: to insist that societal and familial antipathy notwithstanding, the young lovers can create a space of amorous mutuality. This movie, however, does not equivocate in its conviction that given the broader context of white supremacy, the interracial romance also functions as a site of contested racial-sexual power. Indeed, chronologically, Get Out begins this examination before the couple encounters either the law or Rose's family.In the first scene that utilizes the symbolic phallic labor of the cigarette, during the couple's drive to her parents’ house, Rose tosses Chris's cigarette out of the car despite his emphatic and frustrated protests. She has the ability to deny his desire because, irrefutably, only she can wield her empowered status as a white woman: she drives the car, and a short time later, she has the authority to challenge the law's attempt to police their relationship: “No, fuck that. He shouldn't have to show you his ID.” Rose's defiance arouses Chris: “That was hot,” he announces as he looks at her approvingly. However, once Get Out reveals Rose's primary role in the Coagula's plot against Black men, her declaration of “I'm not gonna let anyone fuck with my man” is retrospectively uncovered as an assertion of ownership and control rather than the extension of benign protection that Chris mistakenly understands it to be.17 The tossed cigarette in this sequence, then, represents the movie's uneasiness about Black men's potential disempowerment—their emasculation, if you will—within interracial romantic relationships, not because the men should assume masculinist prerogatives (Chris is not threatened by Rose's authority), but because the women's ability to deploy racial power can negate Black men's expectations of parity.Chris's arousal in the car is the first of two instances in which what he describes as Rose's “racial flow” sexually excites him. The second follows Jeremy's verbal and physical aggression at the dinner table and their parents’ more subdued but still revelatory adherence to racist protocols. Together with Chris in her bedroom, Rose performs her incredulity about her family's racial animus, which, she announces, exposes their similarity to the police officer, as she attempts to reassure Chris that she remains his ally. Ignorant of her masquerade, Chris assuages her assumed anger and accepts her intimation that her capaciously nuanced comprehension of racism enables her to draw the connections between the public hostility of the police and the private “rudeness” of her own family. Chris kisses her repeatedly, and their undressing suggests lovemaking just before the camera cuts away. The film's repeated characterization of Chris's response to Rose's performed alliance as sexual excitement reveals its agitation about Black desire for white recognition and understanding of the aggressions (micro and macro) to which African Americans are subjected. If true empathy is forthcoming and acted upon, the erotic space can emerge as a site of interracial bonding, and yet, Get Out warns, that space also may become one of white subterfuge and Black betrayal. Peele's film suggests that in the
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