Reel Time: Get Out and Revealing the Lie of Post-racial America

Get Out is a sharp and humorous social thriller with a succinct plot and plenty of tension telling the story of Chris Washington who, on a visit to his white girlfriend's family home, finds himself in the centre of a kidnapping plot and must escape the overwhelmingly white country estate and return to freedom. The film is a particularly incisive criticism of the remnants of slavery and seemingly minute instances of racism amongst America's white liberals, exposing the ways in which America is anything but "post-racial". In line with the succinctness of the plot (hurrah for a film plot that doesn't overrun by approximately 45 minutes!), the film employs the symbol of the deer to quickly convey these differing relationships to race beneath the facade of acceptance and equality. Spoilers ahead, so proceed with caution if you haven't seen Get Out yet (and if you haven't seen it yet, why not?).

Throughout the course of the film, the deer is a recurring element. Generally, deer are symbolic of gentleness, kindness and innocence. They are also, however, animals that come with differing perspectives. Many empathise with deer and would never harm one, whilst many also engage in hunting. These mixed perceptions of deer are brought to the fore in the film and utilised with subtlety to embody the shifting perspectives of race between different characters.

For Chris, the protagonist of the film and potentially the first black character in a horror movie not to die first, the deer is a creature deserving of empathy and compassion and is directly related to his own experience of the world. In the early minutes of the film, he and his girlfriend, Rose Armitage, hit a deer on their way to the Armitage family estate. Rose responds with little concern for the deer, as does the police officer they call to deal with the incident - both of them see the near-dying deer on the side of the road as an inconvenience. Chris, by contrast, feels terribly for the deer and insists on calling the police in the first place. 

We later discover that Chris' mother was killed in a hit and run accident when he was a child, and she was left on the side of the road without assistance for hours before she eventually died. This in turn draws a direct relationship between Chris' empathy with the deer and his love for his mother. A further relationship is drawn between the experience of blackness and the experience of the deer, particularly through the lacking responses from the white characters present. This link also draws upon a long history of the dehumanisation of black people during slavery, a myth which was perpetuated in order to justify the act of slavery itself.

For the family, however, the deer is a trophy object to be mounted on the walls with other cultural trophies appropriated by the father's travels around the world. This is revealed whilst the father, Dean, gives Chris a tour of the family estate, showing off their many cultural treasures and artefacts and capturing deer heads subtly in shot. That is, the deer are not a heavy handed symbol, but rather lurk in the background of shots of the home. This collecting of cultural ephemera reveals the ways in which they both dehumanise blackness - harking back to the connection between the deer and Chris/his family, and lacking empathy with the being enough to kill it for decoration - and see their daughter dating a black man as a trophy or bragging right itself as Rose's father is so accepting he 'would have voted for Obama a third time if he could', a trite appeal repeated multiple times in the film. 

Early in this tour of the home, Dean also comments on the couple's crash into a deer. He tells us that the area is overrun with deer and that, as he is losing patience, they should just cull them right now. Like many of the film's seemingly surface observations, this takes on a new angle in light of information we garner throughout the course of the narrative and becomes an instantly horrifying yet blasé description of racial genocide.

The final confrontation - when the secret plot of the Armitage family is revealed - is between Chris, an old style television and a deer head mounted above it. Here, Chris is confronted with the reality of his predicament: he doesn't just come from a slightly different background than that of the Armitage's but is, rather, being faced with the stone cold reality of the blithe racism beneath their pleasant and accepting exterior. Such a confrontation pushes forward the action of the film as Chris now has no choice but to escape the lie of "post-racial" America.

Get Out is an excellent film and balances the scales between entertaining, comic, frightening and serious with a skill most films would be envious of. Commendably, Chris is treated as the everyman and is instantly a relatable figure for any audience member. For all its insightful criticism of "post-racial" America, it never feels heavy-handed. Rather, its subtlety is what makes it a brilliant film and balances nicely with the subtlety of the racism he experiences within the narrative.