Get Out’s original concept was more about social isolation than race. Peele imagined a male character who was invited to his girlfriend’s high school reunion but felt totally out of place in this social environment. The future filmmaker then realised that this kind of exclusion in social settings effectively depicted the African American experience in the US, as they are forced to traverse a society that constructs them as outsiders. This is not the only nuance.
The Coagula Cult
Chris, an African American man, is caught up in a dark scheme while visiting the family estate of his white lover. Chris initially interprets the family’s overly accommodating actions as anxious attempts to handle their daughter’s interracial romance. As the weekend goes on, several unsettling revelations lead him to an unfathomable reality. The family harbours racial superiority, but not in terms of colour, but in terms of physique. He learns that Black people are kidnapped for the purpose of using their bodies as part of the Armitage family’s contemporary slave trade.
These persons are abducted with the intention of using a medical technique called The Coagula to implant the brains of wealthy and ill white senior people into “superior” black bodies. Black victims who are successful spend the remainder of their lives in the “sunken place,” a psychological state of semiconsciousness in which their new white owners take control of their motor functions, reducing them to mere passengers within their own bodies.
Throughout the film, there are slight undertones of their morbid obsession with the African physiology. It becomes evident when Rose’s brother Jeremy asks Chris whether he likes MMA or not. He proceeds with the following statement, “with your frame and your genetic make-up, if you really pushed your body, and I mean really trained…you’d be a f*cking beast.” Roman Armitage invented the Coagula after being defeated by Jesse Owens. Armitages see Chris’s body as a representation of physical desire; this very technique gives way to their obsession with his black physique, which symbolises a modern kind of Black servitude. This portrayal of a racial hierarchy, marked by the superficial compliments given by white people, highlights a pathological fixation with what white people consider to be black attractiveness and prowess.
The consequence of the Armitage Auction Block
Culture is not the only facet. Eugenics is heavily imbued in their psychological and physical manipulation. The scientifically false ideology of eugenics holds that the selective breeding of populations can enhance humankind. Eugenicists held to a biased and false interpretation of Mendelian genetics, which asserted that abstract human traits (including IQ and social behaviours) were simply inherited. In a similar vein, they believed that genetic inheritance was the only cause of complicated illnesses and problems. Eugenics methods have been widely detrimental, especially to marginalised people. In the context of Get Out, Jim wants Chris’s eyes because they are a metaphor of the media ramifications that hold the belief that Africans have extraordinary physical and mental abilities.
Jim adds, “I want your eyes, man. I want those things you see through.” A real-life example of this is in 1936, the U.S. Olympic head coach remarked on Jesse Owens’ success by stating that “The Negro excels. It was not long ago that his ability to sprint and jump was a life-and-death matter to him in the jungle”
Even Jeremy shoots remarks like ‘Genetic make-up’, this coincides with how the family transplants the brains of their affluent peers in Black bodies to give them the desired physical traits, trapping the host’s consciousness in the sunken place. The host’s consciousness, aka the Black People’s real identity, might suffer from a ‘race suicide.’ From the looks of it, it felt like the Armitages feared ‘miscegenation.’ However, Peele’s Get Out remains a cultural masterpiece governing the idea that Eugenics racial ideology hasn’t disappeared, it has mutated. The fake liberalism of the Armitage family is to possess the saying that ‘Black is beautiful.’ But this beauty becomes an object of desire and pseudoscientific hyperabnormality in the face of those who are willing to destroy it.
