Get Out

Allegories are tricksy beasts. They do their work, not on the page, but in the head of the reader, and they go on working long after the writer has stopped. At the time of it's publication Lord Of The Rings was consistently read as being an allegory for the second world war but these days is far more likely to be read as being about the unthinking destruction of the environment by forces of industrialism. Neither interpretation was what Tolkien intended. He was adamant it was just a story about hobbits and nothing more, but nobody cares what he thought.

There is no doubt that Get Out is intended as an allegory for racism (indeed the director states it is "less allegory and more straight up about what it is"), but the way in which the film guides the audience toward the message without beating them around the head with it is impressive. It is at once subtle and incredibly sharp.

It brilliantly skewers a kind of white liberal middle-class racism, the kind that would never dream of expecting any advantage over blacks, and would die of shame if caught uttering a racial slur, but still voted for Trump. The kind that doesn't feel it has anything to apologise for, that refuses to recognise any difference between the white and black experience. None of the whites in the movie, even the cop who needlessly asks for his ID, are ever rude or unpleasant to Chris, but they objectify him as a black man. Indeed they envy him for his "superior DNA," squeeze his biceps, giggle and ask his girlfriend if it is better. The movie stays relentlessly with Chris, forcing the viewer to experience this polite othering from his perspective, emphasising it when the one other black man at the party turns out to be whiter than the whites.

The subtlest and sharpest moment comes when Chris finally asks: why black people, and gets the answer: I don't know. That's them. Don't put that on me, from the man who is about to benefit the most from the racism he is disavowing. The audience has to guess the answer for itself: because black people won't be searched for too hard by the authorities; because the Armitages view black people as nothing more than bodies, not people in their own right; because, even though they don't admit it themselves, the Armitages could never bring themselves to do this thing to whites.

Clever too is the choices it makes to ensure it is read the way its creators intend. The most obvious of these is backing away from the horror at the climax. Although we get a bit of surgery seen, artfully, reflected in the surgeon's glasses, the gore is minimal. More to the point, no writer who didn't have their mind set on another goal would allow Chris to escape before he was actually under the scalpel, let alone before he was even in the room. Hell! A young Peter Jackson would have had him running about for the last fifteen minutes with the top of his skull flapping loose. Instead, as soon as the full horror of what the Armitages are up to is established, the film advances straight to Chris' fight to escape, avoiding turning off any more squeamish viewers or distracting from the message.

It avoids other possible readings too. In Britain, for instance, race is not as live an issue as it is in America (we do not have the tick-tock of police regularly killing black men, and we have not recently put a white supremacist at the top levels of government) but a conflict between the generations is (the housing crisis is essentially young renters funding the increasing wealth of older property owners, and the Brexit vote is, I'm told, seen widely among schoolchildren as the older generation robbing them of their futures as Europeans). Miss the opening dialogue between Chris and Kate while buying popcorn, go for a wee during a couple of the more critical moments, take the character who denies racism at his word, and the film could nearly be read as being about the old stealing youth from the young.

Nearly, but not quite. If it was about generational conflict then Rose would have had to choose Chris over her family at the end, maybe only when it was too late for her, but at some point. It would have been an easy decision for the filmmakers to take. Rose's betrayal of Chris is hard on the audience after we have been with her for so long (was everything she said just lies? We can't know), and leaving the film with no good white characters might lay it open to idiotic accusations of being racist itself, but they did not take it.

It is always easy to read meanings into a movie that are not there. Indeed it is fun to go through this Get Out listicle and work out which of the "secrets" are deliberate details inserted by the filmmakers and which are the fevered imagination of symbol literate internet sleuths. And it is often hard for a movie to carry a message without either feeling like a lecture or being so willfully obscure it ends up just baffling and infuriating. Horror has always done this better than other genres for the simple reason that what we are frightened of tells us something about ourselves, whether that is something visceral and eternal like childbirth, or something cerebral and cultural like the mass society. What is impressive about Get Out is that it keeps the message front and centre, but is never overwhelmed by it.