by Afsheen Farhadi
Our fifth-grade math class was getting new seating assignments, a ritual I didn’t understand and even now can only reason as some sort of prison tactic to ensure no alliances formed between students. It might also have been a social training exercise, evidenced by the fact that the rows of three alternated based on gender—one row: boy, girl, boy; the next: girl, boy, girl. We lined up at the back of the classroom with our backpacks, waiting to be called by Mr. Cox, who held the seating chart in front of him. I remember waiting, like I did most things, anxiously.
Today my anxiety was pronounced because I was worrying about my name getting called, the many ways it would be mispronounced before we could move on. But this was midway through the term. Mr. Cox had been my teacher for months; he knew my name and said it correctly, seating me next to a girl named Jillian (which funnily enough would be the name of my future wife). I didn’t know then, but I would remember this fact in conjunction with what Mr. Cox said next.
He told Jillian that if ever I acted up, she had his permission to whack me. Then he turned to me and said, “Because here, it’s not like your country. Here, the women hit the men.”
It didn’t elicit the disruption I imagine it would now. I simply went about my day embarrassed, mostly because Mr. Cox had singled me out. I was a shy kid, most comfortable in the backs of rooms. Eventually, I would remember his comment as the standout of all the small acts of racism that befell me growing up in largely white Phoenix, Arizona, where my race and name announced an otherness I couldn’t help but internalize, believing myself, as I’m sure many kids do, woefully different from the people around me.
I often felt the way that LaKeith Stanfield’s character, Andre, describes in the opening scene of Get Out as he’s walking through the suburbs: “I’m like a sore thumb out here.” What’s most interesting to me about this statement is that when he makes it, there are no other people in the scene, no other people for him to stick out “like a sore thumb” from.
I find this both strange and relatable.
If there were white women power walking by on the sidewalk, a white family in polo shits with their sweaters tied around their shoulders, a white man on a porch reading a copy of The Nation, there would be no question about what he means—Andre is the only Black person in the area, the only person who dresses urban, casual, who has dealt with certain experiences that none of these white people could immediately understand. But these people aren’t in the scene. Rather, he’s commenting on the idea of these people being there, instead of behind the walls of their well-trimmed suburban homes. Andre is afraid of an environment that’s empty of others, one that brings to mind fear-inducing associations. Were he to say, “Man, it sure is dark and quiet out tonight,” or “Wow, if ghosts existed this is the type of place they would haunt,” it would take away from the core of the movie: When you are Black, there is an entire inner life of consequence and action, developed from the most vicious parts of our history, that exists between your consciousness and the world.
When Mr. Cox said that racist remark, I can’t recall what I did with my face—I was probably smiling—but it was no indication of what I was truly feeling. It was the type of comment that can push your consciousness deeper within yourself. Perhaps this is a unique experience to introverts, the way a certain insult, a certain shame, can make us retreat inward as a means of escape. This phenomenon isn’t particular to people of color, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that we are more susceptible to carrying the burden of embarrassment and fear that results from cultural mismatch.
Once, I was taken to a honky-tonk bar in Phoenix, Arizona, by my college girlfriend (the Jillian I would eventually marry). She’s Black, and one of the things I’ve always admired about her is the way she broadens the definition of Black to include everything particular to her, even her love of country music, which I at the time considered a wholly white undertaking. The moment I walked into the bar, my sneakers kicking up sawdust as I passed the cowboys and cowgirls drinking from jars as they cheered on whoever was then riding the mechanical bull, I felt very much like a sore thumb. I was nervous because I was so different from the people around me. They were all having fun and seemed nice enough. But the environment made me uncomfortable; I was no longer wearing a real smile, no longer thinking about anything but each step that brought me deeper into the fold of people who resembled each other, none of whom resembled me.
I had nothing against these people, but I worried they would have something against me. What stories, what precedents was I drawing upon? The racist indications of southern culture? President George W. Bush, a notable Texan, and his war in Iraq? The anti-Islamic sentiment kicked up like the sawdust at my feet in the aftermath of 9/11. All of these precedents were weighing on me. However, the feeling was simple to boil down: I was different from these people, and historically differences are stamped out one way or another (this difference was further highlighted by a young white woman who scrunched her eyebrows and pointed, yelling “Mark Ruffalo” at me. I only later speculated that she was trying to account for my dark, ethnic features, and tried to come up with a comparison that fit in with her limited points of reference).
At the honky-tonk, like in response to Mr. Cox, my instinct when made to feel different was to turn inward, to escape the conditions of my diminishment (the world) and retreat to a place where I was seen as capacious and complex (my head).
It’s a response the protagonist of Get Out, Chris, is familiar with. He’s reserved, quiet, and introspective, all the things befitting an artist. Chris in particular is a photographer who has shaped his life around observation. Upon first meeting him, we see he is quietly packing while his girlfriend, Rose, asks questions that he answers in mumbles and monosyllables. We quickly learn what he’s packing for—he’s going to meet his girlfriend’s white family for the first time, thinking that he’s the first Black man she’s brought home. Upon our first viewing, we focus on the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner situation, but there are clues that it’s not only this situation that forces Chris within himself, but any situation of conflict.
Chris has developed a coping mechanism. Consider the packing scene, or the one in which the couple deal with a traffic cop (Rose abrasive with privilege; Chris compliant), or later scenes when Chris struggles to explain why Rose’s family’s behavior is so upsetting. He doesn’t push; he doesn’t fight. He concedes outwardly, so he can shoulder the burden alone, inwardly. In some ways, this can be seen as a strength: knowing when to choose your battles. If a person of color was going to draw swords every time they were singled out or misunderstood, they would waste their lives in petty squabbles. Some battles, however, are worth fighting, even if (or because) they require an uncomfortable degree of vulnerability.
In the first scene, why doesn’t Andre go running back to his car before it’s too late? He feels real fear, but, understanding that it may not directly relate to his situation, he doesn’t act on it. It’s the same reason I, at the honky-tonk bar, kept walking farther in, trying to be a good sport, when everything in my body told me to leave—I knew the fear I felt didn’t correspond to a present and active danger, only the potential for one.
The film is aware of this phenomenon, when your survival instinct is spliced, one part telling you to remove yourself from the situation that’s causing you anxiety, one part telling you that doing so will isolate you socially. We see Chris undergoing this thought process when he and Rose are attending her family’s annual party. In a series of short scenes, Chris is subjected to the most overtly racist comments in the film (until now there have been a number of milder comments—the first coming from Rose’s father, regarding their relationship, where he asks how long this thang has been going on). One man obsesses over Tiger Woods and asks Chris to show him his form, one woman asks Rose whether the sex is better, and another man explains that in the pendulum swing of culture, Black is now in.
In response, Chris does what he’s likely done a thousand times. He retreats, in this case, both internally and physically. He heads to the surrounding woods with his camera and begins taking pictures, a familiar means of escape, where he can return to his natural state of observer.
As a person of color, your identity must account for your relationship to otherness. But if otherness becomes your defining trait, it can lead to loneliness and isolation. Being alone can be great, especially for those who are introspective and creative like Chris. However, one must always be careful of going too far, of closing yourself off and diminishing yourself. One can retreat too deeply within.
The episode with Mr. Cox was the crescendo to the other moments of mild racism throughout my childhood, mostly from kids baffled by my name and race, who went after these things as their first points of attack. It’s possible that some of what I refer to as “milder” aggressions were objectively more vicious than what Mr. Cox said. But it wasn’t the content that made the moment so powerful. It was who it came from.
Few random schoolyard encounters have left any impression on me, to the point that I couldn’t faithfully describe a single one now. But Mr. Cox was my teacher. He was educated, one of the handful of adults who were supposed to be my caregivers. I didn’t have any particular fondness for him, but I was fond of all my teachers as my temporary surrogate parents. They were important to the order of my daily life, if nothing else. They were the smartest people in the room, and considering the way I prized intelligence—something that drew me to higher education—I’m sure I saw Mr. Cox, like all my teachers, as a perfect representation of adulthood. It was the fact that this comment about my otherness came from a figure of authority in my life that made his words hit so much harder than all those meaningless encounters combined.
Mr. Cox’s comment made me turn inward, and, if I remained holed up inside myself, his words threatened to send me into dangerous depths where resentment, anger, and hatred breed. To go there is to go to a place where you sacrifice all agency at the altar of your rage. It is a place one should be afraid of, a place I am afraid of. It’s a place I’m grateful to Get Out for naming.
We’re introduced to The Sunken Place when Chris encounters Rose’s mother after he finds himself unable to sleep, returning inside after smoking a cigarette. Against his will, she hypnotizes him, a capability introduced earlier in the film. In order to get him to a state of heightened suggestibility, she has to lower his defenses. However, he is guarded and reserved, as he’s someone who has erected many long-term defenses in his mind. What finally lures him into relinquishing control, to fall into The Sunken Place, is the memory he thinks of when she asks where Chris was when his mother died. “I don’t want to think about that,” Chris says. Not talk about, think about, which means it is a secret he keeps from himself as much as others. It’s the thing his whole tight-lipped life has tried to rope off: The memory, the trauma, the guilt that he’ll never outrun. It is the wound that the scar tissue of his silence has built up around, the wound that Rose’s mother reopens, compelling Chris’s uncharacteristic vulnerability and his susceptibility to The Sunken Place.
Daniel Kaluuya’s terrified, frozen face conveys the pain that Chris is experiencing as he reaches The Sunken Place: His teary eyes express a deep agony. If The Sunken Place is where a person retreats when the circumstances of their life have become too overwhelming, the safety of it requires a steep price.
The Sunken Place is deeper than Chris habitually goes to when he retreats inside himself. It’s too deep, a place where old pains remain fresh, where hints of self-blame reveal themselves to have sprouted from deep-seated self-loathing. The Sunken Place is a risk for anyone who finds themselves forced to retreat too often—from racism, criticism, and violence. It’s the place where everlasting damage is manifested.
Besides this scene where Chris only dips a toe in, twice in the film characters emerge from long stretches in The Sunken Place. Both times—when Andre emerges at the party to rush to Chris, grab him, and warn him to leave; and when the man whose body Rose’s grandfather colonized emerges to take the gun from Rose, shoot her, then turn it on himself—the characters resurface from The Sunken Place with a level of recklessness and fear that convinces us of the torment of the experience.
My fear of The Sunken Place is a fear of losing my humanity, or, to put it another way, of being forced so deeply within myself that I lose my connection to the people around me. It’s possible that a thousand disparaging comments from strangers can do this. But I think it’s far more likely that a few truly cutting comments, or even just one particularly vile remark, from someone you trust, admire, and, even worse in Chris’s case, love, would be enough.
Chris’s path to The Sunken Place begins with the memory of his mother, who died in a car accident one stormy night when he was a kid. Perhaps she would have survived had he been able to alert anyone to the possibility that his mother was in danger. But Chris retreated, as we’ve seen him do many times. He’s a photographer, after all, one who must balance his inclination to observe with the need to act when called upon. After not speaking up at such a crucial moment, the resulting shame opens the door to The Sunken Place, a lair built from all the pain he has harbored since.
However, it isn’t the thing that pushes him through this door. That comes from his relationship with two characters.
The first push is from Rose. Chris loves and trusts her. They don’t experience the events of the film the same way and have some minor disagreements throughout it, but at every turn Chris is patient, trying to understand what it’s like for her to realize what’s been clear to him for a long time about her wealthy white family. While we see her as naïve, Chris’s forgiveness goes a long way toward compelling our own. However, while there are moments of levity and sweetness between them, these are never as convincing as their moments of abrasion. A barrier stands between them. It’s not until Chris finally tells her about his mother that we feel that wall coming down. It is the first moment in their relationship that he shows remarkable vulnerability with her, and it isn’t hard to believe that this will allow them to forge an authentic emotional connection in the future. She seems truly affected by his story, and it seems like she is seeing him for the first time. She finally acknowledges his discomfort and agrees to leave with him.
Chris allows his full, fragile self to be on full display, bearing his soul for his partner. This scene is interplayed with the silent auction back at the party, one over which Rose’s dad presides, and which includes a photo of Chris, indicating that he is being auctioned off. The alternating scenes show Chris in opposite ways: In one, he’s seen as a complex human with emotional depth; in the other, he’s a mere physical object, a body with no soul.
It’s not until Chris learns that Rose is part of the plot against him that the true horror of the situation dawns on him. Even though he has discovered the box of photos of Rose with her previous boyfriends/victims, he still carries his bag downstairs, holding onto it as the family closes in on him, even as Rose’s brother takes a swing at him with a lacrosse stick. Only when Rose confirms his suspicions (though these are more than suspicions, evidencing how badly he doesn’t want to believe that the person he loves could do this to him) does he drop his bag, realizing escape is hopeless.
In a movie that uses racial dynamics as access points to horror, there is no deeper horror than the person closest to you seeing you as an object, seeing you only for your body, your race. Chris appears to be virtually unscathed by the many people who refuse to acknowledge his humanity. This is nothing compared to the horror when Rose, someone who has been intimately part of his life, who has recently heard the story of his mother, who has seen and acknowledged his humanity as few have ever had opportunity to, wounds him. Chris drops his bag, and Kaluuya plays it masterfully, not with terror, not heartbroken, but with a certain cold relief, as though he’s tired of using hope to stay afloat. It’s as though now that the worst has proven possible, he is relieved to stop fighting against the current which pulls him toward The Sunken Place.
There is another character who can claim to understand Chris’s humanity and therefore provides an effective blow when he betrays it: Jim Hudson, the blind art collector and failed photographer who has won the auction for Chris’s body. In his first encounter with Chris, he doesn’t mention race, the first person with whom the subject doesn’t come up, but instead Chris’s art, his photography, which has been intricately described to him. He describes Chris’s photographs as “so brutal, so melancholic.” Jim connects with Chris on a deeper level, two artists of different backgrounds, bound by something essential.
Chris meeting Jim is a heartening encounter among the many disheartening ones. But again, it is the person Chris lets in, the person who sees his vulnerability, his humanity, who refuses to honor it, who becomes the film’s true monster. With a shaved head—prepped for surgery and looking like an evil villain—Jim appears to Chris when he is tied up. He explains that he is going to inhabit his body, and then he admits that it has nothing to do with race, saying that those others at the party who harvest Black bodies are likely doing it for the surface-level advantages, to be stronger, faster, or cooler. “Don’t lump me in with that,” he says. “I could give a shit what color you are. What I want is deeper. I want your eye, man. I want those things you see through.”
For a photographer, eyes are his bridge to humanity, his chosen method of communication, the one he relies on when words fail. Jim understands how important they are to Chris, and it doesn’t matter. Central to the horror in this film, as in all horror, is the idea that someone will see and acknowledge your humanity, but for reasons of racism, hatred, greed, or simple malicious desire, it will make no difference to them, change nothing about what they do to you next.
When I consider Get Out alongside my encounter with Mr. Cox, I ultimately realize a simple fact: It could have been worse. Mr. Cox could have become further emboldened to disparage me in class and in private. Had there been any repetition or escalation, it isn’t hard to imagine how each comment could send me deeper into isolation and alienation. It would have seemed that no matter what I did, who I was would never be acknowledged because of what I was. That to others, I never had any hope of being accepted, only ridiculed, made to feel so different that being totally alone inside myself would have been the only place I belonged.
As I imagine this alternate life, I hear Jim explaining to Chris what will happen to him once Jim takes control of his body. “You won’t be gone,” Jim says. “Not completely. A sliver of you will still be in there—limited consciousness. You’ll be able to see and hear what your body is doing but your existence will be as a passenger, an audience. You’ll live in The Sunken Place.”
When people describe episodes of blinding anger, they talk about the way they’re no longer in control of their actions, the way they become an audience to their own acts of violence. Fury takes over, and the person inside, who loves and wants to belong and be accepted by humanity, is a sliver now, too small to do anything but watch their cynicism play out.
At the end of the movie, Chris dispenses quite easily with Rose’s dad, mother, and brother. In fact, he has turned into a killing machine, best evidenced by Rose’s mother stabbing him through the palm while Chris bears what must be an excruciating pain before turning the knife on her.
But the movie ends with him sitting over Rose, hands around her neck, choking her. He will, the anger on his face says, kill her. And it will be a just revenge. We’ve come to see enough of her evil that we can’t help but root for the whole sordid nightmare to end, which can only happen if Rose, the last living member of the family that presides over the Coagula, dies.
She is, at that point, inhuman. But Chris still is, and if he kills her, we worry about the potential implications of his actions. This was a woman he woke up that morning loving. Chris appears to be guided by blind anger, the veins popping in his neck, his hands shaking with the effort. The Chris we know, the caring and compassionate Chris, is reduced to that tiny, audience-like sliver of consciousness, watching as another being, not an old white person, but the manifestation of his own deep-seated rage, takes control of his body.
But that tiny sliver regains control—stimulated by Rose saying, “I love you, Chris,” which he can’t possibly believe, but which reminds him of the fact that he so recently loved her—and he doesn’t kill Rose. While we think his act of humanity will be punished by the arrival of a cop (playing on our understanding of real-world racial dynamics), we are instead rewarded with the arrival of his friend, Rod, a TSA agent, who provides Chris with his escape.
Rose, because the movie knows we want this, dies as they’re pulling away. Though there must be so much to say between Chris and Rod, who as a verbose character is a good complement to tight-lipped Chris, they both remain silent. The final shot shows us Chris in the passenger seat, internalizing everything as he usually does, perhaps still trying to wrap his mind around the many ways he has saved himself.
If the horror of Get Out has much to do with the monsters being close—not your in-laws, nor strangers at a party, but your partner or a fellow lover of art (the call is coming from inside the house)—then the ultimate horror would be that at the end of the day you become the monster.
In my encounter with Mr. Cox, I got a glimpse of how this might happen to me. A moment like that is shocking because it exposes you as much as everyone else involved. However, it was just a glimpse. In subsequent encounters with Mr. Cox, he was nicer to me, made a point to offer mild compliments, to smile when I walked through the door. He probably regretted saying what he did. Or maybe he was simply scared of being reprimanded. He probably overcompensated, becoming more like the mild villains of the first twenty minutes of Get Out, like Rose’s dad, who trumpets that if given the opportunity, he would have voted Obama to a third term.
It’s possible Mr. Cox surprised even himself with his comment and felt ashamed by it, by the glimpse into his darker, nastier side. Moments like that—slips of the tongue, of discretion—can often reveal a surprising totality of what exists within someone, which can be discomfiting. Because if we were to really go digging into our own hearts, I think we would each be taken aback by how beautiful and how ugly we have the capacity to be.
Afsheen Farhadi was born in Phoenix, Arizona. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Witness, The Rumpus, The Millions, Catapult, Bright Lights Film Journal, and elsewhere. He has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati, where he was a Provost Graduate Fellow, and served as the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing, Prose at Southern Methodist University. He is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno.