NICHOLS

FILM NOTES

FILM NOTES

GET OUT: A Study of Interracial Dynamics in an Unrepaired and

Unrepentant America—A Modern Day Racial Horror
Get Out (McKittrick, Blum, Hamm, Peele, & Peele, 2017) is Jor-
dan Peele’s wildly popular, racially themed horror/thriller film
released last year. It opens with a young African-American man
being abducted by a disguised figure as he walks through a ge-
neric, unidentified white suburb. This sets an ominous tone that
lingers throughout the movie as it progresses through the sto-
ry of an interracial couple, Chris and Rose, leaving the city to
visit Rose’s white family in a semi-rural, wealthy white enclave.
The tension of the movie centers around Chris’s apprehension
about how he will be received by Rose’s family. In the fashion
of contemporary white liberalism gone awry, the family is warm
and engaging toward Chris while making obvious racial faux pas
and micro-aggressions (Sue, 2010). Though such experiences are
clearly discomforting for Chris, Peele takes us through a deeper,
more sinister turn evoking classic horror films, such as Invasion of
the Body Snatchers (1955) and Frankenstein (1932). Despite repeat-
ed warnings to “get out” from Chris’s friend, Rod, a Transporta-
tion Security Administration (TSA) officer, Chris remains in the
home as increasingly foreboding signs of trouble arise. Though
the movie is more thriller than horror, the finale is horrific as
Chris is confronted with the politely malevolent family’s true in-
tentions. In a “better late than never” effort, to“get out,” Chris
contends with profoundly disturbing and evil adversaries.
Peele’s initial depiction of underlying racial attitudes invokes
the argument made in the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good
People (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013) and President Obama’s com-

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Film Series at the New Center for
Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, September 8, 2017.
Many thanks to my esteemed colleagues Drs. Medria Connolly and Larry Green for
their helpful input on this article.

Psychoanalytic Review, 105(2), April 2018 © 2018 N.P.A.P.

224 Nichols

ments on unconscious bias (Korte, 2016) as the interpretive frame

for the movie. However, it soon becomes clear that Peele has set
us up for a twist, with the fairly “good natured” and superficially
benign “unconscious racism” really posing as a cover for more
consciously evil intentions.

IMPLICIT BIAS

According to Banaji and Greenwald (2013), implicit bias in the

racial context comprises unconsciously held prejudicial beliefs
against African-Americans by about 75 percent of white Ameri-
cans. In the movie, the specter of implicit bias looms early when
Chris’s girlfriend Rose tells him that he need not worry about her
parents being intolerant of their interracial relationship, and, as
justification, states that her father says he would have voted for
Obama a third time. It comes as no surprise that after Chris, and
the viewer, meet the parents, Dean and Missy Armitage, Dean not
only repeats this patronizing reassurance but also greets him with
his mimicry of what he understands to be black cultural vernacu-
lar (“My maaan . . . how long’s this thaaang been goin’ on?”).
Chris’s discomfort is palpable as such patronizing gestures
imply either conflict or deception. His discomfort is intensified
when he meets Rose’s brother, Jeremy, a mixed martial arts enthu-
siast who is weirdly challenging toward Chris even as he expresses
admiration for Chris’s athletic build.
This absurd proliferation of implicit bias, either obscene or
comical, depending on one’s perspective, reaches its climax mid-
way through the movie at a garden party in which guests oblivi-
ously make all kinds of insulting comments, suggesting that being
dark-skinned is “in fashion” and focusing on the sexuality of the
black man while literally fondling Chris’s arm.
Rose does her best to soothe Chris’s worries at every turn,
but not only is there no mistaking the strange and unreflective
bias contained in numerous comments and gestures, there is also
no mistaking the strange and restrained black folk haunting the
grounds in the form of Walter, the groundskeeper, and Georgina,
the housekeeper.
But even before that, we recognize that we are only being
teased with the phenomenon of implicit bias. For example, in
FILM NOTES 225

© 2017 Universal City Studio Productions LLP. Reproduced by permission.

the road incident and obligatory police encounter after Chris

and Rose hit a deer on their way to Rose’s home, the policeman,
though aware that Rose was driving the car, nevertheless asks for
Chris’s driver’s license, clearly reflecting his underlying bias that
this black man is out of place. Chris is rescued by his presumably
conscious and protective white girlfriend, an exchange that could
be viewed as further highlighting the black man’s impotence in
the face of police authority. Only later do we realize that Rose’s
true motive on the road was to prevent the officer from acquiring
the identity of this black man, whose future, unbeknownst to us
at the time, is in real jeopardy.
And so, the bias that is so threatening in Get Out is hardly im-
plicit. Rose’s mother, Missy, a hypnotherapist, offers to help Chris
with his smoking habit through hypnosis, and proceeds to hypno-
tize him despite his objections. She taps (literally taps a tea cup)
into his vulnerability based on the death of his mother when he
was a child. His mother had a car accident and died several hours
later, before anyone discovered her. Chris was at home, became
increasingly paralyzed by fear as time passed, and as a result is
burdened with perpetual guilt about his inability to overcome
his emotional paralysis and search for his mother. This provides
the opening for Missy to disable Chris psychologically as she pro-
226 Nichols

ceeds with her real intent, which is to psychically place him in “the
sunken place,” a soul-swallowing void within his psyche. This pro-
cedure paves the way for the eventual effort by the evil Armitage
family to appropriate his body for a member of their community
to use for whatever purposes they wish, a process they call “The
Coagula.”
This truly scary turn of events necessitates a more psychodynamic
analysis of the unfolding process. However, there is something
else that the literature on implicit bias can contribute here: It
reveals that for a large majority of white Americans bias is not only
pervasive and unconscious but also stubbornly resistant to change.
As described in their book, not even Banaji and Greenwald were
able to change their own bias scores on the Implicit Associations
Test that they created. They took their test repeatedly with the
goal of achieving an unbiased score, but they were unsuccessful
and concluded that their bias, like the bias of others, has deep
roots in the unconscious.
It may be that the movie’s tease of implicit bias represents
the fear black people experience that all this “implicit” stuff is
really just a smokescreen for the dark, larcenous, and knowing
heart in White America. Alternatively, it could also be that the
movie suggests white futility with “trying to be good,” a sort of
“racial compassion fatigue” (Figley, 1995), that ultimately leads
to conceding to the intractability of bias and deciding to just take
advantage of, rather than fight, privilege (McIntosh, 1990).

AMERICA AS UNREPAIRED AND UNREPENTANT

This perspective on American race relations has emerged from re-

cent writings and advocacy for reparations to African-Americans
(e.g., Brooks, 2004; Coates, 2014; Nichols, 2017; Nichols & Con-
nolly, 2017; Prager, 2008, 2017), and serves as the interpretive
frame for Get Out. The resistance of the United States to confront-
ing its historical notions of white supremacy is what is described
here as the unrepaired aspects of race relations. Peele takes this a
step further in depicting white Americans who embrace, rather
than resist, historical white supremacy in a conscious, unapolo-
getic way, assuming that it is the natural order of things. This
orientation is referred to as unrepentant.
FILM NOTES 227

From this perspective, the United States is viewed as a coun-

try largely founded on a crime against humanity, chattel slavery,
which has spent much of its collective time trying to ignore that
reality. Although efforts have been made to address this profound
cultural trauma—the Emancipation Proclamation, Constitutional
amendments during the Reconstruction era, and the civil rights
legislation of the 1960s—they have fallen short of a full reparative
act that would include both genuine governmental apology and
material compensation for wages, property, and the loss of life. In
the absence of genuine reparations for a shameful and murder-
ous crime against an entire segment of the population, American
culture is left with a toxic atmosphere that divides its citizenry. As
psychoanalyst and sociologist Prager (2008) describes it, this un-
resolved cultural trauma yields “a past that bifurcates the nation
and establishes (at least) two national histories—history as told by
the victims and by the perpetrators” (p. 405).
The literature on implicit bias may be seen as one of the histo-
ries told by the perpetrators. In that history, a terrible crime did
occur in the past, and guilt and shame are deeply felt about it.
However, the ongoing memory and awareness of the “crime” is
generally suppressed in the belief that genuine reparation has al-
ready occurred and ushered in a new “post-racial” society (Schorr,
2008). Facilitating this “Pollyannaish” view of race relations is an
intolerance of the shame that “being woke” would bring (Jacobs,
2014; Nichols, 2017). The periodic emergence of genuine bias
is cause for surprise and consternation, but not viewed as a sign
that the racism of the past persists and the interracial atmosphere
of the country remains fundamentally un-repaired.
However, there is another narrative afloat, and Peele is all over
it in Get Out. That narrative also acknowledges a past of white
dominance and aggression, but justifies that past as simply the re-
sult of the natural order of things when one group is superior to
the other. In accord with the findings of historian Kendi (2016),
that narrative is grounded in a history in which the horrors of the
slave trade had to be justified to a Catholic Church by describing
Africans as animalistic heathens whose enslavement would be-
stow civilizing and humanizing benefits. The architects of the ear-
ly slave trade were not confused about questions of fundamental
228 Nichols

human inequality between Europeans and Africans, but rather,

were guided by economic incentives. To paraphrase Kendi, rac-
ism did not begat slavery; slavery begat racism.
Six centuries of that religious justification has penetrated
Western culture and set the social norm against which evolving
cultural beliefs must contend. Consequently, this narrative may
recognize modern social mores that frown on open racial domi-
nance, but it remains conscious of an intent and a right to domi-
nate through whatever means necessary. This is the unrepentant
position and is well represented in the words of former President
Richard Nixon, as recalled by his White House Chief of Staff H.
R. Haldeman: “He [Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the
fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to de-
vise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to” (cited
in Anderson, 2016, p. 104). Like Nixon, the guests at the garden
party in Get Out are quite clear in their intentions to exploit black
bodies. They are strategic and systematic in the execution of their
evil plan.
Some psychoanalysts offer theories that may illuminate this
historically grounded unrepentant orientation. For instance,
Miller and Josephs (2009) suggest that “whiteness” is socially con-
structed in a way that reflects “pathological narcissism”: “Our fo-
cus on white racial superiority highlights the defensive grandios-
ity around which white racial identity is constructed as a kind
of pathological organization that manages the dread of narcis-
sistic mortification” (p. 96) .Further, regarding the cultural forces
that contribute to the development of the pathological narcis-
sism of whiteness, Miller and Josephs suggest that “the traumatic
social mortifications of growing up in an intensely competitive,
individualistic, materialistic, and status-conscious society uncon-
sciously create entrenched oedipal fixations. . . . White people
unconsciously racialize the issue to insure that there will always
be someone in the culture who is unconsciously an even bigger
oedipal loser than they are” (p. 96).
In Get Out, Peele imagines an extreme example of attempts
to “manage the dread of narcissistic mortification” in the entire,
multigenerational, Armitage family scheme to devise the “Coag-
ula.” This process allows them to imagine that they are pursuing
human perfection and immortality if only they can locate ade-
quate black bodies to exploit. As it turns out, that odd black man
FILM NOTES 229

tending the grounds at the Armitage house is really the prototype

of the diabolical Coagula process in which Grandpa Armitage
assumed control of the body of a kidnapped black man, Walter,
whose soul was exiled to the sunken place. Grandpa’s choice of
this particular body is no accident. Grandpa, a sprinter in his
younger days, is still smarting from being “dusted” by Jesse Owens
in the 1936 Olympics. He manages his “narcissistic mortification”
by appropriating a highly athletic black body, which he believes
could finally grant him the athletic prowess he felt denied in his
own God-given body.
Further, in a passage that reads almost as the underlying back
story for the scene in Get Out depicting the initial banishment of
Chris to “the sunken place,” Miller and Josephs (2009) observe:

To maintain whiteness as a pathologically narcissistic organiza-

tion (Steiner, 1993), there is an unconscious need to omnipo-
tently construct a reality in which black people are denied an in-
dependent mind of their own. . . . White defensive grandiosity
generates an unconscious need to omnipotently control black
people,in fantasy and in reality, so that black people can readily
serve as the passive receptacles of the repudiated wishes and
fears of white people. (p. 98)

Additionally, it is worth noting that Miller and Josephs clarify

that “our focus is on the white, liberal, educated, upwardly
mobile persons in the United States who are often thought to
have transcended racism and who are also the main consumers
of insight-oriented psychotherapy” (p. 96). This perfectly tracks
the presentation of the Armitage family and friends as wealthy,
educated, and superficially accepting of the young black, Chris,
suddenly placed in their midst.
Other writers point specifically to the failure to mobilize large-
scale racial reparations as the cause of what is being described
here as the unrepentant position (Alford, 1990; Balbus, 2005;
Prager, 2017). In doing so, they draw upon Melanie Klein’s (1937)
classic essay “Love, Guilt and Reparations” as providing a theo-
retical metaphor for the consequences of failed reparation. For
instance, in suggesting the applicability of Klein to racial repara-
tions, Balbus (2005) states that the reparations debate has suf-
230 Nichols

fered from a neglect of the psychological factors involved in repa-

rations:

. . . white Americans are unlikely to be moved by principled

arguments in favor of reparations if they have a deep psycho-
logical stake in resisting them. . . . I draw on the psychoanalytic
theory of Melanie Klein to make and clarify the claim that the
movement for reparations for African-Americans encounters
powerful unconscious resistance on the part of many of the
white Americans who would—in some sense—be responsible for
making them. (p. 92)

Further, Prager (2017) has stated that “the impoverished nature

of reparations discourse represents a refusal to know or to be-
come aware of the presence of unconscious guilt toward the sub-
ject populations” (p. 8).
According to Klein’s theory, infants have a “reparative impulse”
that compels them to attempt emotional repair of the relationship
with their mothers for their raging impatience when mothers are
tardy with feeding, dramatically shifting from angry entitlement
to regretful appreciation. According to Klein, this process of re-
pairing facilitates the capacity for separation of self from other.
In so doing, this self/other differentiation lays down the founda-
tional template for the capacity for the infant to experience both
remorse and love. For Klein, the reparative process is associated
with the depressive position.
However, Klein also suggests that when the reparative process
fails, the infant is not able to integrate feelings of love and hate
and is left to utilize splitting and projection as primary defense
mechanisms. Under this defensive structure, the unwanted feel-
ings and attributes of the infant are split off and projected onto
the “other,” who is, for Klein, initially the mother. This failure of
reparations, and the splitting and projection that go along with it,
is associated with Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position.
Making the leap from the individual reparative process of in-
fancy to racial relations is fraught with theoretical challenges.
Nevertheless, Alford (1990) notes that “several authors . . . such
as Wilfred Bion and Elliot Jaques, have pursued the implications
of Kleinian thought for the group” (p. 7). Perhaps the most entic-
ing aspect of Klein’s theory for group theorists is its implications
FILM NOTES 231

for the foundations of moral behavior. Because of this, Meltzer

(1981) has referred to Klein’s theory as “a theological model of
the mind” (p. 179). In this theological model, Alford (1990) states
that Klein’s depressive position is governed by a “reparative mo-
rality,” while the paranoid-schizoid position is governed by a “ta-
lion morality, the morality of revenge” (p. 8).
Alford cautions that it is very difficult to translate the repara-
tive morality that may dominate the relationship between two
people to the actions between two groups. In fact, Alford (1990)
suggests that the reparative morality that may exist among people
within a group is exactly the reason that the entire group may
enact talion morality in its dealings with other groups: “We pur-
chase the love and concern found in our private relations by in-
vesting our anxiety and aggression in the group” (p. 9). Further,
while Alford strains to imagine the scenario that a “truly repara-
tive leader might be able to interpret citizen’s anxieties with suffi-
cient sympathetic accuracy to lessen them” (p. 28), his conclusion
about the morality in groups is more pessimistic:

From a Kleinian perspective the key problem with the morality

of groups is that it tends to remain fixated at the paranoid-
schizoid position, in part because paranoid-schizoid defences
against anxiety are particularly efficient—but therefore no less
morally problematic—when reinforced by others, as in the
group. The very effectiveness of paranoid-schizoid defenses,
characterized by splitting and projection, discourages the
integration of good and bad necessary for the development of
reparative psychology and morality. (p. 28)

Consistent with Alford’s formulation, director Jordan Peele is

under no optimistic illusions in his depiction of this particular
group of white Americans in Get Out. His white group is clearly
governed by the talion morality of the paranoid-schizoid position.
Yet this group also evinces a curious admiration for black peo-
ple, which is perhaps best interpreted by Balbus (2005). In keep-
ing with Alford, Balbus states that “white racism is fueled by the
primitive passions of the paranoid-schizoid position” and gives
rise to what he describes as “four pairs of demonizing and ideal-
izing fantasies about blacks” (p. 99; see pp. 99-109):
232 Nichols

“Lazy & Shiftless” vs. “Laid Back & Cool”

or
“Dirty & Smelly” vs. “Black & Beautiful”
or
“Sexual Monsters” vs. “Sexual Marvels”
or
“Animals” vs. “Athletes”

Each one of these projections is clearly on display in Get Out, but,

interestingly, mostly on the idealized side. Rod identifies the black
captive, Andrew (who reappears in the movie in his appropriated
state as the “squarely dressed” lover of an older white woman), as
clearly not in his right mind by commenting how nobody from
Brooklyn ever dresses like that (meaning, not cool). And the Black
& Beautiful and Sexual Marvel idealizations permeate the movie
from Rose’s lust to Rod’s repeated warnings about sexual slavery,
and ultimately to Andrew’s actual sexual enslavement. Finally,
athletic admiration is enviously reflected in brother Jeremy’s
excited utterance that Chris could be a “beast” in mixed martial
arts, in Rose’s search for more elite black bodies to garner on
an NCAA basketball website, and, as described earlier, in the
grandfather’s appropriation of an athletic black body to continue
his obsession to eventually best Jesse Owens.

BLACK SKIN–WHITE MASKS MEET INVISIBILITY

What Get Out depicts superbly is that, though idealized, being

the object of projection continues to dehumanize black people
and inspire hostile envy. This group of white people no longer
struggles with trying to compete with the idealized black person;
they merely use their privilege and resources to appropriate black
people, ruthlessly robbing them of their souls and bodies.
Faced with this assault on their essential humanity, the black
person struggles to find authentic identity and expression. This
struggle is magnificently illustrated in an unforgettable scene
involving Georgina, the housekeeper inhabited by the Armit-
age grandmother. In her conversation with Chris, he makes the
presumably black connecting comment, “When there’s too many
white people I get nervous.” This serves as a trigger that momen-
tarily activates the tearful emergence of Georgina’s black soul
FILM NOTES 233

straining to escape its psychological shackles, only to be quickly

suppressed by the governing white grandmother inhabiting Geor-
gina’s body.
In the spirit of Fanon’s (1952) book Black Skin, White Masks,
the film Get Out conjures that truly violent result of hostile white
takeover of the black soul. Over sixty years ago Fanon described
this issue as it pertained to the plight of African peoples in French
colonies: “The black schoolboy . . . identifies himself with the
explorer, the civilizing colonizer, the white man who brings truth
to the savages, a lily-white truth. The identification process means
that the black child subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude” (p.
126).
As Peele depicts it, a necessary prerequisite to the takeover of
the black body is to banish the black soul to “the sunken place.”
Similarly, in Fanon’s (1952) view: “If the psychic structure is fragile,
we observe a collapse of the ego. The black man stops behaving
as an actional person. His actions are destined for ‘the other’ (in
the guise of the white man), since only the other can enhance his
status and give him self-esteem” (p. 132, emphasis in original).
Thus, whether we think of the authentic self as submerged in “the
sunken place,” as Peele puts it, or “collapsed,” as Fanon puts it,
it is nevertheless invisible to the world. Another mid-twentieth
century writer, Ralph Ellison (1952), tells us the consequences of
invisibility for African Americans:

. . . you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you
aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure
in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to
destroy. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you
begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that
way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince your-
self that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all
the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you
curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s
seldom successful. (p. 4)

BLACK RAGE

Ellison’s description of the consequences of invisibility foreshad-

ows the later work of Grier and Cobbs (1968), Black Rage, as well
234 Nichols

as the violent finale of Get Out. For Grier and Cobbs, the “over-
riding experience of the black American has been grief and sor-
row” (p. 176). In this connection, Rose maintains a box of pictures
of the many black men she has lured into the horrific Coagula
scheme. These pictures stir our recognition of all the lost souls
sacrificed to the family’s grandiose and evil program, and the
anguish of their loved ones who have no idea where they are. Ad-
ditionally, there is the obvious grief Chris feels over the loss of his
mother, a vulnerability exploited by the presumably helpful white
mother/therapist, Missy.
But, for Grier and Cobbs (1968), grief is not the final emo-
tional destination for the “woke” African-American. They assert,

As grief lifts and the sufferer moves toward health, the hatred
he had turned on himself is redirected toward his tormentors,
and the fury of his attack on the one who caused him pain is in
direct proportion to the depth of his grief. When the mourner
lashes out in anger, it is a relief to those who love him, for they
know he has now returned to health. (p. 176)

What Grier and Cobbs refer to as “relief” looked and sounded

more like a profound relishing I perceived in the audience during
several viewings of the movie. However, this type of “delicious”
revenge, actualizing white fears of the resurrection of a modern-
day Nat Turner, is so taboo that even Peele had reservations about
his ending. In fact, his original ending, included as an extra on the
DVD of the film, is a conventional response to black rage (Pond,
2018): Chris is arrested and incarcerated, his only reward being
that he rediscovers his authentic self. Thank goodness Peele ulti-
mately and bravely settled on the finale depicted in the final cut,
where rage is understood as a liberating reaction to oppression.
And for moviegoers like this writer, who delighted in this bril-
liant, stereotype-busting, racially insightful film, the cherry on top
is that Chris’s boy, Rod, saves the day, using his TSA training to
transform himself into a sophisticated sleuth. It bears mentioning
that the TSA, which appears to employ a disproportionately large
percentage of African-Americans, labors under public contempt
(e.g., see Berman, 2014) akin to the complaints of inefficiency
often laid at the feet of another civil service agency that histori-
cally hired African-Americans, the Post Office (Boustan & Margo,
2009; United States Postal Service, 2012). In the case of Rod, as
FILM NOTES 235

with many African Americans, “You take what you get, and make
the best of it.” Because, after all, as Rod so emphatically declares
in the final scene of Get Out, “I am T - S - Mother Fuckin’ - A
. . . . I handle shit!”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Immediately before this essay went to press, Jordan Peele won
awards for Best Director and his film Get Out for Best Feature at the 33rd Independent
Spirit Awards on March 3, 2018. The following night, March 4, Peele won the Oscar
for Best Original Screenplay at the 90th Academy Awards.

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BRYAN K. NICHOLS