Volume 2 - Get Out and the Conversations We Need To Have

Last week we had some fun with some horror movies, this week we're starting with horror again. (If you haven't met me, you'll learn to expect that they'll come up a few times.) Gotta admit though - I'm really nervous about writing this piece. Based on who I am and what I've experienced in life, I can't possibly know what I'm talking about here. I thought about that a lot when I was considering this double feature, and I almost didn't do it. But sometimes the conversations we need to have are not the most comfortable ones, and sometimes the things we mean to say are more important than the mistakes we might make trying to say them.

That said, I'll leave one last warning up front. The things I am about to say will be said in the best way I can based on my experiences and the knowledge I have from my life. If the terms I use are insensitive or poorly chosen, please let me know. I am trying to do the right thing, I'm just not sure I'm the person to do it.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

I don't need to spend a lot of time talking about the movie we're starting with this week; everyone else in the film world and lots of audiences have already done that for me. It's one of the most well-reviewed movies of the year, and it's a flick I think will stick around for a long, long time.

Get Out

2017, Directed by Jordan Peele

I've already put my cards on the table, so I'll say this in a real simple way: I love Get Out a lot. I think it's one of the best horror movies ever made, and I'm not the kind of person who says something new is one of the best somethings ever made often. I buy new jeans more often than I find new favorites, and y'all should see some of the ratty jeans I wear. This is not what I do. And yet, here I am, doing it.

If you're one of the people out there that hasn't seen it or doesn't know about it yet, here's the quick summary of what you need to know about the film. A young African-American man, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), goes to the home of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to meet her family. Things there...are not what they seem.

That's it. That's all I want to say. You may be picturing something like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner - a film Peele lists as an influence on his film (more on that in a bit) - but there's a whole lot more "not what they seem" in this film than a difficult Spencer Tracy and a racist maid. The biggest joy in watching Get Out is seeing how it tackles this racial divide and finding out what the twist Peele has waiting for us is. 

The central theme of Get Out is best summed up by Peele's own words. In an interview to promote the film for Crave Online, Peele was asked what scares him the most. His answer, posted below, has a lot to do with the movie I picked for this double feature.

People. I think, and it goes to this whole horror thesis I hope I get to explore, but there's nothing that's scarier than what people are capable of when we get together. The way we can use fear, the way we can scapegoat, the way we can value those closer to ourselves more than we value people further from ourselves, or the other. I think human beings together are capable of the greatest things on Earth but also capable of the biggest atrocities.

Get Out hammers home that point. It manages to do so in an entertaining manner, balancing the injustices people are capable of with impressive comic and dramatic moments and a neat little horror/sci-fi twist. So, where can we go from there? Here's what I was thinking when I started looking for a double feature partner for this one.

• Peele has coined Get Out, and the next several films he plans to make, as "social thrillers." One of the coolest things I've seen in a long time is that, ahead of the release of Get Out, the Brooklyn Academy of Music allowed him to program a series of films entitled The Art of the Social Thriller. Through this 12 film series, he paired his film up with greats like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Rear Window (my personal favorite movie ever!), The 'Burbs, and more. Go ahead and click on that link and look at that list of films. It's beautiful, man. So...I couldn't use any of those films here. Dude stole my thunder. Thanks a lot, Jordan.
• As the quote above states, the scariest thing about Get Out is the human element of it all. At the center of the film are people. People who don't think Chris' life is valuable. People who get together and have their own way. Unfortunately, we need another movie that features people like that - even if it makes the double feature a little less pleasant.
• Before Get Out, Peele was most known for his time in comedy. As the co-star of Comedy Central's groundbreaking Key & Peele, Peele spent five years making people laugh and pushing the limits of comedy, while also dealing with plenty of issues like racism and homophobia. He wasn't the person you'd expect to make a movie that challenges what we think and what we believe about each other - and yet his willingness to challenge viewers helped him become the perfect person for that film. We need another director like that.
• Above all else, the thing that excites me about Get Out is how much it got people who had seen it talking. I can't sum that all up in one bullet point, so let's have a quick personal talk before we get to our other movie.

Hi. My name's Mike, and I am a white man. More than that, I'm a white man who grew up in a place where there were only white people. It was the '80s and the '90s, and that was just how things were there. For the most part, it still is.

The only black - that's the word we used then, because that's the word we were taught - people I knew were on TV or in sports. I never really thought about them as different than me, and I was never really told they were different than me, but the older I got I just started to notice that people around me - and thus, me - talked about them a little differently. And yeah, people used the n-word. It was thrown around in jokes sometimes, just because it could be. 

Perhaps the weirdest encounter of my life happened when I was a young adult. I had gone to college and stayed in my college town after graduation; I was now a "city boy." One day, I was home for a gathering with my extended family. I had a pair of black tennis shoes - cheap ones, I'm not the kind of guy who's rocking any Jordans - and for no reason, other than the fact I thought it didn't matter, I had replaced the worn out black shoelaces with some white ones. If this sounds like one of the smallest decisions I've ever made in my life, that's because that's what it was to me. Yet, as I wandered through a totally normal setting with people I've known my entire life, someone I was walking by said, our of nowhere, "Did you get those white shoelaces from one of the blacks over there?"

I still have no idea why the color of my shoelaces mattered, or how it represented the African-American community, and - I'll be honest - I was far too dumbfounded by the question to even reply to it.  I realize that this is one of the smallest incidents of racism in the history of racism - I've seen much worse, believe me - but it just struck me as the most bizarre comment I'd ever heard in my life. And it made me fully realize...that's how some people think when they've only learned from their own community. Sometimes they are taught things and they teach their children things and the cycle just goes on. And most of the time they don't even talk about it.

Nowadays, I work directly with people of many races and colors, but I still live a mere 25 miles from my hometown in a "city" of about 60,000 people on a school day. It's not a huge shift - this is still a 90%+ white community - but it's something. And when I talked to some of those people about Get Out, I got the biggest smile on my face. I was never in a place where we had actual conversations about race issues with someone, outside of the basic lessons about slavery and The Civil War we had in school. I don't blame my parents or close friends and family for that - I know all of them to be people who would stand up with the same opinions I have if they were confronted this issue - but it's so weird to look back and think about the unspoken beliefs people had back then. I wish we had more movies like this, movies that made us think about our belief systems and made us ask questions and start conversations about life.

Like I said, I know this is a totally white story about racism. But it's mine, and it makes me want to help people who might want to have these conversations get to that point. So let's get to that double feature....

The Intruder

1962, Directed by Roger Corman

I'm really excited that today's audiences have a film like Get Out that can get them talking about race issues. The film I wish I had seen when I was younger, that would have helped me to be more understanding of the dangers of groupthink and stereotypes, is Roger Corman's The Intruder.

Like Peele, Corman - a master of pulpy schlock that covered everything from Edgar Allan Poe to Crab Monsters - doesn't seem like the guy you'd expect to make a statement about how we live with each other and how minorities face challenges being accepted as who they are. Yet here he was in 1962, teaming up with author Charles Beaumont and a pre-Star Trek William Shatner, to create a film that tackled the white reaction to the integration of schools in the South without compromising one bit.

The Intruder is the story of Adam Cramer (Shatner), a young white man who rolls into a fictional town telling those he meets that he's a "social worker" and that he's "come to do what I can for the town." In fact, what he's come to do is stop the town from accepting a small group of African-American teenagers into its all white high school. And it really doesn't take him much work for him to get most of the white people in town on his side.

Bragging about his membership in the Patrick Henry Society (I googled it, it's real) and repeating "Whose law?" whenever someone reminds him that United States law has already decided that the schools will accept these students is enough to get Cramer in the door with most of the townspeople. We quickly see that they are generally opposed to integration, especially when it takes less than four minutes of the film before a little old lady drops a casual "nigger" in conversation. Much like my personal experience, she uses the term toward a white man who just happens to not be meeting her standards. This town is living that same belief that there's something different about white and black people - but unlike my childhood, this was a time when these comments were rarely held back.

While Cramer is busy giving speeches on the courthouse steps and reminding the town's richest man that "democracy is the collective will of the people," there seems to be only a couple of men in town who are willing to stand up against him. The guy I really like is Tom, the head of the town newspaper, who at one point admits to his wife that he is, in fact, in favor of the integration of schools. She responds with shock, because that's just not the way people in that town think, and when she asks him why he's never told her this he gives the perfect response to sum up his realization.

"Because I didn't know. I don't think I really knew til now. One thing Adam Cramer's done for us...he's made us face ourselves."

If this sounds a little like The Twilight Zone, that's because Beaumont - who adapted his own novel for Corman after the studios that bought the rights chickened out on making the film - wrote 22 episodes of that show and knew exactly how to point out the dark side of human nature. But there's no disclaimer from Rod Serling here; this is our world and our reality. As the film builds to a finale that's full of lies, threats, and all kinds of mob mentality, The Intruder becomes a gut-wrenching film to watch. 

Random note, because this post hasn't been long enough, I freakin' love this kid that co-starred in The Intruder. His name is Charles Barnes, and Corman picked him for a central role because he was a student and football player at a school that was integrated the previous year. He didn't bother finding an actor in Hollywood for the role, he just told Barnes to go with what he experienced and work from that. And the kid nails it. So good.

I don't think this would be an easy double feature to watch - you're definitely going to want to watch The Intruder first and end with Get Out, both for tone and timeline reasons - but I think it's an incredibly important one. Both Beaumont and Peele knew how dangerous people can be when they start thinking the wrong way, and both films can be necessary conversation starters.

I've never told that story about my shoelaces before. Partially because it's such a small incident, but also because it's just not comfortable to talk about these issues. Yet, the only way we can get stronger and smarter and braver in our world is to challenge ourselves to do it. Maybe watching The Intruder will help people see how things used to be, and maybe watching Get Out can help them see how things still are today. Maybe if we look at these things, and talk about these things, we can help change the lives of people who don't understand the racism that lives in their community. 

Maybe there are better ways to do it, but for me it's the movies that speak loudest. And if these movies can make me think more, it's my duty to recommend them to others too. That's a chance worth taking.