WisCon 42 Panel Writeups: "Get Out" and Black Horror

Aug. 23rd, 2018 03:17 pm
justira: A purple, gender-ambiguous unicorn pony in the style of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. (lady business)
[personal profile] justira posting in [community profile] ladybusiness
When I was at Wiscon 42 I took over 13,000 words of notes. That is not a typo. Thirteen thousand. And since I took so many notes, I thought I would write up the panels I attended as well as the four panels I was actually on. Let's go!

I attended:
I was a panelist on:


Sorry about the huge delay and long break in getting these out! In June I lost my job, then had surgery, spent July job hunting, and somewhere in there started a company to make a fully customizable reading tracking app named Liberry. I have a job again now, and can get back to work here at Lady Business! Woo!

This was one of the panels where I kept track of speakers, but unless something is in quotation marks everything here is paraphrased/summarized. When I attribute lines to the audience, they may be combinations of different speakers — I didn't keep explicit notes on that aspect. All errors and misrepresentations are my own. My own thoughts on the panel and the movie are at the end, past the transcript.

The panel description lists the panelists as Tananarive Due (moderator), Chesya Burke, Alex Jennings, and Sheree Renée Thomas; however, Sheree Renée Thomas did not make it.





Tananarive: When did we decide we wanted to see Get Out?

Tananarive: When I first saw the sunken place in the trailer, let alone seeing a black protagonist.

Alex: The trailer for me as well, and seeing comedians going for something other than laughs.

Chesya: I wasn't interested in the trailer because I was afraid he would drop the ball. Horror, especially when it comes to race, drops the ball so often. Everyone around me being excited did help. "I walked into the theatre like, oh god here we go again— or well here we go the first time."

Tananarive: For more about black horror, Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman wrote Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. There's Candyman, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Blacula, and Tales from the Hood. Night of the Living Dead is kind of an accident here, the white creator kept the black protagonist.

Tananarive: How does black horror help us process horror and how did you get into it?

Tananarive: I got my horror love from my mother, who tied horror to social justice losses and trauma. She was an activist and wore glasses because of being hit with tear gas at a protest.

Chesya: I also got it from my mom, but not real horror like serial killers. Horror is not about escape, like it is for white people. It's about relation to what real trauma is, relating to characters when they're scared, aren't sure what to do, or can't process what's wrong in their lives. It isn't fearful like it is for white people. Also, you can see white people do the most ridiculous shit and get murdered. That's not a good thing, but it's entertaining for us.

Alex: I feel like horror came to me. I've had anxiety and stress dreams since I was two years old. I saw the black characters handled in ways that were unfair, like in Nightmare on Elm Street 3. The gold standard for a while was Candyman. We really get something out of enacting it with our own voices and experiences.

Tananarive: Get Out does not come out of nowhere. Go back to the birth of Hollywood: The Birth of a Nation. It's not classically considered horror, but I think it is. It was the biggest film in Hollywood from 1913 until Snow White in the 1930s, and was the reigning propaganda for a generation, containing lynchings and accusations of rape. Look at how quick people are at calling the police on black men especially. We are outside the national. Look at Du Bois's The Comet. Jordan Peele is deliberately using the imagery of a black man and a white woman because it is so powerful and has such a history.

Tananarive: Coming at interracial dating is not the point of the film. What is the point of the film? What is Peele trying to accomplish with the black man/white woman imagery? To what degree was he successful?

Alex: Get Out is part of a wave of general realization that race relations are not as healthy, and that the fractious nature of race relations has not decreased, as much as we like to think. The work was very much informed by actual fears that black people have every single day. Doors closing in your face. Losing control of your body in an instant. That white people you know will turn on you.

Chesya: I really agree with that. The idea that black men ascend to the status of dating and marrying white women has not been interrogated in terms of how it affects the community as a whole. Part of Get Out is Peele coming to terms for himself with what this means for him. You get to that status, how do you relate to your community? Part of his [ed. My notes are unclear if this is Peele or the protagonist Chris, but I'm interpreting it as Chris] community was being lost, with his focus on a relationship that is unhealthy. How does one find solace in this and have what we desire? What does it look like for the community and the individual? I'm glad Peele did this with horror, because horror allows the grotesque, fear, anger.

Tananarive: He goes to meet the parents after dating only four months, that's already scary! It's too early!

Tananarive: The question of allyship is very important. We need allies. We are on this boat together. An example that's common in black experience but not in white: I was in the gift shop, and my phone buzzed with an expected text. I reached for the phone, but instinctively stopped because I didn't want to dig in my purse unsupervised in a shop. Art is a way to show that feeling of exposure and isolation. Is Get Out helpful in helping allies understand these issues of isolation and mistrust? Is it for whites or for blacks or for both?

Chesya: I'm an eternal pessimist. It is very possible that Get Out is universal in its message. But it's practical to believe that while it's entertaining for both black and white audiences, the message is lost on white people. White people have called it not horror or not scary! I read a response on Facebook from a white man, and his first response was that it wasn't scary, what's the big deal? Only, a month later he realized it wasn't scary to him, and that's the point. I told him, you were willing to think about it for a month. Most people won't put in the work the movie asks of the audience.

Audience: White folks said it wasn't scary. It's horrifying, but it's about the disconnect in seeing the protagonist as a human being. If you see Chris as human, then it's scary. The comments are very revealing.

Alex: The movie was successful in what it was trying to do because it didn't purport to untangle or fully explicate race relations connected to those fears all at once. Peele was savvy that white and black audiences would see different movies. But in the crossover, he moved the needle. We want an aggregation of that effect until we can come to something new.

Chesya: One of the discussions was among and about white feminists. What was the defining moment when you were like ,"YES!"? When he killed her and the movie ended. The rallying moment for all horror movies is when you slay the monster. White feminists saw the humanity in the monster, rather than the humanity in the man. She as a woman is being brutalized— but she's been hunting black men for years. She's monstrous and a monster. Why are we unwilling to acknowledge that when it's in our face?

Audience: In America we can't see white femininity as monstrous even though it's been a vehicle for white supremacy. In the play Dutchman a white woman kills a black man on a train.

Tananarive: I have waking to do myself. When someone gets in our face we want to flinch— but we shouldn't look away. I just saw a post about a rift in feminism between white feminists and black women. There's a tradition of racism. If it comes to choosing between white women, no matter who they are, versus black bodies, the tendency is to choose your own. Is Peele hard on white women? Peele says Missy is the mastermind, but she married into the family. Everyone else was raised into this, but she chose this. Peele, having been raised by a white woman and dating many white women in Hollywood, had been isolated. It's not about his wife, but he is forcing white women to look at themselves. The father gets a lot of microaggressions, but Missy does the weaponizing, and the girlfriend weaponizes her sexuality and her tears. Earlier in the movie her tears convince Chris not to leave and save himself.

Chesya: When she's on the phone with his friend, there's a switch from ignorant to monster. [ed. At this point my notes just say "Barbecue woman!", still attributed to Chesya, and I have no idea what this is about. Is it the woman who touches Chris? An autocorrect? Sorry about this!]

Audience: Can we talk about the black heroes in Get Out?

Chesya: I'm disappointed in the portrayal of black women. In reality black women are in the streets, doing the work. This relates back to the earlier idea that black women don't like black men because they date white women. Peele shows some negative imagery and stereotypes of black women.

Alex: I'm impressed by the use of the buddy. It's Lil Rel but he's also there in a crunch (back to comedians doing other stuff). I'm glad Peele did not go with the more realistic original ending.

Tananarive: Being subsumed by the colour blue rather than the colour black. Given the critique of black cops, Peele could have shown more of the strength of Georgina. She was the only one who could fight it off without outside help. A student asked me why it was so easy for Chris to find the box of photographs. Peele says he thinks Georgina put it there. He had an idea in his head about Georgina that didn't make it to the screen, or not clearly enough. It's embedded there but could have been amplified.

Audience: Get Out clearly shows microaggressions as precursors to greater/worse things. White people don't see this, they live in a different reality.

Chesya: We are living in an active horror movie right now.

Audience: Code switching is used in the movie to show something isn't right.

Chesya: What we don't find in the main character's life is black women. Black women are often the ones that show people what is the right path. Chris didn't have a mother to show him the right path. Black womanist fears were not instilled in him, so he missed a lot of the cues of things that were weird or wrong or scary. You can write things and you don't realize what kind of story you're writing. Peele didn't realize that he was realistically showing how Chris was lost because of the lack of black women in his life.

Charlie Jane Anders, in the Audience [ed. I was sitting next to her]: Peele's next project is Lovecraft Country. What are the values of going back to that?

Alex: It's similar value to reclaiming Shakespeare and fixing his stereotypical and racist portrayals. I was very impressed by that in The Ballad of Black Tom.

Audience: People don't think the white woman should have been killed. White liberals seeing the backlash to this sentiment is a learning moment.

Tananarive: She smiles when he's strangling her and she smiles because she made him as bad as her. So he stopped. He leaves her to a slow death.

Audience: Regarding black men as heroes, what about the friend being a TSA agent whose whole job is to discriminate?

Tananarive: You meant that as a joke, because no one respects the skill of TSA agents.

Audience: British black actors get more respect in a very American movie.

Alex: British and American experiences are pretty universal.

Tananarive: Anti-blackness is global.

Audience: Speaking of killing the white woman: Would it have been better if he actively killed her?

Chesya: Not killing her is showing his humanity, which you really need for black characters. It's very important for black artists and people to push against and reject white people's ideologies. White people have killed millions and stayed heroes. Chris can kill one woman and stay a hero.

Audience: The story that most don't touch on is the lesbian story, which is how Georgina ended up in the house. Maybe she didn't have a black woman to guide her either, and that's how she fell in?

Audience: Lovecraft was a trash human but now we can steal all his stuff.

Audience: Seeing Georgina was amazing.

Alex: There's a great sense of loss to having just the tip of Georgina's story, which could have been a whole film. It's very little screentime for a very important character.

Audience: For similar movies with persistent horror there's The People Under the Stairs. Even if they get out they still live in a white supremacist society. It's not like Godzilla, it's relatable and frighteningly realistic. It speaks to the layers of horror watching a movie that is in some ways speculative fiction but in other ways is very realistic. The first victim in the movie was not fiction. People do get disappeared, especially people of colour.

Alex: Finding a mode of figuration is the speculative fiction I love most. That sense of oppressive horror really sold the movie.

Tananarive: Tales from the Hood has layers too: the horror is the human horror and the remedy is the supernatural.

Chesya: Both movies are about the power that white people have and how they wield it. In Get Out the cop stops him and it's about the system he's in. Even after he escapes the house and they don't control his body, the system still controls his mind. Whether in the house or outside there is no freedom for them.

Audience: There is no accountability for the injustices white people do. Horror gives a place for those consequences.

Chesya: What do we know after the movie ends? Do they save the others? Does anything change? Are there real consequences for the monsters?

Audience: What about the role of other people of colour, like the Asian man at the auction, or gay men, and other intersectionality? There's stuff like Skeleton Key.

Tananarive: Peele said the Asian question is one of the most common ones he gets. The character isn't Asian American; he's Japanese. You have to be careful with film because it can come off heavier than expected. In this case it's the idea of the model minority, more willing and able to be accepted as white. This was intentional by Peele.

Audience: What does the film allows us to do now? Break culture. Steve Bannon wants to break culture to make something new, and there's the white woman getting arrested for petting another white woman's dog without permission. Does this film break culture enough that we can see the rise of black speculative fiction?

Tananarive: Get Out is part of a one-two punch with Black Panther, and they're upholding careers. We're already seeing ripples. [ed. In the context of black creators getting more opportunities, Tananarive named a project she's working on that she asked not be publicized.] Many people I know are getting chances, scripts, books, etc. Before, if you tried to pitch black horror they'd be like, "You mean like Beloved?"

Audience: I'm anxious about white cannibalization of black culture and black horror. Cultural appropriation is tied into the body in a literal way.

Tananarive: Even when the father is showing off his travel collection you get the hint of cultural appropriation, then later it's literal with bodies. But it's lost over many people's heads.

Audience: We've seen black horror about the problems of being black in a white culture. When it stops short of consequences and restitution, does it belong to other speculative fiction?

Alex: That's more like fantasy or afrofuturism.

Audience: What was being stolen was their bodies, not their minds. Eyes, muscles. There's assumptions there about black physicality as opposed to anything of value coming from their minds.

Tananarive: The NFL protests, the coveting of black bodies and labour, music, fashion. It's always about the bodies, policing and controlling bodies. It's never gone away and it's a lot more obvious to a lot of people now.

Alex: In fiction often the body is the spirit, so there are elements of the spirit they are trying to harvest, like the artist's eye. It's not just the bodies they want, but just enough so you don't have to deal with what it's actually like to be black.

Chesya: It's always been about what we can produce. Black people can be taken and stolen and used while getting rid of everything that reminds us that we are taking and stealing them. These are good liberal white people, not racists. They voted for Obama twice! They are not the bad ones. But even the good white people are our monsters. How can we get rid of them when we can't even kill them for harming us onscreen?





This panel was amazing and a great privilege to attend. I am distinctly unqualified to talk about the aspects of this film that speak to the black experience (aka most of the movie), but there is one huge theme of the movie that really felt directed at me, and that was all about the failure of allyship and intersectionality.

This movie is about many things, and white vs black audiences will have definitely seen different movies. But I feel like the allyship issues were part of the movie I and people like me were explicitly intended to see.

In the movie, we see several levels of allyship failure. Earlier in the movie we see Rose's failure to smooth the way for Chris vis-à-vis her white family — back when we thought she was an ally. As Chris goes on to interact with her family, these allegedly non-racist, Obama-voting white liberals commit innumerable microaggressions. One of the most powerful moments of this failure was when Missy was rude to Georgina. This was a huge moment of a white liberal woman failing to be an ally to a black woman.

Another level of failed allyship in the film comes from the Japanese man and the blind man — both bidders on Chris's body. The panel addressed the issue of the issue of the Japanese man, Tanaka. But what the panel did not cover in much detail was Jim Hudson, the blind art dealer who wins the auction for Chris's body. He has a chilling block of dialogue with Chris when Chris is undergoing mental preparation for the surgery:
Chris: Why us? Why black people?

Jim Hudson: *Laughs* Who knows? People want a change. Some people wanna be stronger, faster, cooler. But don't— please don't lump me in with that. You know I could give a shit what— what colour you are. No. What I want is deeper. I want your eye, man. I want those things you see through.

Hudson covets both Chris's physical seeing body and his metaphorical artist's eye — something Hudson recognized he himself did not have by virtue of his own talent. He is willing to pillage a black body and brain — the self of a man who is likewise oppressed by the kyriarchy, a fact Hudson acknowledges in an earlier scene — to set himself further ahead. Advancing himself at Chris's cost, Hudson is a failed ally of the deepest extreme. Billing himself as race-blind, he seems to think that Chris should understand his struggle and lift him up, while completely failing to lift up Chris in turn.

Then there is the queer element of the movie. It's impossible to tell if Rose was actually queer or not, but she may have been weaponizing her queerness as she had every other aspect of her identity. Either way, she was certainly leveraging Georgina’s queerness, which brings me to another layer of failed allyship: characters’ marginalizations being used against them in the context of their fellow marginalized people. This is echoed in Chris’s interactions with the servants, in that he expects solidarity but is instead treated like an outsider within his own marginalized group. Just as Georgina is treated terribly by someone she perceives to be a fellow queer woman, Chris is treated terribly by people he perceives to be fellow black people.

Having written up this panel and rewatched the movie in the process, I really came to appreciate Peele's screenplay and his very precise use of language. Someone in the audience mentioned code-switching, and upon rewatch this was remarkable, especially in the places it failed to happen. Chris's bafflement at Georgina, Walter, and Andre/Logan's failure to code-switch when in private conversation with Chris were things the movie made clear were off, but I didn't realize how off until I rewatched the movie after this panel. Seeing the grandparents interact with Chris while inhabiting Walter and Georgina's bodies was incredible upon rewatch, when their speech patterns made total sense. The attention to racially and generationally coded language in this movie is phenomenal.

This year I have had the enormous privilege of watching Black Panther (my post on it), Get Out, A Wrinkle in Time (my post on it), and Sorry to Bother You (post soon!), and it's been amazing to have so much fantastic black speculative fiction coming out of Hollywood. I found Tananarive's statement, "we are outside the national" vis-à-vis black people and Birth of a Nation very powerful. Birth of a Nation, the first Hollywood blockbuster, placed black people as firmly outside, marginalized to the point of expulsion from national belonging. With Black Panther — one of the biggest blockbusters in history and coming out of that same industry — we are given a vision of a nation black people DO belong to and own, and how this fantastical nation relates to the black people outside its borders. A Wrinkle in Time offers black people not only a country, but a universe. And Sorry to Bother You brings the dialogue back around to intersections of classism and the appropriation of only the most desirable aspects of blackness. These are huge, fraught conversations— but they're happening, right here and right now.

Thank you to the panelists for a truly wonderful time, and to WisCon 42 for hosting it. Tananarive Due has a class on Get Out at www.sunkenplaceclass.com.
Tags:

Learn about Lady Business!

A group of fans, reviewers, and critics who like art and media. Hugo Award Winners2. (We really like Hugo Award recommendations.) You can support us on Patreon, read our past work by month or by topic, but please note our comment policy. Learn more »



twitter icon syndication icon


Powered by Dreamwidth Studios