Get out and To Kill a Mockingbird

Class essay on film psychoanalysis

Instrutor: Christopher Vitale

Concept and Key words:

the oppositional gaze , double consciousness, hook , Du Bois, Freud

Racial conflict has been one of the major themes of American cinema and has been

brought to the screen at various times. What I have noticed is that nowadays although black male characters are made relatively less threatening to whites, they are still portrayed in a racist manner. Unlike classic Hollywood films that portrayed black characters as evil and white characters as justice, contemporary black characters in most films still play a role that serves in a white society in a more subtle way. I would like to talk about To Kill a Mockingbird and Get Out, as they both reflect racial discrimination in a white-dominated society. While Harper Lee's To

Kill a Mockingbird directly reflects black males are viewed as a threat to white females. Jordan Peele's Get Out has a more profound insight into the situation of black people who are playing the rules of white society. In this paper, I will analyze how these two films portray black characters both male and female in different perspectives with the oppositional gaze, double-consciousness and the black spectatorship that invoked in the films.

In the film Get Out, the black protagonist Chris discovers a conspiracy by the white

people of the town to replace black brains with white brains in an attempt to perpetuate their own lives in black bodies while he is visiting the parents of his white girlfriend Rose. I think the director Peele is likely to demonstrate whiteness as a threat which is represented in the minds of black people in today's society. This film begins with a black man walking through a white neighborhood at night, he calls his friend and complains the middle-class white suburbs are really creepy and crazy. I think it’s so ironic for blacks, it is the white community that is unsafe.

This scene in this movie contrasts with the traditional racial narrative of blacks robbing whites. Director Peele explains why he wanted this plot for the opening credits, "I think it's important for all viewers to feel the fear inside this black man at the beginning. ...... It's one of those experiences that African-Americans don't know about, but it's always there. When you don't fit in, or feel out of place, you feel a danger." (Jeffries, 2018) I think by directly taking the audience through the perspective from a black in the beginning, it opens a brand new perspective on white society.

In the film To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom is also a black man who is accused of raping a

white femle – Mayella. His lawyer Atticus, a white man who reveals the truth to the court that Mayella had a crush on Tom, lured him into the house and seduced him, but he refused. The scene was witnessed by Mayella's father, who in a fit of rage injured his daughter and accused Tom of raping her. The main idea that the director wants to make is pointed out by Atticus by saying a famous line "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it”. This is the reason for Atticus, as a white male to help Tom. And he also brings up an important topic about people’s

different perspectives to others based on their identity and race.

Although To Kill a Mockingbird and Get Out both reflect the directors’ thoughts on the way out for black male, I prefer the latter one that lets the audience get through the eyes of a black male rather than a white male. Despite the fact that To Kill a Mockingbird directly points out the innocent Tom is framed by white female, the character Atticus is portrayed as a lawyer— a hero who fights for justice with Tom. He is the one who is glorified by his characters. I believe that Harper Lee's limitations with story as a white woman are evident in the way she pins the solution for black people aligned with white noble men like Atticus. Although the author took a

stand against racism, she did not fundamentally reject the idea of racism. The hero in the film is still white, the black male is just more than a character in the film.

While on the other hand, Get Out is a film directed by a black director that directly

presents the mind of black people to the audience through black eyes. It is not made for the pleasure of the white male spectator. I think the benefit of being a black director or a black spectator is that, by not accepting or taking what has been presented in Hollywood movies, they are more likely to avoid taking these messages as references in the future. In addition, the black spectator maintained a critical distance to the film than most people. That is there is no way as a black person to easily take the role and be absorbed into that fiction from a racist film that is hard

for non-black people to discover.

The concept of the Oppositional Gaze, is introduced by a feminist writer, bell hooks,

which involves the right to look as a type of looking relation with resistance against the repression of a black person's right to look. In her essay “the oppositional gaze”, she argues that in the past the slave owners would punish black people just becasue they are making eye-contact with owners. The oppositional gaze is a tool that allow black people use to break the power dynamic in a white male dominated spectatorship. In the opening of her essay, she mentions how the children are afraid to look at their parents when they are punished by them yet the children are fascinated by gaze. From my understanding, I think she points out that the gaze is not only aligned with the dominant group in power but is a more flexible way with the power looking that can come from the suppressed group.

Get Out has applied a lot with the relationship between looking and power. Director Peel gives Chris a super interesting identity as a photographer which I think the camera empowered him by applying the oppositional gaze to the white people. He is using his camera in a situation as a shield or a weapon to reclaim his power. When he notices he is surrounded by all white people (and black people with white brains), he seems confused and afraid that he lost his power as a human being. In the auction where the white people are everywhere, Chirs is holding his camera and taking pictures of them from a great distance. He is trying to capture the truth, he is

observing them with his camera. The film also shows some of Chirs’ photos that he took about black lives. The urban street and urban spaces that he has in his camera were so real and immediately reminded me of some street scenes in brooklyn when I was watching the film. He is interested in capturing something real which is oppositional from the white family which is full of lies and disguises the real.

However, Direct Peel depowered Chris at the same time because he is objectified and

fetishized under the gaze of white people. Rose's family only sees Chris for his physical body, instead of his characteristics. Especially, during the auction, a large photograph of him is placed next to the host to represent him as a selling object. The audience is sitting under the stage, bidding for his body. The dominant white gaze comes from everywhere at Chirs during that moment. Same in the To Kill a Mockingbird, when Tom is sitting in the middle of court. He is like Chirs who is in that auction surrounded by people who have more power than him. Although Tom is not an object to sell, he has been treated as guilty as a prisoner who does not have equal rights as normal people do. Both Chris and Tom are gazed at by the white people who are in power, in control of their lives in different situations.

Despite the real world still full of white supremacy, I think the invoking of the black

spectatorship and the oppositional gaze in the movie somehow balanced the power between people from different races a little bit. hook in her essay also mentions that “When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintain white supremacy, To state at the televation, or mainstream movies, to engage it’s image, was to engage its negation of black representation.” From my understanding I think she suggests that

the knowledge of the white supremacy in the movies is what fostered the possibility of an oppositional black gaze. What I don’t understand is the second-half part about being engaged in the image on the television. That is I agree black people are critical about the mainstream media, however at the same time it’s detached them from the real world, we are still living in a white male dominated world. And the real situation is hard to change.

As a non-white asian girl, I feel I was forced to reviced the image a lot from the meida

about the western world, the current trend and the stereotype of being success. I am thinking of Chirs as a young boy who is sitting in front of TV, has also been forced to view the world without any active participant in it. When he talks about his traumatic experience with his mother that she was hit by a car and left on the side of the road, he was watching TV during that time. He is not aware of what happened and did nothing about it. And furthermore, when Chirs met

Rose’ mother who hyperzied him, he was unable to act, frozened and sank with the sofa into the darkness. The director shows us through a really interesting perspective when the image of Rose’mother becomes smaller and smaller, eventually turning into the same size as the TV screen.

From my observation, I found Chris’ action is restricted every time when the screen

shows up. Although he has the power to gaze at the screen, it’s not a real power in reality that allows him to change the situation. Ironically, his situation is getting worse and he loses more power when he is staring at the screen. Moreover, when Chirs is taking a picture of another black person in the auction through his phone, the flash from the phone destabilizes that man's action. I think director Peele is likely to show the TV screens and the phone as an artificial munitalation

which maintains white supremacy and also depowers people who are watching it.

The relationship between looking and power is complicated, when I put what Director

Peele says in his interview " You can ask a white person to see the world through the eyes of a black person for an hour and a half." with what Atticus says in the To kill a mockingbird about one will understand another person “until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it”. This twist "seeing" is strongly and strangely lateralized in the Get Out that a blind man Jim in the audition wants to literally see through the eyes of Chris. The rest of the white people literally climb inside of black’s skin and walk around it.

Georgina in the Get Out is a mammy whose body is taken by Rose's grandmother. On the one hand, Dicrot Peel points out the double consciousness this character is fighting inside of her body. When Chirs met Georgina in the room, their conversation was so unnatural. While Chirs told her he was not trying to snitch, Georgina didn't get what the meaning of the word “snitch” as a white female who is using a really former grammar in the conversation. Then Chirs told her he was getting nervous with too many white people, Gerogina hesitated and dropped a single tear and replied “no..no...no..no, that is not my experience.” I think the director here is likely to show

the audience that Geogina’s denial of racism because she is controlled by white consionces, however the tear is the sign of the resistance as a black female.

On the other hand I think Dicter Peel is also referring to the kinds of balck female

stereotypes that are rampant throughout history of cinema. hook also bring this up in her essay about the black maid character in the cinema that "Black woman have been mothers without children (Mammies -who can never forget the silckening spectacle of Hattie MacFaniels waiting on the simpering Vivien Leigh hand and foot and enquiring like a ninny". The character of Georgina clearly embodies the mammy stereotype from the old classic hollywood movie. I think one of the reasons for Peele's use of Georgina's body as a container for Rose's grandmother is to

show how black women are often invisible in films.

At the same time, Calpurnia in To Kill a Mockingbird is also a black female housekeeper in Atticus' home. She can read, write and has excellent grammar. She chooses to speak in a different manner with white people than she does with black people. She is described in the film as "Led a modest double life... the idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel on. to say nothing of her having command of two language” Although her body hasn’t been taken away by the white female. The way she chooses to speak and her lifestyle makes her no different than Georgina. So Calpurnia’s “double life” matches with W.E.B Du Bois’s “double consciousness” in his book The Souls of Black Folk. He describe double

consciousness as:

“a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder...”

I believe Calpurnia knows how she is viewed by others. She has internalized the racism both within and outside her community, and she is careful to not offend in either world.

In conclusion, I think it’s important to know and listen to people's voices from different groups and try to think across the barrier of race and gender. The biggest common in both films is to encourage people to see and critique the world by realizing how white supremacy has already affected people imperceptibly though the mass media. Both films have demenstate the stereotype impression for black female character as a mammy, the black male character as potential crimist or an object that is dehumanized. And also the struggle with double-consciousness that people are fighting and balancing inside of their mind. The film Get Out gives the audiences a brand new perspective through a balck’s male eye of the white

community, although the main character Chris had been hypnotized and controlled by the white, he has a critical mind with what’s happening around him. His oppositional gaze at the white family helps him get out, to escape and maintain a safe distance from the white-consiciouness. I would like to use hook’s suggestion from her essay as my ending sentences. That is the importance of a critique practice which will provide us with different ways to think about the black subjectivity and female spectatorship. Always be critical with what we have received from the media.