Get Out has many strong visual metaphors and recurring motifs throughout that make it such a multi-layered and complex piece made better with each rewatch. One of these is the importance of the camera and the act of looking. As Lenika Cruz points out in her writings for The Atlantic on the film, “Jordan Peele uses the sense of sight to amplify imbalances of power and control – imbalances often drawn along racial lines”, and so it is worth analysing such lines of sight throughout the film and from whom they come and to who they are directed towards. The first comes from Chris and his camera. Being a photographer, Chris carries his camera with him for a large portion of the film and throughout the entirety of the party at the Armitage’s. It acts as his respite from the party, using it as an excuse to ignore the uncomfortable advances by Rose’s dad. But not only does the camera act as a figurative escape for Chris but it also becomes a literal one when he discovers that the flash on his phone camera has the ability to unearth the secrets behind the Armitage family.
At the party, when he snaps a photo of Andre it triggers the real man behind the face to come forwards shouting at him to ‘Get Out’ and save himself. Not only this, but it also saves Chris at the end when he is able to use the flash to trigger the real man behind the grandpa who then shoots Rose before himself. So, not only does the camera act as Chris’ escape from being subjected to racist remarks during the party, but also from the life and death situation at the end. This importance of the camera seems significant in this era of the Black Lives Matter movement, and amongst racial strife in America where the use of cameras is so significant in capturing the injustices that black people face. Often times a camera is used to reveal the oppression and prejudice that black people still face, and in a sense, this is mirrored in Get Out, with the camera revealing the true racial hierarchies within the Armitage family and helping Chris to discover what they do to black people. Lenika Cruz also suggests that this trope of the triggering flash was hard to watch without “thinking of how important camera phones and video recordings have been for many African Americans experiencing police violence”.
And so, because this act of looking and seeing through the lens of the camera is so vital for the black characters in the film, it is interesting then that the reason the blind art dealer wants to be implanted into Chris’ body is for his eyes: “I want those things you see through”. This is another form of looking within the film that is significant. He wants to take away the one strength that Chris has, his ability to truly see and discover what is happening around him. But even more troubling, Peele is suggesting that he wants to take over Chris’ body for just his eyes, without thinking about what it actually means to be African American. Taking the advantages of his eyes and for what he believes is a superior physicality without even thinking about the oppression and systemic racism that will come with that. Perhaps what we would call a form of appropriation of Chris. He may not believe in himself that this has anything to do with race, in fact he even says that he doesn’t care what colour he is, but it is this denial and post-racial attitude that is specifically the problem that Peele is suggesting. Even though he may not be doing it for those reasons, his complicity with the racist procedure, makes him part of the problem, and this relates to the “invisibility of racial exploitation among ‘liberal’ whites in America”, as Alison Landsberg puts it.
To conclude, the motif of the camera and the act of looking is very important in Get Out, it is used to portray the underlying problems of a post-racial America as well as the separation that Chris feels from the rest of the people around him, emphasising the prejudices that many modern American communities still hold against his racial identity.
Sources
Landsberg, A., 2018. Horror vérité: politics and history in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Continuum, 32:5, 629-64.
Cruz, L., 2017. In Get Out, the Eyes Have It. The Atlantic, [online] Available at: <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/03/in-get-out-the-eyes-have-it/518370/> [Accessed 13 November 2021].
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