The idea of Whiteness in Get Out
Get Out shatters the myth of America as a post-racist country. Everything frightening, as everything funny, in Get Out comes from the fear that members of the former master race and the former slave race have for each other. Holmes notes that in this movie, the antagonists are not whites who hate blacks for their race. The director shows whites who love blacks and even envy them with scary, dangerous, and insensitive machines. It debunks the notion of an ideal culture of political correctness as if proclaiming that it is racist to treat someone positively just because of their skin color.
Get Out at first resembles, and somewhere directly parodies, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Stanley Kramer’s not the most outstanding but historically significant film about a girl who introduces her parents to a black groom. It was made exactly 50 years ago – when interracial marriage was a scandal and just stopped being a crime. Nowadays, it seems like a wildness from the past; however, the question still arises: “Has everything got better since then?”. In Kramer’s film, the nuance was that the parents were progressive liberals, but their daughter’s engagement to Sidney Poitier was a shock even for them. Peel corrects for the Obama era and takes the situation to the point of absurdity – Rose’s parents and their friends, elderly rich whites, go out of their way to show their openness. They praise Obama, talk about Jesse Owens and Tiger Woods, use awkward jargon, and almost start rapping. But all this, of course, only proves that the rift that separates the American people has not gone away; a beautiful fence has surrounded it.
Peele uses these minor, everyday incidents in Get Out to show how someone accidentally or intentionally makes another feel like an outsider. According to Grant, this creates an ever-increasing sense of hostility. The film’s strength is that it uses terrible moments to convey to the audience the truth about manifestations of racism. Peele’s film appeals both to people who have experienced racism and people who may not always understand that they are committing it.
Examples in film, television, or media where whiteness seems to be the default
Indeed, in many films, for a black hero to be recognized by the viewer, they need to have some impressive story. In turn, Syed asserts that white characters are interesting for the very fact of their existence. For example, films such as Jezebel (1938), Gone with the Wind (1939), Dixiana (1930), and Mississippi (1935) both mask and expose the capitalist exploitation of Africans. These films portray American labor through images of opulent plantations and dazzlingly wealthy white southern families. In these films, the rigidity of whiteness is maintained by interracial relationships. Whites dominate but are dependent on blacks, to the point where the actions of African-American characters on-screen serve as an expression of the emotions of white characters to maintain a restrained vision of the world of whiteness. Thus, black characters arouse the viewer’s interest, based on pity for them in these films.
An equally striking example is the film Green Book directed by Peter Farelli. One of the heroes is a black pianist with a conservatory education, elegant manners, and tastes. The other, white of Italian origin, on the contrary, is very simple and direct, straight to the point of rudeness. For Don to gain recognition in society, he does a tremendous amount of work on himself. At the same time, social principles do not allow him to live the ordinary life for whites. In turn, despite his many shortcomings and some lousy character, Tony is popular in his environment.
However, there are films where the directors go against Hollywood whiteness. Despite some criticism of acts of unjust racial oppression, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) is such a film. The film aims to fundamentally destroy the core function of Hollywood as the lifeblood of whiteness and white supremacy. Coogler’s work seems to be mainly about creating a Black Hollywood aesthetic. Thus, Black Panther raises the question of whether a black film can be a box office success.