If it's not in the frame,

it doesn't exist.

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Thinking about The Lost Boys  (1987) and its direct allusion to Peter Pan. More specifically, I'm pretty sure it's an allusion to Disney's version of Peter Pan. We have the obvious, titular lost boys, who are clearly represented by the vampire gang - a group of boys who have run away / been taken away from their families and refuse to grow up/old. Their resulting emotional immaturity also leads them to eschew all ethical/moral responsibility and disregard how their actions may affect others.

The fairground is Neverland, and Michael is obviously Michael, a boy drawn to the lost boys, who has to ultimately decide to go back home. Lucy, the mother, is Wendy, as fairly explicitly stated by Max, when he says that she was the one he wanted because "boys need a mother." Even Nanook, the family dog, is a pretty clear representation of Nana from Disney's animated film.

Now, the interesting question becomes who is Peter Pan? There are two main candidates: David, as the youthful leader of the lost boys who instigates their adventures and gives them eternal youth; and Max, the head vampire aka lost boy, who pursues Lucy aka Wendy in order to secure them a mother. I think that if we view Peter Pan and Captain Hook as foils in the sense that they are two sides of the same person, it makes sense for Max to actually be Captain Hook, while David is Peter Pan. Max is an adult, he doesn't participate in their adventures and, in fact, at times thwarts them, and he is the main villain our protagonists battle in the end. So if we accept that Captain Hook is Peter Pan's shadow side, then the fact that David and the lost boys are actually his 'children' makes sense.

I think this makes the grandpa the crocodile, who just kinda shows up and kills Captain Hook in the end. The only question that remains is, is Sam Tinker Bell? He is perceived as jealous when his mom and Max go on dates, but I'm not sure that's enough to substantiate that claim. The Frog brothers also remain unclassified, but I'm ok with that.

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Snow White vs the Evil Queen

Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) is, at its core, preoccupied with reflections and, through them, the act of looking and being looked at. The Evil Queen's magic mirror is, beyond the voice that it has in the fairy tale's oral retellings, also given a face.

The effect of this choice is that, while consulting her mirror, instead of looking at herself, the Queen is essentially looking at another’s face, which tells her (rather than showing her) who the most beautiful woman is. The Queen, then, cannot see herself at all, except through the mirror's judgment, as an object to be looked at and desired by others. She is thereby stripped of her subjectivity and becomes an object even to herself

When she asks the mirror for the name of the one who has replaced her, she is given the following response: “Lips red as the rose, hair black as ebony, skin white as snow.”  The Queen goes on to conclude, “Snow White!” The irony here is that Disney’s Queen, apart from being beautiful as she has to be according to the story, has skin that is quite paler than Snow White’s, lips equally as red, and hair just as black.

The only apparent distinction between the Queen and Snow White is that the Queen has a mature face, while Snow White has the pudgy cheeks of an infant. Yet this brief verbal description provides the Queen with the certainty of her step-daughter’s identity. The function of the mirror, then, rather than providing an objective view of her beauty, actually reflects the Queen’s own worst fears.

In an exaggerated depiction of Lacan’s mirror stage, the Queen, unable to see her true reflection, perceives Snow White as a (younger and therefore) superior version of herself. Having been judged inadequate by the male voice of the mirror, she lashes out at what she believes to be her competition, only to bring about her own destruction. The Queen and Snow White, then, are but two aspects of the same psyche, a view further affirmed by the fact that they never share a common space until their encounter in the dwarfs’ cottage, which proves seemingly deadly to Snow White at first, and actually deadly to the Queen shortly thereafter.

In the only scene that the Queen shares with Snow White, the two are depicted facing each other through a window in the dwarfs’ cottage. The framing of the Queen, disguised as an old hag, in the window as well as the reverse shot of Snow White as she reaches for the apple allude unmistakably to a mirror image.

We do not see Snow White take a bite out of the apple. Instead, at the moment the apple touches her lips, we cut to a medium close up of the Queen. While we hear Snow White gasping for breath, we only see the Queen’s face as she awaits her rival’s death.

The Queen’s sadistic enjoyment is unmistakable, but only serves to further illuminate her obsession with her other, Snow White. As Lacan states in “Desire and Interpretation”, "for a sadistic fantasy to endure, the subject's interest in the person who suffers humiliation must obviously be due to the possibility of the subject's being submitted to the same humiliation himself.” The Queen’s pleasure in destroying Snow White stems from her terrifying realization that her beauty, and thus her power, is as vulnerable as Snow White herself.

Unlike the Queen, who cannot even look at her own image, there is not one scene in the entire film where Snow White does not have an audience. The first time we see her, though dressed in rags and scrubbing the floors of the courtyard, she is being gazed at adoringly by a number of white doves.

She approaches a well to get more water and explains to the birds the magic of the well. Snow White’s relationship to the well in this first scene is a striking contrast to the Queen’s relationship to her mirror. Snow White sings: “Make a wish into the well, that’s all you have to do. And if you hear it echoing, your wish will soon come true.” Unlike the Queen’s desire to be the fairest in the land, Snow White’s wish to meet her prince returns to her from the well. And unlike the Queen’s mirror which does not allow her a subjective look at her own reflection, Snow White’s well not only reflects her beauty in its water, it also provides her first look at the prince, who walks up behind her.

Snow White's audience persists even in the scary forest scene, where, as she runs from the huntsman, the trees themselves are given monstrous eyes, which completely surround the girl with their unwavering and controlling gaze.

But while the forest scene depicts the agony of the unsolicited gaze extraordinarily well, the central theme of the film remains a woman's unbearable need to be looked at.

What enables Snow White to be kind and giving is precisely the fact that she never has to demand attention. The forest animals, the dwarfs, the prince, and even the Queen are all unable to stop looking at her. The Queen’s ultimate failure stems from the fact that, even when presumed dead, Snow White remains the primary object of men's desire (the morbidity of having her body placed in a glass coffin and displayed for everyone to see notwithstanding).

Like the Queen in her mirror, Snow White is trapped in a glass object, her only purpose to be looked at and admired by others - and this is how she ultimately triumphs over the Queen. It is easy to see how a person whose entire life is governed by the looks of others can disintegrate at the realization that her beauty is fading: Snow White, with time, is destined to become the Evil Queen.

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The Ethical Quandary of Choosing a Hat; or How Westworld Was the Real “Bad Place” All Along

On the surface, the dystopian drama of HBO’s Westworld couldn’t be further from the heartwarming comedy of NBC’s The Good Place. However, the two concurrently airing series both deal with the same epistemological imperative: “Know thyself.” Consequently, they grapple with the same philosophical question: “Who am I?” The issue of the “self” has been at the root of most, if not all, philosophical thought, and it is an issue that is inextricably bound up in the very fabric of ethics.

As conceived in modern Western thought, the self is a contained entity that interacts with the world around it and may leave an impact or be impacted, but is ultimately a coherent whole that exists independent of all that is Other. It wields free will as its only weapon - a weapon in which it has had no training. The connection between this self and ethics has been widely explored. From Socrates to Descartes, Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, examination of the self seems always to lead to questions of morality. Is a person inherently good or evil, or is it a choice? Do we really have free will if we’re the product of our environment, including our physiological makeup? Can we trust our senses, our view of the world, our “selves” to give us access to that which is Real? What does it mean to be one’s authentic self and why should one bother? Is the self a justification to be selfish? Or can the responsibility of self-determination create its own moral framework?

Let’s pause there. In fact, all of these questions have already been raised in both series - both of which are only on their 2nd season. And while both series are exploring the issues in complex and interesting ways, my project is not to decipher their messages. Rather, I am fascinated by the overlapping of the approaches both fictional worlds have taken. Both narratives are located inside a non-linear, and often recursive, time. While initially, Westworld’s hosts are the only ones experiencing this queer temporality, by the end of the first season, there is no mistaking that the audience, too, has been dragged into a time outside of time. Like the hosts, we are unclear on what is happening when - and this is the series’ primary method of mystery-building. On a more narrative level, the hosts’ eventual attainment of consciousness, of personhood, of the self, rests almost entirely on their ability to retrieve lost memories. Unable to control or parse through the temporalities of their memories, the hosts are jolted out of their programmed non-selves.

The Good Place takes up this same queer temporality angle by “rebooting” its characters, starting with Janet. By the third episode of season 2, our four protagonists have had their memories erased over eight hundred times. Much of the character development in this season depends on the recovery of those lost memories. Though the audience has seen a season’s worth of interactions between the protagonists, the characters themselves are only aware of having interacted for a few weeks. Chidi and Eleanor’s relationship is jump-started by the discovery of a videotape and the brilliant Mindy St Claire’s bored retellings of their prior encounters. Tahani and Jason’s relationship is disrupted by Janet’s unprocessed and unremembered love for Jason. And Michael’s cold, evil heart (probably not a heart, maybe a marble) is softened by what at this point may be years of watching the humans grow and care about each other. One might say that he knows them better than they know themselves.

Part of what makes queer temporality queer is that it depends on one’s relationality to others. Queer is in so many ways opposed to the “normal” or more accurately, the accepted default. But if there is no queer, no other, no different, then there can be no normal. Normality desperately needs the queer. Likewise, if there is no Other to compare one’s experience of time against, there can be no “normal” or “straight” time either. The disrupted and disruptive time warps that pull the narrative strings of both series depend entirely on the characters interactions with one another - and so do the characters’ moral choices.

Perhaps the most interesting theme the shows share, however, is that of trauma. The Good Place somehow manages to approach the idea of eternal torture and damnation in a lighthearted way. Shitty Eleanor Shelstrop is motivated by fear of torture to enlist Chidi for help, and Good Eleanor is born. Over and over again. The premise of Michael’s architectural plan is simply that Hell is Other People. His diabolical scheme is simply to put four very different people together and wait for them to torture each other. And they do - but only because they care. Only because they are trying to be good. In Westworld, on the other hand, the apparent lead characters - both white, powerful, and male - and literal showrunners of the park, are the Man in Black and Ford, and though they are often pitted against each other, they seem to have the same deeply disturbing goal. They want to torture the hosts to self-awareness. The basic, underlying premise of the show is that conscience, and hence personhood, is attained through suffering. By that logic, both William and Ford could be seen as the good guys. They’re just trying to grant the hosts free will! Self-determination! Autonomy. Except that they’re clearly not.

The implications of torture and suffering on identity formation are certainly complex, and I’m not sure yet where the stories are going or how they will end. But both narratives seem to grapple with trauma on a deeper level, as a catalyst or the spark of life. There is plenty of evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, of the disruptive effect severe trauma can have on memories, and by extension one’s sense of time. The only PTSD symptom more common than flashbacks is missing or fragmented memories of the traumatic event. The traumatic past is either painfully absent or eternally present. The temporal acrobatics performed by Westworld and the Good Place are as tied into trauma as they are into ethics.

I’m not really going anywhere with this, but I’m pretty sure I know what I need to add to my dissertation to make it into a book. Primary case studies: Maeve Millay and Chidi Anagonye. Almost makes me want to be an academic again.

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Disney’s Moana (2016) as a rape metaphor

A couple of people asked me to elaborate on this reading of Moana on my personal blog, so here are my thoughts. First, I don’t feel qualified to evaluate the movie in terms of its cultural sensitivity and depiction, so I will not be engaging with those issues. I was really struck by the depiction of Te Fiti at the end of the film, and that’s where I see the rape metaphor come together. Moana’s quest is the focus of Disney’s story, but the driving force behind Moana’s journey is the aftermath of Maui’s metaphorical rape of Te Fiti.

The way the story is initially told, Te Fiti is reduced to a passive victim of Maui’s desire to impress people, while Te Kā is the interfering (masculine i think?) villain who poisons the world. But the truth we discover at the film’s emotional climax is that Maui forcefully removed a fertile female deity’s heart -her essence- and as a result of this trauma, she has turned into a fiery monster, forced Moana’s people to become land-bound, and is draining the life from the earth. I would have to take a closer look at the way the scene is depicted, but for me this was enough to make the rape connection. 

Then there's Maui's fixation on his hook, which is the source of his power, and which was damaged when he stole Te Fiti's heart. The hook is so close to being phallic but still not quite there, which I think is really interesting in relation to Maui's shape-shifting gender-ambiguity. Nevertheless, he's still largely coded as masculine, and his dependence on his hook - to the point of abandoning Moana at first because he doesn't want to break it - is clearly a significant theme in the film. So we have the story of a man, using a semi-phallic tool to steal the essence of a life-giving female being. And it takes a strong young woman to recognize Te Fiti in Te Kā and to help her heal. Moana sings, "They have stolen the heart from inside you / But this does not define you / This is not who you are / You know who you are." The story is undeniably about trauma (and not only because that was the focus of my dissertation), and of course it doesn't necessarily have to be rape, but all the trappings are there, in a female coming-of-age story, with a male villain/hero.  

So because I hadn't heard anyone else mention this reading, I did a quick search, and found that Te Kā was named Te Pō in early drafts of the movie script, which is "a reference to the Māori goddess Hine-nui-te-pō, who was originally the life-giving goddess Hine-tītama but became the goddess of death upon discovering that her husband, the god Tāne, was also her father." So, her story is of incest and of running away to the underworld from her father/husband. (I think the Greek equivalent would be Persephone?) Now this information is from Wikipedia, and hence taken with caution, but it is sourced within Wikipedia, so probably safe to accept as mostly true. In Māori mythology, Hine-nui-te-pō kills Maui with her Vagina Dentata (a cross-cultural concept, usually related to defense against rape) after he tries to give people immortality by turning into a worm, entering her vagina, and eating his way through to her mouth, thus reversing the birth path. Everything about this goddess's story is rape-y. So I don’t think that my initial hunch was misplaced. 

I thought the scene when the ocean parts for Moana to return Te Fiti's heart and heal her was really poignant and beautiful, with hints of intergenerational trauma and a powerful, healing bond between women. Maui couldn't have returned the heart because he took it. Of course, I was reminded of Disney's supreme ideological ambivalence when he issues a half-assed apology to Te Fiti, and she immediately forgives him and returns his hook, as though she didn't just spend literally a thousand years in agony because of his vanity.

Anyway, that's where I see a rape metaphor.

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Can we take a moment to appreciate the level of meta-commentary in this promo image? 

The Good Place is the kinda show that just keeps getting better over time, but it’s not because of amazing character development or a compelling narrative arc. In fact, the characters mostly remain flat, slightly kinder versions of themselves, and the narrative is becoming increasingly outrageous. The conventional storytelling model (at least in popular movies and television) of upping the stakes with every coming season doesn’t quite cut it when literal eternal damnation is at stake from the very first episode. So, instead of trying to one-up an apocalypse with a new, even more apocalypsy apocalypses (I’m looking at you, Joss Whedon), the narrative increases its pace. 

After the first season’s jaw-dropper finale, all bets are off. Major storylines are effectively erased from the show’s memory, while others are kept from the audience indefinitely. The unchanging group of main characters continue to face new yet-somehow-not-that-different challenges, which lends itself to some spectacular comedy of repetition. (I will never get tired of Janet saying, “Not a robot!” and “Not a girl!”) The writers are simply -and masterfully- reworking the same material over and over and over again. 

Whereas the first season’s tagline might have been “how long can Eleanor keep this up?” (though “what the fork?” is, admittedly, funnier), the second season poses the same questions about the writers. How long can they keep the story unpredictable and funny, without ever really changing anything? Like our cast of quirky yet lovable misfits, the writers are openly admitting that they have no idea where this is going, and that’s precisely what gives the series its unique charm. Of course, the tagline in the image above ostensibly refers to Eleanor and Michael, the unofficial leaders of the group, but it certainly rings truer of the show’s writers. 

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Kong: Skull Island is a movie.

I'm gonna go ahead and vote Kong: Skull Island as this year's Worst Well-Received movie. I don't really remember hearing anything about it when it first came out, so I don't even know how it was received except for what Wikipedia says, but it seems like people liked it? 

Anyway, it stars Samuel L Jackson, Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, and John Goodman, and they are all giving their best performance of "awkward teenager who has been cast in a B-movie but doesn't actually know how to act." The script feels like something that Facebook's algorithms cobbled together out of a database of jungle movies from the ‘30s on. The editing? The soundtrack? The setting? I'm not sure I've ever seen such a perfect storm of Terrible in one film. It's what Sharknado can only dream to be. 

Of course, I only say this because I couldn't possibly understand the masturbatory Hollywood vision that combines the subtle horror of Apocalypse Now with the thoughtful realism of a major video game franchise. What I see as cheap mimic is, in fact, loving homage to the monster movies of yore. The dialogue may be hammy and cliche, but that is more than compensated for by the occasional wink at the audience that couldn’t feel less out of place if Mel Brooks himself stepped in to deliver it. 

There are moments, I admit, when you can almost feel the tenderness with which a scene was shot or, well, most likely CG-ed. These moments belong in a very well made video game cut-scene. 

There is one thing, however, that kept my eyes glued to the screen for nearly two full hours. Whereas the human characters and their narratives are uncanny skeletons of times past, combined haphazardly as though by a child, and held together with superglue, the film's larger-than-life CGI monsters are the hyper-realist's wet dream. Even in their simplicity, and in their allusion to the more cartoonish and tacky characteristics of early monster movies, they are not only more real than the characters, they are realer still than the actors or the spaces they inhabit. And it isn't until the end of the film, after the giant ape predictably beats his chest proclaiming he is king of the wilderness once more, that we get to the real core of this story, or the lack thereof. 

The closing credits share the screen with a scene of Marlow* reuniting with his wife and meeting his son after 29 years stranded on Skull Island. We catch this silent scene through a small flickering screen, surrounded with black. Marlow's model-homemaker wife runs into his arms, having seemingly never moved on from his disappearance, and his 28 year old son, who just happens to still be living with his mother, i guess, is delighted to meet his dad. The scene ends as Marlow sits down with a beer to watch a Cubs game. Ah, baseball in the man cave. The nostalgic framing of the home movie camera, the odd setting of post-Vietnam US that never quite made sense for the film's primary narrative, and the brief moment in which we become the television that Marlow is watching just as we watch him, all combine into a crystal clear, and somewhat terrifying message. The simulacrum is more real than the Real. Death to Videodrome - long live the new flesh.

*not gonna go there. and yes, there is another character named Conrad.

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True Blood Thoughts

one of the things that i enjoy about True Blood, aside from the exponentially increasing level of camp and absurdity, is the juxtaposition of American small town politics/atmosphere with the old fashioned dealings of the vampires’ global and ancient aristocracy. all the hilarity of the over-the-top treatment of its narrative aside, there is a complex structure of incongruent styles of government being explored.

vampires have been considered the embodiment of aristocratic nobility pretty much since Dracula was first published, and that hasn’t really changed much since then (which is weird, because it’s been over two centuries, and that particular kind of hierarchical governance hasn’t really been culturally relevant for a while now - definitely not in the US).  i haven’t seen enough of the werewolves’ culture yet to see how they compare, but i bet there’s interesting stuff there, too. probably to do with sexuality and ethnicity, i expect.

anyway, among the human population, the culture is basically one of the lawlessness of the wild west. we get regular glimpses of there being a wider picture (i.e. modern and globalized world) on television, which is almost always turned to debates between vampires and those who oppose them, but the local law enforcement is basically two kids in a trench coat trying to enter an R rated movie. people keep dying and weird shit keeps happening to everyone, but at no point does a higher level of government get called in? that seems off somehow. which is interesting in the sense that we have these two communities, each following a primitive, so to speak, code of conduct of their own, while most of our protagonists / characters we are supposed to root for are trying to exist in the modern world.

and, of course, the fact that it doesn’t take place in the west is pretty significant and just adds this sprinkling of racial relations and racism. we have the way that Eggs gets killed and Tara literally being held hostage inside a plantation home. the way that both Tara and Eggs are the only human characters who are forced to fight for their lives in a kind of animalistic or savage fashion, as if to take away their humanity. the worst part about that is that it all comes across as kind of happenstance, like the writers made obvious associations between being black and the horrible history of slavery in the US (which is really what ties the aristocracy to the wild west to begin with), and otherness/monstrosity in terms of representation, but they didn’t actually think about it enough to make a meaningful critique or contribution, thus merely exposing their own prejudices and — i’m blanking on the word, but basically the flip side of overt and conscious racism.

i have a soft spot for shows that are accidentally complex and intentionally ridiculous.

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tropes & media studies

some elements of narrative are so commonly used and have been around for so long that we have started an archive of them and call them tropes. which is kind of what early narratologists were trying to do except their resources were extremely limited, but with the internet and digital data processing and worldwide cooperation, we can actually gather enough information to draw complex conclusions from this about structures of power and communication and bla bla bla. I’m really torn about the value of this in terms of short term information gathering vs long term mechanization of intellectual and emotional work.

it seems that digital humanities scholars are overwhelmingly drawn to this practice, partly because many of them never used digital technology in their work beyond typing in Word or making a PowerPoint. and so the academic field has become about using digital means to explore the humanities, and i think that there’s so much more value in an approach that incorporates the digital into the humanities in such a way that there isn’t a divide between them.

but what i meant to say when i started this text post was that if you think of tropes as characters, then every story can be viewed as an AU for that character. there are many crossovers.

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westworld thoughts pt2

i just finished s1 of Westworld, and I’m really into the narrative complexity. it’s intricate and confusing at times, but not just done for the sake of a plot twist. it’s a surprisingly cohesive exploration of the interplay between time, trauma, memory, and identity (which is like 70% of what my dissertation is about). I’m interested to see where it goes from here.

i got real emotional about Maeve in the finale. i don’t really care for any of the other characters a whole lot, but i love her. i hope they’re not taking her out of the main narrative.

I’m curious to see how they continue to handle this idea that suffering is what makes us human, or, more precisely, that memories of trauma give rise to consciousness. i like that they’re complicating it with the reveal of the Man in Black and Ford’s final decision, because both of those imply that inflicting pain is ultimately a selfless deed because it damns the perpetrator while elevating the victim. and that’s a scary premise to start from. but at the same time, it’s ironic that their belief in humanity’s inferiority is ultimately what makes it true.

i also really like the self-reflexive notes the show touches on, in which the characters are “hosts” to our stories. our (the viewers’) voyeurism and desire for those stories is repeatedly foregrounded as a mirror to the Newcomers’ sadism.

and finally, the image of art, the act of creation, as a form of suicide. true art will rise up and kill its creator. god is dead. love it.

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Westworld Thoughts pt 1

so i was told by multiple people that i would like westworld, but they used the wrong reasons to support their claim, which is why it took me so long to start watching. but like, the whole thing with trauma and memory is literally what my dissertation is on and the way the narrative is constructed is really super interesting.

this setting really allows them to play with the idea of the Other as something we can never access. how are you supposed to know if someone else is self-aware? you only ever have access to their external presentation. and because you have these two different worlds, the hosts and the newcomers, you start realizing that it doesn’t matter. it doesn’t matter if the hosts can really feel the pain. what matters is how you think of yourself, who you want to be.

and that’s when empathy fails. as long as it only works with beings who have certain characteristics in common, it has a loophole. that’s how every atrocity in the world was committed, through the disavowal of the Other aka dehumanization, viewing yourself as superior and more important. but what that really means is that if you are only able to care about others through empathy, you will only ever care about those you perceive as “like you”.

in a way it’s a fairly straightforward morality debate - what makes a good person? and if it’s not empathy, and it’s not fear of punishment, then??

these are things i’ve been thinking about a lot. i think empathy is important because it teaches us to understand the pain of another. but it just isn’t enough.

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I wonder if Get Out (2017) was influenced by Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

There are a number of visual and thematic parallels, which is what first got me thinking about it. But there also some deeper implications that resonate. Jordan Peele has said that he is a fan of horror classics, and while he cites Stepford Wives and Look Who’s Coming to Dinner as his inspiration, I think Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a closer root. The girlfriend’s family in GO is a bit of a mirror to the cannibalistic family in TCSM. The family unit as such is disjointed and terrifying in both films. And there are greater implications here, in that part of the TCSM family’s issue is that mechanization and *progress* have taken away their good ol’ butcher lifestyle. And in that sense, I think that Peele is partly proclaiming that the time has come for the liberal white elite to *get out* - or that progress is going to get rid of them soon.

There are some basic parallels like Leatherface wearing the skin of his victims or Grandfather drinking their blood - which is similar to what the white people are doing in GO by taking over black people’s bodies. The fact that there is an initially hidden grandfather is also a parallel, which, in both cases, implicates the course of history and generational transmission of ideals and worldviews in the horror. Both movies begin with a harmless-seeming road trip, both end with a single, blood-covered survivor being saved by someone in a vehicle. (And I think Rose survives in the end, like Leatherface does?)

The central image of Get Out, used in the trailer and pretty much every advertisement I’ve seen for the movie is a close up of Chris, with his eyes wide open in shock/fear. This image is also repeated in the film toward the end, as he’s realizing what is about to happen to him.

Similarly, among the most iconic scenes in TCSM is when Sally, the only survivor of her group of friends, is held hostage and tied to a chair, and the camera goes wild for a bit, zooming in to extreme closeups of her wide open, crying eye, and using jump cuts and disjunctive editing to highlight her terror through the image of the eye. It’s so iconic, in fact, that in 2015, this poster was adopted for a re-release of the original film on blue-ray:

Look familiar? Not to mention that Sally is tied to a chair much like Chris is:

These shots of Sally are alternated with POV shots of the cannibal “family” watching and taunting her - something that is replicated in the direct address that Chris gets from his hosts through the television while he is trapped. 

This particular TCSM scene has also been analyzed (I think most notably by Carol Clover) as the moment when the victimized woman™ of the horror film realizes that she and the monster share an “otherness,” which makes her confront her own monstrosity. This is mirrored in Get Out with Chris’ recollection of watching TV while his mother was dying. Of course, the audience knows that her death isn’t his fault, but it is also clear that he feels entirely responsible and guilty.  

The focus on the eye in TCSM is also a kind of wink at the spectator, implying their complicity in this violence through the act of watching. In this respect, GO levels up by including this meta-element of TCSM inside the narrative setup – television is the means by which Chris feels he killed his mother. And television is what he is forced to watch when he’s held hostage. (And let’s not forget that he is a photographer, i.e. a watcher rather than an actor.)

Peele said in an interview that the television is

“a metaphor for his inaction, and a feeling of guilt where he neglected his family. The fact that the entertainment industry is not necessarily inclusive of the African-American experience is a similar form of neglect and is a symptom of a deeper problem. I wanted to make a film that acknowledges neglect and inaction in the face of the real race monster. In the process, I wanted to give a horror movie to everyone, but really to black audiences, who are loyal horror fans. We watch movies, screaming, “Get out!” in dark rooms at this screen that we cannot affect. It’s a symbol for that, which stops us from action.”

There are a lot of layers to this quote, but mostly, I’m using it to highlight that the thing that the hero must overcome in both films is not necessarily the monster but his and her own inaction. And neither protagonist is to blame for their initial inaction, so this is not a condemnation. It’s more of a “enough is enough” situation.

One of the most noticeable features of TCSM, to me anyway, is Sally’s unrelenting screaming. She doesn’t have much of a personality, and she spends the vast majority of the movie running away and screaming while witnessing terrible things happening. There’s a kind of helplessness to her that makes her survival almost pointless. This is not the case with Chris. There is a moment at which he overcomes his terror and fights back - and when he does, his actions are depicted in all their violent glory, which partly mirrors visually that of the monsters in TCSM. Chris hitting the brother with a croquet ball with a dull THUMP is reminiscent of Leatherface using his mallet on people’s heads. When Chris skewers the dad with the antlers, it’s presented similarly to how Leatherface pierces one guy’s chest from behind with his chainsaw. 

I was really impressed by how viscerally Chris’ violence was displayed, because it’s playing on white fears of black male aggression, and it’s saying FUCK YOU to them. Which also goes back to the above quote, because this movie is not for white people. The fact that Peele acknowledges “black audiences who are loyal horror fans” in the interview is important, because horror as a genre is among the least racially diverse. Black men in horror movies do not survive. Or they only survive because that’s the joke.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen TCSM, but it’s a royally fucked up and unpleasant movie to watch. Along with Night of the Living Dead and a bunch of others, TCSM was made in this brief sort of darkly artsy and socially conscious renaissance in the film industry, where a handful of (white, male bla bla) directors made some really intense films that reflected the failure of the 1960s in terms of creating a better world. These films are paranoid, vicious, and painfully pessimistic. But, unlike torture porn of today, the discomfort of watching them was meant to jolt people into awareness of the social horrors that still surrounded them. But instead, the blockbuster just paved over that critique, and Hollywood, along with the general financial boom of the 1980s, covered it all up with beautiful (and deceptive) spectacle.

Peele’s film is obviously more optimistic, partly because, unlike the disillusioned hero of the 70s, who becomes a monster himself (or herself in the case of TCSM), Chris’ violence is so completely justified at every moment, and he never stops being human and relatable - and that’s quite a feat, considering how he dispatches everyone. TCSM’s Sally is so dehumanized by the end of the movie that her escape doesn’t feel like a victory. Chris’ does. And I don’t really have a clear reading of that, maybe it gives me hope too, because I’ve come down on the side of violence as a justifiable last resort anyway.