Why I prefer Antebellum to get Get Out

Note: I wrote this a few days ago when I was still in the immediate aftermath of watching and loving Antebellum. My initial enthusiasm has cooled just a little bit, but I still feel it is a very strong piece of work that people should see. I considered not posting this but I will just go ahead. I've been on the record in the past as not loving Get Out as much as some people did, so this doesn't really change that, though I recognize it seems a bit of an inflammatory position, especially when some people have serious concerns with Antebellum. Anyway, I'll just go with it and let you tell me why I'm off base.

Besides, I like the side by side photo of Janelle Monae and Daniel Kaluuya I made for the post. 

It looks like Antebellum is a hill I'm going to be dying on, so I might as well go down in a bloody blaze of glory.

SPOILERS to follow for Antebellum. Really, don't read this unless you've seen the movie. 

I suppose there are also spoilers for Get Out, but you've already seen that. 

Antebellum clearly has a lot in common with Get Out, a reality made all the more clear by the fact that the two films have some of the same producers. (I thought Jordan Peele might actually be a producer on Antebellum, but he is not.) 

Thematically, the similiarity is quite striking. Both movies deal with Black people being kidnapped by crazy white people who intend to do something truly demented and violent with them, while bombarding them with microaggressions on the way down. They are both called horror movies, though I think that's a little more the case with Get Out than with Antebellum. I guess it just depends how wide a net you are willing to cast when discussing the expansive genre of horror. And anyway, there is plenty of horrifying stuff that happens in Antebellum.

The key difference for me, in terms of the films' relative effectiveness, is the nature of that horrifying stuff.

In Antebellum, a group of men (primarily men) in Louisiana have gotten together, under the direction of a local senator, to kidnap Black people and enslave them in a fastidiously recreated 1860s plantation, which is the secret back portion of a Civil War reenactment park. They make their slaves pick cotton in the fields, prepare meals, hang laundry, and submit to whatever sexual perversions they want to heap on them, with the threat of branding or even death as punishment for failing to comply. Equally chillingly, they silence their slaves -- they are not allowed to speak to one another, with the same punishments as a consequence, which is designed to prevent them from organizing and rising up.

In Get Out, a group of people (equal mix of genders) in New England have gotten together, under the direction of a mad scientist and a hypnotist, to kidnap Black people so the consciousnesses of elderly white people can be permanently inserted into their brains, meaning that these elderly white people will live on in their bodies. 

The difference is that the first is a thing that I believe could actually happen, and the second is not.

The reveal of what was actually going on in Get Out was the part where the film lost me the first time. Not only was it far-fetched and implausible as a scientific procedure, I also had a hard time figuring out the film's commentary on racism. The characters in that film are simultaneously disdainful of the people they kidnap while also, on some level, wanting to be them. I could never quite make sense of that message. If the main goal is to be youthful again, and if you are perniciously racist and divorced from an ordinary sense of morality anyway, why not just kidnap young white people?

I did like Get Out better on the second time, and I do think it's a very good film. But I still have not been able to fully reconcile some of its core elements. 

Antebellum is almost certainly the less subtle work, but it has the greater pull on me right now due its sheer plausibility. If there are not already deranged people who kidnap Black people south of the Mason-Dixon line to make them slaves, then this movie could give them the idea to start doing it. (Which is not, in itself, a reason not to make a movie -- otherwise we'd have no movies about terrorist plots.)

I think back to another unsubtle work that really shattered me emotionally when it came out, which was The Purge: Election Year in 2016. I reacted so strongly not only because it was two weeks after Trump was elected, but because I did believe that there could be a future branching off from our current timeline -- one we'll hopefully avoid now that these films have been made -- where a fascist government could design an annual night of lawless violence with the design of exterminating minorities. 

None of the things in these three movies are actually something that could happen, I hope, and my hope is inspired by a basic faith in humanity that is an outgrowth of my fundamental optimism. 

But I think the two that are slightly more likely to happen have a more profound effect on me because, you know, they could happen. 

I guess someone could invent the brain-swapping technology too, but for now that is total science fiction. 

What I haven't been able to wrap my head around, now that I have been reading more reactions and hearing from some friends about their thoughts, is why Get Out is so clearly the superior examination of the subject matter of outrageous scenarios that make real commentary on racism. I have learned that some people find Antebellum ignorant and racist itself. And though I know this type of thing is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to examining the intentions behind a film, I will stop to remind everyone that one of the two directors of Antebellum is Black. That does not mean he still cannot make a racist film, but it does mean he almost certainly did not set out to.

So yes, I may be dying on this hill, but at least I have eight other positive reviews on Metacritic, and hopefully a sizeable portion of other positive reviews out there in the wilderness, implicitly testifying that I am not crazy.

A friend who really hates this movie suggested that I not write this post, because when you misunderstand a movie that he believes is racist, it's even worse when you are white. As I am.

So with the caveat that there may be something fundamentally racist about this movie that I am not understanding, I put it out there: I do find this to be the more compelling exploration of its theme than Get Out.  

If you are one of those who hates Antebellum, I hope at least you know my appreciation for it has the same good intentions I believe its directors had when they made it. 

Don't read the Wikipedia page for Antebellum

And, please, don't read this post if you haven't yet seen the movie. I beg you. This is your SPOILER WARNING for Antebellum.

I had a cinematic experience on Saturday night that is, regrettably, increasingly rare these days:

My mind was blown. 

I'm not talking about the kind of blown mind you get when you sit there in shock after finishing a movie, as the totality of how good it was overwhelms you. I got a little bit of that experience with Antebellum, though that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about a film's actual twists and turns catching you off guard, and paying off in a really satisfying way. 

Twists and turns -- once a comparative rarity in movies -- are now the driving force behind even the shittiest movies. As viewers, we are conditioned to expect them, even look for them, well before the filmmaker actually wants us to know they are going to happen.

So it is, indeed, very rare that a filmmaker -- or filmmakers, in this case (debut directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz) -- can actually play it just right either so I don't expect it, or so I have really misread the movie entirely, meaning that their reveal has the effect they intend it to have.

An intended effect that is entirely ruined if you read the opening paragraph of the film's page on Wikipedia. 

Now the SPOILERS.

Because I was so enthralled by the way the narrative played out -- a narrative I was greeting with some skepticism for its first half -- I went to Wikipedia after finishing Antebellum to kind of take it all in again in word form.

And this is how the film is described in that opening paragraph: 

"The film stars Janelle Monae, Eric Lange, Jena Malone, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons and Gabourey Sidibe, and follows a modern-day African American woman who finds herself in a Southern slave plantation and must escape."

Uh, no. Major disservice here. 

Bush and Renz probably cringe when they read a reductive description like that. Yes, that's what the film is about, but it's a long time before that grand design is revealed. It is not something a viewer should know before going in. 

Other places the film is briefly synopsized -- such as Metacritic and Letterboxd -- do better, but still give away information I wouldn't want to have given away. Here's what they say:

"Successful author Veronica finds herself trapped in a horrifying reality and must uncover the mind-bending mystery before it's too late."

That respects the desire not to disclose certain twists, though it also points to the fact that there are twists, which is not ideal. Also, as the character perceives it herself, it's not a "mind-bending mystery" -- that's the audience's perspective on the material.

Where both of these loglines fall down is they reveal that Janelle Monae's character lives in the modern world. Antebellum itself doesn't reveal this for its first 40 minutes.

The movie begins with a long, unbroken take through a plantation circa the Civil War, the kind of cinematic technique that leaves me putty in the filmmakers' hands. I may have to watch that again before my rental expires, if I don't watch the entire movie again.

I expected this to be a prologue before we shifted to 21st century Janelle Monae, as I thought I did know that the movie was set in present day. I think I'd heard it compared to Lovecraft Country, which I haven't seen, but which also explores racism using genre elements. That show is set in the 1950s, but using the obviously older beasties from the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. I figured this would be the same.

It's not a prologue. The Civil War setting lasts for the film's first 40 minutes or thereabouts. It stayed in that setting long enough for me to assume I'd gotten the movie wrong, and what little I knew about it was not accurate. All sorts of unpleasant slave-related atrocities occur during these 40 minutes: whippings, brandings, lynchings, suicides, the burning of corpses in crematoria. If the movie hadn't gone somewhere useful, they would have just been unpleasant. Given where it does go, I found them incredibly powerful -- at least in retrospect.

But then, Monae awakens in her bed, today, next to her sleeping husband, as a coworker awakens her by phone to ensure she has enough time to get ready for her flight to New Orleans, where she will be speaking at a conference to other Black women of industry. It turns out she's actually Veronica Henley, a sociologist with a PhD who often appears as a guest on news programs to discuss the quest for racial equality in modern society. 

Okay, so this antebellum south stuff was all just a dream, right? An exploration of the film's opening quotation from William Faulkner? That would be "The past is never dead. It is not even past." And she just imagined herself as a slave named Eden as an unconscious projection of her fears of being marginalized in her daily life? 

So for the next 25-30 minutes, we get Veronica as she makes her way through her next two days, receiving racist microaggressions from hotel concierges, and macroaggressions from Jena Malone, first on a Zoom call and then in a series of stalking episodes -- sending her flowers, breaking into her hotel room, that sort of thing. So this is what the movie is going to be about, how the deranged views of 19th century southerners have never actually gone away, and they will result in something really unpleasant for modern-day Janelle.

In this section there are a handful of great moments with Gabourey Sidibe, of Precious fame, who I have always loved. She calls one white girl who has marginalized them "Becky" -- humorously, her name tag reads "Rebecca" -- and tells off another guy for sending a drink over to their table at dinner. You go, girl.

This section ends with Malone kidnapping Monae when posing as her Uber driver ... and then we're back on the plantation again. 

So the movie shifted my expectations again. I figured we'd revisit the plantation in some form, but I didn't know what. And the next thing that happened made me understand this even less. 

Eden -- or is it Veronica? -- awakens to the ringing of a cell phone. The confederate general who has been raping her awakens and goes out to a pouch on his horse, where he talks to an unheard person on the other end of the line, saying he'll "take care of it." Monae's character hears and senses an opportunity.

At this point I'm thinking "How come a character living in the 1860s does not wonder what the sound of a cell phone ringing is?" And "How come a cell phone is ringing in the 1860s?"

So for the next little bit, I thought this was just her dream again, with modern elements breaking into her personalized Civil War nightmare, as apparently unrelated dream elements are wont to do. Another such anachronism is when slaves picking cotton in the fields see a plane flying overhead, again apparently unsurprised about such a development. I began to feel a little disappointed that this movie was going to contain so much content that existed only within the dream space, but I was going with it.

And then, a few minutes later, I realized it was all real. 

So the middle part of the story is actually the first thing that happens, chronologically, followed by the first part and then the third part. Veronica was really kidnapped, and where she was brought was a modern-day attempt by racist sociopaths to create a sort of plantation theme park -- you know, like Westworld, except for the American south. And except with real people taking the abuse as opposed to androids.

Brilliant.

As we see Veronica and another fellow "slave" (actually a kidnapped racial studies professor) attempt to escape, I became more and more enthralled and sat up straighter and straighter in my seat. And the final section of the film is just filled with terrific "a-ha!" moments, which I don't need to recount here, since you implicitly agreed not to read this until you'd actually seen the movie. I will say, however, that the final reveal -- that this is the secret back section of an otherwise "legitimate" Civil War reenactment park -- called Antebellum -- was the perfect capper on an excellently executed mind-blower.

Within the details of the narrative, there are other great things that you don't understand at all until the director's grand design is revealed. For example, a number of times you see "Eden" doing this tricky routine when she walks to the door of the cabin where she lives, which involves these giant yet careful movements where she's landing on every fourth board of the wooden floor. At first I thought this was how she was walking because she was still in pain over being branded. (Yes, that happens.) Ultimately, you realize it's her practicing for her eventual escape -- these are the only boards that don't creak when you step on them.

If I had read the film's Wikipedia page, or even its Letterboxd or Metacritic page, I would have known, or at least suspected, many of these things long before the film revealed them to me. And that's a damn shame. Not for me, since I did it right, but for all the others who didn't. I'm sure watching a trailer, which I also did not do, would have just made it ten times worse.

And so we have a truly strange phenomenon with people's perceptions of this film. And that brings us to the other reason you shouldn't read the film's Wikipedia page, which is that later on, it reveals that Antebellum has only a 28 on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 45 on Metacritic.

Huh?

To be sure, there are some outliers there. Scrambling over to Metacritic as I immediately did, I found that Peter Debruge of Variety gave the film a 90, which is about what I would give it. But the eight positive reviews were overwhelmed by the combined 28 mixed or negative reviews, 18 of the former and ten of the latter.

Huh?

I have to wonder what percentage of these people came in with the blank slate I did. In this day and age, it's likely most of them did not. I have no idea what percentage of critics avoid trailers like I do, or refrain from even a cursory researching of the films they are planning to review. In some quarters we still receive digital press materials for upcoming movies, and it's only logical that some or even most critics peruse them.

But the blank slate should be the condition we strive for. It's not the fault of Gerard Bush or Christopher Renz that we know things about their movie we should not know before we sit down to watch it. They constructed their film in the precise sequence it needed to be structured in order to blow our minds -- multiple times, actually. It's not their fault if those charged with the responsibility of bringing it to the public have not handled it as carefully.

Because I just don't see how a completely unbiased viewer comes away from this without feeling enthralled -- not only by the reveals, but by the technique (remember that great tracking shot to start the film) and by the acting (Monae is amazing throughout). 

If the tepid reaction to the film prevents Bush and Renz from getting another opportunity to make another great film -- realizing it's fraught with peril to throw around the word "great" -- I think that's a damn shame.

Not only a great film, but one that speaks to this particular moment. There are a number of emotional crescendos in this film, but one involves Veronica's climactic discovery of a statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback. I don't imagine Bush and Renz could have known, when making their film, that the toppling of confederate statues would have been a primary narrative in 2020. But great art tends to have an intuitive relevance to the era in which it is produced, an unconscious knack for speaking to an exact moment in our culture -- even anticipating that moment.

This is certainly not a popular opinion, but I think Antebellum is great art. I hope a significant number of people can consume it under the necessary conditions to recognize that.