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.
2 comments:
The characters in that film are simultaneously disdainful of the people they kidnap while also, on some level, wanting to be them.
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The reality is Get Out is commenting on the fact that Black people and culture is appropriated and commodified for white use and consumption but when it's on Black bodies it is demonized. It is as literal as Antebellum.
Example: when Kim Kardashian wears Black originated hairstyles, and fashion, and even alters her body, she is deemed a sex symbol and praised, but Black women are not where they alter their bodies, wear natural hair or not. That is how racism works. It quite literally nonsensical to begin with so it shouldn't make sense. Or in a more extreme case, slavery. Black people are 3/5 human yet Slave master would often desire their "property" who somehow was also good enough to work the land, breastfeed their young, and cook for them. That is what is happening in Get Out - a cognitive dissonance.
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