Nope should have been called Get Out and Get Out should have been called Nope

I like all three of Jordan Peele's movies to varying degrees -- two of them quite a lot, one not as much -- but I think he might have gotten some of the titles mixed up. Specifically with the two I like quite a lot.

Isn't Get Out more of a Nope and Nope more of a Get Out?

Allow me to explain.

SPOILERS AHEAD, though hopefully you've seen Nope by now. (And if you haven't seen Get Out, I'm not even sure what you're doing here.)

We all instinctively knew what function the title Nope was serving as soon as we heard it. The word has been around for ages -- the internet tells me its first documented usage is 1888 -- but it's one of those words that's developed a specific new use in the past five years or so. 

If you don't know that usage, allow me to belabor its effectiveness by spelling it out for you. It's a way to declaim, in a single word, that a situation is way too fucked up to be involved in. You utter "Nope" when you stumble across something that might immediately turn into a disaster, if it is not already there -- either an actual disaster, like the loss of a life, or a messed up social situation from which no one will emerge unscathed. And while I think we do associate it disproportionately with a Black person confronting a scenario that won't end well for him or her, likely but not necessarily involving a racial element, neither do I think it is a word that belongs specifically to any one culture. Anyone can use it without any accusations of appropriation, at least as far as I'm aware.

And while I immediately grokked what the title was going for and loved its potential usage, I'm not sure how well it works with aliens. 

Sure that's a fucked up situation. Sure you are unlikely to escape without loss of life or limb. You might even be digested in the stomach lining of a creature flying over the California mountains, your screams broadcast for people to hear miles around, your loose change spat back to the earth at dangerous velocities.

But I'm not sure it is a "Nope" situation as we classically define it.

I think the classic "Nope" situation, if broken down to its barest elements, is more like this: A Black man walks unsuspectingly into a room, sees a bunch of men in Ku Klux Klan outfits loading shot guns, and immediately turns on his heel and walks out of the room. "Nope" would perhaps be an understatement in that scenario.

Aliens? "OH SHIT WHAT THE FUCK." Yes definitely that. But that's not quite the same as "Nope." 

"Nope" is best coming from an earthbound situation that could actually happen. No, that man did not expect to walk into that room of Klansmen preparing for a murderous, racially motivated rampage. But neither was it too much for his brain to comprehend. In fact, in a way, it was the purest realization of his deepest and darkest fears, the moment that he always knew, on some level, was bound to happen eventually.

I think it's for this reason that both of the actual "Nope"s as spoken dialogue in Nope didn't work for me. I think there were only two. I really hope Peele was smart enough not to go for three, but he may have.

Both times a character said "Nope" in Nope, I thought that "OH SHIT WHAT THE FUCK" would have been a more appropriate thing to say in that moment. And because it was the title of the film, the moments called attention to themselves and had sort of a thudding execution. (That's how I remembered it, anyway -- Nope is one of the top films I'm looking forward to rewatching once a suitable amount of time has passed since my first viewing, so I'll see how the usage hits me next time.)

You know where "Nope" does work? Get Out.

The first scene that occurred to me was the opening scene, where the great Lakeith Stanfield is kidnapped by what turns out to be the crazy white boy Caleb Landry Jones. (One of our craziest white boys, so it was perfect casting.) When the car Jones is driving slows down to a menacing crawl next to Stanfield, who is lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood that he refers to as a hedge maze, Stanfield picks up pretty quickly on the driver's nefarious intent, and changes direction to get away from the car as quickly as possible. "Not me, not today," he mutters as he tries, in vain, to extricate himself from the situation.

That's "Nope." "Not me, not today" is like 100% exactly the definition of "Nope."

You mightn't base a whole movie title on the vibe of one scene, but of course it's not just one scene. As the movie shifts to the perspective of Daniel Kaluuya's Chris -- Kaluuya being the common element between Get Out and Nope, other than Peele -- he's just met with one "Nope"-worthy scenario after another. Seeing crazy white people put drugs in your tea to hypnotize you with the ultimate goal of inserting the consciousness of an old white person into your body? Sure you should get out, but also, that's a giant steaming pile of "Nope" right there. 

(You could catch me on a technicality here, telling me that this is not the "earthbound situation" that I mentioned earlier as a precondition for "Nope." As far as we know, mind-swapping is not a thing. In fact, aliens are likely more of a thing, given the vastness of our universe. However, of the two, aliens are definitely the more mind-blowing in terms of the "OH SHIT WHAT THE FUCK" factor.)

"Get out" is, in a way, more practical advice to the characters in Nope.

Most of the characters in Get Out only get this advice when it's too late, and just because Chris survives his ordeal doesn't mean that it isn't basically too late when he gets the advice. Everyone else in his position couldn't get out in time.

But if you've got an alien flying over your ranch, a ranch you are thinking of selling anyway? SELL THAT FUCKING RANCH.

O.J. and Em still can get out, and when you are getting rained on by the blood of 30 people who just got sucked up by the alien now swooping over your house, you can just get the fuck out of there and never return.

Us? I guess that title works for that film. 

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. 

The inability to form your own take

Although I try to avoid discussions of films before I’ve had a chance to see them, it’s not always possible. Especially when it’s a film from which there is a lot expected, and it opens in the U.S. three months before it opens in Australia.

That happened in 2017 probably with a number of films, but I’m thinking of two in particular it was hard to avoid, both of which relate to race relations. (I’ll try not to speculate on why movies about race relations are delayed three months in Australia.)

The first was, of course, Get Out. By the time it finally released in May, I knew a lot about the movie, even though I’d avoided watching the trailer and even though I didn’t have a clue about what the movie is actually “about.” (Which, ironically, led in part to my initial disappointment with it – I was expecting something more realistic than what the movie ultimately had in store for me. The movie was elevated significantly for me on a second viewing.)

The second was Detroit, which finally made its way to Australian theaters in November, after an August release in the U.S. A lot more was expected of this movie than Get Out before it was released, as Get Out was largely unheralded, becoming an instant word-of-mouth hit. After The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, people were practically stalking Kathryn Bigelow’s next movie, having tabs on what was called “Untitled Detroit Project” for at least a year before its release.

By the time it did hit Australian theaters, I did not even prioritize seeing it in that format, given that I’d already heard it was a big disappointment to everybody. I also knew that with its August release date in the U.S., I’d be able to rent it from iTunes before my list closed.

Which is precisely what I did last night.

And you know what, I like this movie. I don’t love it, but I think it’s a good movie. I was gripped by the genuinely shocking material, and I felt like Bigelow gave it shades and nuances I would not necessarily have expected. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay it is that I started it after 9 p.m. and wasn’t really at any risk of falling asleep, despite its two hour and 20 minute run time. I was involved the whole way.

But I couldn’t help but wonder if my personal take on the movie was unduly hampered by knowing what the popular take on it was. Namely, that a) it documents a bunch of shocking/violent behavior without really drawing a message from it, and b) it’s a story that its director does not necessarily have the right to tell.

I may have reached these conclusions myself, but knowing that others had already reached them made it a lot more difficult to judge that in a vacuum. I came in knowing those things, so was looking for them every step of the way.

The issue of who has the right to tell a particular story is a thorny one. I’m against the notion that certain people simply cannot tell certain stories, because I think anything is possible if you approach it sensitively, having done your due diligence. That said, did you know that the person who was originally planning to make the biopic of Malclom X was Norman Jewison? That it ended up in Spike Lee’s hands – and that the resulting film was a masterpiece – was a relief for all involved, I imagine, including myself, to the extent that I’m “involved.” (Don’t worry, Mr. Jewison, you made one of my all-time favorites in Jesus Christ Superstar.)

Bigelow has established her bonafides by making films that ask difficult questions about our institutions, and she’s already credibly addressed the issue of racism in police departments in Strange Days. Of course, that was a small if important part of that film, which was essentially a genre movie. Detroit not only makes the movie all about that, but it purports to adopt the African American perspective, which is slightly more problematic.

Still, watching this film, I can’t identify a single moment that seems tone deaf in some way, or like the work of someone who is not black. I suppose that’s really what you want in a movie that tries to reckon with “The Black Experience,” that there’s no part of it that reads as clearly non-black. For some people, the fact that Bigelow is not black will be a stumbling block regardless of how deftly she does it.

I don’t want to get too sidetracked here, but any time someone makes a movie where a significant percentage of its characters are from another race, you try to identify how successfully they’ve adopted the perspective of that other race. Get Out might be an interesting example in the opposite direction, or so I thought after my first viewing. While there was no doubt that Jordan Peele had an innate understanding of the characters who had a race in common with him, I must admit I wasn’t sure about his realistic grasp on the white characters. The second time, of course, I got that it was not supposed to be realistic. Different movie when you watch it that way.

A really interesting example of that in 2017 is Mudbound, directed by a black woman, Dee Rees. The story is split almost equally between black and white characters – almost. Interestingly, the balance is shifted in favor of the white characters in this one. At the center of that movie are characters played by Jason Mitchell and Garrett Hedlund, one black and one white, and they have families of about equivalent size as supporting characters. However, there seems to be a lot more in the way of subplots for the white family than the black, which also creates the impression that Rees is a bit more in touch with those characters than the black ones. I’m not sure what to say about that and I think now I really am getting sidetracked.

Anyway, the second question – or, I guess, the first question, in terms of how I presented them above -- is also a tricky one. What lesson should we, can we, take from a movie like Detroit? Is it enough just to show awful, reprehensible racism at work, without giving us a specific nugget of truth we’re supposed to glean from it? I suppose the movie is meant to show us how far we have not come since then, but it doesn’t make either explicit or implicit connections to today in the text of the film, leaving it as something of a head scratcher as what our takeaway is supposed to be. This happened in Detroit then; this happens in Ferguson now. Is that really all the movie is supposed to be saying? It doesn’t feel like enough.

And yet I don’t know if that would have been my conclusion had the discussions I’d consumed of this movie not planted that thought in my brain. I was unable to form my own take on this material because it was already formed for me. I could have avoided discussions of this film for some time, if I’d tried, but probably not the five months between when it hit theaters and when I finally saw it. And practically speaking, I couldn't really have because I'd be dying to know why people were not considering this an Oscar frontrunner.

But maybe without that take, I would have thought of this as a lacerating portrait of an America that has not changed as much as we’d like to believe it has. Kathryn Bigelow does not sensationalize these portraits she makes. She just presents them and lets the outrageous details speak for themselves.

And in a country trying to grapple with, and heal from, its own racism, maybe that kind of hopeless factuality, without a silver lining, is not enough.

Lowering my defenses

I have always believed, and recently reemphasized on this blog, that in order to be a good film critic, you need to divorce yourself from the specifics of your own perspective as a viewer. You can't just see a movie through your own eyes. You have to see it through the eyes of the person for whom it was intended. Or really, you should continually become that person. You should be Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, and have all the faces at your disposal. You should be No One.

I didn't do that when I watched Get Out the first time.

Fortunately, in this case, I was not reviewing it. Not officially for ReelGood. But I did "review it," in a manner of speaking, on this blog, in this post. And you can tell from the way I labored to say exactly what I meant that not only was I trying desperately not to offend anyone, but that I might not have actually known exactly what I meant. Or might have felt uncomfortable with what I meant on some level. SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

To summarize, so you don't have to link back to that post, I wished that the movie had dealt more realistically with the genuine problem of parents who can't accept that their daughter is dating someone from another race, complicated by the fact that they consider themselves open-minded liberals. I didn't like the fact that the movie took a more fantastical, science fiction approach to its contemplations on racism, thinking that it damaged our ability to draw real messages from it.

Then I saw Get Out again.

I always knew I would, before finalizing my year-end list. At the pace it was going, it looked likely to sink down as far as somewhere in the 50s, which would mean it wouldn't even make the top third of the movies I saw this year. That didn't seem right, something I knew even when I struggled to write that post.

I got my opportunity at the Hoyts kiosk last night, purportedly to rent the Will Ferrell-Amy Poehler comedy The House to watch with my wife that evening. She had accepted that choice with a bit of a shrug, and I thought maybe I could do better. So instead of just picking The House on the opening screen, I scrolled four screens in and was reminded that she had not yet seen Get Out, and had stated an express desire to see it. Thinking she still might have her mind set on something a little lighter that evening, whether she shrugged at The House or not, I texted to be sure, and got an enthusiastic response. A few minutes later, Get Out was spat out of the machine.

For some reason I was with Get Out every step of the way this time. Knowing where it was going to go was a big help in that regard. Instead of being blindsided by it, I was able to view earlier occurrences in the plot in light of what I knew was going to happen. I have also recently said on this blog that a film shouldn't take two viewings in order to figure out why it's great -- this was in reference to Dunkirk -- but I'd also be a fool if I suggested the implied opposite, which is that it's never worth watching a movie a second to see if you missed a brilliance that was always there.

But I think the big difference was how I lowered my defenses this time. And that gets back to my perspective as a viewer.

See, the first time I saw Get Out, I found it all too easy to put myself in the shoes of the Armitages, the supposedly liberal family living in the country who are proven be demented psychopaths. Of course, it wasn't the second part I related to. It was the part where they were asked to put their liberal views to the test and accept their daughter's black boyfriend.

I don't have a daughter, and if I did, she wouldn't be of dating age. But my sons will one day be of dating age, and if they date outside their race, I want to be their biggest champion.

But there's that nagging part of me, as I suspect there is of anyone who considers themselves post-racial, that wonders just how I would react. Would I be as supportive as I think I would be? If I weren't, I doubt it would be because my son's prospective partner were black, or Indian, or Japanese, or extra terrestrial. It would be because that person is in some way different than what I had envisioned. The same scenario would confront me if that person were male rather than female, and again I hope I would be cool with that -- but I can never really be sure until actually being in that situation.

The first time I saw Get Out, I got off on the wrong foot with Chris because I thought he wasn't giving his girlfriend's parents the chance to make good on their own ideals. He doubted them out of the gate, continued to doubt them the whole time, and was ultimately proven correct. It felt, on some level, unfair.

The second time I watched Get Out, I fully realized what others had told me the first time -- which is that the movie is not meant to be told from their, or in this case my, perspective. It's Chris' perspective, and his perspective has a lot of history informing it. Throughout history, dads of white girls have been a lot more likely to chase people like him off their lawn with a shotgun than welcome him into their homes. A little skepticism is only practical.

It's true that Chris warns his girlfriend and then says "I told you so." But he was justified in worrying about it, and justified in "telling her so." This time around, with my defenses lowered, I was not as sensitive to the evidence he was stockpiling to feel weirded out by them. He does give them a fair enough shake, it's just that things are so weird, so early, that his instinct to say "I told you so" is stimulated almost the moment he walks through their door.

And since this movie isn't doing what I thought it should be doing -- exploring the micro-aggressions of subtle racism -- I met the movie on the terms of what it was doing. Namely, existing as a paranoid fantasy that says real things about blacks and their fears of what white people might do to them. These fears are not always as straightforward as "white people hate me so they will try to lynch me." They are sometimes more nebulous, with less of an identifiable and explainable psychology behind them, like "white people might turn me into a sex slave."

What happens in this movie is so gonzo, scientifically, that it seems clear there is no other way to interpret it but metaphorically. That's what I called "confused messaging" the first time around, as it seemed arguable that what the Armitages do with blacks is as much out of a desire to be them as a hatred for them. But what's really happening in this movie is that Chris is imagining the worst possible thing that could happen when he's introduced to his white girlfriend's parents -- and that thing actually manifesting itself. Whether it "really" happens or whether the whole movie is meant to be taken as a metaphor is somewhat less important. The important part is that it is an expression of a fear that black people really carry around with them -- a paranoid fear, but just because they're paranoid doesn't mean that people aren't out to get them.

Because, as the world today continually tells us, they are. Maybe not in this exact way, but they are. And Get Out dramatizes this fear viscerally.

My reevaluation of Get Out is probably still not enough to make it a candidate for my top ten, as I still have nagging concerns about it. But it was great to watch it in a spirit of giving myself over to it, and not feeling defensive about it.

And thought it may not make my top ten, it no longer has to worry about being mired in the 50s.

The confused messaging of Get Out

It's never a good idea to talk about what a movie "should have been." All conventional wisdom about reviewing a movie endorses meeting it on its own terms, rating the movie you have in front of you and not some hypothetical permutation of that movie that might have done x, y or z differently.

Yet we all do it. And that's not only because a central part of reviewing movies is quibbling with decisions, and implicitly if not actually proposing alternate ways of accomplishing the movie's goals.

I suppose the sin comes out as a matter of degrees. You can talk about small adjustments to a movie, but you can't suggest sweeping changes, or else you're talking about a different movie altogether.

And yet I can't help but wish sweeping changes upon Get Out ... while still wanting it to stay more or less the same movie.

I'll try to explain. But first, some background.

I have been keeping up the cone of silence around Get Out like around no recent movie I can remember, and that's probably because I've waited longer for the release of Get Out here in Australia than any movie I can remember. It was basically nine weeks between the February 24th release of the movie in the U.S. and the May 4th release in Australia. That's a lot of podcast discussions to avoid (four, to be exact), online comments to not parse too closely (several), and theatrical trailers to plug your ears and scrunch your eyes shut as they played (about four as well).

Yet I did it because I had such high hopes for what this movie had the possibility of being.

For a while it looked like it was going to get there. And watch out, because now I'm going to spoil the hell out of this movie.

When it looked like it was going to get there, I thought it might be a horror movie version of Django Unchained. When I realized it wasn't going to get there, it had turned into a horror movie version of Self/Less.

One of those is a more common reference than the other, so I'll explain the other.

Self/Less is a 2015 sci-fi thriller directed by Tarsem Singh, in which the consciousness of a dying man (Ben Kingsley) is swapped into the body of a much younger, more attractive man (Ryan Reynolds). It's not all that good but it has its moments.

I don't love Django Unchained either, but boy do I wish this movie was more like Django than it was like Self/Less.

See, the movie I thought Get Out was going to be -- and, to return to the fallacy of wishing a movie were a different movie than it is, the movie I wished it had been -- was that horror Django Unchained, or maybe the horror version of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, which is probably the most obvious point of comparison. Attractive young white girl brings handsome young black boyfriend home to her supposedly accepting family, and all hell breaks loose.

It was the way in which the hell broke loose that I didn't like.

I expected this movie to be about racism, and it is -- sort of. But racism is actually kind of a red herring in this movie. Or, it's racism of a totally different sort, or reverse racism, or extremely hurtful behavior directed at a particular race of people that has more to do with wanting to be them than not wanting to be them.

And it's about swapping brains into bodies where they don't belong.

But how much more interesting would this movie have been if it were really about racism?

I love the idea of untested liberal values. So few of us liberals have to prove that we are actually the liberals we say we are. We believe in equal rights, and we tell everybody we'd love a gay or trans child just as much as we'd love one who's straight, and we tell people we "don't see skin color." But rarely are we required to provide the proof of this in our own lives.

So I love the idea of a movie where a girl brings her black boyfriend home to her liberal parents, who have their liberal values tested for the first time and fail that test spectacularly. And fail that test in a way that drops the movie they're in into the horror genre.

Jordan Peele could have made that movie. That he made a movie about body swapping instead is to this movie's detriment.

I don't want to say there are not cool parts of the plot he did choose to tell. The most chilling thing I can think of in Get Out is the performance of Betty Gabriel as Georgina, the maid/servant who shows the most obvious signs of being "off" -- of, basically, being a lobotomized zombie. She's terrifying. And if it had been this other movie, we'd likely lose her performance.

But I think the scariest thing about scary movies is the ways in which they are plausible on some level. I don't know about you, but movies involving the threat of fantastical creatures don't get under my skin the way that movies involving the real behavior of humans can. I want to see what a liberal father who suddenly realizes he can't stomach the idea of his daughter being with a black man might surprise himself by doing. I also think that movie is a more interesting conversation starter.

More interesting than, you know, a mad brain surgeon who sticks the minds of old white people into young black bodies, first having gotten his wife to hypnotize those young black bodies' original hosts.

And let's get to that. This movie puts you on the lookout for racist behavior against black people, and it certainly gives you it, or some version of it. But more than anything it's really giving you a look at the awkwardness of white people around black people, who try to find that perfect balance between trying too hard to ingratiate themselves to them and trying too little. Well-meaning white people try to engage black people on subjects that they believe to be of mutual interest, like Barack Obama, in the case of liberals (and in the case of Bradley Whitford's character in this movie). I find that pretty interesting, because although it's a sort of racism, it's really just a sort of racial hyper-awareness. The requirements of how to behave in a situation they consider fraught with the potential to offend causes them to become extra conscious of everything they say or do, which can turn them into babbling idiots stumbling over themselves. Whereas if they just shut off their brains, they'd probably interact with the person who is different from them in a natural fashion that might even contain genuine bonding.

That stuff is all interesting, and it becomes even more so when you throw in an element of how it might go wrong. How it might go horribly, horribly wrong, and how things might escalate into dark places over the course of a well-intentioned weekend.

What Peele does instead is he confuses his message through seemingly contradictory elements of that message.

Because they are inexplicably sinister, the white family in this movie treats their daughter's boyfriend (Daniel Kaluuya) with a kind of thinly veiled contempt. That would be all well and good if they were secret racists posing as a picturesque liberal family accepting of all shapes, sizes and colors.

But these people are not secret racists, or at least, I don't think they are. Their secret is not that they're racists, but that they want to be Kaluuya and the others they have kidnapped, hypnotized and lobotomized over the years. They find there to be something essentially superior about a black person that makes his/her body ripe for this mind swap procedure. And yes, some of that is based on a Jimmy the Greek-style "blacks have better hips for running" type of racism, but the end result is still that these people choose to transplant their brains into the bodies of people they want to serve as physical vessels for their consciousness for the remaining days of those bodies. You don't assume the form of something you loathe, do you?

And it's not all "blacks can run faster" stereotyping. Some of it is "blacks are cooler," or "blacks are better lovers," or whatever fantasy these old white people have conjured up about these idealized corporeal vessels. In any case, they are not just trying to be rejuvenated via some younger version of themselves. They are actively seeking an experience that they consider foreign to theirs, and implicitly, superior to theirs.

The confusion of the message comes in the sense that there is a disdain and loathing in the attitudes of the captors toward their prey. Maybe only because they are movie villains and Peele is playing things a bit on the broad side in his first feature, but Peele requires them to appear to hate this thing they are also trying to attain. There's no essential reason they have to behave in a sinister fashion toward Kaluuya's Chris and the others they also enslave. They do so because the beats of a horror movie require it. I'd argue it might almost be more scary if they were appearing to worship these people they were about to lobotomize.

And another confusion results from all this, namely, Chris' certainty from the very start of the movie that it is a bad idea to bring your black boyfriend home to your white parents without telling them he's black. Which, I suppose, is a bit of conventional wisdom I would tend to agree with. However, he's so focused on the likelihood that they will balk at him that it almost feels like it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. He's looking right away for any sign that something's wrong, and he gets those signs because Peele has written those characters to give off signs. He's done this because they are villains in a movie and he doesn't trust them to be scary if they are not scary in obvious ways, ways that align them with mad scientists more than with real people whose actual complexities are scary enough on their own.

So what ends up happening is that Chris ends up being right, but for the wrong reasons. Sure, he's got pretty good evidence in the spooky handyman and spooky maid he encounters upon arriving, who, one might argue, are also written to too much of an extreme. (I mean, why would you want to transplant the brain of a loved one into another person's body if it meant they were going to entirely cease behaving normally?)

But I'd argue that his prediction that her family is secretly racist is not actually borne out. They don't hate Chris, they want to be him, though it's conveyed in a problematic way because Peele also kind of wants to have them be racist, even though that doesn't make sense. And the daughter, who turns out to be their field agent luring in their subjects, can't be very racist either if she's dated and slept with a string of black men. She too displays a loathing toward Chris (and presumably, her previous boyfriends) though she has presumably committed months if not years of her life to sleeping with them and spending significant amounts of time in their company. That's like someone saying they smoke two packs a day because they hate cigarettes.

So if I've got this litany of complaints about Get Out, why do I kind of also just want to leave it exactly as it is?

Because there are great things in this movie. Like the hypnotism scene. Like Kaluuya's performance in that scene, and in general. Like the mood of dread that permeates the movie. Like Gabriel's aforementioned performance, and like the performance of Lakeith Stanfield as another enslaved vessel. Like the opening scene, which could make a great short movie in itself. Like the last third of awesome genre satisfactions. Like the promise it shows in a director who has cut his teeth as a comedian, but is not laughing here.

I just wish the thoughts and ideas of this movie, which are bursting with social and cultural relevance, could be streamlined into something more coherent.

And that, you know, maybe the movie didn't have to be about brain swapping.

Get out, Get Out!

Every year around this time, Australia makes me wait an interminable amount of time for the release of a movie that's being buzzed about in the U.S.

I griped about it here three years ago, my first beginning-of-the-release-year in Australia, when The Lego Movie was held back until the first term school holidays, which did not start that year until the beginning of April. (It's Easter dependent). It had already been out for two months in the U.S. by that point.

It's a bit of deja vu in 2017, as there's a new Lego Movie with a similar early-year U.S. release date being delayed for similar reasons, though I'm not so worked up about that (despite hearing that it's really good). Rather, it's another movie, one that would have utterly no incentive for waiting for the kiddies to be out of school, that's bothering me in 2017.

Namely, the whole world has seen Jordan Peele's Get Out but me.

People are talking about it online. People are recommending it in Facebook groups in which I participate. People are sending me direct messages about it. People want to know if I've seen it and what I think.

And so when I tell Get Out to get out, I mean get released already, dammit.

You see that February release date taunting me in that poster above? Uh uh. The Australian release date was not in February. It's not in March. It won't be in April either.

May. May is when this movie is coming out where I live.

May 4th, to be exact.

May the fourth be with it.

Instead of already knowing what it's all about, as most of the world does, I had to cover my eyes and ears last night during the trailer before A Cure for Wellness. I don't want this movie's surprises ruined for me. I know the basic premise and can make likely extrapolations from there, but I feel like specifics will be encroaching soon if I don't carefully guard myself against them.

And Get Out is coming at me full force on the podcast front. I have three podcasts that regularly discuss modern movies -- Filmspotting, The Slate Gulture Gabfest and The Next Picture Show -- and each of them has discussed it recently. In one case I skipped through the discussion, and in the other two, I have yet to get to them.

Ho hum.

So all I can really do now is wait, and make this joke:

"Have you seen Jordan Peele's new movie yet? It's called Get Out: The Elaine Benes Story."