The Image of the Other in

Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us

Andreea Mirică
MA English Literature, Humanities Department, Northumbria University at Newcastle, UK

Institution email: [email protected]

Alternative email: [email protected]

Abstract:
This essay seeks to look at Jordan Peele’s horror films Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) from the
perspective of racial discrimination in America. Analysing to what extent Peele reinforces or rewrites
white superiority and black inferiority in both films, the essay will discuss the image of the Other and
its contemporary political implications in light of the Black Lives Matter movement. The core
questions that will shed light on the racial discourse in Peele’s films are ‘To what end are African
American people portrayed as the victim rather than the attacker?’ and ‘How does Peele address
issues of racial discrimination through horror?’ To answer these questions, I will draw upon
theoretical concepts such as white supremacy, black politics and modern slavery. I will equally draw
on Alison Landberg’s reading of Get Out and the concept of horror vérité (or truthful horror), which
makes use of Walter Benjamin’s approach to history, and on Harry Olafsen’s reading of Us, centred
on the concept of mimicry as explained by Homi Bhabha. The analysis of the two films considers first
how film studies and film culture are a prominent medium for racial debate, moving on to provide
historical background meant to clarify the present-day racial issues. Subsequently, the essay
considers how horror and gothic tropes are used by Peele to discuss racial segregation. A third part
looks in more depth at the science fictional elements and their implication in how the superior control
the inferior. Lastly, the paper returns more specifically to the Black Lives Matter movement and
instances of police brutality.

Keywords: Jordan Peele, race, white supremacy, the Other, Black Lives Matter

Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) are American horror films written and directed by
African American actor, comedian and filmmaker, Jordan Peele. Get Out, Peele’s directorial
debut that won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, tells the story of Chris
Washington, a young African American man who gradually uncovers the chilling secret his
white girlfriend, Rose Armitage, and her family mask behind the appearance of a typical,
liberal, post-racial American family. Us, Peele’s second directorial success, tells the story of
Adelaide (Addy) Wilson, an African American woman, and her family, following their fight
against their doppelgängers. Apparently, the two films are very different, Get Out being
closer in style to a thriller film, while Us uses more common horror tropes, most notably the
(psycho)killer – victim chase. Yet, despite their different plots, the two films are similar in
creating an atmosphere of suspense, in focusing on African American protagonists and in
discussing, more or less subtly, contemporary political issues connected to the Black Lives
Matter movement. Looking at the role of cinematography in discussing such issues and
shedding light on racial segregation through historical lenses, this essay seeks to analyse
Peele’s films in terms of what I would call modern slavery and contemporary racial
segregation in America, as well as how Peele employs the horror genre and gothic tropes to
address political and socio-cultural matters.
Film Studies and Race

Both Get Out and Us can be categorised as horror vérité – ‘politically inflected horror
film[s]’ – as described by Alison Landsberg in her essay on Get Out. (Landsberg 2018, 630)
Citing Walter Benjamin, she points out that visual arts (here, photography and film) have
‘radical, even revolutionary potential in [their] capacity to awaken people to the dominant
ideologies that appear invisible, “natural”, normalized, and that nevertheless govern their
lives.’1 (Landsberg 2018, 630) Similarly, Harry Olafsen in his essay on Us draws upon the
theory of Homi Bhabha from his The Location of Culture (1994) in pointing out that ‘“[Art]
renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space that innovates and interrupts
the performance of the present” (7).’2 (Olafsen 2020, 22) Both of Peele’s films do this,
bringing the past into the present as a means to bring racial issues into the consciousness of
the (white Western, so-called liberal) audience. If film, as an art form, is meant to speak
directly to the masses, to bring issues to the attention of a large audience, then film studies
have a role in discussing these issues from an academic perspective. Thus, Gerald Sim deems
film culture a prominent medium for racial debate, having an audience that ‘appear[s] to
possess keen awareness of ideology’s presence in films’. (Sim 2014, 1)
Sim’s book focuses on critical race film studies as a branch of film studies that became
widespread in the 1970s – after the African Americans’ battle for civil rights in the 1960s. As
an academic discipline, it is focused on showing instances of racism and the communication
of ‘racist values’ through film. (Sim 2014, 2) Through some works cited by Sim, such as
Peter Noble’s The Negro in Films (1948) or Edward Mapp’s Blacks in American Films
(1972), it becomes clear that this type of film studies fits in the broader debate about popular
culture’s role in normalising stereotyping and discrimination. One compelling example is
Django Unchained (2012), a film set in early 1858 Texas (the Antebellum South), centred
around Django, a black slave, who is saved from slavery by a white German, Dr King
Schultz. The liberation of Django, suggested by the term unchained (implying he was
chained, unable to unchain himself) in the film’s title, raises many issues: (1) Schultz has to
buy Django’s freedom, (2) Django and Schultz leave the other slaves behind, and (3) later in
the film, Schultz’s offer to buy Django’s wife, Broomhilda, as his escort. Such scenes
problematize Schultz’s good intentions and Django’s black consciousness.
Keeping in mind some films’ tendency to at least apparently promote racial
discrimination or discourage open resistance, the concept of horror vérité Landsberg coined
shows how Peele’s films present an opposing image to films like Django Unchained,
becoming pseudo-documentaries of contemporary times as opposed to presenting slavery as
an issue of the past. Horror vérité is thus a kind of film meant to present the audience with a
truth ‘they are otherwise blindly [i.e. ideologically] subject to.’ (Landsberg 2018, 632
[emphasis in original]) Everyday experience becomes ‘unfamiliar and grotesque’ so that the
truth about the contemporary society be rendered more evident. (Landsberg 2018, 632) Thus,
mass culture can be used as a tool not for perpetuating stereotypes, but for reaching as large
an audience as possible with a message intended to go beyond the screen.
To fully understand the racial issues at play in Peele’s films and today’s America, it is
necessary to look back onto the past and to discuss some aspects of American history. Ideas
about white supremacy, understood as superiority over all racial Others, date back to the first
American colony, Jamestown, established in the seventeenth century. The non-white Other

1
See Benjamin, Walter. 2008. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second
Version.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on
Media, translated by E. Jephcott, R. Livingstone, H. Eiland, and others, edited by M. W. Jennings, B.
Doherty, and T. Y. Levin, 19–55. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP.
2
See Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
was looked down upon as savage, an image that allowed for the creation of the
superior/inferior and the civilised/savage distinctions between Europeans and non-Europeans,
ultimately enabling colonialism. (Fredrickson 1981, 7) George Fredrickson argues that
slavery originated from ‘a belief that white[s] were destined by God or nature to rule over
people whose physical characteristics denoted their innate inferiority.’ (Fredrickson 1981, 70
[emphasis added]) Fredrickson moves on to discuss ‘biological racism’, giving the example
of the Jamaican physician Edward Long, who ‘presented the case that Negroes were a lower
order of humanity than whites’ and a different species. (Fredrickson 1981, 142) This served
to justify slavery in the past, and can still be seen as a justification for present-day racial
discrimination. As a counterexample to Long, ‘[Thomas] Jefferson argued that the alleged
moral deficiencies of blacks were a product of nurture and environment, not nature.’
(Fredrickson 1981, 142) If the inferiority is not innate, it meant that natural rights – most
importantly the right to freedom – applied to people of colour as well as Caucasians.
The debate as to whether the non-whites are naturally inferior is also highlighted in
Harvey Young’s Embodying Black Experience. Young’s analysis of Joseph Zealy’s
daguerreotypes of seven African slaves suggests the idea that the black body had always been
put on display for the white Wester observer – suggesting the Caucasian’s ambivalent attitude
between fear or disgust and fascination with the black body confined within the studio in
Zealy’s case and within slavery from a broader perspective. These photographs were part of a
study – commissioned by Louis Agassiz, a Harvard natural scientist and comparative
anatomist – meant to show ‘that the African body bore no relation to the European body.’
(Young, 2010, 30) Photography here acts as a way to Other people of colour, to show they
are sub-human and in this way destined to be ruled, enslaved, and controlled by the superior
whites. I note this case study here because it is centred on photography, an art form that in
Peele’s Get Out functions as a way to arrive at a truth that is otherwise invisible to the naked
eye. Eventually, Chris’s camera will act as an instrument to liberate modern black slaves
rather than subdue them, as the analysis of Get Out will subsequently reveal.
Returning to Sim, it is noteworthy that he draws on Neo-Marxist theory, citing Fredric
Jameson’s idea that ‘“Otherness” . . . is a peculiarly booby-trapped and self-defeating
concept; and the slogan of “difference,” while politically impeccable in all the obvious
senses, is formalistic and empty of concrete social and historical specification’. (Sim 2014, 5)
This, in turn, suggests that otherness and difference are abstract concepts that can be
challenged and eventually overcome, determining a change of perception. Where
Enlightenment philosophers ‘assume the presence of the liberal subject, an individual that
possesses a given rationality and morality, capable of independent action and thought,
unaffected by social determination’, Marxism and certain poststructuralist ideas, on which
Sim builds his arguments, show that the individual (hence identity) is a social construct. (Sim
2014, 88) Similarly, Young emphasises the idea that the body, in general, is a socio-cultural
construct outside of the physical/phenomenological realm. It is an ‘outside perspective’, an
image of one’s position within society – hence the misrecognition and discrimination of
black bodies. (Young, 2010, 10) What is argued in Young’s book is that identity cannot be
reduced to one aspect of the person – here, his/her skin colour.
Moreover, taking African Americans as a whole, a community, is to reduce individual
experience to a common or mass experience. Stereotyping ignores thus the different socio-
cultural circumstances in which a person’s identity is formed. In White Supremacy,
Fredrickson claims that ‘a slaveholding mentality remained’ among white supremacists long
after slavery has officially been abolished. (Fredrickson 1981, 93) The issue of stereotyping
and prejudice remains because of an inability on the part of the Caucasian to accept a racial
Other as equal. By referring merely to the conscious mind of the individual and disregarding,
for the purpose of this paper, the unconscious mind, I would argue that, by using the horror
genre, Peele shows precisely how black identity is constructed within an unhospitable white
society.

Horror, the Gothic and Racial Segregation

The black body and identity are central to understanding how Peele puts on display
issues of racism, discrimination and what I would like to call modern slavery, in both Get
Out and Us. As Dawn Keetley suggests in the Introduction to her edited collection of essays
on Get Out, Peele was influenced by ‘a tradition of body horror that emphasizes the ways in
which black bodies, in particular, are not their own.’ (Keetley 2020, 5) This goes back to
issues present in American gothic narratives (in both literature and film). For example, Justin
D. Edwards cites David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1830), where
he ‘argues that the “monstrous excesses” of slavery are a “perpetual source of terror and
dismay to every reflecting mind” (2).’3 (Edwards 2002, xx) Thus, issues connected to slavery
enter the gothic realm. Edwards subsequently builds on Freud’s The Uncanny, claiming that
essentially it ‘has to do with our sense of strangeness when the unfamiliar appears at the
center of the familiar.’4 (Edwards 2002, xxv) Making a familiar place or an everyday
experience unfamiliar (unhomely) is one of the gothic devices used by Peele in both Get Out
and Us.
The opening scene of Get Out is a prime example of how Peele uses gothic tropes to
defamiliarise the issue of racial discrimination by separating it in the audience’s mind from
the image of the threatening racial Other (often portrayed as attackers, home intruders, etc.),
turning African Americans into victims. The white suburb – Edgewood Way – is presented as
a threatening place where a young African American man gets lost on his way to a friend’s
house. The uneasiness he feels in this opening scene, saying he is like a ‘sore thumb’ in there,
is justified by his abduction moments later. (Peele 2017, 00:01:20 to 00:01:25) The film later
reveals the abductor, significantly driving a white car, to be Rose’s brother, Jeremy, and the
African American man to be Andre (otherwise known as Logan) one of the Armitage
family’s victims. This opening sequence influences the remainder of Peele’s film,
dramatizing the idea that the African American is an outsider in a white-dominated space
such as the suburb or the house of a white family. Chris also shows anxiety about meeting
Rose’s parents when he asks her, ‘Do they know I’m black?’ (Peele 2017, 00:07:15 to
00:07:19) Both Andre and Chris share a ‘position as young black men in an inherently racist
society’, and their anxiety about racism distracts them from seeing ‘the horrific trap they have
unwittingly fallen into.’ (Murphy 2020, 75-6) Both the suburb and the Armitages’ house
represent culturally alien, unhomely spaces.
Similar to Get Out, the opening scenes in Us also set the tone for what is about to
happen. The audience sees on TV ‘the Hands across America Campaign of the 1980s, where
the people came together to show the unity of the American people across the contiguous
United States.’ (Olafsen 2020, 21; Peele 2019, 00:01:36 to 00:02:11) This later translates into
the plan Red, Adelaide’s Tethered, has to unite all the doppelgängers and take over the
aboveground, a plan of which the audience only learns at the end of the film. The opening
scenes also show the moment Adelaide, as a little girl wandering away from her parents at the
Santa Cruz beach, meets her Tethered Other. Even if everybody in the film has a Tethered
Other, the film centres on the experience of the African American Wilson family, and mainly
that of Adelaide. Later in the film, where her family, and particularly her husband Gabe, is

3
See Walker, David. David Walker’s Appeal (1830). 1995. New York: Hill and Wang.
4
See Freud, Sigmund. 1955. “The Uncanny.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, translated by James Strachey et al., 219– 52. London: Hogarth Press.
oblivious to Adelaide’s anxiety about going to the beach, the audience is kept in
knowledgeable suspense, expecting her Tethered to appear at any moment.
In Us, the Tethered or doppelgängers make the home – each individual’s house,
regardless of race – an unhomely space. ‘Seeing one’s double inspires fear not only because it
is, as Freud suggests, a harbinger of death; it also strikes at the heart of individuality and
forces one to face the fiction of a stable self.’ (Edwards 2002, xxv) Indeed, Olafsen also
points out that the Tethered, around whom the main plot centres, give ‘a clear sense that
horror stems from seeing a reflection of the self in the Tethered (or Other).’ (Olafsen 2020,
20) Homi Bhabha’s ‘almost the same but not quite’ (Bhabha 1984, 130) is cited multiple
times by Olafsen as a way to explain the kind of mimicry or imitation of the aboveground
people that their Tethered Other perform. According to Bhabha, ‘the discourse of mimicry is
constructed around an ambivalence’ (Bhabha 1984, 126 [emphasis in original]), a state in
between real identity (or real racial background) and a desired image, a fabricated identity
(the wish to be equal). From a colonial perspective, ‘mimicry is at once resemblance and
menace’. (Bhabha 1984, 127) That is to say that the African Americans are different in skin
colour, in origin perhaps, but otherwise they are American. This is echoed when Gabe asks
their Tethered ‘What are you people?’ and Red replies, ‘We’re Americans.’ (Peele 2019,
00:47:55 to 00:48:05) If the Tethered can be considered the aboveground people’s
subconscious, it appears that they are not as mindful of racial differences as Gabe proves to
be.
Where the main plot in Us does not offer the kind of racial Othering I seek to discuss in
this essay, class and race issues appear between the African American Wilson family and the
white American Tyler family, with the former continuously trying ‘to live up to the same
standard as the [later].’ (Olafsen 2020, 21) In the final chapter of White Supremacy,
Fredrickson discusses racial segregation as a phenomenon that appeared ‘in the early years in
the twentieth century’ and arguably survived until the present day. (Fredrickson 1981, 241)
Separating the people of colour from the Caucasians can happen on multiple plans – politics
(disfranchisement), education (exclusively black schools), faith (people of colour would be
seated in the rear in church), and so on. However, the kind I want to bring to attention is the
segregation and discrimination in the workplace. Peele brings this issue in front of the viewer
in Us through what’s perceived as rivalry between Gabe Wilson and Josh Tyler. While the
families mirror one another (husband, wife, and two kids), the Tylers obviously look down
upon the Wilsons. For instance, at the beach, Becca and Lindsey Tyler for the most part
ignore Zora Wilson, and when they do talk to her it is just to say that her brother, Jason, is
‘weird’ and to ask why she would not swim. (Peele 2019, 00:26:28 to 00:26:50) Similarly,
while Gabe and Josh have the exact same job, the Tyler family seems to have a better
income. After Josh buys a yacht, Gabe buys a boat. When they get back home from the
beach, Gabe says to Adelaide, ‘You saw their new car, right? He had to do it. He just had to
get that thing to fuck with me too.’ (Peele 2019, 00:29:38 to 00:29:40) Later in the film, when
the Tyler family is also attacked by their doppelgängers, the audience can see the Tylers’
house, more modern and evidently more expensive than the Wilsons’.

Science Fiction in Horror

Robyn Citizen argues that Get Out is part of a series of body-swap films based on the
idea that the mind (consciousness) can be transferred to and control someone else’s body.
This idea can also be extended to Us, considering that Adelaide and Red swap places in the
1980s when they meet as little girls. Nevertheless, in Peele’s films the mind/body divide is
more complex than its scientific implications. By the end of Us, Red reveals that the Tethered
were part of an experiment ‘to make a copy of the body’ but failing to copy the soul – the
experiment’s failure led to the Tethered being abandoned in the subway tunnels. (Peele 2019,
01:35:53 to 01:37:05) While the otherness between the Tethered and the aboveground people
is not racial, it still shares a sense of the oppressor/oppressed or superior/inferior divide. ‘The
implications of Get Out’s reveal […] how this mind/body split is mapped onto other binaries
including civilized/uncivilized and mobility (agency)/stasis.’ (Citizen 2020, 90) Citizen’s
analysis is in line with Bernice Murphy’s idea that the black body acts merely as a body, a
lump of flesh, stereotyped as strong, athletic, healthy. In a twisted form of modern slavery,
Get Out’s protagonist, Chris, gradually realises that the Armitage family uses young African
Americans for their superior, stronger bodies.
After Chris realises that Rose has been luring African Americans people into the
Armitages’ house and that there is indeed something wrong with those people, he tries to
leave, but is hypnotised by Missy Armitage, Rose’s mother. He then wakes up in the
basement of the house, tied to a chair. Along with him, the audience learns about the Coagula
procedure, which transplants a white person’s brain – thus white consciousness – into a black
body. (Peele 2017, 01:13:37 to 01:15:15) Later on, Chris learns about the auction, and the
fact that the blind art dealer is the one who outbid the others. The blind man claims that he
wants something more important than the others, something less superficial. He does not
want Chris’s body for his physical strength or (paradoxically) for his colour, but for his
ability to see. Chris also learns that his consciousness will not disappear entirely, but will be
locked in the Sunken Place. He will ‘be able to see and hear what your body is doing, but
your existence will be as a passenger.’ (Peele 2017, 01:22:25 to 01:25:30) Landsberg
effectively explains that the Sunken Place in Get Out represents ‘a place of black paralysis, a
place of imprisonment that exists within white liberalism under the banner of the post-racial.’
(Landsberg 2017, 637)

‘The fact that Chris is black also lends the trope an even more sinister historical
resonance: slavery, after all, essentially reduced African American captives to the
status of human “livestock” who could be tortured, put to work, and “bred” as their
owner wished.’ (Murphy 2020, 78)

In saying livestock, Murphy also refers to the comparison Dean Armitage does between
the deer Rose hit on the road driving towards her parents’ house, and Chris. In this scene,
Dean says that he does ‘not like the deer. I’m sick of it. They’re taking over.’ (Peele 2017,
00:15:11 to 00:15:25) What he means to say, and what becomes clear later in the film, is that
he is sick of people of colour, and that the death of one African American would be a good
start. Dean Armitage masks racism as liberalism and a fascination for racial differences, but
the mask is nonetheless exaggerated. Thus, the film explores a false sense of security the
person of colour may feel when assured the white Westerners are liberal, not racist. In the
film, while Dean and Chris make the tour of the house and grounds, Dean says he would have
voted for Obama a third time and Chris agrees with him, unsuspecting. (Peele 2017, 18:54 to
19:01)
‘When popular connotations of blackness are mapped across or internalised within
black people, the result is the creation of the black body.’ (Young 2010, 7 [emphasis in
original]) What Harvey Young argues here is that this image, constructed in the white man’s
consciousness, takes over the real ‘flesh-and-blood body’. (Young 2010, 7) It is arguably the
result of years of slavery, and struggle to abolish it and integrate the racial Others in the
community while still thinking of them as slaves, or sub-human. Peele also offers the image
of the white Westerner as abuser and the African American as victim, challenging the
contemporary stereotypical image of the Other as ‘criminal body’. (Young 2010, 12) Where
slavery in itself was abolished, the black body is still under constant threat of being looked
down upon as different, inferior, or as a tool to be used by the white Westerners. (Keetley
2020, 5) For instance, the black body in Get Out is considered a mere vessel, devoid of
humanity. On the other hand, African Americans who want to adopt a white way of life
(including tastes, interests, etc.) can be read as ‘black bodies with white consciousnesses.’
(Keetley 2020, 7) Putting on a mask in order to fit in the contemporary American society
arguably leads to a kind of behaviour similar to how Georgina and Walter act in Get Out or to
how Adelaide (originally Red), at times, acts in Us.
In Get Out, there are many instances in which Walter and Georgina appear as strange in
the eyes of Chris and the audience. Beyond the way they talk, there are certain occasions
when the way they act gives them away. One is when Georgina seemingly malfunctions
when pouring Chris an iced tea. Another is when Walter is seen welcoming and hugging
guests coming to the so-called party or get-together – in reality, the auction. Both Chris and
the viewer later learn that, in fact, Walter and Georgina are Rose’s grandparents, and their
strange behaviour is thus explained. But at first sight their behaviour serves to keep up the
suspense for the audience and the anxiety for Chris. Anxiety seems to peak when Logan (aka
Andre from the opening sequence) is brought out of his trance by the flash of Chris’s phone.
A close-up of Andre’s eyes show the exact moment he regains his black consciousness, and
he jumps at Chris, screaming at him to ‘Get out!’ (Peele 2017, 00:55:30 to 00:56:00) Dawn
Keetley also invokes the idea that Peele’s Get Out is pessimistic. (Keetley 2020, 13)
Pessimism in Get Out can be explained by the fact that, even if a camera’s flash can undo the
Coagula procedure, it is only temporary. In short, the idea that, once possessed, the black
body cannot regain its black consciousness fully suggests a strand of pessimism as to how
alienated the African American putting up a white mask becomes. The ending scene of the
film, when Chris uses the camera flash on Walter, most effectively shows that his former
identity is restored enough for him to help Chris by killing Rose, but not enough as he then
kills himself. (Peele 2017, 01:35:40 to 01:36:30)

Black Lives Matter and Police Brutality

In light of the recent Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, Juliet
Hooker’s article shows that it is by no means a new movement appearing after the death of
George Floyd in May 2020. Hooker begins by listing names of unarmed African American
citizens killed by white police officers since August 2014. This suggests clear discrimination
of the African Americans by the police, an issue that resurfaces in Peele’s films. Building on
the theory of Ralph Ellison, Hooker claims that ‘African Americans learned to meet racial
terror with nonviolence in order to preserve their own lives within an arbitrary system in
which responding in kind to any insult or harm could lead to sudden death.’5 (Hooker 2016,
453) She counters this with the idea that African Americans, as a racial minority, should not
‘reconcile themselves to further sacrifice.’ (Hooker 2016, 458) She seems to be reading
Ellison’s idea of meeting racism with nonviolence as passivity/submission, which ultimately
cannot lead to change. Building on this, however, I would argue that film (or any other art
form) can bring forth issues such as those discussed by Black Lives Matters protesters in
precisely a nonviolent way.
Thus, it is worth noting the few instances in Peele’s films in which police response, or
lack thereof, appears. A first instance in Get Out is after Rose hits the deer on the road. The
incident is reported and when a white police officer asks to see Chris’s ID as well as Rose’s,
she overreacts, saying there is no need, that he was not driving, all in what is nothing more
5
See Interview with Ralph Ellison in Robert Penn Warren. 1965. “Who Speaks for the Negro?”. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
than a bravado to show how anti-racist she is. (Peele 2017, 00:12:25 to 00:13:12) Another
instance in Get Out would be when Rod goes to the police with the story about Andre and
other African Americans getting hypnotised in the Armitages’ house in an attempt to help
Chris, and is obviously not believed. The issue is complicated here by the fact that the police
officers are all people of colour, but it can be argued that they are the kind of African
Americans people who would put up white masks to fit into society. (Peele 2017, 1:15:36 to
01:18:50) In Us, Adelaide tries to call 911 first when the Tethered family appears in their
driveway. (Peele 2019, 00:37:15 to 00:37:50) Gabe tries to scare them off with a bat, but he,
like Chris, is the nonviolent type of African American Hooker talks about. Similarly, when
the Tylers are attacked, Kitty tries to ask Ophelia (a virtual assistant AI) to call the police,
and the machine mishears it as ‘Fuck tha Police’ – a protest song by American hip hop group
N.W.A, directed against police brutality and racial profiling – which plays all throughout the
scene in which the Wilsons fight and kill the Tylers’ Tethered Other. (Peele 2019, 01:07:32
to 01:07:41)

To conclude, Jordan Peele makes effective use of horror and gothic tropes to emphasise
issues connected to the image of the Other and differentiation, most notably on racial bases,
in both Get Out and Us. By using science fiction, if not dystopian scientific experiments,
Peele brings to the audience’s attention the idea that slavery is not merely an issue of the past,
but a matter that is now transformed into the kind of racial discrimination people of colour go
through as a normalised, everyday experience. If the director presents African Americans as
victims and the white Americans as abusers, regardless of how science fictional the plot may
seem, the socio-cultural implications at the core of the films remain. Thus, the black body still
has not become master of itself, and it still exist by comparison to the white body and
consciousness. Both African Americans and white Americans are subject to looking at black
experience through white experience lenses, and thus the contemporary society still tips the
scale in favour of Western ideals. Despite evident differences between Get Out and Us, what
unites them is the way in which Peele makes use of filmmaking as a political tool to
challenge perception on racial discrimination, arguably hoping to also change people’s
attitude towards it. If his intentions are successful is up to the audience.

Bibliography
Primary sources
Peele, Jordan, director. 2017. Get Out. Universal Pictures.
Peele, Jordan, director. 2019. Us. Universal Pictures.

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Seconds and Jordan Peele’s Get Out.” In Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, edited by Dawn
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Edwards, Justin D. 2002. “Introduction.” In Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the
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