A deep-dive into Get Out: A series in five parts - Quintet Part 2 - Portending Evil

As Dean is showing Chris around the house, he leads him down a hallway with a portrait of the former’s late father, Roman Armitage, hanging on the wall alongside other pictures of his family. The portrait depicts a young Roman Armitage crouched into the starting pose for some race, which Dean reveals in a bit is the one for the qualifiers to the 1936 Berlin Olympics and where he lost to legendary Afro-American sprinter, Jesse Owens. Hitler was part of the audience to the race that day and Dean remarks how Owens’s victory stood in stark defiance to everything Hitler was an advocate for. To this Chris nods in agreement and adds that the defeat must have been tough to swallow for his father. Dean offers a cryptic and strange response here that leaves the viewer puzzled and without being able to make any sense out of it.

CHRIS: “Tough break for your Dad though.” 

DEAN: “He almost got over it..”

It therefore bowled me over completely when it finally clicked what was meant in this line. Roman indeed ‘almost got over it’, that is to say he never did and the bitterness of the loss stung so deeply that it triggered his creation of ’The Order of the Coaguala’. And through the surgical process developed and refined by The Order he was able to transplant his consciousness into an African body (belonging to Walter) that had become the object of his envy for its naturally superior physical prowess. Peele expertly builds on the foreshadowing for events to come.

The hallway connects to the kitchen and it is where Dean guides Chris to next. Awaiting inside is the housekeeper Georgina, a slender young African-American woman no more than a decade older than Chris. The thing that makes this scene uncomfortably stand out is the palpable stench of artificiality which hangs in the air. The unshakeable feeling that something is off, that something is not quite right about her is felt through the screen. An inexplicably sinister aura is looming quiet and heavy inside the kitchen but neither the viewer nor Chris at this point can quite put their finger on the source of this. A wry ghoulish smile is plastered on Georgina’s face who returns Chris’s ‘Hi’ with a conspicuously and jarringly, perhaps deliberately tone-deaf and discordant greeting: ‘Hello’. There is something fundamentally conflicting about the person of Georgina. Deeper than the more apparent disagreement between Chris’s and the audience’s notion and conception of what a black woman is and what instead presents itself as reality through Georgina, there exist s a more disconcerting conflict raging on within the stiff and motionless frame of Georgina as we are to find out later. The most chilling part about this scene however is something Dean says right as he escorts Chris into the kitchen: “My mother loved her kitchen so we kept a piece of her in here.” Understanding what is truly meant here allows one to finally account for the inexplicable sense of dread. The piece of Dean’s mother that stays on in the kitchen Is her brain, her consciousness and memories transplanted into Georgina.

As Dean continues the house-tour, he next leads Chris to the spacious play field which is right outside the kitchen. Addressing the elephant in the room, he broaches the obvious but delicate fact about the Armitage home which is virtually on everybody’s mind at this point; ‘White family, black servants..’ to Chris while playfully nudging him shoulder to shoulder to which Chris calmly responds that he wasn’t going to ‘go there’.

DEAN: You didn’t have to. Trust me, I know. We hired them a few years ago to help care for my parents; they’re like part of the family now. Couldn’t bear to let them go. I hate the way it looks though... 

CHRIS: Yeah, I know what you mean. 

DEAN: And by the way, I would’ve voted for Obama a third term if I could’ve. Best president in my lifetime. Hands down.

CHRIS: [smirks] I agree

Again in these handful of lines Peele expertly builds on the sense of foreboding and foreshadowing. On a rewatch one might even say he’s practically giving away the climax, but of course there’s no way to connect the dots for someone on their first watch. What Roman meant, what he really meant, was that following the passing away of his parents, both of them were transplanted into Walter and Georgina therefore making them ‘part of the family’ who he couldn’t ‘bear to let go’. And of course he hates the way it looks because they’re black. Chris however much like the uninitiated first-time viewer interprets this as him saying he hates how the dynamic unwittingly resembles that of the white master and negro slave from the bygone era. One can hardly place any blame on Chris here either who, in addition to having his expectations for the family pre-conditioned by Rose, really wants to believe that his girlfriends’ family are good people. Therefore he naively smirks when Dean heaps praise on Obama clinging to Rose’s explanation about her dad, dismissing all else.

[Continued in Part 3...]