You’d better look twice!: Annexation and De/Colonization of the Gaze in Jordan Peele’s ‛Get Out’ (2017)

Abstract

In his first two fictions (Get Out [2017] and Us [2019]) Jordan Peele invites the viewer to question the way in which the new paths of horror reinvest, through the treatment of images and bodies, the articulation and opposition between seen and unseen, seeing and knowing in a narrative economy that thwarts the expectations of the genre. Get Out renews the figures and forms of horrific discourse by revealing the internalized horror of our contemporary societies. By proposing to take hold of the representations that surround us by decentring our gaze and replace the horrific aberration with a horror indexed on the real world, Get Out manages to revitalize the horrific genre and revisit the history (notably Hollywood) of our representations. This essay will show how Get Out displays a whole range of images, in particular stereotypes and clichés—both photographic and stylistic—in order to question our gaze, which is biased by a habitus that is now only governed by unconscious mental operations. In the film, the exposure of the ideology underlying the standard expression of racism in the United States is based not only on a study of the representations of otherness, but also on the colonisation of the gaze resulting from the interdependence between the visible, the seen, vision and the lens through which we view the world.