A Scary Truth: Jordan Peele and Racialized America

Jordan Peele is rapidly rising through Hollywood’s ranks as one of the most promising young filmmakers working today. With a background in sketch comedy and a clear interest in the horror genre, Peele has offered sharp social commentary and criticism via films such as Get Out (2016) and Us (2019). Peele is significant in that his body of work seems to mark a clear shift in our conception of how Hollywood intersects with race. Peele has by no means erased the entertainment industry’s prejudiced and often racist nature, but his films have drawn attention to race in America in a way that few would expect from those produced by a major Hollywood studio. He is not the first African American filmmaker to revolutionize the way we discuss race in film, and he likely will not be the last, but he remains unique in his willingness to create genre films with sociopolitical and socioeconomic implications. In this essay, I will demonstrate how Peele has managed to exist within a racialized studio system while creating films that are a direct response to the racialized structure of Hollywood and the United States more broadly.

Peele specifically creates films in what Jason Smith (2013) would consider the colorconscious tradition. But before we can understand what makes Peele’s colorconscious brand of filmmaking so significant, we must examine the differences between this colorconscious approach and the much more common colorblind approach. Often used as a sort of defense by those with racist and prejudiced views, colorblindness ignores the significance of race in the United States. Ultimately, it is not a question of whether or not one sees color, but rather how one responds to it. Smith suggests that colorblindness actually “allows and justifies the persistence of racial inequality [and] can thus be seen as a political tool in which racial privileges are maintained” (p. 781). Colorblindness therefore has a natural relationship with the notion of America as a post-racial society, a false reality that has been pushed in several circles, especially since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, a notion Peele hints at slightly in Get Out when the Armitages assure Chris that they “love Obama.”

Peele’s films not only levy specific criticisms at these lines of thinking, but actively reject them altogether by adopting colorconsciousness as their means of thinking about race. In her attempt to classify Peele’s Get Out as an example of a new genre known as horror verité, Alison Landsberg (2018) explains that “in horror verité the terrifying nightmare is everyday reality” (p. 632). Landsberg is making a distinction between a film like Get Out and countless other horror films, which surely have some sort of social commentary, but are not directly responding to the sociopolitical or socioeconomic events of the time. Because this is Peele’s primary goal in crafting such a film, he cannot operate via colorblindness. And as a man of color himself, he lives his every day acutely conscious of color and how it impacts both himself and the world around him. But Peele’s own awareness of race is not enough; he must find a way to inject this awareness into his films if he is to effect any change. He does this in a variety of ways, beginning with the very first sequence, which Landsberg describes as “a defamiliarization of the space of the suburbs” (p. 634). This defamiliarizing effort is a response to how the media typically represents suburbia, as a white domain, something Smith identifies still as markedly colorblind. The exclusion of blacks from white spaces is never on the basis of race, but is instead “due to various defects within the individual” (p. 789). Because the media often represents the suburbs as a white space, Peele subverts this notion by depicting a hooded black man walking down the sidewalk of a nice, suburban neighborhood. Rather then presenting danger to this space, this man is actually in danger himself, as a masked figure gets out of a car behind him and kidnaps him. We can consider a moment like this one colorconscious as it draws specific attention to color and how it is treated in film. By reversing our expectations in regards to how race operates in suburban spaces, Peele is forcing colorconsciousness onto his viewers. A white audience may perceive the black man as a threat to the suburban space, but once he is captured and revealed to be in danger, audiences must reckon with their own assessment of the situation. This is not to say that all white viewers carry prejudice, but rather that these ideas are deeply engrained and have been around for centuries. Initially perceiving the black man as a threat does not guarantee that one harbors hatred for people of color; it merely suggests how they might respond or behave if they found themselves in the same space. Hollywood continues to push for greater diversity in its casting, finding varying degrees of success, but a film can have a diverse cast and still be dangerously colorblind. Peele’s work highlights the importance of creating media that raises consciousness regarding color, rather than obscuring the conversations surrounding it altogether.

In just its first scene alone Peele’s work manages to effect more conversations regarding race than many other contemporary works. Of course, the colorconscious nature of Get Out only becomes more explicit as the film goes on. Peele literalizes the racial problem in America by establishing a scenario in which “liberal” whites are coopting black bodies so they can insert their own souls instead. And Landsberg also notes how this section of the film, where most of the narrative takes place, remains committed to a brand of horror that utilizes traditional genre tropes but does so in service of a consciousness-raising effort. Jump scares in the film, as just one example, “are racially inflected, calling attention to race and racial hierarchies” (Landsberg, p. 635). When protagonist Chris first meets Walter and Georgina, the white family’s hired help, it is meant to startle the audience. It is not simply their sudden appearance that is meant to shock, however. Peele intentionally draws viewers attention to the subordination of black bodies in this white space. A separate essay could easily be dedicated to a more cinematic analysis of how Get Out uses its medium and its genre to dissect race in the United States, but I remain more interested in how we may situate Peele’s overall body of work in the broader context of the entertainment industry.

Get Out, for its part, was produced by Sean McKittrick and Jason Blum, two white men who have found success producing a variety of films across Hollywood. Their whiteness does not nullify their support of the project, or even their belief in its messaging. But Peele’s work successfully illustrates the ways in which all white people may be complicit in the systemic suppression of blacks in the United States. We may even consider Peele’s work in relation to Charles Mills’ seminal work The Racial Contract, in which Mills suggests that “all whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it” (p. 11). The contract here refers to the differentiation being made between whites and nonwhites in which nonwhite bodies are subordinated and thusly considered viable to be exploited, denied, or controlled. So, while whites may choose not to associate themselves with such a contract, they must remain aware of their participation in this dynamic. And by creating colorconscious media, Peele seems hopeful that audiences, white audiences in particular, can develop this understanding and become stronger allies in combating prejudice and racism.

Peele has quickly become one of the key figures associated with the contemporary horror genre today. With Get Out drawing Oscar nominations, and Us continuing to build momentum currently, Peele’s films seem to push back on what Van Jaap Ginneken (2007) refers to as “the residue of ethnocentrism in recent blockbuster movies” (p. xi). Media as a whole, but blockbusters in particular with their stronger emphasis on box office numbers, has maintained an ethnocentric approach to its own creation. In a predominantly white country, in which whites are continually afforded easier access to education, jobs, and the like, whites emerge as the primary creators and the primary customers. The assumption, then, is that white creators want to make things in their image, and white customers want to see themselves on screen. But Ginneken complicates this idea a bit by suggesting that the ethnocentric nature of the film and media we encounter is less rooted in our own egos, and more so in a lingering interest in the colonial or segregationist eras. Interestingly, he also notes that “minorities are avid moviegoers” compared to whites, further complicating this notion of putting white bodies onscreen for a white audience (Ginneken, p. 10). It seems, then, that Hollywood, and ultimately America as a whole, had been waiting for films like Peele’s. But there may also be something sinister about how white audiences receive Peele’s work. If ethnocentric blockbusters, films we could safely describe as colorblind as well, have dominated our cultural landscape for so long, then how do we explain white audiences’ sudden acceptance of films like Get Out and Us? Perhaps white viewers are able to embrace these films as blockbusters, as forms of entertainment, whilst rejecting their colorconscious elements. Peele certainly created films that put color and race at the forefront and make it nearly impossible for audiences to ignore the prevalence of these issues, and yet if our interest in them is anything like our interest in the decades of blockbusters preceding them, there remains a connection between white identity and a segregated past.

Peele recalls racist imagery of the past throughout his work, with the obvious intention of criticizing and removing such imagery from our contemporary collective imagination. And while many viewers may welcome this perspective, there remains a lingering fear that the continued presence of these images allows for their continued appropriation in our collective minds. Get Out obviously recalls slave auctions of the past, a rather jarring image and clear indication that we are in no way living in a postracial society. In Us, Red’s tired and worn out face, a product of a life lived underground, recalls minstrel imagery from the early 20th century. The film’s poster alone depicts her with overly expressive eyes, removing a mask from her face. This mask seems to especially stand out as an allusion to minstrel imagery. Of course, minstrel shows of the past featured white performers in blackface and black dress, so we can think of this reference again as Peele directing our attention towards race and color by subverting our expectations of such imagery.

Us is not a film explicitly interested in race in the way that Get Out is, dealing much more with class and privilege. Yet, the film remains colorconscious, mostly because Peele is hyperaware that you cannot ignore the relationship between race and class in the United States. If we imagined Us and Get Out as existing in the same universe, we might imagine Get Out as the reveal that we are in fact not living in a postracial America, and Us as the exploration of those who are yet to figure that out. The film follows a black family, and yet their race is never dealt with any meaningful way through dialogue or narrative. In fact, they are rather privileged, seemingly ignorant of the plight many around the country are experiencing every day. There are slight allusions to blackness beyond the color of their skin. The family’s father, Gabe, wears a Howard University sweatshirt early on in the film, for example, potentially even further indicative of privilege. This decision to largely ignore race doesn’t make the film itself postracial; Peele’s camera remains too interested in black bodies and how they either comfortably or uncomfortably occupy white spaces. Rather, the film responds to the postracial context, and postracial contemporaries, it exists in and around. By focusing on a black family in a fantastic situation that has no immediate relationship with their race, Peele is attempting to clean up the “residue of ethnocentrism” that Gikkenen referred to in his discussion of mainstream film (p. xi). In viewing a vast majority of mainstream film, one could be mistaken into believing that all Americans, regardless of race, exist only in relation to white people. Us suggests sovereignty and agency for people of color, something they are rarely granted in most media representations, by putting them squarely in control of a narrative that would often be afforded to white characters first and foremost.

Each individual within the family can also be read as a subversion of the tropes often mapped onto them. For example, Gabe’s status as the man of the family, and a black man in particular, should indicate emphasis on his masculinity and limit his value to that of his bodily strength. And while he obviously still sets out to protect his family, and physical violence does become a tool in doing so, his struggles to understand his wife and the larger situation in which he has found himself place more emphasis on his brain than most films would ever afford to a black man. And Adelaide, his wife, marks an especially progressive take on how black women are depicted in media. Rather than being relegated to a supporting, caretaker-like role, Adelaide emerges as our protagonist, our gateway into the film. Of course, she has motherly instincts like any mother would, but her body is not sexualized nor is it limited to care work. She becomes the ultimate aggressor in combating the family’s doubles, and in some ways, takes on more masculine traits than her husband. And in contrasting her with Kitty, a white woman in the film, Peele again subverts how we traditionally think of black versus white bodies. Kitty complains about her skin and her appearance, and suggests to Adelaide that she get work done on her face. The camera, however, allows Adelaide’s black skin to stand out against the beige, sand background, while Kitty is seemingly washed out. Whereas most media positions white women as the pinnacle of femininity and the ideal form of beauty, Us affords this perspective to its black female lead instead. These contrasts between how blacks and whites are depicted in media have had a very long shelf life, and Peele’s films alone cannot erase the cultural hegemony they have established within the United States, but his colorconscious approach is certainly successful in drawing our attention to these contrasts and how we may better engage with them moving forward.

So if we have established Peele as a key figure in the continued fight for greater and more impactful media representation for blacks, then what else is still needed to improve this large and complicated issue? I suppose what I am doing here is offering Peele advice of sorts, and identifying some further problems he may need to tackle in future endeavors. Smith identifies “the highly individualized nature of Hollywood storytelling” as a key barrier in preventing the advancement of colorconscious media (p. 794). It is unsurprising that America’s entertainment capital churns out stories focusing on the individual. These stories are, after all, reflections of society writ large. American society has and will likely continue to emphasize the individual over the collective. We can think of countless superhero, western, or spy thrillers that support Smith’s claim. The racial problem in America, however, cannot be tackled by any one individual. Sure, individuals have emerged over time to impact racial progress, but even these individuals led movements, large collectives of people. Several Hollywood narratives position individuals as capable of changing their own fortune or fixing their own predicament. Peele seems at least somewhat aware of this issue. Get Out features Chris on the brink of defeat, only to be saved by his friend Rod. Us features an even stronger collective in the form of its central family unit. Peele is perhaps participating in the tradition of several other black filmmakers, deemphasizing the work of the protagonist so as to emphasize the significance of the support they receive from their community. Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do The Right Thing is one such example of a film that emphasizes community over the individual. Peele may also soon encounter an issue of genre. In discussing comedy as a genre, Smith notes that “humor can be useful for African Americans in dealing with oppressive forces [but] the gains provided by humor can be offset when comedies are the only outlet [for] such commentary” (p. 794). While Peele has a history in comedy, he is obviously now preoccupied with horror as a genre. But could he eventually face a similar issue? Smith problematizes comedy because it seems to both illuminate issues for an audience while allowing them the opportunity to not take those issues quite as seriously. Horror seems to lie closer to drama than it does comedy, but if Peele’s colorconsciousness only ever manifests itself as something frightening, we perhaps run the risk of never pulling it back down into reality, never reminding ourselves of how grounded these ideas are in our everyday lives, and why that is what is truly terrifying.