Peele-ing Back the Layers
Femininity and Manipulation in Get Out (2017) written for CORE 112
Get Out’s final scene: protagonist Chris sits shell-shocked in his friend Rod’s TSA car as Rod stares at Rose’s body, still bleeding out, and admonishes Chris, “I told you not to go in that house.” Too often, straight men will refer to their ex-lovers as ‘my psycho ex,’ as if one bad breakup invalidates any and all history. And in the end, to Chris, that is exactly what Rose is — a bad story, a warning, for Chris to pass around to his friends and to any future girlfriends. In actuality, Rose Armitage, the antagonist of Jordan Peele’s 2017 psychological thriller Get Out, is a direct contradiction to this image, though she seems to fit that category very well. She is, after all, a master manipulator who nearly kills Chris, but she is also extremely smart and competent, and her relationship with Chris had seemed loving in the beginning.
Though most of Get Out’s existing scholarship is race-driven, there is this theme of femininity in relation to manipulation that is largely unexplored. In contrast, Mary Anne Doane, a film scholar, reconciles the two aforementioned facets of womanhood — the compressed and the alive — in her paper “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” The Freudian Masquerade Theory, first developed by Joan Rivieres, proposes that women hyper-feminize themselves as a defense mechanism, in an attempt to seem less of a threat to men. Doane then takes this theory and applies it to cinema. By tricking the patriarchy into believing that they are not a threat, women are then more able to secretly wrest some power back from it. Paralleling this concept, Rose uses her race, racism — as she feels that being white means she is somehow ‘superior’ — and her acting ability as leverage against the patriarchy, and her death at Get Out’s conclusion is indicative of society’s inability to reconcile living, breathing women with the puppets portrayed on-screen.
Beyond the obvious symbols of race and power — the dark nothingness of the Sunken Place, cotton in the black man’s ears, deer antlers rammed into the chest of a tormentor — Rose’s family in Get Out is also very patriarchal, as evidenced by her father Dean presiding at the head of the table during the family dinner, fraught with “awkwardness and perhaps liberal exoticism of racial [difference; in] fewer words, microaggressions” (Henry par. 3). Kevin Lawrence Henry’s review of Get Out challenges trends in inequitable education, especially for people of color. In that same vein, education is important for the white characters as well. Throughout the entire movie, Dean is the one who makes the big decisions, as he facilitates the silent auction where he sells Chris’s body and he performs the brain surgeries; he is well-educated and smart. Furthermore, despite his sloppy appearance, Rose’s brother Jeremy is revealed to be a student in medical school moments after he makes his first appearance.
Even Missy has a job that deals with sciences; she is a psychologist, a healer, a scientist. And Rose? At no point in the film does anyone mention her job; at no point in her and Chris’ idyllic, pre-Armitage-home life does Rose go to work. And, towards the end of the film while Jeremy and Dean prep for the surgery together, Rose remains in her bedroom, so ensconced in her own little world that she doesn’t even notice her family is dying until nearly all of them have perished. Rose, as a woman with no known income of her own, economically ranks below Chris and the members of her own family. Her sole purpose is to be bait — smart, enterprising bait, but bait all the same. In order to perhaps combat this feeling of inferiority, then, Rose utilizes her self-righteousness and confidence.
In manipulating people of color and making her seduction an art form, Rose is using her race and her discrimination in an effort to push against the patriarchy and her assigned role within it. If Rose were to feel excluded from such a patriarchal system that “assigns the woman to a special place in cinematic representation while denying her access to that system,” then she must create her own ins (Doane 62).
There are several key scenes that indicate Rose’s willingness to go to any length in order to escape the suffocating patriarchy that permeates her life. Early on in the movie, when the couple is headed toward the Armitage house, Rose is shown to be driving the car. This suggests that she is the one in charge, both in this situation and in the relationship in general. Typically, the person in the driver’s seat is the one who decides where the car goes and when it gets there; they are the directors, and in essence have complete control. Rose even takes Chris’s cigarette out of his hand and chucks it out the window, to his very weak protests, again establishing her dominance over his actions. When Chris calls Rod later on in the drive, she flirts with Rod on speakerphone in front of Chris, a thread of manipulation that makes its way all the way to the end of the movie where she uses flirtation to distract Rod from his line of questioning.
In Doane’s paper, she states that women sometimes may “[feel] compelled to compensate for [their] theft of masculinity by overdoing the gestures of feminine flirtation” (Doane 66). Rose’s instinct, then, is to go for hyper-feminization to assuage any of Rod’s suspicions, especially as Rod had warned Chris multiple times to never “go to a white girl parent house [sic].” This goes to show that Rose is already laying down backup plans before the two even get to her house, and it helps reinforce the fact that she is very good at what she does. In terms of the masquerade theory as well, Rose is using masks that cover up her true intentions, in order to achieve her goals.
Later on in the same scene, the car rams into a deer and Rose stands next to their car while Chris takes the initiative and goes into the woods to investigate. In this instance, she seems to be relegated to a more passive role; her brief stint in control abruptly comes to an end. On a deeper level, however, this stepping back may actually give Rose more control. Doane mentions the “female spectatorship” (Doane 62), an appropriation of fetishizing male gazes, for as Doane posits, if men can find enjoyment in the hypersexualization of women on screen, what is to stop a woman from finding her own pleasure? In this case, then, Rose sates her curiosity by taking on a more passive role and watching Chris’ reactions, perhaps remembering his weaknesses for future use. After all, it is only because Chris goes back for Georgina after he hits her that he fails to make a clean escape at the end of the film.
For Doane, too, the proximity of women to their images on the screen as objects to be desired “prevents the woman from assuming a position similar to the man’s” (Doane 63–64). Therefore, Rose, in stepping back from the situation, has room to observe. Rose’s physical distance translates to the distance for the female audience as well. Rather than portray Rose as manipulating Chris just because of her sex appeal, her later reveal as Chris’ manipulator actually strengthens her characterization and gives her more dimension. In recognizing that she is her own woman and that, in this case, she has the agency to plan and to exploit, Rose is more three-dimensional than most other female characters.
As Zadie Smith’s Harper’s Magazine article “Getting In and Out: Who Owns Black Pain?” states, “Get Out is structured around […] inversions and reversals” (Smith 2). Rose’s continuous shifts between being in control and taking on passivity, is in keeping with the rest of the film. During her struggles, she is alternately a tool for the patriarchy — as bait for her family — and also a dominant figure — exerting her own brand of control over Chris. As the one in control, she also has authority over others’ perception, directing attention where she wants it to go and away from suspicious behaviors.
Also in terms of perception, “Chris is a photographer […] and that white and black Americans view the same situations through very different lenses is something he already understands” (Smith 3). Rose’s view of the deer is different from Chris’s; whereas he sees an injured, docile creature, Rose sees a weak thing that could just as soon be her; one wrong move, and her quarry could escape and bring her carefully-constructed plans tumbling down around her. As a woman, she longs to never be in that position of powerlessness and perhaps stays behind because she does not want to be reminded of her own weakness, though of course at the end of Get Out she is left bleeding out in the middle of the road, watching Rod’s TSA car crawling away slowly. Could her situation perhaps parallel the deer’s situation? Or perhaps some kind of foreshadowing?
At the end of this scene, Rose assumes control yet again, as the police officer arrives on scene to make a report on the deer’s death. The officer insists on seeing Chris’ ID, even though Chris was not driving the car when they hit the deer. His “whiteness — a socially constructed, yet materially manifested ideology, practice, and positionality — operates to secure its symbolic and structural advantage, its dominance, by devaluing, debasing, and dispossessing that which is constituted as black.” (Henry par. 2) Although Rose seems to stand up to the officer’s racial profiling because she is ‘woke,’ Rose’s actress Allison Williams revealed in an interview with Seth Meyers that Rose’s primary motivation for standing up to the officer was to avoid leaving a paper trail. If no one knew that Chris was headed in this direction, then no one would suspect her of kidnapping him.
Compare this, then, with a much later scene, well after Chris has been subdued by the Armitage family and Rod has Rose on the phone. Not only does Rose switch masks with Rod as well, but the aforementioned thread of sexually-charged manipulation comes into play as well. Though the conversation starts normal enough, with Rod asking after Chris and Rose’s tone coming through the phone with just the right amount of worry, when the scene cuts to Rose’s face we can see that her face is completely blank. It belies none of the wavering emotion that we can hear, alerting the audience to the fact that she knows exactly what she is doing. Even her attire seems impersonal and cold; her hair is pulled back tightly, and she has no more makeup on her face, not even the lipstick she was wearing earlier in the film. She has traded her comfortable sweaters, too, for a stiff, pearl-white turtleneck. In this case, she appropriates Rod’s ‘male fetishizing gaze,’ and forces it to be directed at her, and at her hyper-sexualized persona.
For Rose, “womanliness [is] assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it — much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods” (Doane 66). The moment Rose’s voice stops sounding scared and she shakes her head a little, starts sounding more confident (the line “Rod, just stop”), is the moment she drops one mask in favor of another. Rod, in turn, becomes so flustered that he almost immediately hangs up when Rose starts to accuse him of making advances on her.
Throughout the entire exchange, Rose’s camera slowly draws closer to her and then pans to show that Rose’s entire family is lurking in the doorway of her room, inexplicably other. Missy is bathed in a dark blue light, barely visible, while Dean and Jeremy stand in an overexposed harsh yellow, both extremes to Rose’s more reasonably muted and desaturated lighting. Rose glances to her right, towards her family and towards her father, when she first starts to seduce Rod. It is virtually the only moment in the entire scene where her face moves — before this, she rarely even blinks. When the camera finally does show Dean, then, he is Doane’s ‘“no’ of the father, the prohibition, [which] is [the repressive patriarchy’s] only
technique” (Doane 70). He stands tall in the brighter lighting, composed with his hands pushed deep into his pockets and his vest buttoned properly over his white collared shirt, in control and in power.
Perhaps Rose glances in his direction for the go-ahead before she commits to a plan that she has doubtlessly thought through (and knows more about than Dean ever will). Dean is directly representative of the powers that control Rose and is therefore a representation for the patriarchy’s role in society as a whole. Many men still participate in a sort of barter and trade of women; the father owns his daughter because he created her, and the husband owns his wife because he chose her or provides for her or protects her. The control that the patriarchy exerts over women seeks to destroy independence, in essence telling women that they were made to be accessories to men. Dean, in his control over Rose, then takes away any previous agency she had displayed and reduces her to something lesser.
On playbacks of the scene, one can also just barely make out Missy’s smile as she leans against the doorway. She seems almost proud, or at least self-satisfied, at Rose’s compliance, and perhaps with Rose’s technique. Having integrated so well into this system herself, perhaps Missy is happy that Rose is serving as such a great tool for the patriarchy. In Chris’ absence, Rose only seems to become more clever in her manipulations, and the fact that all of her efforts were for naught again highlight the contradictory attitude that society has towards women. There is an objectifiable value to women; while the patriarchy desires and indeed needs women up to a certain point, past that point, women instead become a burden. Rose, in all of her intelligence and usefulness, is a wonderful asset to Dean’s business, and yet if she is too smart and plans too much then she risks taking down that same business from within; in her reach for more power and more independence, there is always that chance.
Of course, interspersed between these two scenes, there are a myriad of little clues that Peele carefully places in the film for us. There is Rose and Chris’s lovemaking, the two curled up on Rose’s childhood bed, next to each other. They seem to be on equal playing fields, even seem to be balanced — Chris is in white and Rose in black, yins and yangs of each other — until Rose climbs on top of him and the camera cuts away, hard. For this scene, “Peele has found a concrete metaphor for the ultimate unspoken fear: that to be oppressed is not so much to be hated as obscenely loved […] There are few qualities in others that we cannot transform into a form of fear and loathing in ourselves […and] in place of the old disgust comes a new kind of cannibalism” (Smith 5). For the white guests who buy Chris’ body, they of course have that perverse love for Chris; they love his strength and his youth. But, for Rose, that hunger comes from a deeper place that longs for power, and in consuming Chris, in a sense, she will have just a taste of what the patriarchy offers to its own and what it excludes her from.
The word ‘cannibalism,’ too, implies some sort of filling of a void or of some reverence; and so Rose absorbs Chris’ power using that “new kind of cannibalism” and must be in some way grateful for it, must afford him some veneration, and perhaps that is what she means when she tells him “You were my favorite” as her father and brother carry his prone body down to the basement.
There is also the scene where Chris asks Rose one last time for the keys and her face goes impossibly cold and she reveals that she’s been holding them in her hand the entire time. As Chris flounders in his shock and the Armitage family closes ranks like so many predators locked onto a meal, Rose puts her hair up into a ponytail and immediately adopts a more masculine and powerful air. Doane posits that one facet of womanhood’s masculinity in cinema is the presence of glasses, or the antithesis of the makeover, as the cliche of a character removing her glasses and instantly becoming more attractive to man is the bread and butter of makeover storylines: “Glasses worn by a woman in the cinema do not generally signify a deficiency in seeing but an active looking, or even simply the fact of seeing as opposed to being seen. The intellectual woman looks and analyzes, and in usurping the gaze she poses a threat to an entire system of representation” (Doane 67).
Rose, in putting up her hair, is subverting that trope in one of those inversions and reversals that Peele is so fond of. She is also solidifying her role, as manipulator, player, controller, and is reassuring herself of her usefulness. In becoming more masculine, Rose is also growing closer to the patriarchy and embracing her given role, the opposite of her hyper- feminization earlier on in the film. This role-reversal perhaps indicates that Rose is changing her approach to gaining more power. If the girliness she adopted to seduce Chris was her fighting against the patriarchy, then her realignment with her masculinity is her moving back under her father’s wing. If she can’t beat her father and his power over her, then she pretends to join him, all the while cultivating the illusion of power for herself through her coercion of people of color.
Some may argue that the scene in which Chris discovers Rose’s photographs is indicative of some carelessness on Rose’s part; why else would she keep actual evidence of her crimes, of her involvement? And in a place so easily discovered, no less. However, in the scene where Rose sits in her room and eats her cereal, as the camera pulls away, it reveals that on the wall behind Rose all of these photographs are up and framed. Though most believe that sentiment is a product of weakness, for Rose, remembering her past victims actually would have allowed her to better her technique. She would be able to draw on her past techniques and mistakes in order to improve her current plans. In fact, even as we look on over her shoulder, she pulls up a picture of a professional basketball player. He is an ambitious target, with so much more of a presence than Chris; but to save his picture is to mean that Rose truly believes she can get away with seducing him, with making him disappear. Rose, as a young woman in a family that in turn lauds her for being white and denies her access to privileges because of her gender forces Rose to lash out and become the monstrous manipulator that she is.
If, as Doane says, “The photograph displays insistently, in microcosm, the structure of the cinematic inscription of a sexual differentiation in modes of looking,” then Get Out is an insistent commentary on both race and femininity (Doane 69). There is no denying that whichever one of the myriad versions of Rose is true, she is racist, and entitled, and complicit in numerous deaths. Returning to that ending scene, Chris is slowly choking Rose while she whispers to him, “I’m sorry. It’s me,” and then over and over again “I love you.” Perhaps that is the real her. Perhaps she has been manipulated herself. Even if, however, she is the coldly manipulating seductress who has been pulling his strings all along, she is no less validated in her very human desire for power. Her demise may be a fitting end for a villain, but Rose’s treatment by the people in her life is reflective of society’s treatment of its own women, both in real-life situations and on film. The coarse and careless dismissal of the ‘psycho ex’ compresses women into a two-dimensional state of being, one that contributes to today’s culture of victim blaming and rape and disrespect. Any woman, including Rose, will never truly fit into any throwaway phrases.
WORKS CITED
Allison Williams Reveals What White People Ask Her About Get Out. Seth Meyers and Allison
Williams. Prod. Late Night With Seth Meyers. Youtube. 1 December 2017. Accessed 1
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Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator.” The Feminism
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Universal Pictures, 2017. HBO Go. Web. Accessed 1 April 2018.
Henry, Kevin L. “A review of ‘Get Out’: On White Terror and the Black Body.” Equity &
Excellence in Education, Vol. 50, Iss. 3, 2017, pp. 333–335. Doi: 10.1080. Accessed 17 February 2018.
Smith, Zadie. “Getting In and Getting Out: Who Owns Black Pain?.” Harper’s Magazine. 24 June 2017. https://davidcastillogallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Harris- Harpers-Magazine-June-20171.pdf. Accessed 17 February 2018.
