The complex relationship between race and visuality extends from matters of representation – the erasure or distorted depiction of racially marked characters – to the way in which we learn to see in racialised ways. As Donna Haraway puts it: ‘eyes are a technology, too’ (1988: 583). In this chapter, I argue that Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) addresses both the problem of racist representation – the hyper- and invisibility of the black body in US culture – and the ways in which cultural norms, themselves shaped by race relations, condition what emerges, and how, in our field of vision. ‘The very concept of seeing and being seen – or of not being seen – ‘, remarks Richard Brody, ‘emerge in ‘Get Out’ as essentially racialised experiences’ (2017). The film also foregrounds the mediation of racial representation, working through cinema's complicity in the stereotyping of black bodies and the establishment of racist viewing conventions, but ultimately challenging such ‘established ways of seeing’ (Sinnerbrink 2011: 141). This visual approach corresponds to what Keith Harris has called a ‘dialogic’ representation of visualisation, a methodology that engages with ‘the iconography and image discourse of pre-existing representations’ (Harris 2012: 41–2). As Get Out invites its audience on a journey of intentional engagement with such media frames and with our own patterns of looking, the film factors in different habits, experiences and viewing positions. Specifically, I argue that rather than a homogeneously imagined ‘modern subject’ (Choi/Frey 2014: 3), Get Out carefully addresses both white and black audiences1 in different ways, using film-specific cues to disrupt dominant looking conventions. The analysis will focus on how markers of the horror genre, emotional and sonic alignment, visual address, and narrative economy help to translate different non-dominant experiences of embodied seeing into drama and aesthetic form and to motivate a broad engagement with questions of perception and mediation.

Strategies of Seduction

Get Out tells the story of black photographer Chris Washington, who takes a weekend trip to meet Dean and Missy Armitage (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener), the parents of his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams), a wealthy, politically liberal couple. When they arrive, the parents reveal that an annual gathering is to take place that very evening.