Get Out (film)

Get Out (film) Summary and Analysis of Part 5

Summary

Rod tells Rose that the last time he spoke to Chris, Chris told him that he had been hypnotized by Missy. Rose tells Rod to stop, and accuses him of being in love with her. Rod is indignant, however, insisting that Chris is his best friend and he would never cross that boundary. "I know you think about fucking me, Rod," Rose says, and Rod hangs up angrily.

In the basement, Chris wakes up again with a gasp and the television turns back on in front of him. Jim Hudson, the art gallery owner, appears on the screen and talks directly to Chris, telling him he can answer any questions Chris might have. He tells Chris, "Phase one was the hypnotism. That's how they sedate you. Phase two is this. Mental preparation. It's basically psychological pre-op." He then tells Chris that his white brain will be transplanted into Chris's body, and that Chris will live on in the Sunken Place, able to see and hear what is going on, but completely powerless.

Jim's brain will control Chris' motor functions and benefit from his sight and artistic ability. "Why black people?" Chris asks. Jim replies that "people want to change. Some people want to be stronger, faster, cooler...But please don't lump me in with that. I could give a shit what color you are...I want your eye, man. I want those things you see through." Jim turns off the video.

Chris, alone in the room, notices that he has scratched through the leather of the chair he is strapped to and pulled out some cotton inside. Suddenly the television turns on and the teacup appears, and try as he may to ignore it, the sound hypnotizes Chris into unconsciousness.

We see Jim Hudson lying on a surgical table, as Dean prepares to operate. Jeremy comes in to assist his father, opening a box of surgical instruments. Dean begins cutting open Jim's head with a scalpel. Meanwhile Jeremy goes to collect Chris with a wheelchair. After he unstraps Chris from the chair, he stands to check the wheelchair, but Chris stands up and bashes him in the head with a ball from a nearby pool table, killing him. Chris pulls cotton out of his ears, which he evidently put in to block the sound of the teacup.

When Jeremy doesn't come back, Dean calls to him and goes to look in the hall. Suddenly, Chris impales him with the stuffed deer head, and Dean falls to the ground, knocking over a candle which lights the lab table with Jim Hudson on it on fire. Chris goes upstairs into the kitchen, where he finds Georgina knitting. She runs from the room as Chris grabs his phone off the table. Suddenly he spots Missy in her office, and she goes to get her teacup to hypnotize him, but he smashes it before she can reach it. They struggle and Chris ends up stabbing her to death.

In the hall, Chris goes to open the front door, when suddenly Jeremy leaps on top of them and they engage in a struggle. Jeremy puts him in a headlock, but Chris manages to get the upper hand, stabbing him in the leg and stomping on his head.

Meanwhile, upstairs, Rose listens to "I Had the Time of My Life" on earphones and eats Froot Loops on her bed, while looking up "top NCAA prospects" on the internet and admiring their physiques.

Outside, Chris gets in Jeremy's car, where he notices a mask on the passenger seat. It's the mask that the man was wearing in the first scene of the film—the man who attacked the black man (who we now infer is Andre) in the street. "Run Rabbit Run" plays on the radio as Chris drives out of the driveway and calls 911 to report what has happened.

As the woman on the call asks Chris to repeat himself, he hits Georgina with the car, a noise that Rose hears from her bedroom. Chris looks in the rearview and has a flashback to his mother's death, which he still feels guilty about. He puts Georgina in the passenger seat and drives away, as Rose emerges from the house with a shotgun. "Grandma," she says, referring to Georgina.

As they drive, Georgina screams at Chris, "You ruined my house!" and attacks him. They hit a tree and Georgina dies. Underneath her wig, Chris sees she has an incision from an apparent brain transplant.

As Chris gets out of the car, Rose shoots the rearview mirror off of it and starts to reload the gun. Chris limps away as Rose shoots at him and orders Walter, who she calls "Grandpa," to run after Chris. Walter tackles Chris to the ground and just as he goes to strangle him, Chris pulls out his phone and takes a picture of him. Walter asks Rose for the gun to shoot Chris himself and she hands it over.

Suddenly, Walter shoots Rose in the stomach, then shoots himself. Rose is still alive and begins to reach for the gun, but Chris grabs it before she can. Chris goes to choke Rose and she tells him she loves him. He starts to choke her, but cannot go through with it.

A police car pulls up and Rose begins yelling for help. Chris holds up his arms, prepared for the worst, but it is his friend Rod who gets out of the car. Chris stumbles over to Rod's car and gets in. When Rod gets in after him, he says, "I mean, I told you not to go in that house."

Chris asks Rod how he found him, and Rod says, "I'm T. S. motherfuckin' A. We handle shit. Consider your shit handled." They drive away.

Analysis

In this final section, we learn about the process that Dean has developed in his basement more specifically. As Jim Hudson explains to Chris, Jim's brain will be transplanted into Chris's body, while Chris himself will be forever relegated to the Sunken Place. Georgina, Walter, and Logan are all just vessels for white brains that have taken over the bodies of their black "hosts." Jim wants the body of Chris so that he can profit off Chris' sight and artistic abilities.

In his meeting with Chris through the video, Jim explains to Chris that many of the people who want to undergo the treatment want to do so because they want to benefit from the value of blackness. "Some people want to be stronger, faster, cooler," he says. According to this logic, the racism that the white people populating the Armitage's orbit experience is a kind of high-level envy, a desire to merge with blackness because it is viewed as superior in some way.

The ending sequence of the film, in which Chris must escape the Armitage house, is a blood bath. In true horror movie fashion, there are gruesome struggles around every corner, but in Get Out, the situation is reversed. Instead of a serial killer ravaging his victims, Chris is the victim of an elaborate and violent scheme who must fight his way out of the house with all his might. Inverting the stereotypical trope of the horror genre, in which the black character is the first to die at the hands of the bloodthirsty murderer, Chris does whatever he can to make sure he is the last man standing.

In spite of the darkness and horror of the film, Get Out always maintains a satirical edge and the grotesqueness is often contrasted with comedic images. The rural pristine family home is transformed from a catalog-ready haven into a blood-soaked horror house. While Chris must stab, stomp and fight for his life, Rose sits upstairs listening to the song from Dirty Dancing and eating Froot Loops, the image of a clueless white girl who remains unaware of the harm she is doing. Then later, after the final violence, Rod gets in the cop car with Chris and says "I mean, I told you not to go in that house." Images and moments such as these, that are at once horrific and hilarious, are what make Get Out such a biting satire and such a unique commentary on both the horror genre and on race relations.

Up until the end, the film uses horror tropes to expose the horrors of racism. In the final moments of the film, Chris calls the police as he is driving out of the Armitage house and is clearly the victim of the violence that took place there, but when the police car pulls up and the nearly dead Rose begins calling out to the policeman for help, the viewer can see that Chris is going to come off looking like a villain, especially from what we know about police brutality and the treatment of young black men under the law in the United States. It is a subtle touch, and the suspense of the moment depends on the viewers' understanding of police brutality, but Peele makes something which in any other horror film would be the moment of relief and resolution into a moment that raises its own horrific implications, just based on the protagonist's race. Luckily, however, the driver of the car is not a cop at all, but Chris's friend Rod.