Event

Mia Mask

Get(ting) Out of the American Horror Story

This paper examines the way Jordan Peele’s film, Get Out, simultaneously accomplishes three significant tasks. First, Get Out spoofs the classic American interracial romantic comedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner by offering a subaltern perspective on the homecoming narrative. Get Out re-stages the social problem of interracial marriage embedded in the film, and the narration, by telling an analogous story from the perspective of the black male character rather than the white female protagonist. Second, Get Out re-imagines the horror film as a transgressive cult picture in which familiar cinematic conventions of the genre are comically subverted. The comic subversive reconfiguration of narration, point-of-view, and tone enable audiences to recognize the inviolable humanity of African American characters and the fact that Black Lives Matter. Finally, by closely reading the protagonist’s experience of the all-American family, and his encounter with cognitive dissonance, we see how Get Out mobilizes critiques of racial categories and concepts of race. Many similar critiques were clearly articulated by psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) in his philosophical study of racial categories: Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

Mia Mask is a Professor of Film at Vassar College where she holds the Mary Riepma Ross endowed chair. She teaches African American cinema, documentary history, and seminars on the horror genre. She is the author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film. Mask edited the anthology Contemporary Black American Cinema. And, she published the jointly edited collection Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age. Her cultural commentary has been featured in documentaries for the Smithsonian Channel, the Criterion Channel and CNN’s The Movies.