The 25 Best Movies of the Century: No. 13 - 'Get Out’

0:00This episode is presented by State Farm. Life's full of decisions, big and small, and sometimes you make movie ones you can really stand behind. For example, I was wise enough to stick around through the mid-credits during Ryan Coogler's Sinners. And unlike my co-host, Amanda, I got to see a very special sequence with a great buddy guy, among other things. State Farm gets it. Making confident choices can make all the difference. That's why with the State Farm Personal Price Plan, you can choose the right amount of coverage to help create an affordable price for you. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan.

0:34Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer, availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

0:56I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Adams. This is 25 for 25, a big picture special conversation show about Get Out. Now sink into the floor. Number 13. Lucky number 13. Is Jordan Peele's Get Out. This movie was released on February 24th, 2017. It's Peele's directorial debut. It stars Daniel Kaluuya, Alison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry-Jones, Stephen Root, Catherine Keener, Lakeith Stanfield, Little Rel Howery. is our horror pick. Yes. So let's talk about Get Out. Get Out is a tremendously important movie to this show. This is one of the signature movies that was here at the launch of this show.

1:42One of the very first guests on this show was Jordan Peele. And I don't think I quite knew at the time what a culture-changing event the movie was. You did a little bit because you changed your Oscar pick last minute to Get Out over The Shape of Water. Well, that was a whole year after the movie came out. Sure, but like wish casting wise, you know, you understood that there was something in the air. Yes. I have kind of set the course straight on my best picture predictions since then. I've gotten a little bit better at doing this professionally, but back then I was really following my heart. And what Peel did with this movie, I found to be frankly stunning.

2:25And it's one of the reasons why it's here, but it's not the only reason why it's here. So let's talk about it. This being Peel's first movie, you might think if you had followed his career prior to this, that he would have made something slightly different. He was one half of Key and Peel, which was a sketch comedy duo. They had a series on Comedy Central for some years that was well-liked and pretty popular. And turns out he's an insane horror head. And his biggest inspirations are Wes Craven and John Carpenter. And he wanted to make a movie that reflected his experience in the world using the tropes and tools of horror.

2:59And he did so with this fascinating, fairly modestly sized, I think the budget of this movie was$4 million, more or less an independent production that Blumhouse helped to distribute. And kind of changed the face of horror. Honestly, the last eight or nine years is very much living in the shadow of what Get Out accomplished and it elevated Peel to extraordinary circumstances. So for you, why is this movie on this list? Because we did need a horror pick, but it is not limited to a horror pick. The influence has gone beyond horror, both in the movie world and just pop culturally. This was an absolute phenomenon, certainly in the movies, but also sociologically, pop culturally.

3:45and a phenomenon for Jordan Peele in the sense that this is his first movie and now he's like one of our generation's auteurs, you know, and it really did happen like that. This was less than 10 years ago. And this gives us Daniel Kaluuya. This gives us a better understanding of Alison Williams. That's not fair, but - It's a great utilization of Alison Williams. But it's really, really hard to overstate how big a deal this was and how it did come out of not quite nowhere, but pretty much, you know, as you said, Jordan Peele was part of a comedy duo. This was a Sundance premiere that suddenly is making over$200 million worldwide and is being nominated.

4:34And Jordan Peele wins the Oscar for screenplay like within a year. So the size of it, we don't have movies with this kind of giant impact anymore, give or take your Barbenheimers. But it was, if not box office wise, it was kind of on that level as a sensation. Yeah, there's a variety of reasons for that. I believe that this is the highest grossing original debut for a filmmaker in movie history, which is just a staggering statistic when you think about it. And the fact that it happened in horror at a time when horror was finding its way as one of the only reliable non-franchise driven ability to powers to get people into movie theaters.

5:14And I think this movie kind of set the course for a generation of people who got really excited about a number of filmmakers that were kind of working around the same time or followed in their wake. some who are associated more with your A24 brand, some who are more classically kind of Blumhouse, studio-oriented, but, you know, your Robert Eggers' and your Ari Aster's and a whole host of other people who are all roughly around the same time, they feel like a class. And they live alongside some other filmmakers who aren't working in horror, like Coogler, like Greta Gerwig, like Damien Chazelle, like Barry Jenkins, who are kind of like the people that we are depending upon most to make movies special these days.

5:52and people who've really come into their own in the last decade, this movie in particular is so great because one, it's just a fun, funny horror movie. If you go in with an inability to process any of the real world stakes and consequences and satire of the film, you probably could still have fun. Yes. If you were complete dunderhead or you've had one side of your brain dulled, you could still enjoy the thriller aspects of the movie. That's obviously not what makes it special. The mechanics are good, But what makes it special is this is really the sharpest critique of a post-racial America that we've had at the movies.

6:29And the reason that I think it has that imprint that you're talking about sociologically is because there's so many ideas and phrases in this movie that have stuck to the ribs of our diet. And did pretty instantly. It is the post-Obama era movie, and I was chagrined and amazed to learn last night that it debuted at Sundance quite literally three days after Trump's first inauguration. So like this stuff was happening all the same. And we like we kind of knew, but we didn't really know. But the the idea of the sunken place that I would have voted for Obama third times if I could. But all of that stuff really did instantly become kind of Rosetta Stone's, for lack of a better word, shorthand for us trying to make sense of a world that we had been living in for a long time.

7:20But with the election of Trump the first time kind of was revealed or not revealed, but put back on center stage. And then we had to look at the last eight years. and this movie like really became central to that in addition to being just like a dynamite horror movie. Yeah, I think the satire really moves in two directions in that way too. And I really felt this watching this this time because we have some distance from the Obama administration. The one way it works is very obvious, which is that, you know, the villains of this movie being upper middle class liberals and not your redneck, you know, your typical like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, living in the outlands, kind of crazy person who doesn't understand anybody that doesn't look like them, was very cutting at the time and very clever and one of the funniest and best parts of the movie.

8:09And that is a condemnation of what white America thought it had accomplished in electing Barack Obama and then re-electing him and this idea that we had kind of like moved past a very ugly history in America. The movie also operates as this really interesting critique of Obama and the era of Obama politics, which I find kind of fascinating. And I think that, I mean, I wouldn't have gotten, you wouldn't have gotten that if you hadn't seen the consequences of what the Obama administration wrought, where there was this attempt to communicate a kind of unity amongst the world. Yeah. And that the right exploited those pursuits of unity by doubling down on division and making that the primary characteristic of American politics, that we are different and our differences are the friction that makes us exciting and real and gets us going every day by looking at social media and what have you.

9:07And that's an unintended consequence. But this movie also has like, it has a role in that. It has a part in that. That's sort of like, we kind of mishandled or we miscommunicated about what it meant, not just to have a black president, but to pretend as though we'd gotten past something that we are not getting past anytime soon. Yeah. I mean, it's not a coincidence that he and Peel's most famous, at least to me, speech was like the Obama anger translator. Yes. Right. Which was contemporaneous with his presidency. But it's like this is what he's probably, you know, like actually thinking and imagining.

9:38Likewise for the handshake line for Barack Obama as well, where like, you know, any black member of his cabinet or the press, he reads like super warmly and gives him a pound. And any like older white woman, he's like, oh, hello, madam, you know, and the code switching that was evident in the Obama presidency. And, you know, I think you can really like overreach on a movie by looking at the political status of the country at that time. But in this movie, it's so obvious. Yeah. I mean, it's literally in the text. Like that Bradley Whitford line has become iconic in a bad way, but an effective way.

10:11But, you know, it is written there. He is taking these things head on and like with proper nouns. Yeah. It's unusual to be able to literalize an idea like this and have it not feel ham-fisted. And in this case, it doesn't feel ham-fisted. I think it's because he has this really acute understanding of horror genre tropes and that stuff works really well. The movie is not gross. It's not... No. It doesn't feature monsters, which you're not a huge fan of. Obviously, the monsters are among us. I was also... I was thinking about our recent, though I don't know... Yeah, our recent conversation about the horror canon and whether something like Silence of the Lambs is horror.

10:49And we decided on violence and like violent scream time as the definition. And this doesn't have that much violence. I mean, once it does, there are some kills, but it's not even really a movie about kills. The thing that makes it pure horror to me is that there is a kind of mad scientist, fantastical trope that you would find in a Vincent Price movie in the 1950s. the idea of this body swapping that is transpiring. This idea of having a host body is like, it's almost Cronenbergian in a way. It's not as fully realized in terms of makeup effects and things like that, but there's stuff that is ripped right out of classical horror that is placed in here, but it doesn't define the movie, and it's probably not even the first or third thing you think of when you think of the movie, which is one of the reasons why I think it crossed over so hard.

11:45Right. I do think there is also an essential horror aspect of it, which is this structure and the way it involves the audience and also quite literally the title, which is just like you just you need the character to leave from like the minute like like don't get in the car. And even like the little character says, like, do not get in the you know, do not go. Don't go in the house. And the whole thing is just like, no, no, no. Why aren't you leaving? Why? Why? Why aren't you leaving? But what's amazing about the movie is that that is a very classical horror structure, but the way that it brings the audience and the signals that it gives to the audience of like, no, no, you need to leave.

12:26everything is messed up here is like an amazing sociological text about the liberal class and racism in America and also about how we watch these movies, you know, and that is like indicting the audience at the same time that you're watching it. It's both very simple and very, very complex and effective. There's also something really fascinating about the way that the text speaks to the movie-going culture around the movie. Like, obviously, the idea here suggests that deep down, these upper-middle-class liberals, and for the record, I am an upper-middle-class liberal, are predatory figures, you know?

13:10And that they are looking to consume and adopt and co-opt black culture, black life, black identity, black bodies. Like, that is the idea that is central to the movie. And then, of course, this movie becoming a phenomenon, powered in part by black audiences loving the movie and talking about the movie and then white audiences, some of whom needed to catch up to the movie and then start referencing things like The Sunken Place on podcasts, for example. I don't mean to be too self-indicting, but there is something really interesting about the way that the movie's ideas can become realized in the real world.

13:44And I don't think that this ever creeped into any kind of weird, you know, mid-90s rap territory where like the next generation of artists are ripping off the ideas and co-opting them and stealing them. But it was a kind of fascinating little reflection in the pool that he filled with this film. So I love that aspect of looking at it. And especially when you think about the idea of the Steven Root character, who's a blind art dealer. You know, I had forgotten that until my rewatch. And I was like, oh, this is quite literal. He He just, he wants to be able to have your talent and literally your eyes and see the world and then be his own person.

14:21You know, I thought of sinners for a lot of reasons, obviously, but in terms of Black art, Black ownership, Black cultural influence, and how the creative industry and or the world at large metabolizes that, if you will. They're definitely in conversation. For sure. and I think Kugler is clearly climbing the steps that Pete will help to build here. There's some history of black horror for sure. There's a really good series on Shudder called Horror Noir, which is about the history of black performers and black writers and directors, but it's not a very deep history. And so him emerging in this way as this like central figure in Hollywood, while more or less sticking to the horror genre has been interesting too.

15:08And for me, it's been really exciting. the fact that he followed this movie up with us and then he made Nope, which I just mentioned I recently saw again and was my favorite movie of 2022. And I'm so curious to see what he does in the future and if he is sticking to this because Nope was the sign of somebody who was reaching towards Steven Spielberg for the first time. You know, somebody who really had a bigger vision in mind just in terms of the canvas that he wanted to draw on. This is a really small film. This is a very modest movie that basically takes place in one apartment and one house.

15:42And it just goes to show how far you can get even in modest circumstances and modest settings. And a lot of that comes down to a couple of key things. One is he's got an incredible sense of craft and pacing in this movie. The music is wonderful. Michael Abel's score. Score really underrated. Another thing that jumped out to me on rewatch. Excellent score. The sound design is really strong in this movie. The costuming is modest, but really sharp. You know, the way that Bradley Whitford is styled, the way that Catherine Keener is styled. The turtleneck for the auction, yeah. Yes, the turtleneck.

16:22Alison Williams, all white, get up in the moment when she's shipping milk. There are some really good choices there. And then the production design, where the sunken place sequence in the movie, where Chris sits in a chair and is effectively hypnotized by Catherine Keener's character is a pretty big visual achievement for a$4 million movie. I mean, it looks phenomenal. And it completely sells you on the idea, which is this really blow-bearing metaphor about basically what happens to Black identity when it is like subsumed by white power. And he makes it feel like a slick sci-fi psychological experience.

17:01Right. And it builds visually, like the template for the rest of the movie and the reveal plot-wise in a very smart way. It just doesn't look cheap, which is just essential, especially when it's only$4 billion. And I had forgotten how early in the movie it comes. Right at the beginning of the second act. When they sat down in the chairs, I was like, no, really? Like, sunken place already? But that's kind of a risk to ask people to go into this high concept other place so early and trust that they'll buy in and stay for the rest of what's to come. The other thing too, and I thought of our conversation about I Know What You Did Last Summer is, you know, this is a movie that features a character who's coping with a trauma that he hasn't really reckoned with totally.

17:46The death of his mother is this signature event in his life and he's not at peace with it and he gets stuck in that chair because Keener's character has located the fact that he has this vulnerability and she's going to attack it so that she can control him eventually. and it exists. It's a part of Chris's character. Yes. It's not the primary focus of the character. It's not the thing that we go back to over and over again that they keep circling in red in the movie. It's just something that happened to him. Like all people have had terrible things happen to them and it's exploited but it isn't the motivation.

18:19It does even, at one point, he and Allison Williams are like by a lake and it's cutting between the auction itself and an emotional moment between them. And it is used to explain his character's motivation as why he doesn't leave at that exact moment. So it's still character development, but he doesn't give a speech where he's just like, I had a trauma. And so that is why I take photographs and why every single laundry list of a thing, he, it's, as you said, it's just part of who he is rather than the defining plot thing of the movie.

19:26The different Tic Tac-Sortes, from mint, fresh to fruit, sweet. Tic Tac. Refresh your good vibes. Peele, during interviews, and I think during our interview, used the phrase social thriller to describe the movie. And he wasn't rejecting horror by doing that, but I think he was, and he was citing the Stepford Wives a lot as a big influence, the 1975 version. Okay, yeah, sure. because that's a movie about a person who enters a world where everything seems a little bit off. Right. And that they're disoriented by that and they feel like they're potentially going to be taken over by that. And it's also like exploring social structures through, you know, scientific metaphor.

20:10And the politesse of American culture and what we feel but don't say and all these other ideas. So it's clearly a cool influence and you could say Stepford Wives is kind of a social thriller. It's not really a horror movie. But there's also plenty of horror stuff in here too, you know, Like it doesn't shy away from that. And so I always found that fascinating. And then the other thing too, is I feel like a lot of Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan in this movie too, which is that's where some of the thriller part comes in. I can feel a lot of psycho with the sort of like, the movie is constantly making you feel unnerved.

20:40And though something is clearly very wrong here and Chris is in trouble, but it never, it takes a long time to be like, this is what you think it is. this is in fact exactly what you think it is there's a moment during the party which is one of the best sequences in the movie where Chris runs upstairs and when he runs upstairs all of the white patrons at the auction just stop talking just stop talking and they all look up at the same time and that to me is the moment really beyond some of the awkward conversations or some of the things that we see Bradley Whitford doing or the oddity of Caleb Landry Jones's hyper aggressive older brother but that's the moment where you're like they're all they're all watching him There is something that he is prey in this deadly game.

21:24And all that stuff is just really well handled. And I think it's amazingly well told. And it could have gone off the rails at any time. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is that in addition to it being such a phenomenon, it's just also really, really good. And they even land that. Can we talk about the endings? Yeah, of course. Because famously there, there were a few options, including one where Chris is actually arrested by the police instead of saved by Lil Rel in a TSA police car, which is genuinely really, really funny. and also you know it's a release which I guess in one way you need though you ask the important question which is like is the other ending does it make a better movie?

22:10Is it truer? Like I you know I think it's an interesting conversation the movie was was tested and they listened to the audience and what the audience wanted and the audience wanted Chris to survive they wanted Little Rel to save him They wanted Alison Williams to die and they got what they wanted. And the movie went on to be a mega sensation and it won Jordan Peele an Academy Award for best original screenplay. Right. So they did the right thing. Yeah, totally. Like in the grand scheme of things. And I remember vividly being in the movie theater seeing for the first time Lil Rel popping out of the car and the audience went apeshit.

22:47Yeah. They were so excited and loved that moment. And it's fun. given the strength of the ideas and where the whole conceit is going yeah no i yeah the more sort of like dramatic and true ending right probably him getting arrested yeah totally but i think the the you know focus groups are in general like the bane of everyone's existence but it's like you have to believe that it would not play as well and that it would not as many people would not be as excited to go see it and then is it the success that it is is it as widely seen and discussed as it is almost certainly not yeah because you wouldn't walk out of the movie theater feeling exultation right you would feel sad and depressed and you would think then that it actually puts on the audience if you do that whose fault is this instead of we had fun yeah and whose fault is this is important but it doesn't usually make for movie phenomenons yeah and the movie still sort of asks that or it has it has some ideas we can eight years later talk about that and it's pointing right back but yes I think if the whole movie is pointing right back it's yeah less people are people are less excited you know what's the feedback sandwich you know like you want like a happy thing and a happy thing with the with the real truth in the middle yeah yeah that's a good way of putting it you mentioned Kaluuya.

24:14Yeah. So, one of our great actors. He is, and he doesn't work that much. And he has since won an Academy Award, and whenever he's in a movie, it kind of feels like an event. Yeah. Because he's a bit sparing about what parts he takes. I had forgotten what a special performance this is. And this is not a speechifying Judas and the Black Messiah, hyper-charismatic leading man part. It's a very reserved character. It's a character who has to fit in in this environment, who is confused and disoriented and is sort of a detective as he's figuring out the case of what's going on, sort of the victim as he starts becoming more entrenched in the plot to capture his body.

24:58Kaluuya has this great stillness as an actor, super expressive eyes, and one in the scene with the sunken place when he loses it and bursts into tears, he's phenomenal in a big emotional moment but in the rest of the movie he's kind of doing a little bit of a Paul Newman like is it what's going on here guys I'm just watching yeah you know like I'm a little smarter than you and yet I'm kind of stuck like it did remind me a little bit of like Cool Hand Luke where he thinks he knows what's going on but maybe doesn't have any power and it really hit me watching him this time around just paying close attention to him rather than trying to solve the movie in any way which is something that happens the first time or two that you watch this.

25:40I was thinking about how on this rewatch and when you get to the sunken place moment, like right before he falls back and it is, you know, that shot just of his face and his eyes. And I had the moment of like, oh, there's the shot, you know? Oh, there's the shot. Sorry, there it is. There it is. And that is like a single shot that we think of when we think of Get Out. This movie, yeah. And, you know, and we have those shots for a lot of different movies. but they're not usually just like a person's face acting and that it's just him and that's it and you know everything is pretty remarkable. He's very special in this movie.

26:19All the actors are very good. It's surprising what a, it's not a star-studded cast, but it's a lot of very accomplished performers that I think carry the movie. The Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener parts could have been a lot worse in less talented hands. They both have this very interesting mix of broad TV styles, you know, presentational acting. But then obviously Keener has like a really kind of serpentine, quiet communication style that is very powerful. And they're both really, really special. And then Alison Williams, who, you know, I've had a crush on for a long, long time. Of course.

26:57And is obviously an insane person. In this rewatch, I was just like, okay, so could my hair do that? And like, what would I need to do to get my hair to do that, you know, which is intentional. The movie is, she is drawing you in. She is the trap. She is complete, or the bait, I suppose, in the trap. And she is weaponizing what we knew about Marnie from Girls so well in this movie. And it has actually interestingly gone on to be a little bit of a scream queen. You know, she's in the Megan movies. She was in a Netflix streaming movie some years ago that was like fairly violent body horror movie.

27:29And she seems actually pretty comfortable in genre and doing this kind of work. But at the time, this was very surprising. Yes. And she presents herself obviously quite innocently through roughly the first hour of the movie. And like I said, the hard cutaway to her wearing all white listening to I Had the Time of My Life. I always think of, you know, I can't give you the keys, right? And just like the little hand flip. But yes, also the hard cutaway for her, to her drinking milk and Googling NCAA draft. You know, which is so good. Eileen made a really good point though there, which is that You wouldn't want to target a well-known person, would you, if you were this family?