Lauded as an instant classic soon after its release, Jordan Peele’s Get Out has hardly left the American cinematic consciousness since its domestic box-office domination in 2017. Eerie, evocative, and often funny, Peele’s screenplay is certainly deserving of the Oscar it received. But that award, Best Original Screenplay, had never found its way into the hands of a Black screenwriter before that moment. Get Out is absolutely a landmark cinematic moment, but Peele’s picture would make an impact with or without the Academy’s gracious praise — perhaps even in spite of it. In fact, the story of the Academy Awards’ origin is eerie through the lens of Peele’s film. Louis B. Mayer, creator of the Academy, once said: "I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them ... If I got them cups and awards, they'd kill them to produce what I wanted. That's why the Academy Award was created.”
One scene in Get Out depicts Chris Washington following Dean Armitage a tour of the Armitage’s house. Dean stops at a framed photo of a young man in a sprinter’s staring position and says to Chris, “Oh, you’ll like this. My dad’s claim to fame. He was beat out by Jesse Owens in the qualifying round for the Berlin Olympics in ’36.” Dean continues, “Talk about a perfect moment in history. There’s Hitler on his high horse with his perfect Aryan race, and here comes this Black fella to prove him wrong in front of the world. What a moment.” In this moment, Peele’s screenplay briefly but critically questions supposed “perfect moments” in history. This moment is Dean’s father’s “claim to fame” not because he was happy to see a Black man succeed but rather because he becomes obsessed with using the Black body for personal success — the Coagula procedure is the outcome.
The procedure allows for the transplant of an aging white person’s brain into a Black body. The part of the Black person’s brain that remains will reside in the “Sunken Place.” An endless void containing a rectangular projection of reality, not unlike a movie screen, growing more and more distant. This scene calls to mind the troubled history of Black actors in American cinema, long made to wear a mask molded by a white world and exhibited for entertainment. Similarly, Chris learns the details of this procedure from a white man on a television screen. More important, though, is the way in which Chris discovers he can bring back to the surface the suffocated Black voices trapped inside victims of the procedure. For a brief moment, the flash of a camera is able to restore an erased identity. Like Chris with his camera, Peele’s motion picture is an attempt to shine light on a truth that is still being stamped out. The man who hopes to inhabit Chris’s body is the same man who praised his photography earlier in the film. The Academy that awarded the white-directed and white-written Green Book Best Picture in 2018 is the same Academy that praised Peele in 2017.