Colleagues,
Yet another great discussion, this time on Sisters! Thanks for your thoughts and attention to Dumas and De Palma. On to Get Out by Peele next week! Recall that all readings are sent directly through e-mails due to copyright nonsense. Be sure to check your spam, even though I am not sure I will ever truly get over the Google Algorithm unjustly discerning rich and fecund philosophical theory as "spam."
After a career in comedy sketches, Jordan Peele initially strikes serious movie viewers as an unlikely horror director, let alone a worthy successor of Hitchcock himself. Yet, Peele’s directorial film debut Get Out rightfully garners commercial, academic, and artistic acclaim. Peele frequently contends with comparisons to Hitchcock when discussing his own films, noting that he finds Hitchcock to be “kind of a creep” while adamant that Hitchcock’s influence looms: “I think I often ask myself, 'what if Hitchcock worked with black actors?' Those are my favorite movies that have never been made."
In this class, we will consider the unique intersection of humor and horror, its opportunity for political discourse, and how Peele transcends frontiers that Hitchcock attempts but rarely passes.
Required:
Jordan Peele, Get Out. (Film)
White Zombies - Key & Peele (TV Sketch)
Blake, Linnie. “BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: Get Out and the Female Gothic” in Jordan Peele's Get Out: Political Horror ed. Dawn Keetley, Ohio State University Press. (2020) (PDF)
Optional:
Iliot, Sarah. “RACISM THAT GRINS: African American Gothic Realism and Systemic Critique” in Jordan Peele's Get Out: Political Horror ed. Dawn Keetley, Ohio State University Press. (2020) (PDF)
"Get Out" by Jordan Peele. Screened in class; available on for rental or purchase on Amazon at home.
As many of us know, Jordan Peele rose to fame during the TV Sketch era with "Key and Peele," a collaborative 30-minute comedy show with Keegan-Michael Key. Fans of the show know that several sketches are already an early love letter to horror, rendering Peele's eventual directorial debut in film almost inevitable, rather than the shock that many film fans frame Peele's "shift" from comedy to horror. Check out one of Peele's early gestures towards political horror here in this short 2 minute sketch, "White Zombies." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xyhVO-SWfM
We stated it in class 1, and we will state it again: it is highly unorthodox to see the field of film theory write, discuss, and publish academic articles on movies this quickly. Get Out came out in 2016, and this compendium of articles on the film was published in 2020. Stunning! A true testament to the emergence of Peele as an auteur worthy of our attention. In "Burning Down the House: Get Out and the Female Gothic," Linnie Blake considers Female Gothic conventions that underpin movies like Hitchcock's Rebecca and squares these conventions with "black representation by signifying on bourgeois American culture and white social practices." This will be the article that we discuss the most in class.
*optional* From the same book as Blake's article comes "Racism that Grins: African American Gothic Realism and the Systematic Critique" by Sarah Iliott. Like Blake, Iliott premises her argument on Peele drawing from Gothic literature and films, but specifically focuses her attention on the function of humor and satire in achieving political and therapeutic ends.
Note: Several articles on Get Out will reference the "alternative ending." You can watch that ending here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3JS7_OcPWQ
See y'all next week! Happy reading.
-S/D
