AF AMER 112A Blog post #1
Blog Post 1
Maya Nejat Haim
Before taking this class, I never watched Get Out, so I didn’t really know what to expect from it. I knew it had something to do with horror.. (which scares me) but I didn’t think how much more there was to it besides just being scary. After watching it and hearing the discussion about it in class, I started to look at the movie in a different way. The part that stood out to me the most was the Sunken Place. At first, I just thought of it as Chris being trapped and not being able to control what was happening to him. But after our class disussion, I started to understand it as something bigger, especially the idea of feeling like you are physically unable to control your own body while remaining conscious while everyone around you is deciding things for you.
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I was surprised by how much the movie was about isolation. I did not realize that before our class discussion. Chris is always being surrounded by people, but he is still alone in so many ways. He is the only Black person in a lot of these situations, and even when people are being “nice” to him, there is still something really uncomfortable about the way they treat him. The party scene especilly made more sense to me after class because we talked about how it can almost look like an auction, with people looking at Chris and talking about his body. I definitely did not think about the scene that way when I first watched it and it made me feel uncomfortable.
Our class so far has also made me think about microagressions in a more personal way. I have experienced people saying things to me that they think are funny, but they actually make me uncomfortable and embarrassed. Sometimes my friend will point out how I can’t pronounce certain words and then announce it to our friends or make me try to say the word again in front of them. They’ll find it funny and get a good laugh out of it, but it makes me feel embarrssed, put on the spot, and incapable of saying certain words. It made me think about how something can seem small to one person but still make another person feel uncomfortable or singled out. That part of the lecture really stuck with me because I could relate to the feeling of someone making something about you into a joke in front of other people.
I also honestly did not trust Rose from the begining because I have trust issues lol. But as the story went on, I grew to be more suspicious of her, and by the end I was not very surprised by what happened. The lecture made me think about her character diferently too, especially when we talked about how she was part of everything even though she seemed like she was helping Chris at first.
Overall, I think the biggest thing I took away from our class so far was that Get Out is not just a horror movie. There were so many things happening underneath the actual story that I did not notice when I first watched it. The lecture made me pay more attention to the way Chris was issolated, the way people treated him, and how the horror was conected to things that can actually happen in real life. I did not expect the movie to make me think this much!
