Re: <nettime> So what does awakening mean to you?

On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 8:10 PM, Dan S. Wang <danwang@mindspring.com> wrote:

Hi Brian,

Thank you for an inspired meditation on the film Get Out. I watched it a few days ago. [spoilers to follow, sorry]

The film is totally about race, but so is America, or for that matter, Europe. No >one can miss the fact that the ghouls of the story are liberals. The film is >about societies whose highest enlightened ideals are the very essence of >domination. Although it allows you to make all kinds of valid statements about >how domination works in racial terms, still that misses the most troubling thing. >Domination in its contemporary form is seductive, even for its victims.

.....

"Get Out" - like all Afro-Pessimism - is about the impossibility of reforming the cultures of domination. And so awakening is no seduction, but it does mean embracing the fall of Empire. Or that's how my sliver-of-self sees it. Horror as a call to counter-culture.
As in many a great horror movie ending, Get Out leaves off with the dawning of the protagonist’s changed perceptions. The hardest work is about to begin--in this case not for a fictional character, but rather us, the viewers. It is a call to counter the culture, in deeds. Let's do that, shall we?

I thought that Brian's take on the movie was a bit overwrought and he didn't relate his ideas to what is in it. But Dan's lucid and yet poetic version compelled me to see Get Out and I did, today. I thoroughly enjoyed it, It is a work of art in the noble line of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. There wasn't a moment when I was scared, so I don't think it qualifies as a horror movie. Of course it was "totally about race", but it was a racial version of a recognizable genre that did not pretend at all to be realistic. I would call it a "satirical parable" and, like any good parable, you can read into it whatever you like. It's impossible to miss racist domination in the US, but the message hinges on what to do about it.

I was misled by the term "Afro-pessimism" which for means the idea that external domination is inevitable and there is nothing the dominated can do about it. Here I side with Dan. You can get out" if you use your courage, persistence, smarts, will power and potential for violence. Chris and Rod, each in their own way, exhibit these qualities and they do not have to be discovered in the future; they overt and latent in what they already are. Moreover the black zombies can still temporarily break with their passive persona, as when the toy boy is shocked by a camera flash and urges Chris to get out while he can. I loved the revelation at the end that the zombie gardener and housekeeper were grandpa and grandma whose house the action takes place in.

I was reminded of the anti-capitalist movements on the 1970s, going by "underdevelopment", "dependency" and "world systems" labels. You have to GET OUT; there is no plausible accommodation with western capitalism. To which Fanon, in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, added that violence is indispensable. Many white reaers and black activist saw that as the only message in the book, but of course it wasn't, just as it wasn't in this fine film.

Thanks for the ride, guys. I will be recommending it warmly.

Keith

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