A Traveler in the Wilderness: The resignification of race and otherness in the film Get out by Jordan Peele

Abstract

From the transdisciplinary position of Visual Studies and Decolonial Studies, an intratextual analysis of the ideological discourse of the film Get Out (2017) by Jordan Peele is presented. Through a reading focused on the intentio operis of the work, which uses the narrative analysis models of Zavala (2014), Žižek (2009) and Yepez (Yepez, 2020), it is proposed that Peele's work appropriates the generic conventions of western horror cinema, to emit an allegory where an inversion of the representation of otherness is made (Quijano, 2014; Smith, 2017). Throughout this text, it is argued that —within the film— whiteness (Echeverría, 2010; Frankenberg, 1993; Morrison, 1992) and the values ​​of American liberal society are the sources of terror and threat for the African-American protagonist. Such resignification of otherness is opposed to the canonical structure of homogeneous cinematography, where the plot presents the main characters entering the threatening world of racialized populations. Such a structure is represented by the film Cannibal Holocaust  (Deodato, 1980) and literary antecedents such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness (2013). In this sense, it is possible to affirm that historically horror cinema has produced cultural representations where racialized people are shown as dangerous and abject bodies (Montes, 2017). Peele's aesthetic proposal, which marks a distance from hegemonic discourses, can only be explained from the historical conjuncture and the racial tensions that currently occur in the United States and that have a historical trajectory in social movements around racialization processes in that country.