Rod and Karen discuss listener feedback.
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I know nobody asked my opinion (but I’m white so I have to give it lol), but just as a bit of chat I wanted to tell you guys why I loved Get Out. Hopefully other white people got the same out of it. I watched the movie by myself and it sure doesn’t spoon feed it’s message to you but by the end I was mouth agape and there was pain in my chest. I think Jordan Peele was trying to convey the horror that black people feel when they begin to really learn the history of this country and the white supremacist system that is in place. When you look at the way white people have always consumed and claimed ownership of black bodies and minds, from the musicians who stole their style and sound from black musicians and got rich, while the original musicians got nothing or a pittance…to the idea of “urban” fashion trends, I can’t imagine what that really feels like. Instead of celebrating and rewarding the black people who have contributed amazing and important things to our society we have to own them or try to claim their hard work as our own. There are so many other smaller nuances to the movie that I was struck by, but I think the overall message was really deep and probably really hard to deal with for white people. That’s why a lot of people may have just seen it as a horror movie, they were too afraid to deal with the real message. I find that there are plenty of movies that have a social critique embedded within them. Sadly, I just don’t think the majority of people notice or care when they are pointed out.
Not that it should matter to anyone, but just as a bit of chat, I really liked Get Out. The message was not spoon fed to me but by the end of the movie I was mouth agape and nodding with pain in my chest. What I got from it was the horror of how white people have always consumed black bodies and minds and how for so many people it seems totally benign. From the way that black musicians have been copied by white musicians to the way that white people want to enjoy “urban” fashion, it’s so insidious that white people can’t even recognize what they are doing. I had a conversation with a co-worker one time about Elvis. I said I could never enjoy his music because he basically stole everything, from his songs to his dance moves, from black musicians. He got rich and the people he got all his ideas from got nothing. She said she never even thought of that! And that sort of thing is basically the story of this country. Black people do excellent and amazing things for our society and instead of getting credit and compensation, their work gets copied (badly)and they get nothing. As a white person I find it enraging that white people have not been able to simply celebrate black greatness. Instead, they need to own it and claim it as theirs. That is the message I got from the film, one that I already could recognize, but done in such a brilliant way and the movie was creepy as hell too! Anyway, I hope that I’m not totally off and I hope most of the white people who claimed to love the movie got what I got from it. Anyway that movie really hit me hard, it was definitely not just a horror movie to me. Jordan Peele created a masterful critique of society and history imbedded into a scary as fuck and amazingly acted movie.