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2018 Oscar Nominees: Best Director
Note: Contains spoilers!
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I had missed Jordan Peele’s terrifically creative Get Out when it was in theaters, due to working an unpaid internship at the time that did not exactly have me rolling in movie-going money, and also being a weenie who likes the option of turning the volume halfway down when horror movies get horror-y. (Do other people also find visual scariness easier to handle then auditory scariness? What’s that about?)
So by the time I finally watched it this weekend, I had over 10 months of people chattering about Get Out to develop an idea of what this movie would be. Turns out, I had it kind of backwards! I thought it would be a horror movie where it is gradually revealed that the real horror was white liberal racism all along, and that this would dovetail with whatever traditional slasher nonsense-villainy was going on, making everything so much worse for our lead, as well as serving as a sharp social commentary, et cetera. Instead, it’s the white liberal racism that is gradually revealed to be housing the traditional nonsense-villainy, like the tip of a white, white iceberg of yikes. If is, of course, still a brilliantly sharp social commentary.
Jordan Peele and Greta Gerwig photographed by Art Streiber for Vanity Fair, December 2017