<nettime> So what does awakening mean to you?

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

"You know when you’re going to sleep and it feels like you’re about to 
fall, so you wake up? What if you never woke up? Where would you fall?"

With these questions, director Jordan Peele asks *you* to explain the 
real horror of his box-office sensation, "Get Out."

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.

The protagonist hears a voice from the TV screen, telling him that the 
procedure will work better if he understands it. He's going to fall into 
paralysis, and when it's over only a tiny sliver - something like an 
almost-awareness - of his former self will remain. The protagonist is a 
photographer, and when the procedure is over, his eyes and his brilliant 
capacity to see through the forms of the world will belong to his murderers.

What is this were the story of class as well as color? Of imperialism as 
well as slavery? What if this were the drama of a desire, a talent, a 
brain that betrays you to the point of death? The black protagonist's 
love for the hot white college girl Rose with her politically correct 
eroticism and her perversely liberal parents would then represent the 
aspiration that draws people from all corners of the earth to the great 
Western centers of culture. But this is not a fundamentally gendered and 
sexualized thing. It is a film about those places of money and power 
where social ascendancy itself is social death. It is a film about the 
horror of *falling upward.*

Remember that "Get Out" was not conceived, and even mostly not made 
during the presidency of Trump. It was conceived when Hillary Clinton 
was widely assumed to be the future president. In racial terms, Clinton 
would then be the ghoulish politician who lures the black vote into a 
liberal trap. Or it could be even worse. Obama himself was maybe nothing 
but the Democratic vehicle for Lyndon Johnson's undead brain.

But go further, and really ask yourself: What is it like to forget your 
own humanity? What is it like to be almost-aware? What if you never woke 
up? What if you *rose* into unconsciousness?

The protagonist recounts that as a child, while his mother was slowly 
dying and could still be saved, he remained paralyzed watching TV. Which 
sounds a lot like the citizens of the capitalist democracies, staring 
into screens as the climate changes.

"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.

The film has been out for a long time. I'm curious what others think.

Brian
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