Ten Best: Films for 420

Well it’s 4/20 day, even here in England, which is confusing because they write the dates the wrong way around over here. In any case, what better way to celebrate the ultimate stoner holiday than with a movie in the comfort of your own home? That way when the weed nap kicks in, you can just let it go, doze off, wake up and rewind. Here are the ten best films to watch while stoned. (Not necessarily the ten best films about being stoned). If you’re close enough to me that you want plausible deniability about the choices I’ve made in my past, then you may want to stop reading here.

1. Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1980)

   

   Damned if I know what this film, or the concept album behind it, really means. Isolation, loneliness, consumer culture leading to fascism. While generally understood to be the last gasp of the acid culture of the 1960s, Roger Water’s masterwork combined with disturbing visual images both real and imagined will no doubt take your altered state to a hellishly introspective state, if you want that sort of thing. Soon enough you’ll be asking, “Is there anybody out there?”

2. Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke (1978)
   
   Sober or stoned, I defy anyone to get through the first 15-20 minutes of this film without gasping for air from laughter. This first feature length film of the famously stoned duo is tightly written and full of social commentary that those of you in Colorado and the west coast will probably miss. There are other comedies about being stoned, good movies too, but this is the crown jewel.
3. The Matrix (1999)
   
   I watched this film sober in a theater in Berkeley when it came out and was not impressed. As someone from the famously snobby crowd of Berkeley movie goers remarked as we exited the theater, “Keanu Reeves as a kung fu fighting, computer wiz, messianic figure? I’m not buying it.” But watch this film stoned and whoa! The special effects really overtake you. The scene where Keanu is first brought to the truth, is mind blowing. The questions this film raises about the nature of reality are made for stoners and philosophers alike.
4. Any Episode of any Sitcom
   
   Ok, so, inevitably if you smoke marijuana you’re going to turn on the television, and you’ll likely want something lighthearted to watch, so you go for sitcom in syndication. Smart move right? Sort of. What is sort of funny sober becomes ridiculous and then creepy. See with a sitcom people are meant to be real. Friends, How I Met Your Mother, even Big Bang Theory, these are people who in theory, exist in our world but say clever things and have better adventures. Except, they’re not real at all. No one behaves like this. Once you start to see how absurd a sitcom is, you find yourself caught in a weird, “Wait, can this really happen?” kind of disaster that you would have thought was only suited to films like The Matrix. The sitcom that was both infinitely compelling to my younger stoner self, and also creepy as fuck: The Drew Carey Show. That show blew my mind. Of course, he did bill himself as The Human Cartoon once upon a time so…
5. The Big Lebowski (1998)
   
   The Dude has taken on a life of his own in the 20 years since its release. He’s become an almost cosmic, pseudo-religious figure. This is because despite all of the negative qualities he possesses (we’re told immediately that he’s the laziest man in L.A.) he is the stoner all stoners aspire to be. Easy going, mellow, unconcerned with the vagaries of life. Of course most of us have to worry about the rent, because as we know, tomorrow’s already the tenth, but we can dream a dream of bowling along the way, can’t we?
6. Brazil (1985)
   
   Of course the go to drug film from Terry Gilliam is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but I’m going with his earlier work, Brazil, for this list. It’s message of growing government control justified by terrorism and executed sloppily is timely for one. Of course it’s been timely since its release and it’s only getting timelier. More to the point of this list, however, like all Gilliam films, it’s visually stunning in such a way that it makes you question reality. And then of course, there’s the ending.
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969)
   
   So the lava lamp mostly exists because despite it’s non narrative flow, it is compelling as all hell to watch. The effects of THC on the brain enhance the ability to be captivated by such things. Add music and you get a typical Friday night for any stoner. Replace the lava lamp with visuals by genius filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and you get 2001. There is no film like it. Some films have tried to imitate it (Dune and The Black Hole come to mind) but have succeeded in simply being boring. Kubrick does more with a floating pen then most directors do with pages of dialogue. Honestly, this film is the visual equivalent of a Hendrix guitar solo. I didn’t understand it sober, but then I understood it.
8. Fight Club (1999)
   
   So hypothetically speaking if you were going to stay with a friend for the weekend, and he got into a fight with his girlfriend and she threw him out of their apartment, and you wandered over to another friend’s house at 2:00 in the morning, and he let you in because he was that kind of guy, and he tells you he’s just about to watch Fight Club, which you’ve never seen and know nothing about, and you’ve smoked yourself silly already and are entering that deeply introspective high that lies beyond the giggles, under those circumstances Fight Club might be the greatest movie of all time. Of course, it’s aged poorly thanks in large part to the douchebag community of MRA (Men’s Rights Activists) types. But as Derrida once said, “Douchebags may misinterpret a film, but douchebags cannot misinterpret just any film.” Or something. Still, hypothetically, this film earned a spot on my list.
9. American Pop (1981)
   
   This is a feature length cartoon for adults produced at a time when such things were in fashion. I first saw this film at about the age of 9, flipping the channels after sneaking out in the middle of the night and turning on the television. I thought “ooo, cartoon” but no, not for kids. The artistic style of this film makes it the sort of opposite of the Sit-Coms I described above. You’re watching a cartoon, but it feels real. Combined with a tragic story of the development of American pop music from the days of vaudeville to the verge of the post punk 1980s, this film is a series of successive tragedies that just tears you down. It’s fictional, but the music is well known pop and the story is compelling. I owned it later in life on VHS, and it became a go to favorite when I wanted something heavy.
10. The Song Remains the Same (1973)
    
    I’m not a huge Led Zeppelin fan, but I am a fan of this concert film which covers the seminal ’70s rock band at the height of their fame. The film is interspersed with concert footage, backstage action, and fantasy sequences the fit a band that wrote no less that two songs about Tolkien’s Middle Earth. All in all it’s a fantastic concert film made by a great band at the apex of their talent. Combined with the visuals, it’s should always be under consideration for what to pop into the Blu-Ray while packing a bowl.

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The Boss Baby: The Corporation as God

The Boss Baby

Directed by Tom McGrath

Starring: Alec Baldwin, Miles Bakshi, Steve Buschemi

True story: Just so happened that this week I decided to sit my son down and have “the talk” with him. Of course, this isn’t the 1950s and if you’re at all wise as a parent you know that there is no one “talk” but rather a continuing conversation about sexuality beginning as soon a they are old enough to understand minimal amounts about self-protection and appropriate and inappropriate behavior. This evolves into anatomical explanations and hopefully eventual discussions of consent, safe sex, and pleasure. Such a small part of this conversation is about babies, and it turns out, the “where do babies come from?” part is the simplest part of the whole conversation. My kid knew a bit, but it was time to be sure he knew a bit more, so we talked.

Against this backdrop, I took my son to see The Boss Baby, and while it certainly has its moments, I was just baffled by the entire premise of the plot. In this world babies are produced in some sort of corporate heaven by the aptly named Baby Corp. There’s no real discussion of exactly how babies are made; whether they’re assembled like dolls, poofed into existence by magic, or even created ex nihilo by God. I preferred to imagine some gruesome Matrix-esque hatchery occurring just off screen, but that’s just me.

Where the film starts is with already preassembled babies making their way down conveyor belts getting diapered and fitted with booties and pacifiers, until they come to some Wonka-es que quality control device that ensures the babies are proper babies and giggle when cootchie cooed. The ones who do are sent to families, the ones who are humorless are sent to management of Baby Corp.

Thus we get to the premise of the film. Baby Corp. the celestial corporatization of baby manufacturing, is run by an army of perpetual babies that are not cut out to be actual babies. They are kept babies by drinking a magic formula that keeps them babies forever. Now why Baby Corp needs to be run by babies is unclear, especially since the babies working there aren’t proper babies.

This is made even more confusing by the title character’s fear of losing his formula and actually being forced to grow up, even though he detests everything child like. My advice is to not think about it too much.

One of these management babies, the titular Boss Baby (Alec Baldwin) is sent to Earth in order to investigate Baby Corp’s main rival, PuppyCo, which is rumored to be introducing a new, even cuter, puppy, threatening to cut into Baby Corp’s market share and I guess profits?

If you are sitting there thinking, “wait, what’s a new kind of puppy?” Yeah, me too. Apparently not only babies, but puppies are also created, mass produced, and distributed by corporations. The macabre imagining of the lab in which a “new puppy” product line would be created is the stuff of horror. But in this film where corporations are responsible for life itself, this isn’t even wondered about.

So Boss Baby, which is essentially Baldwin’s character from 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy, imagined as a baby, comes into the home of two upper management employees of PuppyCo, known simply as Mom and Dad (given the way babies are manufactured in this universe, do parents even deserve names?). His arrival causes friction with Tim (Miles Bakshi), Mom and Dad’s seven year old boy.

The film essentially boils down to a movie about sibling jealousy toward new arrivals and how to overcome it. Tim is at first resentful, and then eager to get Boss Baby back to Baby Corp, until eventually learning to love and accept his little brother as an essential part of his life. I’m an only child, I have nothing to say about this aspect of the story except that the world is overpopulated, consider having only one child at least until we make the move to green energy.

Really though, what needs to be highlighted about this film is the vision of a world in which every aspect of life, including the creation of life itself, is managed by corporations. There is no God in the world of The Boss Baby, only the corporation. As an atheist I have no essential problem with God’s absence, but I do balk at replacing the concept of God with a corporation.

When Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God in his famous section 125 of his book The Gay Science, Christians freaked out so much that even 125 years later they felt a need to make a movie entitled God is Not Dead. But this film’s producers not only missed the point of film making (and likely Christianity) but they also misunderstood Nietzsche.

In his most famous iteration of the phrase, Nietzsche puts the claim “God is Dead,” in the mouth of a madman sermonizing a crowd of atheists in the marketplace. Sure, Nietzsche has plenty to say to people of faith, but in this passage specifically his message is for the “men of the marketplace.” The grounding nature of faith in the perfect creator at the center of all things cannot be dispensed with and replaced with something as trivial as market capitalism. The effect of the secularization of the western world is fundamentally destabilizing, but of course, in typical Nietzschean fashion, he welcomes the destabilization.

When I see a film like The Boss Baby I see the minds of the people Nietzsche ridiculed at work. “Well,” they say, “God is out of fashion, but we need babies to come from somewhere. I know! How about a big corporation in the sky!” Even as virulently anti-Christian as Nietzsche was he found this kind of thinking even more repulsive, and frankly, so do I.

Think of the metaphysics slipping through to all of those young impressionable minds in the theater watching this movie. The corporation runs everything. Even the enemy of the corporation is in fact another corporation. Life itself is simply a competition among different product launches and corporate bottom lines. Corporate capitalism becomes the fundamental structure of the entire cosmos.

You could almost redeem this film by saying, “Hey wait, doesn’t boss baby decide he wants a family after all?” Yes, he does, but in the final scene we see that the entirety of the film is a story told by an adult Tim to his daughter on the arrival of a little sister. His brother walks in and is basically boss baby grown up, i.e. Jack Donaghy. Nothing really changed in terms of value structure. It’s also hinted at that the new little sister is part of Baby Corp. (Do I smell a sequel? Yes, given this film’s success).

In general I really think Hollywood should get out of the “Where do babies come from?” story telling premise. For one, absent an overarching religious consensus, the metaphysics become ghastly. But more importantly, in a world where we have decided to treat sexuality as a focal point of our ethical concerns, do we really need films that treat human reproduction as some kind of fairy tale mystery? While certainly young kids don’t need detailed accounts of in utero development, should we really be actively obfuscating pregnancy and child birth? And for kids old enough to take it as a joke, why on earth would they find it funny? For his part, my son described the film’s premise as “weird” but thought there were humorous moments. So I don’t know. Enter at your own risk.

Ten Best: Music Videos (1991-1995)

In an effort to provide some fun, I decided to try something different this week. After reminiscing with a friend about the hey day of MTV, I decided to honor the little bits of film that are music videos. In this installment, I’ve decided to focus on the early 1990s as that seems to be when the video was at its peak point of influence. There is no claim that these are the best songs, I should not be trusted in my knowledge of music. Rather, these are mini visual statements that had profound impact on a generation and convey a sense of depth any feature length film would be happy to have. So here they are, my ten best videos from 1991-1995.

10.  REM, “Everybody Hurts”

Directed by Jake Scott

The companion to disaffection is loneliness, and this video captures that as well as the song every could. Taking us through a traffic jam and providing subtitles for the thoughts of those stuck in cars, we are immediately immersed in the countless ways that we are alone together. Hundreds of people in a confined space, not at all connected to each other; two people in a confined space, alone in their thoughts. How do we break down those barriers? Is it even possible? Of special note is the fake news cast ending which says that all of the people in the cars just disappeared. Perhaps, absent connection to each other, that’s precisely what happens.

9. Ice Cube, “It Was a Good Day”

Directed by F. Gary Gary

Researching this list, I became conscious of how many hip hop videos from the era just featured images of House Parties. This video may not have been groundbreaking, but it did follow the narrative path of the lyrics and made some, albeit minimal, use of Cube’s acting talent. What earns this video a spot on the list, however, is the ending. While hyperbolic in its use of police, what’s so genius is the image of Cube, having had his good day, suddenly confronted again with trouble, turning his back with an exasperated head shake and simply walking into the house. The shot immediately reinforces the entire point of the song, that good days are more rare than they ought to be for folks in South Central.

8. Counting Crows, “Round Here”

Directed by Mark Neale

Ok, so, of course this list is going to be colored by my own tastes and interests, but I promise this is a really well done video. Showcasing the disaffection of the early 90s with reference to the loneliness of crowds and the feeling of apocalyptic doom that came with an increasingly isolated society, this video has some pretty stellar imagery. On the one hand, there’s a reference to the pith helmet wearing pilot from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and on the other is a shot of a woman holding a sign that says “Nobody Move and Nobody Gets Hurt.” I think that’s just brilliant, as is the imagery around this video.

7. Weezer, “Buddy Holly”

Directed by Spike Jonze

To combine a song referencing Buddy Holly and Mary Tyler Moore with the television show that every college kid in the early 90s grew up with was sheer genius. The fact that the effect was carried off near flawlessly made this video as addictive as the song. Of course, while the effects are brilliant, the effect on the viewer is what matters most, and as much as any video on this list, Buddy Holly pulls you into a world that you immediately want more of.

6. Tool, “Sober”

Directed by Fred Stuhr

As with most Tool songs, I can’t begin to unpack the meaning of the images in this video. The claymation figure (created by Tool guitarist Adam Jones) at the center of the story conveys isolation, terror, disease, and longing, and while we may not fully understand the world that he inhabits, perhaps that’s for the best. What I can say it that in a brief five minutes, Stuhr captivates his viewers with images both heart-wrenching and grotesque. And if you don’t wince at the image of whatever it is flowing through the pipe, then I don’t even know.

5. Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Directed by Samuel Bayer

“Heart Shaped Box” might be a more complex feast of images, but the simplicity of taking a high school pep rally and giving it a dark edge, complete with goth cheerleaders in black lipstick perfectly captured the cynicism of the age. Like the strained cover of the Youngbloods’ hippie classic, “Get Together” that appeared on Nevermind, this video took images familiar and warm, and turned them into a mocking critique of the failure of the preceding generation to accomplish anything positive, while revealing a seething undercurrent of dissatisfaction in the nation’s youth.

4. TLC, “Waterfalls”

Directed by F. Gary Gary

The video fairly straightforwardly follows the narratives within the song, but does so very well. It’s the little touches that matter most, of special consideration is the little puff of smoke that escapes from Precious’s mouth after his lover has consumed him. Of course, the video gets special attention for its use of green screen and CGI to portray TLC dancing on water and appearing as water themselves. The effects maybe haven’t held up well over the years, but at the time you’d watch the video just to marvel at those brief effects.

3. Blind Melon, “No Rain”

Directed by Samuel Bayer

Who didn’t love Bumblebee Girl back in 1994? This compelling, simple little drama about a girl looking for her place in a cold and unfeeling world is what film making is all about. The video sums up GenX’s search for belonging and relationship as well as Reality Bites ever did. Bayer captivates his audience on the emotional ride and ends, unlike so many other GenX narratives, with a happy ending. Who can’t help but feel joy when she finds her place in the sun?

2. Beastie Boys, “Sabotage”

Directed by Spike Jonze

Sabotage is one of those videos that makes a song make worth listening to. By turning what is a monotonous and repetitive bit of hard rock into the soundtrack for a 1970s style gritty police procedural Jonze gave context to the ever present refrain. In an era when Tarrantino’s 70s nostalgia was king of the hip box office, Sabotage condensed that down to 4 minutes of familiar themes and images allowing, making a song worth listening to and in the process creating a fictional television show we wished was real. I’d have watched it.

1. Soundgarden, “Black Hole Sun”

Directed by Howard Greenhalgh

Suburban dysfunction is on full display in this video which makes full use of the fun new technique. Like other videos of the era, the deployment of bright colors serves as a mask for a deeply disturbed reality. Yet the genius of this bit of filmmaking is that there is only ever the faintest hint of the darkness underneath. Everywhere you look, you’ll see allusions to (especially sexual) perversion, but only allusions. Is it me then, filling in the blanks, and making this mini film perverse? Am I the disturbed one? Why is that woman taking a bath with her dog? This video is so messed up, but so visually compelling.

So what did I miss? What did I get wrong? If you like the list, please go ahead and give it a like and a share. And as always, thanks for reading.

Get Out: Why so Complicated?

Get Out

Directed by Jordan Peele

Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, LilRel Howery

Anyone going to see Get Out is expecting a film that depicts a young black man from the inner city being terrorized by white people during a visit to an affluent suburb. I suppose the basic sense is that this is a metaphor for the kind of violence perpetrated by white privilege against minority communities for decades at least, and may even serves as a stand in for such historical wrongs as segregation and slavery. It does this and delivers a fairly entertaining horror film as well.

If I don’t sound as enthusiastic as others, I suppose I’m not. While the film hit several notes in pitch perfect style, I felt when it came to the big payoffs it pulled a few too many punches that minimized the impact of its underlying social critique. I’ve wondered if the studio made Peele pull back, or if he himself wanted to disassociate from a film with a message straight out of critical race theory. I’m not sure. Maybe I’m asking too much, but as I will explain below, for as good as Get Out is, it could have been better.

We meet Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) as he prepares for a weekend away with his girlfriend Rose, (Allison Williams), and Chris is nervous. In addition to the normal jitters surrounding any first time meeting a significant other’s parents, Chris is worried because Rose has not told her parents that she is dating a black man. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t understand what the problem is for Chris, or if you think his fears should be set aside once Rose reassures him by explaining how her father loved Obama, then you should leave and slip into some other film more your speed, might I suggest Denial?

In any case, the two go on the trip. One of the decisions of sheer brilliance on the part of the filmmakers is to cast everyone’s favorite television liberal, Bradley Whitford (Josh from West Wing) as Rose’s dad, Dean Armitage, a respected neurosurgeon. It’s difficult not to hear all of those smug Aaron Sorkin speeches float in the background as Whitford plays the part of the privileged New England liberal tripping over himself to explain to Chris why he and his wife have black servants, and how he’s really okay when it comes to race.

Of course this is the genius of the film. It would be easy write a story about how overtly racist, rebel flag waving, Trump supporters were secretly kidnapping and torturing young black men. This film brings us face to face with the inability of privileged white liberals to come to terms with their refusal to recognize and grapple with their own systemic complicity. We don’t need the exaggerated horror themes in order to feel palpable anxiety of the idea of a young black man from Brooklyn traveling up state to secluded white suburbia for the weekend, all we need is the presence of a white police officer giving him a suspicious eye. It’s a facet of American life that has changed little since the release of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. For far too many white liberals, racial justice and integration is great until it begins to question white liberal privilege.

At least, this is where we think the film is going. Rose’s mother, Missy Armitage (Catherine Keener) is a psychiatrist who offers to hypnotize Chris in an effort to help him quit smoking. And while Chris wisely refuses, she manages to hypnotize him against his will (big red flag, by the way), conditioning him in ways we the audience are not entirely sure of. We meet other black men and women who behave bizarrely and mostly occur in some sort of servile capacity. Everything is leading to the idea that the town kidnaps and brainwashes black people to be the servile creatures that white people secretly want people of color to be.

Except, as the film unfolds, it’s clear that that’s not going on at all. Instead, we get a contrived explanation that what’s really going on [SPOILER ALERT] is that the doctors Armitage have perfected some kind of brain transplant technique which enables wealthy white men to inhabit the bodies of these young black men in an effort to… prolong their lives, I guess? The fact that this is happening to black people is merely coincidental. It’s not racial resentment, it’s not a desire to create some kind of perfect racial hierarchy. After learning the plot, Chris point-blank asks, “Why Black People?” and he’s told “Who knows? Maybe someone wants something different, or to be more hip.” And the kicker is that the man who purchased the right to Chris’ body explains that it’s Chris’ artistic talent as a photographer that has made him so desirable. “I want your eyes, man. I want those things you see through.” In other words, it’s got nothing to do with being black at all.

At this point I was massively disappointed in the film. It ends up embracing a message that is in line with the most right wing understandings of racial politics in the United States. The fact that the system in which we live disproportionately affects black men and women negatively, leaves them more prone to police harassment and incarceration, more prone to poverty, more prone to poor health care access, and on and on, is according to this view merely accidental and doesn’t have anything to do with racism. Likewise, the fact that black men specifically are targeted by what the film calls “The Family” is merely accidental. It could have been young white men, or Latinos, but it’s not.

This is an important point. When activists and social political theorists talk about “systemic racism” they are not arguing that every individual within a system is racist. Nor is it necessary to even argue that decision makers within a system are racist. In fact, it could be the case that no one within the system is consciously racist. What matters when we talk about systemic racism is outcomes. If a system is set up that routinely privileges whites over blacks, it doesn’t matter if everyone within the system is individually innocent of racist intent [speaking hypothetically], the system is still racist in that it produces outcomes that systematically privilege one race over another.

So why does Get Out back off of a more straightforward racial explanation for what is obviously racially motivated? I’ve tried to rescue this premise, justify it as somehow more cutting than the straightforward and less complicated story line that would merely subjugate young black men into servile roles in the same way that the wealthy white communities in the United States and Europe have done for 500 years.

Maybe Peele made the film more complicated and less straightforwardly about race in order to comment on the arbitrariness of racism. There is no reason it happens to black people, it just does. This is a reasonable interpretation, except that, as explained above, the film goes further and absolves Chris’s own subjugation of any racial motivation via the reference to his artistic talent.

Or perhaps there’s the criticism that Old racist white people think it’s advantageous to be a young black man in today’s society, and this film lampoons that that thought. This idea does enter the film through the mouth of a Japanese man oddly enough, but it doesn’t sit well with me, however, because it’s not wealthy white men who think this. It’s poor white men who think being black is better because it means someone is fighting for them. Consequently, this explanation doesn’t really hold water. Would any wealthy white man willing become a young black man? This idea seems to press the boundaries of suspended disbelief.

I suspect that the real reason here is a desire on the part of either Peele or the studio to create a more sophisticated explanation that would both provide more opportunity for terror and allow the filn to be embraced by a wider, i.e., whiter, audience. It’s unfortunate because Peele was on the verge of creating something truly stellar but seems to veer off at the moment of truth.

There is one other missed opportunity in the film that needs to be addressed. Chris’s best friend, Rod (LilRel Howery) is a scene stealer that makes this film infinitely enjoyable by providing both comic relief and valuable insights that move the film along to its climax. As a TSA agent, he embraces an exaggerated sense of duty and despite being blown off by Chris and eventually laughed at by Brooklyn (i.e. Black) police, he follows the threads and ends up arriving at just the right time to save Chris.

Of course this final moment of triumph is played for suspense. Chris has broken free from his bondage, killed the Armitage family in what we know is self defense and has burned their house to the ground. Stumbling in the road, trying to get away, next to a still conscious Rose who has been shot, we see flashing lights pull up the road. The audience in the theater groans, knowing that no cop will ever believe Chris’s story. Instead of the racist white cop we met at the beginning of the film it’s his friend, Rod, and we are all relieved. The two friends escape their white suburban ordeal and head back to the safety of Brooklyn.

But what a missed opportunity! We all know that no young black man would be able to simply walk away from killing a white family of four and burning their house down. Especially since all the evidence that might have supported his story went up in the fire. What a powerful statement the film would have made to end with a scene of Chris being arrested and sent to prison. I know, it’s not what the movie going public wants, they want happy endings. But in that audible gasp when we see the arrival of flashing lights at the end, everyone in the theater knows Chris is going down for this, even though he is the victim. That would have made the story more of a metaphor for race in America than any other change in the film.

In the end, Get Out is a good movie, a terrifying movie. But if you’re looking for the film of the previews, the one that presents itself as a metaphor for racial subjugation and white powered injustice, you’ll have to overlook some glaring missteps. Strangely enough, I find this tale of horrific, racialized torture and enslavement to be too positive to act as a metaphor for what is really happening in the United States. But still, in Trump’s America, the fact that a film like this got made at all is reason enough to laud it.