The Sunken PlaceIn Jordan Peele’s (2017) film Get Out, the white antagonists desire to have themselves implanted into the bodies of African Americans. The process by which they engage in this scheme involves the use of hypnotherapy, which is conducted by Catherine Keener’s character Missy. Chris, the film’s protagonist, is lured to the home of the nefarious Armitage’s, where the head of household Dean is still nursing a grudge over his father’s loss to the African American sprinter Jesse Owens in a qualifying run for the Olympics. Revenge is one part of the motive of these deranged Caucasians; covetousness is the other—and Chris’s body and artistic talent is coveted by the blind art dealer Jim Hudson. In the “sunken place” scene in which Missy hypnotizes Chris for the first time, one of the film’s main themes—psychological oppression—is vividly depicted as Missy lays a guilt trap on Chris in order to suppress his mind and push him into a helpless state. Chris is made to feel guilty for not doing anything to help his dying mother (though there was nothing he could have done). Using this leverage, the white villainess cudgels the black hero into a state of psychological submission that mirrors the submissive state of the other black characters in the film who have had their minds replaced by the brains of white people.
The scene is emblematic of the film as a whole because it pits antagonist against protagonist in a one-on-one that reveals specific traits about each one. Underneath Missy’s calm and collected demeanor is a mean-spirited, forceful, oppressive witch whose real interest is in lulling her victim to sleep through the steady, droning, insistent use of kindly-intonated words that have very deadly implications hidden behind them. With Chris, one sees an intelligent young man who is aware that something isn’t quite right with those around him but is willing to go along if only for the sake of the girl he loves and the need to keep up appearances. Behind his kindly face, however, is a mind that is working to make sense of it all—and when he realizes what his hostess is up to he fights back, attempting to claw his way out of the sunken place—the grit and determination...
At the end of the scene, he wakes up in bad thinking it was all a bad dream—but the reality is that he is engaged in toe-to-toe face/off with some formidable foes. This scene boils that contest down to its two main opponents and reveals the subtle ways in which the villain uses honeyed words to psychologically oppress the hero, while the hero senses that he is being poisoned attempts to steel his mind and his will against her venom.
The stylistic choices made for the scene are important to understanding the dramatic tension that blows the lid off the otherwise so-far nice family get-together. The moment when Missy (with a smile on her face) orders Chris to “sink” into his subconscious, the music flares dramatically, with the shots flickering between Chris the adult and Chris the child, both of whom are feeling themselves paralyzed by uncertainty and doubt. Chris the adult, however, is the Chris of the present—and he is the one being pushed into a grave of paralysis by Missy’s surprise hypnotism. The screen goes dark except for Chris whose body is seen falling into nothingness while Missy is shown far away on a movie screen soundlessly moving her mouth. The viewer sees this distance from Chris’s perspective and is made to feel the horrifying effect of Missy’s intentions as the music dramatically underscores this horror.
The music consists of stringed instruments playing a single note repeatedly (echoing the hypnotic suggestions of Missy’s words—“You did nothing, you did nothing”) and begins in earnest once the frame capturing Missy disappears from the viewer’s sight and all that is seen is Chris falling through space. Indeed, the scene is reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the sense that there is a kind of cosmic interaction going on between antagonist and protagonist—between good and evil—which is accentuated by the score which arrives just as the light goes out.
The relationship between style and theme in this scene is indicative of the film as a whole. Here the main theme being exposed is the theme of psychological oppression and the style in which that theme is approached is a combination…
