La Ron S. Readus
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The Black Reclamation of the Body Snatchers (VIDEO SCRIPT)
🕑 Added 2023-07-10 20:00:01 +0000 UTCI wanna talk about Get Out
/Get Out is a 2017 horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele. It tells the story of Chris Washington, a black photographer from Brooklyn played by Daniel Kaluuya, who’s taking a weekend trip upstate to meet the parents of his white girlfriend Rose Armitage played by Allison Williams. However, after experiencing things that are off with both Rose’s family, their rich white friends, as well as the “help” and other black associates he meets, Chris discovers he’s actually the next victim of a cult called the Order of the Coagula and has been mentally conditioned over the weekend to undergo a brain transplant that would grant a white individual from the order full control of his body while the mental remains of Chris would subconsciously be helpless to stop it. So now it’s a race against time for Chris to get out and escape the clutches of the Armitages before it’s too late./ (You know I would’ve voted for Obama a third time if I could)
Readers, it’s no secret that Get Out was one of the most successful films from a first-time director in the early 21st Century.
Sure, it was nominated for four Academy Awards and won one. But I’m talking about different, more important reasons.
Also the Oscars have been on my shit-list lately for Will Smith shaped reasons, and this video ain’t really about them.
For me, as a black creator and storyteller, I thought it was a beautiful combination of displaying one’s inner black geek when it comes to multiple facets while also succeeding in being a cautionary tale for those who sought horror focused on American blackness.
/Him basing the Coagula’s brain transplant procedure on a real-life one previously tested on animals was incredibly interesting to learn, and it was an aspect of fantastical takes on real life situations that I hadn’t seen since I was first introduced to The Last of Us’ apocalyptic take on the cordycep fungus four years prior./ (It is a theoretically possible operation. They’ve conducted this on mice. It’s called a partial brain transplant)
Then there was the actual horror of the situation that Chris was in that was incredibly relatable as a black man.
The house party was incredibly uncomfortable to me as someone dealing with being fetishized by white individuals living in mostly white cities and communities that still wanted to label themselves as Detroit.
/The silent auction the Coagula members had for Chris’s body reflecting American slave auctions of the 19th Century./
And then there was the procedure itself, and the idea of there being only a sliver of your consciousness left to helplessly watch as this foreign invader claimed your life and your body as their own, erasing everything that made you YOU while others would forever notice that something was off; that something wasn’t right.
/Because thanks to both the situation Chris finds himself in, as well as the reinvention of the subgenre during the mid to late 1970’s, Get Out easily qualifies as a brilliant and equally important addition to body snatcher horror./
It’s brilliant because not only does it give us an amazing illustration of the black fear of losing our identities -- both as an individual and as a culture -- but also because it shines a very prominent light on who it is that we are losing our identities to.
What makes these aspects important however, is that thanks to the plot and the messages that the movie is distributing to its audience over the course of it...
/The foreign invaders robbing us black folk of our individuality and culture -- the very body snatchers of the film -- have actually been present since the conception of the genre in American fiction. They’ve just been hiding in plain sight./
That’s why I actually want to dissect the origins of body snatcher horror here in america, show you the difference in who its creators were trying to tell you it represents versus who it ACTUALLY represents, how its been allowed to spread, grow and evolve over the course of generations...
And how it -- like the Order of the Coagula in Get Out -- has found ways around its own rules in order to claim us as their own. Our culture, our bodies, and even our individuality.
You’re Next!
Body snatcher horror in America began as early as the 1950’s, starting off as a form of propaganda against anything that stood in the way of capitalism and heteronormativity.
Thanks to the likes of McCarthyism causing the beginning of The Red Scare that led to the Cold War after World War II, the “threat” of communism was at an all-time high.
/And while the witch hunts for confirmed and possible communists in government grew across the country, the same was done with queer people working in government; both given the same stance that their influence is a perversion of American society./ (I work for the state department, and I’m a homosexual)
Despite Joe McCarthy’s actions being slowed near the mid 50’s, a lot of the damage had been done and his influence spread to other public figures that could do incredible harm. One of those individuals was the at-the-time president of the Screen Actors Guild and soon-to-be president of the United States, Ronald Regan.
(Ronald Regan? The ACTOR?).
He bought into McCarthyism and put the pressure into blacklisting Hollywood talent that could’ve been and were confirmed to be communists. Which, if you know how quick he was to call for gun control after The Black Panther movement exercised their second amendment rights when he WAS president, that shouldn’t surprise you.
So after lots of probing from government officials that cost a good amount of performers, directors and writers their jobs thanks to being outed as a communist or suspected of being one, as well as force lots of queer creatives to make the decision to stay in the closet because of homosexuality’s link with communism despite McCarthyism fading out -- not to mention the Hays Code taking another 10 to 13 years to phase out -- Hollywood decided to govern themselves to avoid further blacklisting.
They looked for and stopped projects that could be interpreted as pro-communist propaganda, while at the same time creating original work or adapting stories that already had a sense of anti-communism and anti-queerness propaganda of their own.
One such work was “The Body Snatchers,” written by Jack Finney. It was first serialized in Collier’s magazine; a new chapter was released with every weekly issue over the course of November and December of 1954 before all of them collected in novel form in 1955.
Then, a year later, it was adapted into the film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” more than likely as a way of discerning it from the 1945 film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher” starring Boris Karloff.
It told the story of a physician named Miles Bennell, who, with a small group of others in the California town of Santa Mira, finds out that the citizens there are being replaced by duplicates grown from alien pods that fell from space.
/The duplicates are exactly like humans in likeness, speech, body scars and such, then they finish the duplication process when their victims fall asleep and absorb their minds and claim their memories; the originals disappearing forever. The only thing the alien copies lack once the process is complete are feelings and emotions./ (No emotions? Then you have no feelings. Only the instinct to survive)
This is where the Red Scare propaganda of Invasion of the Body Snatchers comes in, at least in the 1956 adaptation. The way McCarthyism initially sold America on the horrors of communism was by exaggerating the aspects of it as a violent yet subtle disruption of what American capitalism already had established.
Instead of selling the concept of the nuclear family to successful white families who were able to build generational wealth in land ownership and forced families of color out of those same opportunities via redlining -- despite constantly lying to them by saying said privilege was within their reach thanks to hard work and due diligence -- communism the way McCarthyism painted it threatened the “American Dream” by getting rid of the concepts of private property, money and social classes. And by doing so, it would kill the likes of innovation, creativity and personality, with individuals working strictly for survival.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers took that fear of capitalistic loss and, with the philosophy of the pod people, used the individual loss that would come from it as an allegory to represent the loss of the individual themself.
/The rate it took for a pod person to replicate a human symbolized how quick and easy one can be indoctrinated into the ideology of communism, and be willing to collectively sacrifice their “individuality” for the sake of the collective/ (Where everyone’s the same? What a world).
/And this goal is only obtainable for the pod people because they already lack emotion./ (Love. Desire. Ambition. Faith. Without them, life’s so simple; believe me)
Now some of you might be wondering to yourself, “Well if that’s the case, then how does Invasion of the Body Snatchers use the pod people to comment on McCarthyism associating communism with queerness?” The answer to that question isn’t in the movie, but in Finney’s original story.
As you can imagine, the Body Snatchers novel goes much more in-depth into the lore and habits of the pod people as opposed to the movie, explaining that the lifespan of a pod person only lasts about 5 years and that they have no other way of reproducing after the initial duplication. So after replacing the planet with its dominant species and utilizing all of its resources, the planet would be dead.
Now remember; The Body Snatchers was written, published, and adapted for feature film during the McCarthyism Red Scare. So with all the previous comparisons the pod people had with those who are “converted” to communism, they being unable to reproduce makes the homophobia that became naturally associated with the communist witch hunt of the time feel right at home.
And I’d be remiss not to mention that despite there being multiple methods of doing so nowadays, that the argument of queer people not being able to reproduce -- specifically those in relationships that make it impossible to naturally do so without help -- has been one that, even to this day, has been the go-to for a lot of queerphobic conservative politicians and personalities that regularly speak against the likes of homosexuality.
/With McCarthyism affecting Hollywood as much as it did even as it started dying down, 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers -- as well as the published story it was adapted from two years prior -- became a seemingly perfect vehicle to distribute anti-communism propaganda just as easy as the pods they shipped off from Santa Mira to the rest of the country/ (They’re here already! You’re next!).
The reason why I say seemingly perfect as opposed to perfect, however, is because while both versions of The Body Snatchers pushed the fear of communism over American capitalism as a loss of individualism and a world where everyone’s the same, the truth is that the loss of individualism and the creation of a world void of uniqueness has been happening in the country since its foundation. And it wasn’t because of communism.
One Of Us
The main way I realized that using introductory Body Snatcher horror as a vehicle of pushing anti-communist propaganda ala fear of the loss of individualism was hypocritical in nature, was through experiencing one of the favorite pastimes that I as a black man and other POC in America I’m friends with love to participate in; clownin’ the shit out of white folk.
Some of my POC Readers out there probably partake in this pastime as well. Hell, I’m sure I got Readers of the Caucasian Persuasion who talk just as much shit about their blanco brethren as we do.
As you can imagine, there are LOTS of legit reasons for this; the majority of them surrounding aspects of white supremacy and imperialism.
And one day, I witnessed on Twitter an OG YouTuber who has since made a name for himself in comedy named Mike Falzone, question one of the most common of these roasts; the stereotype that white folk don’t season their food.
Now in case you couldn’t tell by his last name, Mike Falzone is Italian American and was keen to make that known when he decided to comment on the stereotype in a Tweet he made on June 16th, 2018, saying, and I quote, “Quick question for everyone who believes ‘white people don’t cook with spice.’ Why don’t you know any Italian people?”
Now while it may look like I’m using this tweet to start some “Not all white people” beef, I promise that’s not why I’m pulling this tweet up.
Because I was there live when this tweet came up in my feed back in 2018, thanks to Tim Chantarangsu, who previously went by the stage name Timothy DeLaGetto -- also an OG YouTuber and of Wild’n Out fame -- responding to him with one of the funniest “we not talkin’ bout y’all” replies I had ever seen at the time.
I bring this up because when we examine his argument in the tweet, Mike Falzone is exactly who he says he is; /an Italian American millennial who clearly has proximity to whiteness and the privilege it grants as defined by American standards./
But he is also in touch with his heritage and culture enough -- probably thanks to him having first generation immigrant grandparents to teach him, I assume -- to have never had to completely associate with the stereotype like those within said proximity do, to the point where he is constantly confused whenever its brought up according to how this tweet was worded.
The reason why this questioning exists in the first place is because for the longest time, North America allowed and encouraged its fair-skinned inhabitants to toss their Irish, German, Jewish, Swiss, Turkish, and even Italian heritage and cultures to the side in exchange for becoming white.
As you can imagine, the concept of whiteness existed in America since the first colonizer set foot on this land. But the very establishment of whiteness wasn’t truly formed until those that fit its description of the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group didn’t care for the unification of working class European Americans and that of freed African Americans in Virginia and Maryland 200 years before the Emancipation Proclamation. There were so many laws passed from 1660 to 1723 that sought to break up that solidarity in order to create the concept of whiteness as we know it today, just so THEY benefited from the numbers game.
/“What distinguished this system of social control, what made it ‘the white race,’ was the participation of the laboring classes: non-slaveholders, self-employed smallholders, tenants and laborers. In time this ‘white race’ social control system begun in Virginia and Maryland would serve as the model of social order to each succeeding plantation region of settlement.”/
This would become most apparent when the Civil War happened almost 140 years later. Those who were the main minds behind the confederacy were able to use the social control from creating “whiteness” to tear the European American working class away from multi-ethnic labor unification, and convince those already affected to fight for them under the falsehoods of them upholding southern pride and heritage as fellow white folk.
/And it’s been so ingrained in the beliefs of these individuals, that even the future generations of those who were indoctrinated still believe such “pride” and “heritage” exists/ (they were poor, do you know how much a slave cost back then?)
Soon, this treatment of whiteness and its system of racial oppression began to spread from the south to across the country in a very simple expansion. Because with the arrival of immigrants, the southern strategy of uniting fair-skinned individuals under the banner of whiteness for social control over darker skinned minorities was given a rebranding, sortaspeak.
In that rebranding, whiteness received a new name: Americanization. And the introduction of Americanization is when whiteness truly became the mascot of cultural homogenization.
With President Theodore Roosevelt being one of the biggest proprietors of the concept, Americanization encouraged immigrants to give up their cultures and native tongue in exchange for adapting the American way.
British Author and playwright Israel Zangrill -- he himself being a child of Russian Jewish immigrants -- even wrote a play about the Americanization of European immigrants as a positive that Roosevelt greatly enjoyed called “The Melting Pot: The Great American Dream” back in 1906...
Saying, and I quote: /“America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming... Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians -- into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.”/
And yes, this is where the phrase “The Great Melting Pot” came from.
As you can imagine, just like the establishment of whiteness in the confederate states of Virginia and Maryland almost 300 years prior, the immigrants passing the Paper Bag test that sacrificed their individual culture and heritage in exchange of being Americanized were granted access to white privilege, and were given unspoken permission to participate in the subjugation of the brown and black descendants of the original inhabitants of the country, and those who were brought to America against their will respectively.
As the years went by, the descendants of those immigrants associated less and less with the heritage and culture the generation that brought them to America decided to give up, and more and more with the homogenized “melting pot” of whiteness.
/Because James Baldwin said it best: No one was white before (they) came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country./
So when I look at the effects of white american homogenization that resulted in white americans letting their own cultures from across the world either mix together or be completely abandoned for the sake of a collected brand of whiteness under the guise of patriotism, it’s very hard for me to NOT see the “Great Melting Pot'' metaphor as the equivalent of the untroubled world the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers are after.
/Where everyone's the same, but only after being stripped of their uniqueness and individuality. And those who held onto their culture -- their uniqueness -- doing so by not drawing too much attention to themselves./
The so-called horrors of communism might have been the reason why Body Snatcher horror was conceived in America, but history has shown that the better real-life comparative match for the Pod People isn’t communism at all, but Americanization. All for the sake of qualifying European immigrants under the umbrella of whiteness.
It’s thanks to this viewpoint still being popular among white folk to this day that causes them to be blind to the likes of white privilege, persecution of and systemic racism against black and brown people of this country, and using the phrase “I don’t see color” as a way of writing off suffrages that they don’t and will never experience being able to comfortably fit under the American umbrella of whiteness, because Americanization’s “Great Melting Pot'' jargon would list us as all the same.
But clearly, we are NOT all the same. And there are people who know that we are not and actively try to dismantle the “Great Melting Pot'' analogy in order to do so.
/People like anti-racist educator Jane Elliott, who said it best: We don’t need a melting pot in this country folks; we need a salad bowl...you want the vegetables, the tomatoes, the lettuce, the cucumbers, the onions, the green peppers to maintain their identity. You appreciate differences. A melting pot does not appreciate differences, and this country ought to be about appreciating differences./
Unfortunately, while this has for sure opened the eyes of plenty of individuals who thought said way of thinking was a good thing, plenty of instances have proven that this won’t stop the Body Snatchers -- won’t stop whiteness from trying to turn as many people as possible into one of them. What’s worse is that once whiteness realizes it can’t do it THIS way, it makes ulterior plans.
Now You’re In The Sunken Place
Surprising no one, the North American invention of whiteness and its evolution into Americanization had roots in cultural homogenization long before it was given both a name or a definition.
And also surprising no one, it has done severe damage to the cultures of ethnicities outside of the ones that are capable of willingly sacrificing it in order to join this collective of pallid pod people.
Because with its established power, it can also force said change on those who couldn’t join its club even if they tried.
Native Americans, as you can imagine, were among one of the first to experience this. Families of the Cherokee tribe located in northern Georgia and Alabama, western North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee willingly adapted to the colonizer’s way of society, government and agriculture back in the 1600’s, in order to find common ground; becoming one of the first ingredients thrown into this prototypical “Great Melting Pot” by sacrificing what made THEM unique. Then, despite said effort being made, they were uprooted from their ancestral lands a bit over 230 years later in the Trail of Tears because gold was discovered in Georgia.
/According to John Ridge when he spoke out against President Jackson’s decision to relocate them in 1832 ala his Indian Removal policy, “You asked us to throw off the hunter and the warrior state: We did so -- you asked us to form a republican government: We did so -- adopting your own as a model. You asked us to cultivate the earth, and learn the mechanic arts: We did so. You asked us to learn to read: We did so. You asked us to cast away our idols, and worship your God: We did so.”/
Now if you think any of what John Ridge said sounds familiar, consider how some current individuals under the doctrine of whiteness discuss those who are unable to physically conform to it.
/“You asked us to throw off the hunter and the warrior state: We did so”/
- Your current hairstyle isn’t suitable for the workplace
- You clean up real well
- God, I swear, some people just make being queer their ENTIRE personality
/“You asked us to form a republican government: We did so -- adopting your own as a model.”/
- Stop complaining about lack of generational wealth, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make your own
- The only way to truly fix the system is from the inside out
- You know how many sacrifices were made for your right to vote and marry?
/“You asked us to cultivate the earth, and learn the mechanic arts: We did so.”/
- It wouldn’t be such a big deal if they were LEGAL, but they’re taking perfectly good jobs away from US citizens
- This is entry-level anyway. The REAL money is in I.T.
- You wanna end up being a thug like your uncle?
/“You asked us to learn to read: We did so.”/
- This is America. We speak English
- I’m surprised at how articulate you are; no ebonics or anything
- You’re a credit to your people, son.
/“You asked us to cast away our idols, and worship your God: We did so”/
- That blond haired blue eyed Jesus put food on this table
- That look isn't gonna fly here, you need to tone it down
- I’m queer too, but you don’t see me voguing every five minutes
If you found any of those sayings familiar growing up as either a black person, a POC, a queer person, a black queer person or a queer POC, that is because whiteness is presented to us as a hypocritical double-edged sword that heavily relies on respectability politics in its favor to keep it sharpened.
Both sides of the blade work in tandem when it’s being used to pierce us, and it simultaneously inflicts both physical and psychological damage to us in ways that rob us of ourselves for its benefit without ever needing our consent to do so.
The first side of the sword works like this. While those who immigrated to America and could both pass the paper bag test and check off enough boxes on the Eurocentric Facial Features list could turn in their culture for whiteness -- which includes heteronormativity and capitalism...
Those of us who couldn’t even if we wanted to are either peer pressured into wanting proximity to it for the sake of acceptance, or tried to adjust a system already native to us to one that better resembled the one constantly used by whiteness because of how well it works for them.
As you can imagine, the former individually affected many people that didn’t fit this Americanized standard that whiteness initially upheld in multiple ways. If you’re a black person that grew up insecure about yourself because you thought your skin was too dark or your hair was too curly for you to be accepted by society, you probably know what it’s like to be cut by this sword.
If you’re of Asian descent that experienced a childhood of torment from individuals who fit in the bracket of whiteness because of your lineage to the point where you wished you no longer were that lineage, like Chinese American journalist Kimberly Yam wished as a child when she shared her journey of identity on Twitter in 2018, you probably know what it’s like to be cut by this sword.
Hell, even queer folk who, depending on their chosen or assigned gender, lean either too masculine or feminine, are too flamboyant or promiscuous, and naturally challenge how one should say they should be perceived by societal standards probably know what it’s like to be cut by this sword.
And the latter part of that sword’s first side is just as sharp as one who grew up with a large sense of community among fellow minorities outside of the bracket of Americanized whiteness.
I can only speak for myself and my experiences as a black man experiencing black functions, but I, like my fellow YouTuber FD Signifier stated in his first of two videos about black conservatism, fondly remember when the black communities I was part of were naturally socialist with the way we would naturally help out one another.
Whether it was with food, raising money to help others out with bills and rent via block parties and the like, or just naturally making sure everyone within the community had each other’s back, regardless of what it was you did for a living or how you chose to live your life.
It wasn’t until the concept of black capitalism coming in like the Fire Nation to compete against systemic racism locking us out of generational wealth and proper neighborhood funding via redlining that the whole vibe was thrown off, instilling an “every man for themself” mentality in individuals if it’s not members of their own family they’re helping out -- if that -- and drastically reduced the gauges of empathy and understanding of one’s fellow man down to like...a now steady minimum of 10%.
After all, it wasn’t a white-run corporation that kicked my mom and myself out of my childhood home after the city of Detroit illegally reclaimed the property due to back taxes and sold it to the highest bidder, despite it being completely paid off. It was a black family that cared more about being landlords and collecting monthly rent than buying back the block.
Meanwhile, there’s a whole other side to this sword of white homogeny. Thanks to whiteness utilizing The Great Melting Pot rhetoric of Americanization, all of the European cultures that whiteness absorbed into itself became this indistinguishable bland sludge.
Soon, those who grew up under the hodgepodge banner of whiteness began the hippocratic ordeal of making fun of people who were never invited to this abominable potluck in the first place -- keeping their identity and cultures in tact as a result -- while coveting the identities and cultures of said individuals at the same time.
That’s why instead of respecting the cultures of others like one should, whiteness instead causes those within its hive mind to appropriate them. And this is because all of the cultures that have been assimilated under its banner are too well mixed together at this point to properly siphon out to singularly celebrate, unless certain individuals and families never bought into the Americanization process when they gained citizenship to begin with.
This is why the various cultures, dress and ideologies of Native Americans have been appropriated by white folk for either fashion, costume or a new level of spirituality instead of respected and understood, when they were previously mocked, ridiculed and made the villains in stories about the great American frontier a few hundred years prior.
Even pro-capitalist, anti-union and anti-semetic American animator Walt Disney -- who turned in his Irish, German, and British lineages inherited by his parents for American whiteness -- spent 13 years of his career feeding into the white revisionist depiction of Native Americans over the course of two of his bodies of work; /Pinocchio and Peter Pan/ (Walt Disney is so creative! Nobody told him to make that “what makes the red man red” song and put it in Peter Pan, but he did!)
And while it’s safe to assume a good amount of us as African Americans who are natural born citizens of this country thanks to transatlantic slavery can trace our roots back to the likes of Nigeria and Cameroon, whatever culture, ideologies and dress that our ancestors had from those west African countries was lost to us thanks to various levels of indoctrination and subjugation as slaves.
So when we as African Americans created our own cultures -- both before and after our emancipation -- both we and what we created became the subject of ridicule, stereotype and mockery for those who had an active subscription to whiteness.
Meanwhile, everything they openly ridiculed, they secretly coveted. And it resulted in constantly appropriating things that we started and that they gained more accolades for, from music genres to TikTok dances.
As I stated in my video about heteronormativity, the watermelon stereotype only exists because white folk couldn’t handle that we found joy and started to gain financial freedom from growing and selling them.
They let us play and perform our music in their clubs for them to enjoy, but refuse to let us be customers.
They both cover and blatantly rip off our songs without our consent and it becomes an overnight sensation when they do so.
Hip Hop and Rap was constantly ridiculed for being incomprehensible and blatantly promoting violence according to them, but white music producers were quick to use respectability politics to paint Marshall Mathers -- aka Eminem -- as a victim of racism for trying to include himself in one of the only black safe spaces in the music industry left until Dr. Dre let him in.
And thanks to heteronormativity also playing the respectability politics card with that one straight drag queen from Drag Race season 14, we’re even starting to see this being mirrored in queer spaces as well. Which, real talk, ALSO has roots in black culture.
Both sides of this blade are dangerous enough on their own, as I’ve previously explained. But then you remember that this is double-edged for a reason. History has shown that it’s not just the likes of Kimberly Yam that desired proximity to whiteness after those who have access to it made her feel lesser for it being out of her grasp.
Because while being black, asian, latino, indian, middle-eastern or indigenous isn’t monolithic, we end up losing bits of ourselves in our journey to at least graze the edge of whiteness, since we cannot fully grasp it.
And because we’re too busy trying to clasp on to this institution created specifically to make our oppression easier to distribute, the culture is no longer safeguarded. Everything that makes us unique -- everything that the body-snatchers covet -- is left out in the open for them to assimilate into themselves.
This is why Coco from both the film and the Netflix original series Dear White People is such an important character study. She has experienced this same desire to have proximity to whiteness thanks to being conditioned that aspects of herself such as her skin and hair are lesser than her peers, and has sought the majority of her life to reach said acceptance.
/Yet despite everything she does, from constantly unsuccessfully seeking the acceptance of her white peers, to associating with other black elites of the college campus that bought into separating themselves from those that Ronald Reagan associated as “Welfare Queens” in order to make a white system work for those it was never meant for, she sees the combination of appropriation and mockery just as easily as one sees the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell driving down the street and feels a certain type of way about it. But she knows that speaking on the conflict would undo all the work she’s done to simply know what whiteness FEELS like, and says this in their defense./ (They spend millions of dollars on their lips, their tans, their asses, Kanye tickets, because they wanna be like us. And they got to be for a night. I’m not about to go out onto the street and protest a fucking halloween party)
While she is a fictional example, Coco in both the movie and at least season 1 of the sequel series, is an embodiment of plenty of individuals that exist in real life.
The Candace Owens’, the Clarence Thomas’, the Ben Carsons. Yes, even the Shameik Moore’s.
Those who, by following John Ridge’s example, dropped any and everything about themselves that made them unique in order to associate to a system built specifically to justify their persecution in hopes they’ll have it a tad bit better.
And just like I stated earlier, even queerness is being policed by the ever growing Americanization of white homogenization with laws and persecutions encouraging groups of cis queer individuals already associated with or in proximity of what is now traditional whiteness...
To stay as closely associated with heteronormativity as possible to make sure THEIR rights aren’t removed in a time where trans people, femmes, and those who both don’t and choose not to live within its pre-made molds of sex and gender expression need their support the most.
Because at the end of the day, one saying “I may be black, but I’m not a nigga” or any other ethnical variant of it is no different than another saying “I may be gay, but I’m not a faggot.”
Behold the Coagula
So what makes Get Out so special? What is it about Jordan Peele’s first film that does such a good job at highlighting all the hypocrisies that Invasion of the Body Snatchers initially conceived?
Because if we’re to be fair here, time has shown through multiple remakes of the 1956 film and other films that have taken the concept of body-snatcher horror since its introduction to mainstream media that it can be used as a tool to highlight ACTUAL social and systemic dangers surrounding us, not just the initial anti-communist propaganda in pro-americanization’s clothing that it started out as.
Well, that’s actually part of the reason why Get Out is so special. It takes the roots of body-snatcher horror, exposes them for what they were and what they represented before its recontextualization, and shows us that they’re still drawing nutrients from the soil as initially intended while simultaneously informing us how all of us ethnic minorities are still being affected by it.
In the film’s narrative, we learn that Roman Armitage, the patriarch of the Armitage family and the founder of the Order of the Coagula used to be an athlete. He participated in the 1936 Olympic games, the same year Hitler sought to show the world the perfected strength and agility of the Ubermensch.
/But, like Hitler, Roman was beaten by Jesse Owens./ (tough break for your dad, though. Yeah, he almost got over it)
Those of us who’ve seen the film would later find out that reply had more meaning behind it than we realized.
/Because in him not getting over being beaten in his professional sport by a black man, the Order of the Coagula was formed and Roman was one of the first to undergo the procedure of transplanting a white mind into a black body while the original owner was subconsciously trapped within what is now deemed The Sunken Place; a procedure that has since become very popular among other white elites like himself. Meanwhile Roman enjoys the peak physical conditions provided by the black body he snatched after coveting them since being defeated by one 77 years ago./
Whiteness coveting that which it hasn’t already absorbed into itself.
By highlighting the covetous nature of the Armitages and their localized white upstate neighbors part of the Coagula, Get Out does a great job in showing that the origins of body snatcher horror always were in white homogenization, even if the propaganda associated with its american debut tried to say otherwise.
Every single member of the order that has participated in either the act of acquiring blackness or claiming it for themselves, has lived a life of privilege that can only TRULY be guaranteed for having the ability to claim the concept of whiteness through its evolved form of Americanization.
/Regardless if their reasoning was blatantly envious/ (black is in fashion) /or slyly liberal/ (don’t lump me into that, I could give a shit what color you are).
This makes it easier for those of us who have lived under the racial oppression that whiteness created even after its evolution, to see the members of the Coagula wanting black bodies for their own nefarious purposes as the equivalent of whiteness craving the appropriation of the culture that we black folk had to build from scratch...
/Even when they were the ones who created the stereotypes associated with aspects of our created culture in order to dehumanize us/ (is it bigger?)
Even the concept of the Sunken Place existed before the movie was released. We just never really had an official name for it until then.
As I’ve stated in my previous segment, while we as marginalized ethnicities cannot utilize whiteness in the way it allows others that fit its bill, we’re made to crave it in one way or another.
We already use the Sunken Place to refer to individuals who give in to the craving enough to form a very dangerous addiction -- so dangerous that it can even start to affect other people...
But it’s also an indicator of those who wish to speak out about the oppression that they’re being faced with but no longer have a voice to do so, ala respectability politics and the like. It’s very much giving “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison.
/As Samuel Autman says in Black Body Snatchers, a personal essay he wrote about the movie, “the film doesn’t shy away from its warning about what can happen to Black people who ingratiate themselves to white people. We are not only risking our identities but our whole selves.”/
So now that the narrative of the movie has made us privy to the fact that not only does this qualify as body snatcher horror, but that the ones doing the body snatching in this narrative are those with an active subscription to whiteness that want what they can’t have in those they oppress thanks to their own rules, this causes us to look at the genre in a completely different light if we have enough knowledge of the initial historical context.
And in doing so, we see that the correlation between the evolution of whiteness -- everything it stands for in regards to assimilation, oppression and control -- and the ways of the pod people of the mid-50’s that started it all are actually one and the same.
/The threat of communism was simply used as a scapegoat, pulling the wool over your eyes that for a good amount of Americans born with the appropriate skin tone and the right facial features, you’ve already been assimilated./ (It’s such a privilege to experience another person’s culture, know what I’m saying?)
Conclusion
As I stated earlier, there have been plenty of remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers since the release of the 1956 original adaptation, both for film and for television.
/And each of them have tossed the pod people’s weak allegorical connection to communism out of the window in favor of the actual loss of individualism one would suffer when one allows themselves or is forced to be assimilated into various forms of institutional control./
Something that, thanks to the constantly encroaching state of fascism being indoctrinated among various states in the nation with the intention of spreading said control across the country, is very fucking important.
Even original intellectual properties that have utilized body snatcher horror since its introduction in the 1950’s have explored other factors in which various types of sociopolitical control is allegorically applied to both the foreign invaders they introduce and the ones that might as well be right next door.
/John Carpenter’s incredibly popular remake of The Thing From Another World, 1982’s The Thing, while also capable of being interpreted as an examination on the paranoia propagated from McCarthyism and the Red Scare, can also be read as a study of toxic masculinity’s response to queerness./
With no women in the cast until its 2011 prequel introduced Kate and Juliette into the franchise played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Kim Bubbs respectively as part of the expedition that tried to kill the alien at the beginning of the original when it arrived at the base in the form of a dog, trying to identify and survive the Thing prompted the all-male ensemble to challenge aspects about masculinity that heteronormativity always told them were unacceptable to channel, less they be seen as gay.
This involved being more open to the likes of empathy, openness and intimacy among other men in order to possibly identify the alien, while those who were unwilling to let go of these toxic traits they were brought up to believe were regularly associated with manhood paranoidly withdrew further into themselves and from others upon realizing what it would take upon seeing others make the change.
/Not to mention with it being the early 80’s, the idea of testing the blood of the alien was just a huge allegory to HIV and AIDS./
1998’s The Faculty, written for the screen by Kevin Williamson at the height of his fame from the first two Scream films and I Know What You Did Last Summer, gives the film aimed at Gen X teenagers and young adults a meta commentary on the original 1956 movie similar to how the Scream franchise comments on the slasher horror genre.
Concentrating on the cliche cliques along with the stereotypical character tropes and archetypes usually associated with high school narratives, the loss of individualism that’s being threatened by these parasites in a football focused high school in Ohio surrounds those who are trying to break away, in the process of, or have successfully subverted from the tropes they originally fell under on their own volition.
/Meanwhile, despite the promises of the queen, it’s the parasite that forces them to keep participating in the social roles they initially were listed under, and that we’ve been watching them willingly try and break away from./
And while my fellow YouTuber Princess Weekes has already made a brilliant video that talks about how good the original is, where its remake falters and how recent films in its wheelhouse have failed to capture its heart that you should definitely check out after this one, the 1975 film The Stepford Wives -- which, in my opinion, is the closest body snatcher horror film that comes close to matching the tone of Jordan Peele’s Get Out...
/Replaces the exploration of whiteness coveting the bodies and cultures of those it can’t completely assimilate inside of itself with that of patriarchy combating against modern day feminism in order to regain a sense of control and command over women’s bodies and where they believe they should socially stand./
Body snatcher horror has come a VERY long way from the era of McCarthyism that it originated from, both as a multifaceted source of visual dread and as a true allegorical tool. What Get Out adds to both of these aspects makes it just as vital as any of these other examples of how the concept has been elevated since.
While the concept of white people being culture vultures when it comes to the created cultures of black folk or the pre-existing cultures of other POC isn’t anything new, for a lot of people it was the first time they have ever seen a fictional depiction of this in order to gain an idea of what we’ve been talking about for decades.
Especially since a good amount of us have either always known or recently put together that the Ashen Ones we share a landmass with don’t have to be that. Regardless if they put together that early body snatcher horror is an allegory for white homogenization or not.
So for any white person -- Reader or otherwise -- watching this video, who truly believes that they don’t have a culture of their own outside of being white and American. Yes, you do.
The reason why you believe you don’t is because the combination of your family’s skin tone and facial features allowed you to claim the concept of whiteness in order to further promote the persecution of people of color in this country to the benefit of the dominant socio economic-ethnic group that runs it, when in actuality, you have more in common with those of us that are constantly being persecuted by the banner you’ve been told you fall under.
Somewhere down the line in your family tree, a member of it gave up their culture -- their individuality -- in order to allow themselves to melt into this pot of Americanization, either not knowing or knowing completely that they were also joining the hive mind of whiteness, instead of appreciating how their culture and that of others can be appreciated and respected among others in this country.
And while some of you might believe it’s too late for you to find the ingredient you represent, pull it out of the pot and place it among the others in the salad bowl -- that you think it’s melted to the point where it’s completely unrecognizable at this point -- I assure you, it’s not.
There are plenty of people every day who are waking up to the concept of what whiteness is, realizing what they’ve been contributing to, both consciously and subconsciously, and are throwing their association with it in the trash in favor of reconnecting to their ACTUAL cultures.
And for a lot of the individuals who fit and benefit from the concept of whiteness, it’s VERY easy for y’all to get in touch with the culture you originally hail from. Hell, most of y’all more than likely have multiple because whiteness benefited from them intermingling.
You have the ability to either talk to members of your family who immigrated to America if they’re still alive, or find out through genetic testing and whatnot where in the world you came from and responsibly reconnect. Not all of us can do that.
And if you do so and find out that you came from the likes of colonizers or whatnot, don’t be Ben Affleck about it.
Instead, do what black folk and POC in this nation have been consistently asking those of you who still subscribe to whiteness to do: acknowledge that what they did was wrong, and put in the work to be better than them.
Because I promise you; no one is trying to make you feel guilty for the shitty shit your ancestors have done unless you are willingly continuing the cycle. Especially when you have it within yourself to be and prove that you are better.
And the educational laws that are being passed across this country that enforce sheltering those who could benefit from learning these truths in order to perform the necessary change, only states how much the concept of whiteness counts on this level of ignorance to thrive. And that’s not even mentioning the amount of responsibility politics that are constantly being used to gaslight those who try to call out and warn others about its dangers.
It’s only when you see how quickly the concept of whiteness is allowed to perpetuate in its growth and influence, and compare it to how quickly those that participate in the horror of body snatching can invade the likes of a school, a town, a city and even a people that the correlation between the two becomes more clear.
Because thanks to narratives like that of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” the truth isn’t stranger than fiction. It’s on par. And the TRUE horror is that, it always has been.
