Jordan Peele film unsettles digestion
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London…
>> From our bedroom window.
>> This Marina Hyde article was so funny I decided to make my Tweet of it into a piece of art using the Picsart, Snapseed and Lit Photo apps.
>> Flashback. Just remembered a conversation with Stuart at Headway on Thursday last week.
I can’t remember the context, but he told me about his Uncle George, who Stuart didn’t like.
George was married to Auntie Peggy, whose cooking was allegedly so bad she could “ruin a bowl of cornflakes”, said Stuart’s dad. George and Peggy lived in Brecon, south Wales.
>> Having renewed the aeriel cable to our TV with happy results, we settled down with a curry to watch the Jordan Peele horror movie ‘Get Out’.
We’d seen another Peele Film, ‘Us’, at the cinema. ‘Get Out’ had been rated by friends. And it’s a gripper from start to finish.
Very simply, black boyfriend joins white middle-class girlfriend for a weekend with her family.
“Do they know I’m black?” he asks her as they cruise along a leafy lane in New England, or Maine, or somewhere.
Girlfriend laughs this off as a stupid question, but then they accidentally kill a deer.
What happens next is a minestrone soup of tension, suspense, intrigue and shock.
Girlfriend’s mother, who hypnotises everyone using cups of tea, is the only laugh to be had in a 20-mile radius of this spooky house in the woods.
Lots of post-trance smiles of satisfaction, though. And sexual implications.
If the film has a problem it is that horror is rarely seen as “serious”. And the ideas here are disturbingly serious.
It starts with an examination of what David Baddiel in his recent BBC documentary on Holocaust Denial called “soft racism”.
In this case, the soft racism becomes soft submission, which slides effortlessly into soft slavery. A variety of.
Then, just as you’re mulling over the soft slavery idea and finding it quite a worry, all softness disappears and the horror grabs hold and goes to work on your head.
You wake up tied to a chair in a wood-panelled room with a retro cabinet TV in front of you.
On the screen is a very ominous-looking cup of tea.
The room smells of Pledge.
>> Is there any reason other than for dramatic effect that TV police officers entering a dark house don’t turn on the bloody lights?
>> Is there any reason other than national stereotyping that the police officers in TV cop shows based in Wales (‘Hidden’, ‘Hinterland’) never smile? Laughing for Welsh plods must be a blissful brush with the transcendent.
>> My wife thinks the perfect gift a man can give a woman – a sort of equivalent to the idea of a woman buying an item to ‘please her man’ – is a mute button that attaches easily to the back of the man’s head.
BillyScraps 