In February 2016, Daniel Kaluuya arrived on set at a large suburban home in Fairhope, Baldwin County, Alabama. In many ways it seemed like any other morning during the three-week, low-budget feature shoot. However, the movie’s director, Jordan Peele, seemed to believe the footage they would shoot that day might take on a greater resonance.
“Yo, this is iconic,” the actor remembers Peele saying to him. Kaluuya wasn’t sure if his director was simply trying to amp him up; nevertheless, he took his place opposite the Oscar-nominated actor Catherine Keener and focused. “It felt intense,” he later recalled to Variety. “It was just that five-page scene that day.”
In retrospect, Peele was right. The film in question was Get Out, and the scene has, two years after it was staged and one year after it was released, found a surprisingly animated position within popular culture. That day, Kaluuya’s character Chris dropped into the Sunken Place.
In the movie, the Sunken Place is a fugue state Chris and other unfortunate black people fall into once they’re in the clutches of a rich, white, and – at least on first impressions – apparently liberal family, the Armitages. Rose and Jeremy Armitage, the young-adult children of the clan, kidnap or lure suitable prospects to the family home; their mother, Missy, hypnotises them with the mesmeric power of a steadily stirred cup of tea; and their father, Dean, a prominent neurosurgeon with a lustrous white beard and a fantastic line in ethnocentric virtue-signalling, performs a cerebral transplant in a basement operating theatre, removing all but a nugget of the victim’s brain.
Once that grey matter is out, the whites move in. Their bodies are occupied by the Armitages’ elderly, infirm friends and relatives, enabling the new hosts to live a full life, with just a flicker of the old mind, languishing in some impotent psychic netherworld, at the very base of unconsciousness.
For the production, the Sunken Place that Kaluuya falls into was faked in a nearby hall, which was repurposed as a soundstage. Peele and his director of photography, Toby Oliver, created the billowing void using a fan and a high frame-rate technique, usually employed to simulate underwater environments.
Over the past 12 months, however, the Sunken Place has taken on surprisingly real cultural resonance. It has come to express a widely felt political and social mood of liberal inertia and unspoken white supremacist hegemony, just as Peele’s acknowledged influences, Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Stepford Wives (1975), captured, respectively, cold war group-think and a Nixon-era backlash against second-wave feminism. Ben Carson’s political career in the Trump White House, and OJ Simpson’s life have all be said to indicate that these three prominent African Americans have entered the Sunken Place. Kim Kardashian recently spoke out against the number of Get Out memes about husband Kanye West, telling Elle “people are so fucking dumb and stupid.”
In June 2017, Drake shot a parody of the Get Out scene as part of his role hosting the NBA awards, in which he suggested the clean-living basketball star Stephen Curry may have slipped into the Sunken Place. By August, Jay-Z’s Moonlight video went from Friends parody to Get Out homage. Peele himself warned that Meghan Markle might enter the Sunken Place during her Christmas trip to London, tweeting, “A lot of tea cups lying around Buckingham [Palace].” And a pivotal scene from last season’s Insecure, in an episode entitled Hella LA, in which Lawrence had a threesome with two non-black girls, was likened to him entering the Sunken Place.
This year, in January, the film’s distributors Universal sprang for a hashtag emoji, which added a teeny decal of a teacup to accompany every mention of #thesunkenplace. And at the end of February, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah suggested Stacey Dash, the Clueless star-turned-Fox News commentator and Republican congressional hopeful, “should run as president for the Sunken Place”.
However, as a metaphor, the Sunken Place runs deeper than social media gifs and TV punchlines. In academic circles, it serves as a sleepy counterpoint to the hyperawareness of “woke” social criticism, or as a more forgivable, understandable, sympathetic version of the Uncle Tom racial trope.
Tananarive Due is an author, screenwriter and lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, who teaches a course entitled The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and the Black Horror Aesthetic. “I realised that Get Out was worthy of academic discourse immediately upon seeing the film,” she says, “I modelled an entire black horror course around it.
“When Daniel Kaluuya is floating in that void,” Due goes on, “it speaks allegorically to so many issues blacks in the United States in particular have grappled with: assimilation, incarceration, slavery and silencing. This visualisation of black pain and struggle has a profound impact on viewers and my students, who readily recognise how Peele’s film unpacks so many aspects of their experiences.”
Peele himself has backed up Due’s assertions, particularly with reference to black prison numbers; he has spoken at two of her classes, and remains quite willing to offer personal interpretations of his work.
“The Sunken Place is something that exists not just for black people, but for women, for our Latino brothers and sisters, for any marginalised group that gets told not to say what they’re experiencing,” the director said at his most recent UCLA address, at the end of January. “It’s the system. It’s all these cogs in the wheel that sort of keep us where we are … The Sunken Place is the silencing. It’s the taking away of our expression, of our art. It’s the very fact that this movie has never been made before.”
Kaluuya, meanwhile, feels the deadening effects of low-level liberal racism his performance embodied are equally common on this side of the Atlantic. In a 2017 interview with Vulture, the actor highlighted Get Out’s garden party scenes, in which guest try to compliment his character Chris, with crass racial platitudes.
“You kind of can’t say anything, because you know the intention is to make people feel welcome,” he reasoned. “However, the impact is making people feel isolated and different, because you just want to feel included, like you belong. That’s what the conflict is, and that’s what it captured. Only a black guy could write this, only someone that lives this. I’ve been to so many parties in England and in America that’s exactly like that, where you’re kind of seen as Other.”
Due, conversely, sees the Sunken Place as a more pointed critique of American politics that was, crucially, written during the Obama administration but released in Trump’s term. “Racism never died,” she says, “it had simply gone underground, or was hidden behind polite smiles, and is deeply embedded in American systems, particularly the criminal justice system.” Get Out’s Dean Armitage might brag that he “would have voted for Obama for a third term”, though really he is a product of the post-Barack era.
Of course, none of this is wholly original. The idea that the oppressed are subdued not only with clear acts of violence but also with a spooky streak of learned helplessness is well documented.
The notion that African Americans occupy some unseen subterranean space is a big part of Ralph Ellison’s seminal 1952 novel, Invisible Man; it’s also apparent in the name of the 19th-century slave escape network, the Underground Railroad. That is not to deny Peele’s brilliance, which lies in dropping all this into a single, six-minute scene that’s as easy to reference yet deep enough to merit academic scrutiny.
At the very end of the 20th century, Scream and Nightmare on Elm Street director Wes Craven likened horror films to a “boot camp for the psyche”. “In real life, human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers, events like [the 1999 mass school shooting] Columbine,” said Craven. “But the narrative form puts these fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears.”
That flimsy packaging, those threats and that violence remains, yet in 2018, the most prominent horror movie’s rationalisation process seems to have less in common with a boot camp, and more akin to a social-studies class. And that might offer enough to escape Get Out’s spooky netherworld. “It is imperative that ordinary Americans recognise racism for what it is and better understand its power to drive elections and policy,” says Due. “Get Out, through art, can help us all climb out of the Sunken Place.”
