At the beginning of "Escape from Deadly Town", a suspense was thrown out of his head and face: a man walking alone in the night was suddenly dragged away in a daze. The film officially started immediately. However, the next image is very "fresh", the rolling woods, black-and-white art photography, and new century-style vocal music, as if the audience is about to watch an independent literary and artistic film. The film also quickly presents the superficial contradiction of the plot through the dialogue between the hero and the heroine, that is, interracial marriage-black Chris has a white girlfriend Rose, and they plan to meet Rose's middle-class parents on the weekend.
But as the Chinese translation of "Get Out" (formerly Get Out) and the pre-marked "thriller" label tell us, things are obviously not simple. After Chris arrived at Rose's parents' home, weird incidents occurred one after another. These incidents strongly reminded him of his identity as a person of color, and made him feel very uncomfortable. He was hypnotized and imprisoned, only to realize that the black people had become a physical transformation tool for the white middle class represented by the Ross family, and then began to escape.
"Escape from Breakthrough" is bold, because director Jordan Peel chose to explore post-American racial issues in the form of a thriller. Thrillers or horror movies often talk about religion, family, crime, monsters, science fiction, etc. Rarely, racial issues are rarely seen. Movies that express racial issues often take inspirational or bitter paths. Thrillers are not genre. It is easy to create a sense of identity.
However, it may seem out of place to discuss interracial marriage in a different form. After all, as early as 1967, "Guess Who Is For Dinner" had already dealt with this problem head-on, and won two Oscars in one fell swoop, which had a major social effect; and Compared with today's realities of race and gender, interracial marriage is no longer a social problem.
However, "Escape from Destiny" is clever in grasping and creating the quality of "horror". On the one hand, it is well versed in thriller/horror film routines. Its scene is a lakeside villa, which can be said to be a typical closed space; it has death and corpse early in it-although it is a deer; it has abnormal characters, and the expressions and eyes of black gardeners and black maids are absolutely creepy; It worked hard on the sound effects, and had a great time with jump scare. In the later stage, the blood plasma burst on the escape route, and the killing of the door made the adrenaline soar. The suspense of its plot will also make people astounding at the end, feeling the powerful screenwriter design. In other words, spectators who like thrillers/horrors can find sufficient excitement.
On the other hand, when the audience watched the complete film and re-assembled all the details, they would find that the horror of "Escape from Death" was not due to Chris' escape from the dead, but rather the context of American social reality on which the entire movie was backed. . This level of horror does not rely on sound effects or plasma. It is strong enough just by rendering the discomfort caused by a black man surrounded by many whites. It accurately expresses the absurd and terrifying feeling that is regarded as a different kind. It may be similar to a personal "social phobia", but its implicit discourse mechanism is more ambitious and public.
However, the "black" here is not only an alien, it is also a rare thing to live in, which has attracted a lot of white middle class to play Bingo games and bidding. They are not the suburban KKK, and their purpose is not to drive out people of color. But their intentions are equally evil, because they regard black people as tools to extend life or improve the flesh, through hypnosis and neurosurgery, to achieve the grafting of the white brain and the black body, which is absurd and sci-fi.
At this point, the film did not analyze technology and ethics. But rather than saying that this is insufficient, it is better to say that this lack of lack is the result of careful weighing, and instead use criminal/psychotic cuts to bridge the grand racial issue in a short and smooth manner. For example, when we think about why the object of expropriation of the body is black, it is not difficult to derive the reason from the details of the comprehensive film. On the one hand, because black people are the deepest obsession of Grandpa Rose (losing to black people in the Olympic sprint), black people have a human body advantage, and because in the United States, black disappearance is far less noticed than white disappearance, just like Chris’s friend, When TSA Police Officer Rod tried to report the crime, he became a joke in the eyes of fellow black officials. In the eyes of the latter, it is only a fantasy that blacks were arrested as "sex slaves" by whites.
This is the director's clever irony, pointing to the social reality of America in the post-Obama era. On one side is the so-called "Black Lives Matter" (Black Lives Matter), and on the other side is the absurd black flesh harvesting Qi Tan. People of color are just gorgeous conceptual slogans. Killing, stupidizing, and marginalizing are the cruelest facts. Injustice, violence, and repression one after another. This social anxiety is the most chilling.
It's no wonder that at the end of the movie, Chris directly killed the Ross family on the way to escape. Most of the audience's reaction was "to relieve their breath"; when the audience discovered that the friend Rod was getting off the police car, the audience's reaction was "cheers"—— Chris was finally safe.
The explosion of this movie-watching mood is due to the continuous stacking of the previous horror and suspense effects, and it also comes from the contempt for the hypocritical and evil middle-class white (WASP)-a kind of realism. At the end, the black gardener who almost "sacrificed his life for righteousness" and the black police officer who bravely saved his friends also created a vigorous and heroic ending. It can be said that the director scratched the audience's itchy and pain points with extreme precision.
From this point of view, "Escape from Desperate Town" brought a quite successful catharsis effect to the audience. But on the other hand, it can also be considered that this climax designed for the audience is still simplified, and the duality is still slightly mechanical.
But there are other highlights in this film, especially the comedy elements seamlessly weaving in the film by the director who is a comedian/screenwriter. Rod, a black TSA staff member, is a concentrated representative. He speaks nothing, and swearing is like a gunshot, but it can make people smile easily. And when Chris escaped from the cell, he stabbed Rose's father with a wall-mounted stag specimen. This unusual weapon also had a deliberately comedic element. Of course, the deer that has appeared many times also has important hints and symbolic meanings.
However, there are two things that I admire the most. One is that Chris was hypnotized and his consciousness fell into a "sunken place" (sunken place). The lens language of the film is very clever. The camera becomes Chris’ subjective perspective, and the content of the window becomes the audience watching "self"/Chris’s body is moved by the Ross family, which has the impression of breaking the fourth wall, which also strengthens The combined effect of horror and comedy.
Another point is that in the script design, Chris has his own childhood shadow (didn't save the mother who was in the car accident in time), and finally overcome it (after knocking down the black maid and deciding to save her). This not only strengthens the suspense in the early stage of the film, but also enriches the character image at the end. In addition to the courage to face racism, Chris's overcoming of himself gives the film an extra dimension.
If it is said that in "Never let me go" (Never let me go) adapted from Ishiguro Kazuo's novel, the story of "bred" clone donors seems to be too soft and hypocritical, weakening the appeal, then "Escape from Deadly Town" In "The fleshy harvest of the dog-blooded Qi Tan took a different approach, not paying attention to physical ethics, but instead directly attacking the still pressing racial issue, with a novel perspective and full of tension. As a thriller and suspense film, it is detailed, logical, and there are no lack of laughter; as a racial film, it does not have clichés and does not pretend to be tragic, although at the end it has a slightly "shuangwen" quality under the protection of political correctness, which is weakened. Responsible for its own society, but still has its breakthroughs.
What the author is looking forward to most is a further irony: black people with white brains, banana people... are all these things worth unfolding?
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This article was first published on the "Iris" WeChat public account on May 9, 2017
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