The Role of Hypnosis in “Get Out”

Chris gets hypnotized in Get Out

Even if you haven't seen Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning horror film Get Out, you’ve seen publicity stills of its most iconic moment. Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), eyes wide and slightly red, sits in a leather chair, staring not-quite-straight into the camera, while tears dribble loosely from his eyes. He isn’t quite crying, but he’s clearly lost control of his reactions. He looks paralyzed, unable to look away, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. This isn’t coincidence.

In this moment, Chris is hypnotized. His white girlfriend’s psychotherapist mother Missy (Catherine Keener) has used deception, and Chris’s eagerness to please, to trick him into therapeutic hypnosis. She’d offered to do this earlier in the afternoon, claiming it would finally help him break his longstanding nicotine habit. He’d demurred, and his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) supported his decision, claiming “Some people don’t want others getting inside their heads, Mom.” So Missy resorted to deceit.

On some levels, this misrepresents both psychotherapy and hypnosis. Despite common fears, your therapist can’t “get inside your head”; your therapist only knows what you’re willing to share, and simply reads signs you present. And it’s impossible to hypnotize a resistant subject, much less make them do anything they wouldn’t otherwise do. But in this case, scientific accuracy isn’t the point. Chris and Missy’s relationship represents common fears about psychology, fears that don’t lack foundation.

Without spoilers, this hypnosis experience represents a common struggle among minorities, the poor, and probably women too: the experience of finding your lived experience separated from the messages we receive daily. We see ourselves working extraordinary hours in grueling conditions, yet getting nowhere. Then powerful people in politics and finance tell us our continued poverty reflects our own poor character. People we respect say we’ve achieved equality, yet we look around and see we haven’t.

We ask ourselves: do we trust our experiences, or the words powerful people speak? People who go along to get along clearly have more peaceful work lives, families, and other relevant experiences. If we make waves or resist, like union picketers or civil rights protesters, we know we face struggle, arrest, blacklisting. The undeniable appeal of “fitting in” makes many people deny their experience. Maybe my poverty really is my fault. Maybe the system works.

Alex get hypnotized (sort of) in A Clockwork Orange

Research psychologists understand this experience. Prisoners under torture can be made to see things that don’t really exist, because disbelieving their own senses is easier than facing the continued pain. Star Trek fans will know this as the “There Are Four Lights” scenario. We voluntarily relinquish the evidence of our senses because getting along peacefully, escaping the torture of outsidership and isolation, is a reward we want. We just want friends, family, and human contact.

From the beginning, Chris shows this willingness. A working artist, he’s achieved enough standing to resist gentrification and hold onto his converted Brooklyn loft, tastefully decorated with the accoutrements of middle-class life: posh leather furniture, flat-screen TV, pedigreed dog. Turning his artist’s eye toward commercial ends has been lucrative for him. He isn’t exactly assimilated, but he’s accepted his role in society, and been richly rewarded for it—a common Key and Peele theme, too.

This contrasts Chris with the other Black man he sees in Rose’s parents’ posh surroundings, Andre King (Lakeith Stanfield). In the movie’s prelude, Andre gets lost in a nameless Eastern suburb, walking streets designed to actively discourage pedestrians. Like many Black men in white suburbs, he finds himself tailed by faceless strangers. Andre, who has verbally mocked suburbia to this moment, gets dragged from the streets. Not for Andre the romance of surface-deep white acceptance.

Chris thus arguably makes himself vulnerable to Missy’s hypnosis, because he’s willingly hypnotized himself already. He’s denied the evidence of his senses that a shifting economy, and the preference for white people since around the year 2000 to move into cities (the reversal of historic White Flight) has shattered communities and their support networks. Chris has already chosen to participate in the evolved economy, chasing the rewards of inclusion. Missy doesn’t need to do much.

Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Chris would rather join society than retain his unique experiences. Unlike Alex, Chris has no specific moment he made that decision; it’s been a long string of paychecks, rent payments, and coffee dates. Moment by moment, he’s hypnotized himself, for the reward of acceptance—a reward powerful people could withdraw at any moment. We the audience, rich and poor, white and Black, must ask: have we hypnotized ourselves too?