‘We Are the Gods Trapped in
Cocoons’: Neural Entrainment in
Get Out
Kodwo Eshun
According to Saidiya Hartman, the practice of white North American
enslavement can be diagrammed as a libidinal circuit of enjoyment in which
white self-augmentation is engendered by possessing captive African bodies
as fungible commodities and abstract property.1 In Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele,
2017), the Order of the Coagula offers its white members the pleasurable
prospect of ‘immortality’ through the ‘racial reassignment’ exclusive Coagula
Procedure. African-Americans kidnapped by Jeremy Armitage (Caleb Landry
Jones) groomed by Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) and sedated by Missy
Armitage (Catherine Keener) provide the bodies required for the Procedure’s
‘man-made miracle’. Each abductee supplies the youthful ‘vessel’ for the
Procedure accomplished by neurosurgeon Dean Armitage’s (Bradley
Whitfield) enforced ‘partial transplantation’. The imaginative limits of Get
Out’s diagram of racial capitalism emerge here, in its incapacity to envision
the Order of the Coagula extending its ‘service’ to wealthy Afrodiasporic
elites prepared to acquire ‘immortality’ at any price.
Photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is the eighth AfricanAmerican to be lured by Rose for a weekend visit to the Armitage family
home. The Armitages embroil Chris in obligations from which he cannot
disentangle himself without appearing ungracious or inhospitable. Chris finds
himself drawn into the finely woven net of Armitage family rituals ranging
from afternoon iced tea en plein air to the evening family dinner at the dining
table, culminating in ‘the big get together’ that commemorates ‘Rose’s
grandfather’s party’. When Missy taps her metal teaspoon thrice on her tall
glass to summon the ‘maid’ Georgina (Betty Gabriel) to serve iced tea, she
draws Chris’s attention down towards her aural gesture from which his gaze
moves upwards to meet her eyeline. As Chris locks eyes with Missy, the
knuckles of his right hand beat a rhythm of nicotine withdrawal. Dean picks
up on the measure of Chris’s ‘jonesing’; Missy’s hypnosis ‘method’, he
smirks, will ‘take care of that for you’. When Chris demurs with the words
‘I’m good, actually…Thank you, though’, he prefaces his polite refusal by
winking at Missy as if to share an unspoken connection at Dean’s expense.
Missy builds on this ‘attentional focus’ by ambushing Chris on his return to
Rose’s bedroom after a late night cigarette in the grounds of the Armitage
estate. Enmeshing Chris within a ‘Yes Set’ of weaponised Ericksonian
hypnotherapy, Missy connects Chris’s interiority to her apparatus of rhythmic
entrainment.2
During a Vodoun ritual, argues Maya Deren, ‘our sense-perceptions’ are
‘geared’ by the regularity of drum rhythms to the ‘expectation of its
reoccurrence’.3 Missy uses the white bourgeois ritual of tea for two to
engineer Chris’s neural possession. Missy explains that ‘We do use focal
points sometimes…’. She breaks off, tilting her head as if some unannounced
entity has caught her attention, drops her attention towards the saucer that she
holds above her left knee, then redirects her gaze at Chris, concluding with
the words ‘…to guide someone to a state of heightened suggestibility’. Her
right hand continues to stir tea with a vintage silverplate teaspoon.
‘Heightened suggestibility?’ Chris repeats sceptically, indicating non-verbal
acceptance in the ‘ideomotor signal’ of his slow nod.4 ‘S’right’, Missy
confirms softly, slowly stirring the cup’s base hidden by the brown liquid
obscured by its porcelain exterior. As the volume level of her spoon stirring
gradually increases, its steady, silver cycles engender an ‘expectant attention’
that entrains Chris’s sense-perceptions in a psychophysical circuit of
concentration without consciousness.
Because the source of the teaspoon’s ‘sustained rhythmic regularity’
operates ‘outside the individual rather than within’, consciousness, to quote
Deren, ‘is unnecessary, as it were, in the maintenance of this concentration’.
Chris’s consciousness is outsourced to the regular gesture of the rotating
teaspoon. The contact between the silver spoon and the teacup’s ceramic
cavity takes over the work of concentration from Chris’s concentration. It
stands in for his attention. It functions as a psychotechnical apparatus that
deactivates his perception. In operating at the threshold of consciousness, the
‘fixation device’ of the stirring teaspoon manipulates Chris’s affective
suggestibility. In the protocol for hypnosis first systematised by Bleuler in
1916, suggestibility is defined as a form of transmission that forms
complexes of associations beyond language through ‘accompanying affective
tones’.5 Missy uses the affective tones of the stirring spoon to reactivate the
repressed remorse associated with Chris’s childhood’s memory. Faced with
the prospect of calling 911, which might confirm his mom’s possible
accident, which in turn would ‘make it real’, the chain of causation frightens
the eleven-year-old Chris. Frozen in a state of subjunctive irreality, the young
Chris sits in front of the television set that stands in for the telephone call he
cannot bring himself to make.6 Following Missy’s instruction to ‘tell me
when you’ve found’ the audible memory of rain that fell during those long
hours facing the television screen, Get Out’s soundtrack of heightened rain
signals the onset of paralysis triggered by his bodily memory of childhood
trauma witnessed by television and induced by telephony that might have
saved his dying mother’s life. Entrapped by his own muscles, Chris finds
himself incarcerated within his vision, a body flailing and falling through the
endless abyss of his mind, away from the two-way screen far above that
displays his own perspective back to him, showing him the shrinking screen
of an external world occupied by his cataleptic body.
‘I think your mom got in my head, right’, confides Chris to Rose, nodding
to himself as he struggles to recall the what, the when, and the where of the
‘sunken place’. Chris’s memory is ‘geared’ to a circuit that dissolves the
distinctions between sedation, sleep, and amnesia by functionally connecting
waking dreams, nightmares, and limited consciousness. Missy’s hypnosis
switches his nervous system on and off, bringing Chris back online and
taking him offline, preparing him for the future described by the blind white
gallerist Jim Hudson (Stephen Root) of Hudson Galleries. Hudson explains to
the manacled, distraught Chris that ‘your existence will be as a passenger…
an audience. You’ll live in the…’. In completing Hudson’s description with
the term ‘sunken place’, Chris verbalises the extent to which he has
consciously grasped the use of hypnosis as a functional device for dissolving
his consciousness in the interests of the Procedure. Hudson’s live television
broadcast is itself the second phase of ‘psychological pre-op’. It aims to
‘mentally’ prepare Chris by forcing him to comprehend what Hudson calls
‘our common understanding of the process’. Because Chris’s understanding
of ‘our common understanding of the process’ amplifies the ‘positive impact
on the success rate of the Procedure’, Hudson’s praise of Chris for getting ‘it
quick’ is designed to encourage Chris’s consciousness to accept his future as
a ‘limited consciousness’ or ‘vessel’, a ‘cocoon’ or ‘coagula’ for a ‘newly
reborn’ Jim Hudson.
When Hudson declares that ‘I’ll control the motor functions so I’ll be…’,
he pauses. Leaving space prompts an exhausted Chris to pronounce his own
death sentence by muttering the embittered words ‘me. You’ll be me.’
Articulating his fate closes the circuit between ‘you’ and ‘me’. In speaking
the copula between ‘you’ and ‘me’, Chris appears to embrace his acceptance
of their ‘common’ destiny. Copula becomes coagula in the closed circuit of
the Procedure. What shorts the circuit between copula and coagula is Chris’s
capacity to play dead by replaying unlife’s sound against undeath’s image.
Using just enough cotton wool to tamp his ears against the television that
switches on a fixed frame of Missy’s stirring teaspoon in order to turn him
off, Chris impersonates himself as a sedated body. Taking his cue from the
mounted stag’s head that provides him with an insight into the exhibition of
the insensate, Chris cloaks his aural self-defence in a visible display of the
signs of unlife. Chris masters hypnosis’s capacity to induce what Hortense
Spillers calls slavery’s ‘severing of the captive body from its motive will’.7 In
doing so, he steals back his corpse and gets away with his undead unlife.
NOTES
1. S.V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997),pp. 17-26.
2. M. H. Erickson, E. L. Rossi, S. I. Rossi, Hypnotic Realities: The Induction of Clinical Hypnosis and
Forms of Indirect Suggestion (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1976), 38–9, 57.
3. M. Deren, ‘Possessed Dancing in Haiti’ (1941), typescript from the Maya Deren Collection, Mugar
Library, Boston University, cited in U. Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, tr. D. Hendrickson
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 109–10
4. Erickson, Rossi, and Rossi, Hypnotic Realities, 31–2, 71–3, 104, 132–4.
5. E. Bleuler, Textbook of Psychiatry (New York: Macmillan, 1924), cited in Holl, Cinema, Trance and
Cybernetics, 107.
6. J. Sexton, Black Men Black Feminism: Lucifer’s Nocturne (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018),