by Jamie A. Thomas

Anyone who knows me knows I'm fairly obsessed with zombies, where they come from, why they persist, and how their inability to speak as we do masterfully articulates their sudden and involuntary departure from humanity. We all have our obsessions, right?

So when I went to see Get Out in theaters recently, with its central narrative of race-based body-and-brain-snatching, I couldn't resist reading zombies into it. Between writer and director Jordan Peele's chilling interpretation of the living dead, and his move to open and close the film with a hushed chorus sung in Swahili, I was stunned. All throughout the film my mind was completely blown by its twisting plot line, but even more so because of my expertise in Swahili, and continued research and teaching on discourses of zombies and survival horror across the African Diaspora.

As Get Out unfolds, Peele's Black male protagonist pays homage to the groundbreaking narratives of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). However, Get Out goes beyond these earlier films to offer additionally complex critiques on gender and interracial relationships, and the merit of competing discourses of survival when zombies are afoot. Get Out also harbors an important commentary on the power of communication, and above all else, the extreme costs of a failure to listen. 

With a promise to keep spoilers to a minimum, here are 5 reasons why the horrors of Get Out are a particularly apt vehicle for exploring discourses of exploitation, betrayal, and survival in today's America...

By Jamie A. Thomas

"Why won't you let me finishing my painting? I'm satisfied with it. I'm proud of what I've done." ​Emily can't understand why her art teacher isn't enthused. Her voice wavering, Dina implores her student to push her  creation by seeking a transcendent level of evocativeness and emotion. She must go beyond the real. "Your work is good," Dina tells Emily. "But it's about getting the work right, it's about the work!" I paraphrase here, but it was in these tense moments between art teacher and student that I began to personally connect with the on-screen story of Words and Pictures (2014). 

Yes, it's loosely a romantic story between an artist and a poet. Yes, I had been shamelessly looking on Prime for a new romcom earlier this afternoon. But no, this movie is not a romcom. It has a brilliant screenplay by Gerald DiPego, and a wonderful, poignant message on the importance of creativity, passion, and teaching.

In the movie, painter Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche) develops a friendly rivalry with poet Jack Marcus (Clive Owen) who also teaches at the high school. He finds himself "teaching in the era of the undead," where high school students seem devoid of passion and intuition. Searching for a way to motivate his students, Jack asks them to question: "Are words more powerful than pictures?"

One such word at the center of Jack and Dina's friendly feud is hyperemotionality. As the storyline advanced, I took this word to relate to the exceptional emotional response inspired by evocative artwork, prose, and poetry. While watching the movie, I had to press pause so I could reflect. Already, my mind was recalling the wonder, surprise, laughter, and gloom I've experienced in reading ethnographic encounters. 

From Geertz' thick description of the Balinese cock fight, to Ochs and Schieffelin's account of communication among mothers and their children in Samoa. In ethnography, there's not so much a rivalry between words and pictures, as a combining of these into imagery that recreates lived experience for those of us who were never there. Just like the painted canvas or stanza are crafted to draw audiences into the artist's own worldview.

These days, I'm more and more fascinated by ethnographic writing and creation, because I'm pulling together my very own first book, Zombies Speak Swahili. So now I want to share developing reflections on experimental ethnography as an artistic and cinematic exploration in creation. 

by Fanyi Ma

I’ll just be honest with you—I am very disappointed by this movie. The zombie is a social concept we’ve been contesting throughout the semester, and it has so many potential ways to be embedded in Jane Austen’s novel. Being a by-product of pride and prejudice itself, the zombie can be a perfect tool for conveying themes like social class, self-identity, hatred, fear, etc.However, what I saw in the movie was just the thread of human vs. zombie simply synchronized and paired up with the plots of the original story, creating a logically flawed, overly dramatized and self-contradicting pandemonium.

Another detail of the film ​Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that caught my attention was the time period in which the story takes place. The early 19th century is a crucial era in the history of China-Western interaction. That’s when the falling empire of the Qing Dynasty clashed with rising Western powers.

Great Britain, along with many other European countries and westernized Asian countries, forced the historically self-sufficient agricultural empire to open its gate and pushed China into the trend of global trade. The weakened Chinese empire had no choice but giving away its land and sovereignty after several unsuccessful attempts at fighting back.

Foreign missionaries and businessmen swarmed into China to spread "civilization" and seek their fortunes. Encounters with Chinese culture were usually described as modern civilization converting the primitive, mysterious, and incompetent doctrines of the Chinese. If we keep this historical background in mind, the appreciation of what is referred to in the film as "Oriental culture" seems pretty out of place.

These two paradoxes--Orientalism and female empowerment in the early 19th century--both have the potential to escalate the original story to a deeper level of inquiry into gender and cultural privilege. However, the movie's directors don't seem to bother. Instead, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies easily focuses on  dramatic battle scenes, while leaving these two threads unresolved.