Live Burial: The Deep Intertextuality of Jordan Peele's Get Out

ABSTRACT:This essay revisits Jordan Peele's concept of the "sunken place" from his 2017 film Get Out as a model of deep intertextuality. I argue that the film draws extensively from the twentieth-century female gothic, especially the cinematic and literary versions of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, to formulate a narrative about racial violence and white privilege in America. In asking his viewers to identify his film's referencing of female gothic tropes, Peele also compels us to delve into these earlier narratives to witness how their prioritizing of white female experience depends on silencing racial trauma. My aim in this essay is twofold: firstly, to examine Peele's repurposing of the structures of identification afforded by the female gothic; and secondly, to argue that the mode of intertextuality he deploys in Get Out offers a new relationship between source texts and their adaptations. This model reverses the expected direction of referentiality, in which earlier texts are thought to shape later ones, by exposing the power of adaptations to shed light on what was suppressed in their antecedents. By looking backward, we discover that the exclusion of racial engagement in Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives is not accidental, but a pointed attempt to limit the viewer's attention to white female experience. Get Out is groundbreaking not only for its innovative use of gothic tropes, but also for its political and historicizing use of intertextuality to reveal why the female gothic, at least in its mainstream forms, stayed white for so long.