GET OUT: A Look Through Love & Sex

Image via Blumhouse.

As individuals, we can love both the whole person and their properties and/or the person not the properties, vice versa. For the purpose of this post, I will discuss humans loving the properties of a person, not the actual person.

With Erosic love in mind, we understand the romantic love for the beloved comes from their properties- their clothes, their hair, their music taste. So if we love their properties, can we love the person? No. I will use Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) as an example.

Firstly, Peele’s film relays Gellner’s Paradox. The idea that Rose Armitage can fall in love with people non-exclusively, meaning loving Chris (her boyfriend) and seducing other men at the same time (Rod), proves her love just an attraction to their properties- skin colour. Portrayed is Rose’s lack of ‘commitment’ to the ‘well-being’ (Hooft 2011, pg. 118) of her beloved.

Perhaps the Armitage’s view of love is a ‘divine madness’ (Plato 1951, unknown) wherein the ‘divine’ (Get Out 2017) love for black properties is a result of a theia manic spirituality. Aka, the beauty of being black and having black properties but without the whole self of blackness (devoid of the soul, the crux of the Substance View)

Rose loves her beloved because he has properties she desires, not his self/person because ‘black is in fashion’ (Get Out 2017). This all falls under the Property View.

Lastly, Schopenhauer’s idea that we’re not actually attracted to the person, but we need them to reproduce due to an ingrained order and will to breed healthily. This is prevalent as a woman gropes Chris and asks if it’s really ‘better’ (Get Out 2017) than white men, implying the physical ‘advantages’ (Get Out 2017) of these properties over the person.