Surviving the Sinking Place: Get Out and PTSD
Spoiler Alert: This piece includes details from the movie Get Out. There are no major plot points, but the whole thing will make more sense if you’ve seen the movie.
The plan was sketchy. It involved playing hooky, ditching the kids, and day drinking. That wasn’t overkill, though. I hadn’t done this in decades. I was frankly terrified, but I had to find a way.
I wanted to see Get Out.
I haven’t been able to watch horror movies since the ’90s. The PTSD I’ve suffered from a year of mental, physical, and sexual abuse in high school sucks the fun out of jump scares and other startling effects. Instead of a skittery, thrilling jolt of adrenaline that gets the blood pumping, I get what feels like 15,000 volts: red cable, black cable, ZOT. It leaves me feeling nauseated, scorched, wobbling on the edge of physical and emotional collapse.
But Get Out looked amazing. People I trust with my tiny wallet of entertainment dollars told me I needed to see it. Interesting minds were having interesting conversations. And I wanted to put my money behind a Jordan Peele project, another unique black story being told by a black creator who’d already delivered so much quality storytelling. So I spiked my bucket of movie theater soda with the small bottle of vodka I smuggled in. I hid my eyes, dug my fingers into the arm of the chair and/or my husband. But for the most part, I watched and I really, really loved it.
What I didn’t expect was that my own PTSD wasn’t the only one relevant to Get Out. The horror that Chris and the other black characters experience is deeply rooted in PTSD. Those feelings of being trapped mentally, physically, and socially are painfully familiar to people who live with this mental illness.
The “sinking place” perfectly captures the dissociation that often occurs as the original traumatic event that triggers PTSD. Everyone’s familiar with the expression “fight or flight,” but most folks don’t know that the full phrase is “fight, flight, or freeze.” Whether it’s an accident or abuse, it’s incredibly common to become paralyzed. Your brain is all about self-defense, and especially in abusive situations, it makes a lot of sense to become completely still and quiet. You try to make yourself disappear so you don’t trigger anything worse. And often you watch what’s happening to you from what feels like a great distance, screaming and fighting back only in your mind. That movie haunts you again and again in the future, replaying as clearly as it was the first time you saw it, trapped in your own body.
That disconnection continues as a PTSD symptom, and it can cause you to freeze up again later. We see Walter and Georgina, unable to move or speak, in the moment when their inner selves, trapped deep inside, struggle for a moment of control. Finding yourself in a similar situation provokes that, even if it doesn’t appear on the surface to have any connection. For example, veterans who’ve participated in urban combat, with threats around any city block corner, can be paralyzed and have flashbacks in grocery stores or libraries. Many veterans’ service dogs are trained to “pop the corner” by walking out ahead of it to show that it’s safe to come forward.
Even the social performance we see in Andrew is familiar to PTSD sufferers. We carefully calibrate our outward personality to fit seamlessly into the group where we find ourselves, however distant that performance is from our true selves, so that no one will suspect how close to emotional collapse we might be. Andrew’s breakdown and violent outburst is what we fear the most, because when our inner selves are screaming for release and relief, we feel like a meltdown that exposes how broken we are could happen any moment.
The one thing that shouldn’t come as any surprise at all is why black characters would have the symptoms of PTSD. To be black in America is to be traumatized both individually and generationally. When the cop asks for Chris’ ID on the side of the road, we see all of these PTSD symptoms go by in rapid succession. At first, he just clams up and moves to comply. As Rose starts to make a scene, the panic in Chris’ eyes and his effort to laugh off the tension communicate the movie Chris is watching inside his mind: Walter Scott, Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile. It could all go sideways at any moment. If a situation that makes you fear for your life is trauma, then Chris and every other black person — in the movie and in the audience — already knows what PTSD feels like. And the coping mechanisms that helped me get through my own PTSD in a two-hour matinee won’t fix that fear.
