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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and narrative devices that can help to develop and inform the movie’s major themes.

Hypnosis and Mental Control 

The Armitages use hypnosis as a tool for control. Missy hypnotizes Black people so she can force them to become submissive without physical restraints, in order for Dean to carry out the Coagula procedure. Once Chris falls into the Sunken Place, he loses the ability to move, speak, or resist. Missy can return him to a state of hypnosis just by making the sound of stirring her tea with a spoon. This method of control is more insidious than physical force because it takes almost no effort and can be deployed at any time, and it removes the victim’s ability to fight back while keeping them aware of their helplessness. The Armitages’ victims don’t even get the relative dignity and mercy of unconsciousness while they’re subdued; they have to watch helplessly as their autonomy and their bodies are stolen from them.  

When Chris tries to resist Missy’s hypnotism, his consciousness gets pushed further down into the Sunken Place. The more he fights, the more powerless he is. This motif reinforces the movie’s theme of losing autonomy both literally and metaphorically. The Armitages warp the already-horrific legacy of slavery; where generations of white Americans before them owned and abused the Black people they enslaved, the Armitages want to exercise a new level of control, not only robbing Black people of their bodies, but erasing their personhood, and forcing them to witness their own subjugation in utter, solitary silence, with no hope of escape.  

The White Gaze and Constant Surveillance 

Throughout Get Out, there’s a claustrophobic sense that Chris is under constant observation. Like any new boyfriend meeting his girlfriend’s parents, Chris is nervous and self-conscious, and the fact that he is Black and Rose’s family are white just amplifies this anxiety. Chris has no idea how right he is to be nervous. From the moment he arrives at the Armitage estate, Rose’s family and their guests scrutinize his body, actions, and responses. They ask incredibly invasive questions, touch him without permission, and make unabashedly dehumanizing comments about Black physiques directly to his face. Their interest does not come from respect, but from a desire to possess what they see. 

This discomforting sense of ever-present scrutiny creates immense suspense in the first half of Get Out; Chris constantly feels like he’s being looked at and objectified, rather than seen as an equal.  Jim Hudson is interested in Chris’s “artistic eye,” literally describing to Chris how he wants to steal his ability to see things artistically—his intent is to replace Chris’s Black perspective with his own while appropriating Chris’s talent. Get Out powerfully illustrates the suffocating pressure of the white gaze and constant surveillance, portraying how Chris is never truly seen as a person—only as a set of physical characteristics, or a commodity to be consumed. 

Deer Imagery and Chris’s Guilt 

The deer motif enters the film through a jarring moment—when Rose hits a deer with the car while she and Chris drive to her parents’ house—and later becomes linked to Chris’s guilt about his mother’s death. Rose smashes into the animal, and she and Chris watch in horror as it struggles and then gruesomely dies. This sets an eerie tone even before Chris arrives at the Armitage house. It’s also the first act of violence on a powerless body by a white person in Get Out. When Rose and Chris explain what happened, Dean reacts by casually dismissing the incident. Instead of showing concern for the suffering animal, he makes a comment about needing to cull the deer population.  

Chris is especially upset by the deer’s death because he lost his mother in a hit-and-run accident when he was a child, and he blames himself for not calling for help sooner. He’s spent most of his life believing that his fear and inaction contributed to her death. The dying deer mirrors this horribly traumatic incident, and the fact that the Armitage house is full of mounted and taxidermized deer heads brings the violence of the deer’s death into the home, as does the fact that Missy brings up Chris’s mother’s death to help hypnotize him. The Armitages are clearly proud of their abilities as hunters and are happy to show off their many trophies, human and deer alike. This motif comes full circle when Chris kills Dean with a set of mounted deer antlers. By using the same imagery that haunted and destabilized him to defeat his captor, he reclaims power and overcomes some of the guilt that has burdened him for years. 

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