SPECIAL NOTE: Warning — Spoiler Alert!
In this essay I talk about the movie GET OUT. If you haven’t seen it yet, beware. I give away nearly all of its surprises.
At first I thought that maybe I could be ambiguous enough to avoid identifying the specific movie but I really couldn’t.
Impactful Entertainment
I watched a very popular and successful horror movie recently in which almost no one was who they seemed to be. Some characters, who presented a face of genteel good nature, were actually vicious predatory monsters.
Other characters, who appeared contented to the point of being almost sleepily complacent, contained within themselves imprisoned and terrified souls, screaming desperately to get out. These souls were ensnared deep within what was referred to as “the sunken place,” from which they could commandeer neither their speech nor their movements. They were passengers in their own bodies, possessed by cruel invasive agencies.
And one of the main characters turned out to be so startlingly treacherous that (reportedly) many moviegoers refused to believe in her duplicity even after the truth was revealed in the movie. They made up rationalizations for her behavior. I saw a little YouTube clip of an interview with the actor who had played this character, and she affirmed emphatically that her character was truly a very evil person. Her character had not been hypnotized or coerced or anything like that; she was just bad.
Though the movie came out in 2018, I only viewed it recently, at the suggestion of my godson Taoh who thought I might appreciate it. I did. It was brilliant, tightly plotted, well-acted, and even meaningful; it had “socially redeeming value.” The dialogue was excellent too.
And it haunted and disturbed me for days, in ways I did not initially understand.
Other Monsters and Sunken Places
A couple of days after taking in the movie with Taoh on his widescreen TV, I saw this YouTube clip of Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a congressional hearing, facing a grilling by Senator Van Hollen of Maryland on the topic of unlawful arrests and deportations, and on the massive tragic human consequences that have proceeded from the dismantling of USAID. Rubio’s responses were so blatantly disingenuous, his gaslighting so shameless, his mien so smoothly and unwaveringly remorseless, that I was moved to “share” the clip on Facebook, coupled with my overall assessment: “Marco Rubio is a piece of shit posing as a human being.”
Susan, in an accompanying comment, echoed my sentiment, albeit a bit more gracefully:
I’m infuriated and disgusted every time I see these individuals’ perfect impermeability to normal human feeling and reason. Do they undergo training in how to repeat falsehoods, half-truths, and platitudes with implacable self-assurance and an absence of shame or a semblance of actual dialogue?”
Susan had captured and articulated my feelings precisely. All the same, I later commented:
I understand that my comment within the post above does not promote healing, and probably doesn’t help anything, and I have considered removing it but I’ll let it stand, because it expresses and reveals my own pain and delusion and maybe that transparency serves a purpose, I don’t know.”
… to which another friend responded:
Don’t worry about that. We are not in ‘healing’ mode right now, we are in survival mode. And telling it like it is, with a clear moral sense, as you have above, is one of the ways we might survive.”
My Own Sunken Places
I took a macro dose of mushrooms a day later, largely to try and arrive at some clarity about my personal finances and whether or not I need to sell my house. But I spent most of the trip processing the horror movie, which was still very much in my system.
The movie had spoken viscerally to the atrocious legacy of racism, white supremacy, and slavery in the United States. It effectively delivered a sense of the vast, unspeakable horror that African Americans and their ancestors have been subjected to. It was terrifying, sobering, and – in certain respects, for me (and perhaps many white viewers) – edifying. I know (again, from YouTube interviews that I subsequently pulled up) that writer/director Jordan Peele intended this impact.
I wonder though, did Peele also anticipate the broader resonance of the dark (for god’s sake, no pun intended) themes explored in his film? I’m talking of course about the hidden personas that live beneath our habitual facades, the motives we hide even from ourselves, and each person’s potential for appalling violence, obscene selfishness, evil, and treachery.
And with this perception comes the terrifying possibility that all appearances are deceptive, that nothing is as it seems, that all we see are each other’s masks, and that reality has a sick, grotesque, viscously foul, malevolent core – a nature so hideous it stains and contaminates everything.
Does it sound like I had a bad trip? Truly, I didn’t.
It really just boils down to this. Inside me (and perhaps I should have stuck to “speaking for myself” in the first place), I can see the following “selves”:
- A terrified, petrified, screaming, trapped being – utterly confused; totally helpless; doomed,
- A wicked vengeful entity capable of extraordinary violence; capable of taking profound gratification in the suffering of others,
- A craven callous traitor who can betray the purest love ever offered me; who can pretend and dissemble for long periods of time and then – at a critical moment – reveal myself as faithless and ruthless.
I saw all of this – or at least the potential for all of it – inside myself. But when I faced and accepted it, it no longer frightened me.
Impactful Conversation
The night before my mushroom trip I spoke over WhatsApp with my Buddhist godson, Mikiah, who is currently in Nepal. (I have two godsons … and two goddaughters!) I described to him the rage I felt toward Marco Rubio. And I spoke of the disgust and fury and frantic helplessness I have been feeling toward Trump and all his soulless surrogates who are tearing apart our country, our world, our planet, relegating all vestiges of honor and decency and truthfulness and compassion to the status of quaint anachronisms in more ways that I can even count, but in particular (in this instance) with respect to all the heartless arrests and deportations of innocent individuals to hellish places where they are abused and tortured.
I said I felt a bottomless roiling rage for people like Rubio.
Mikiah offered a carefully worded question, which I don’t recall verbatim, but as best as I can reconstruct it, it was something like: “Can you consider the possibility that your rage actually fuels the very types of behavior that trigger your rage, that your rage is actually an element in the cycle that generates those behaviors?”
Intuitively, that all felt probably true. I said, “Well, one thing I realize is that a big part of me wants to see them suffer! Trump, Rubio, all Trump’s people, I want inflict on them the pain they create for others! I want to torture the torturers! I want to tear them to pieces!”
Mikiah said, “Yeah. It’s the exact same energy. So you do see it.”
“But I don’t like feeling enraged. It’s no fun, it’s unpleasant, but I can’t help it.”
Mikiah took a breath. “What would it take … to uproot the source of all your rage?”
I thought about it for some seconds. “I guess, for one thing, I’d have to release the belief that revenge accomplishes anything constructive, and the conviction that justice demands people be punished, and that people should have to suffer to the extent that they have caused others to suffer, because that’s what they deserve.”
And though I did not mention it in the moment, I remembered I had long ago read in A Course in Miracles that the belief that vengeance accomplishes anything is insane, and that this belief is the core insanity which drives all the suffering in the reality we perceive.
I continued: “In the movie I watched with Taoh the other night, there’s a part where the protagonist beats the crap out of one of the bad guys, and I LOVED it, and even though it was just Taoh and me in his living room, I could imagine an entire theater of people erupting into cheers when that happened. And so many movies are like that – we get set up to crave revenge. And when revenge arrives, it’s a huge emotional payoff.”
“I know,” said Mikiah. “We come from a deeply sick society. That conditioning is everywhere.”
Many Faces of the Same Sunken Places
The concept of “the sunken place” really scared and resonated with me, and I started seeing it all over the place after watching the movie.
Right before I took my mushrooms, I was walking a sidewalk in Portland and I heard the growling, rasping, furious, psychotic voice of a mentally disturbed homeless person behind me, threatening someone who wasn’t even there. I didn’t even turn around. I was sure I couldn’t help or offer anything. Just hearing that voice, I knew this person was far too submerged in their sunken place.
Similarly, at last week’s demonstration outside the local Tesla dealership, a beefy 30-or-40-something white dude in a black t-shirt, gripping a sad-looking dog on a tight leash, walked down the line of peaceful protesters and told each of us, in turn, “Fuck you.” “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you,” he repeated, making sure to miss no one, though at one point he broke his rhythm to announce “You’re all a bunch of fucking morons!” And then he resumed his paces: “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you …”
No one spoke to him. No one said a word back. We all implicitly understood that we could not possibly reach into his sunken place.
So he spewed hatred and the only response he got was a collective shrug. What can you do?
As I mentioned, in the movie, there were characters who hid diabolical evil behind their masks, and other characters who housed desperate terrified prisoners within themselves, and now I wonder if the prisoner and the evildoer are not one and the same.
In the movie, they were not the same at all. But in real life …?
Rage into Compassion
Mikiah said something like: “Marco Rubio is just a product of his causes and conditions like you and me, just at the effect of his mind stream and his karmic seeds, his delusion-driven motivations, his blindness … It’s all just blindness. And it’s such a tiny turn of the coin to turn your rage into compassion. You just have to stretch your vantage point, look from a different angle, expand your perspective.”
Recently I was walking in the park, entertaining grandiose fantasies about how I would articulate American values on the world stage if I were president. Or if I were in the White House press corps, the incisive questions I’d pose.
And then someone crossed my path, offering a brief but sweet little smile and a friendly hello. Just a passing stranger. No big deal. But that popped my little daydream bubble, awakening me to the fact that all life was asking of me in that second was to meet this individual’s hello with similar presence and goodwill, which was easy, and a pleasure.
I think life is also asking me to remember to be kind to everyone, always. My mind tends to be picky and judgmental though. I guess I’m delusional. Who isn’t?
Anyway, I know comparisons are odious but I think I’m at least doing a little better in that respect than Marco Rubio, poor guy.
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