Jordan Peele’s X-Ray Vision So did Burton, one of Peele’s favorite directors, whose approach to filmmaking revolves around the experience of belonging: “I feel like I don’t quite fit in, like how I am supposed to fit in,” he said, summing up one of Burton’s themes. “One of the reasons this movie clicked with more than just a black audience,” Peele said, “is because you get to be black while you’re watching it.” Blackness is the orienting principle of Peele’s art. Their Comedy Central show, “Key & Peele,” was, in some ways, a lab for “Get Out,” one in which they did as much critiquing of blackness as they did of white people’s relationship to it. For a white audience, the movie might be one of the few times they’ve been asked to identify with a regular, imperiled black person without the sweetener of a white co-star — no Spencer Tracy or Sandra Bullock here, just Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford as the Armitages, the sort of parents who’ll inquire about the history of their daughter’s interracial relationship by asking: “How long’s this been going on? “Get Out,” of course, is the surprise hit movie that Peele wrote and directed about a black man named Chris, who discovers that his white girlfriend’s family is running a nasty racist conspiracy. “The first moment in the writing process where I sat there and cried,” he told me, “was realizing that while I was having fun writing this mischievous popcorn film, there were real black people who were being abducted and put into dark holes, and the worst part of it is we don’t think about them. “I don’t know, there was always something about the rain that was like I couldn’t be upset,” he said. About the terror of black America accusing you of “talking white.” About feeling suspicious as a black person among white people.
