Why a Stirring Spoon Triggers Get Out's Sunken Place: The Clue Hidden in Rose's Cereal Scene

Jordan Peele built the sunken place in Get Out as a horrifying metaphor for marginalization, but why is the trigger specifically the sound of a stirring spoon, the same image Peele has since used as the logo for his production company, Monkeypaw? I think I finally figured it out, and it comes down to young Chris sitting on his bed connecting to another character posed on a bed in exactly the same way: Rose, in what I would call the film's most analyzed and most misunderstood scene.

Get Out is my favorite movie from 2017, and I think it changed modern social horror in Hollywood over the past decade. It is a perfectly constructed film packed with details I thought I knew, but on this rewatch I discovered dozens more. I think it should be required annual viewing. I will get to the spoon at the end of this piece, but first, the details from the top.

Andre's opening walk turns Peele's "perfect white neighborhood" into a trap

The film opens in a peaceful suburb that Peele chose as a nod to the setting of John Carpenter's Halloween, where the most horrifying things can happen in what he called the perfect white neighborhood. Andre, played by LaKeith Stanfield, says suburb in a stereotypically white voice, foreshadowing how he will later have to speak in a white voice once his body is taken over. When I interviewed LaKeith Stanfield for Disney's Haunted Mansion, he told me he has been in these scenarios countless times and, unfortunately, didn't have to do much transformative acting. It is telling how he tenses up when the dog barks, something black men are especially wary of in neighborhoods like this.

Peele wrote dozens of drafts, shot one, and winnowed it down to a tightly edited 1 hour 44 minutes. An earlier draft opened with a white family inside a house Andre passes, talking about Disney World and how Mickey is actually someone else inside, and that family does nothing while Andre is kidnapped. Peele instead stays with Andre in a two minute long take as his anxiety builds, which also evokes the two minute opening of 2014's It Follows. In the screenplay, Andre is talking to Crystal, who is actually Rose, telling him to stay put because her brother Jeremy will come get him. His line about it being like a hedge maze out here is, Peele confirms, one of many nods to The Shining.

Jeremy's car is white with a black interior, like how the cult plans to force black souls into the sunken place. It plays the 1939 song Run Rabbit Run, and Peele has said rabbits terrify him, something he explored further in Us. Here Andre is the innocent sacrificial rabbit being told to run. Jeremy uses the same MMA style headlock he later puts on Chris, and wears an antique Templar helmet that Chris later finds in the front seat. That is part of Peele's mythology for the Red Alchemist Society, which descended from the Knights Templar, which is why its members all wear red.

The title, the music and Chris's apartment are full of warnings

The teal blue title text, Peele said, was taken directly from The Shining's opening titles, and it is also the text color in the Behold the Coagula presentation. Michael Abels' strings transition into a song with Swahili lyrics that translate to "brother listen to the ancestors run," a kind of spiritual guiding a runaway slave, here an escape from a northern plantation. Peele got the title from Eddie Murphy's 1983 special Delirious, where Murphy joked about gullible white families in movies like The Amityville Horror and how black families would respond differently.

In Chris's apartment, Childish Gambino's Redbone plays, with its "stay woke" lyrics, another warning to keep his eyes open. The edit goes from Chris getting out of the shower to two pastries as Rose leans in to look at them, making Chris seem like one more treat in the display case for her to devour. When you rewatch this, she is all kinds of creepy. Chris's shaving cream is, Peele confirms, a whiteface metaphor for the threat of being abducted by another race, which is why he cuts his chin and draws blood.

Rose knocks on the door with her head, and throughout the apartment she never really touches a surface, avoiding fingerprints. She tells the dog she has to pry something out of his dad, as in her family has to pry his brain out and swap it for an old white man's. Her hair changes, too: it starts down and carefree, then gets pulled back tighter as she reveals her true self, and Peele and Allison Williams called that version identity Rose.

The Obama line and the deer set up the whole film

Chris worries about being chased off the lawn with a shotgun; Dean doesn't do that, but Rose later chases him with a rifle. Rose says her dad would have voted for Obama a third time, and Dean confirms it later. Many white liberals have actually said this. The line was likely scripted between father and daughter as part of the charade, but it rings authentic because it comes from Bradley Whitford, who played Josh Lyman on The West Wing.

Rose hits a deer, and while Chris checks on it, haunted by his mother's hit and run, Rose has no reaction because she has no empathy. From here the film likens deer with black people, and the term black buck was a racial slur from the post Reconstruction era. Stuffed deer heads fill the Armitage home, which makes it powerful when Chris uses antlers to kill Dean. You could see this deer as Chris's guardian angel, his mother trying to stop Rose taking her son, because Rose refuses to let the cop see Chris's ID. It looks like a heroic girlfriend defense, but she just doesn't want any record of Chris being in the area.

Dean Armitage's house tour maps out every horror to come

The first thing Chris sees is Walter raking the yard, making it look like a plantation, like Candyland in Django Unchained. The columns carry Omega symbols, the final Greek letter and a symbol of eternal life, fitting for a cult that has unlocked immortality by hijacking black bodies. The name Armitage comes from the H.P. Lovecraft story The Dunwich Horror, and Roman Armitage takes his first name from Roman Castevet, the cult leader in Rosemary's Baby. That film was about gaslighting and rape culture; Get Out is about gaslighting in modern racism, a subtler form in the 21st century that is still racism, whether you live in a city or a rural area.

Peele designed the tour to work like the opening tour in The Shining, giving us a map. We linger a second longer on the red chair in Missy's office, where Chris will fall into the sunken place. In the family photo, Dean wears bright red pants, as Jeremy will. Dean calls it "such a privilege to be able to experience another person's culture" while Rose lounges by a globe turned so Africa faces us, because she is really a modern slave trader. Get Out dispels the notion that American racism only exists in the South. Peele said, "The sunken place is a metaphor for the marginalization of the black horror movie audience. We are a loyal horror movie fan base, and we're relegated to the theater, not on the screen."

Dean's father lost in the qualifying round to Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics, which is how Roman became obsessed with combining black physical advantages with a white man's determination. According to Peele, it's why Walter sprints later, in 1930s running shoes. Dean says the basement is sealed because of black mold, as in mold from lost brain matter, or molds for black bodies with white souls. Then: "My mother loved her kitchen, so we keep a piece of her in here." A piece of her brain resides in Georgina, and Peele wanted that reveal to land like the Grady twins or Hannibal Lecter when Clarice arrives. When Dean says he couldn't bear to let his parents go, he literally means putting their brains inside these two people.

Missy's first move starts at the tea table

Chris reveals his parents aren't in his life, part of why Rose chose him: no family would look for him. Missy has already begun the hypnosis, linking his painful memory of his mother to the spoon. Chris gets fidgety with his fingers, as he did as a kid when his mother didn't come home. The family opposes his smoking because it is a health risk to the body they will auction, and Missy only cures it because they couldn't hypnotize it out once Jim Hudson took over. Georgina refills Chris's empty cup last because this grandmother resents him.

At dinner, Jeremy calls jiu jitsu a strategic game like chess, about being moves ahead. Later Chris applies that, noticing Jeremy lifts his leg to kick the door shut, then reaching for the knob so Jeremy lifts it again and he can stab it. Rose has a poster with "death" in its name, perhaps a nod to the family's mission to cheat death. After Chris jokes about Jeremy calling him a beast, we cut to Rose's stuffed lion, Chris treated like hunted game. He turns it away from the bed, and when he returns, Rose has turned it back.

Walter's sprint and the sunken place

Peele wanted Walter's sprint to evoke the crop duster scene in North by Northwest, saying someone running at you creates a visceral reaction. It's also like It Follows at a faster pace, but the lighting is what works: Walter slips into the shadows and appears closer in moonlight, so it takes a second to gauge his speed.

Many have pointed to Missy's silver spoon as a symbol of wealth and privilege. She never breaks eye contact, which Peele attributed to Lecter getting inside Clarice Starling's head. In Chris's flashback, a camera sits right of the TV, so his photography began that night. Young Chris picks at the bedposts, cutting to present Chris picking at the armrests, which will be how he escapes. In the sunken place he can only see out through a square shaped like a 90s television, the same shape he stared at instead of looking for his mother.

Peele was inspired by the moment you jerk awake while falling asleep, wondering where you would fall if you never caught yourself. He called it a metaphor for marginalized people paralyzed when oppressors rob them of control, saying, "No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us." Deleted scenes had Chris light his lighter and see a ghostly deer skeleton. Chris assuming it was a dream echoes Rosemary's Baby; the sunken place is that violation for Chris, a psychological seizure of power followed by gaslighting and doubt.

The party, Georgina's breakdown and Rose's trophies

Georgina's wig covers her lobotomy scar, the same reason Walter and Andre wear hats. Guests all hug Walter, revealing an intimate history. The cult wears red while Chris wears blue, which you could read as Republican versus Democrat, but that misses Peele's point, because racism crosses political lines. Paired, Chris and Rose's tops look like an American flag, Peele's way of saying this is the full America he knows. Like the cult in Rosemary's Baby, they aren't hiding anymore, because they know they've won. Hudson seems like the one sane person, which Stephen Root does really well, but his "I think" about Chris's photos shows he is blind to the pain behind that skill, thinking talent is physical rather than psychological.

Behind Chris, a band poster is framed to read "Chris is dead." Peele pushes the lens closer to Chris and Georgina, with the subtlest dolly zoom, so we lose it when she breaks down. Betty Gabriel is the MVP of this cast. When Chris's flash briefly wakes Andre, I see a metaphor for phones with cameras changing protest movements by letting people hold police accountable in real time. Peele kept the bingo card numbers a mystery but suggested they deal with Knights Templar antiquities and relics. Rose always seems to call out racism before Chris and verbally commits to leaving so we trust her, which makes the betrayal sting.

Chris finds her photos, one in a debutante gown or maybe a stage costume, one in a ceremony with people in long white robes, and selfies with past boyfriends and Georgina, kept as trophies. I once had an ex who took selfies just like these, and after we broke up I found out she took her next boyfriend on the same exact dates. Rose's red striped shirt now gives major Freddy Krueger vibes, and she waves bye bye because she thinks this is the last time she will see the real Chris.

The Coagula, the cotton and the Fuller Court photo

The cut to TSA Rod mirrors The Shining's jump to the character traveling from Miami to Colorado, and Rod even says 237, the hotel room number. Peele based the Coagula on the Dharma Initiative training films in Lost. Its line about a terrible thing to waste was a slogan for the United Negro College Fund, another example of appropriation. Hudson's possession is creepy because he seems to want that sliver of Chris as a passenger. Chris pulls cotton from the armrest to plug his ears, which Peele said was intentional irony: Chris escapes slavery by picking cotton. The chair was originally polyester, but Peele insisted they search Mobile, Alabama, for a cotton stuffed one.

Jeremy wheels Chris past a photo of the 1896 Fuller Court, infamous for Plessy v. Ferguson and separate but equal, not overturned until 1954's Brown v. Board of Education. After striking Jeremy, Chris sees the deer head as the Swahili whispers return, refusing to become a mounted trophy. Jeremy appears behind him in an homage to the nurse jump scare in The Exorcist III. Jeremy counts with Mississippi instead of a thousand, and I know I may be reading into that, but in this context, come on.

Why I believe the spoon works: Rose and the cereal

Rose's band posters have been replaced by photos of her trophies, her head framed in the middle. She eats Froot Loops in tiny dry nibbles, then gulps milk through a straw. Many have read meaning into her separating white milk from colorful cereal, and Peele denied that was intentional, but I believe there is something deeper here. She sits on the edge of her bed, posed exactly like young Chris the night his mother died.

We can't see what is in front of young Chris, but what does any kid have between him and the TV when no parent is home to make dinner? It's got to be cereal, the other context where you'd hear a spoon scraping porcelain. That's why I believe Missy's trigger was so effective: she brought him back to the sound he made eating cereal while his mother was dying.

Peele's original ending would have sent Chris to prison

Rose chases Chris with her deer rifle, Walter shoots her, and as police lights flash she turns on the tears. In the original ending, Chris was arrested and Rod visited him in prison. Peele wrote that draft in the Obama era, partly responding to civil rights protests, wanting the gut punch of mass incarceration. But with release moved to February 2017, the election three months earlier changed the country's tenor, and Peele felt he couldn't strike that same fear. Instead he delivers one of the best cathartic endings ever, and I'll never forget the opening night reaction.

The Swahili music returns as they drive off, framing the ending as a cautionary tale: listen to your ancestors who escaped to tell the tale, and when everyone around you is draped in literal red flags, get out. Do you buy that the spoon takes Chris back to a bowl of cereal, or does Missy's teacup work on its own?