Rose Lehrman
In most films that involve hypnosis, the trigger is the timeless trope of a swinging watch or other objects, a visual cue. This is not the case in Get Out, Jordan Peele’s directorial debut. Get Out is the story of a young, black photographer, Chris, going to visit Rose, his white girlfriend’s family for the first time. It explores race and its implications throughout time.
The sound design in this film is very interesting and complex, as it relies on auditory cues, such as a spoon stirring a teacup, to alert the viewer of what is about to happen. One of the most important scenes, sound-wise, sets up important sounds that will become motifs throughout the film and helps create an atmosphere that continues through the whole film. When Missy, Rose’s mother sits Chris down and begins to try to get him to talk about his past, she has a cup of tea and begins to slowly stir it. This seems harmless at first but as the scene progresses, the sound of the spoon hitting the sides of the teacup gets louder and louder until it becomes the main focal point. The sound of the spoon becomes Chris’s trigger for hypnosis and as he starts to reveal his past to Missy, the viewer begins to see flashbacks of Chris’s life paired with the non-diegetic sound of rain. The rain comes from Chris’s memories of the night his mother died. The sounds within this scene trigger each other, the spoon, the cause of hypnosis, triggers the memories of rain and pulls the non-diegetic sounds of rain into the scene. The rain slowly fades out of the scene as the spoon slowly grows louder until Missy says “Sink into the floor.” and suddenly the spoon is replaced with the sounds of the “Sunken Place”. The sound designer of the film, Trevor Gates, described the process of figuring out the sound of the “Sunken Place” in an interview. “The sunken place was designed and crafted pretty closely with Jordan [Peele]. I asked him what he wanted the sunken place to feel like and Jordan told me, ‘Well what does it sound like when you put your head underwater in the bathtub and someone’s holding you down? What does that feel like?’ Ultimately, we ended up with half a dozen layers [of sounds] and Jordan and I reviewed, and we took out a couple of layers and that’s the way the sunken place sounds now.” All of the sounds in this scene evoke a very visceral reaction from the audience.
Sound design is important throughout this film but this scene is a pivotal moment and sound design really comes to the forefront.
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