Smells Like ‘10s Spirit: How Memes Cemented ‘Get Out’ Firmly in the Cultural Lexicon

“Smells Like ’10s Spirit” takes a look at the decade in movies through the lens of success stories only made possible by unique trends that emerged. This series explores ten films – one from each year of the 2010s – and a single social, economic or cultural factor that can explain why it made an impact or lingers in the collective memory. Each piece examines a single film that tells the larger story of the tectonic forces reshaping the entertainment landscape as we know it. In this edition: Get Out, written and directed by Jordan Peele.

“Y’all play too much,” tweeted Jordan Peele on March 3, 2017, alongside an image taken from Instagram. The picture? A stitching together of two vertical images. On the left was KellyAnne Conway, then-counselor to President Donald Trump, kneeling on a couch in the Oval Office and scrolling on her phone while a large gathering of HBCU leaders surround her. On the right? A screenshot, which viewers are supposed to assume represents Conway’s phone, of a Google search for “top NCAA prospects.” As the popular Internet saying goes, if you know – in this case, specifically the film Get Out and the wacky minutiae of the Trump administration – you know.

Peele’s tweet both acknowledged and accelerated a key fuel behind his directorial debut Get Out‘s gangbusters success: memes. Like the subject of the last column, Deadpool and star Ryan Reynolds, Jordan Peele understood that he needed to be an active participant in the conversation around his film to keep the buzz going. But a key differentiation between the two men is that, in Peele’s case, he did not have to do much to start the chatter. Instead, he amplified and extended it by propagating (and occasionally creating) memes using content derived organically from the film.

What is a meme? Don’t “OK boomer” the question – there’s serious debate even at the highest levels of academia! I didn’t read an entire 23-page academic paper describing the difficulties of defining an “Internet meme” to come here and pretend like I am some kind of ultimate authority on the matter. The term itself long predates the creation of the world wide web itself, first finding expression in the writings of renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins used the term to describe a “new replicator […] that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” Whether a meme is more like a gene containing cultural information or a virus disseminating cultural information remains debated, but the term stuck around and gained traction in the Internet age. Now, it’s more of a catch-all phrase describing a set of transmittable, replicable and often mutable cultural signifiers shared within online communities.

Film, and mass media on the whole, have always played a large part in creating a cultural connective tissue. Long before the Internet and memes as we know them now, cinema contributed immensely to shared meanings among disparate people. It just took a more personal, less trackable form. Awards shows, commercials and in-film homages are analog predecessors to the contemporary meme – they were just lagging indicators of what films left an enduring cultural footprint. Memes make the same influence clear, but with greater immediacy (not to mention measurability). “Memes spread faster and wider than ever,” wrote Andy Baio of Wired in 2012, “with social networks acting as the fuel for mass distribution.”

By the time Get Out arrived in theaters at the start of 2017, it all but required a meme-level event to stand out in a box office overcrowded with franchises and familiar faces with massive marketing budgets ready to cloud out any competition. The prior year, seven of the ten highest-grossing films were based on some kind of existing property. (The other three? Original, sure, but all featuring animated talking animals.) It feels strange writing about this as if it’s in the past tense already, but let’s go ahead and admit it since Disney rocked an over 30% market share in 2019 – viewers looking for smart, boundary-pushing entertainment knew they were more likely to find it on their televisions. Nearly 50 million in America alone were subscribed to Netflix by the end of 2016.

Prior to Peele’s smashing success, there was a major precedent for memes ginning up conversation around non-IP driven adult dramas: 2015’s Straight Outta Compton, also released by Universal Pictures. Nine days prior the film’s release, Beats by Dre (in partnership with the agency North Kingdom) dropped the “Straight Outta Somewhere” meme generator that allowed fans to customize the N.W.A. black and white logo and place it on top of a photo of their choice. Bolstered by influencer support from Beats partners like Serena Williams and Richard Sherman, the site generated over 6 million meme downloads and 400,000 #StraightOutta tweets prior to the film’s opening – which, unsurprisingly, shattered expectations and projections.

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#StraightOuttaCompton @beatsbydre

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As Straight Outta Compton illustrates, it’s possible to engineer a meme for your movie, but it takes a particularly creative campaign for the Internet to adopt in earnest. Otherwise, attempts to manufacture a groundswell of conversation around your film might trigger the snark impulse of the extremely online set (just ask the folks who thought it was a good idea to ask people to take any portion of the whitewashed Scarlett Johansson-starring Ghost in the Shell into their own hands with a meme generator). But as memes become a new currency that Hollywood attempts to trade in, as evidenced by the social media feeds of any new release, it’s worth reflecting on why everyone is chasing this kind of attention for their products.

Memes show that people are actually taking the time to engage with the work. Whether they do so earnestly or ironically ultimately does not matter because the very meme-ification of anything elevates it above the status of mere “content” that has been relegated to the status of a millennial yuppie’s weeknight background noise. By isolating a replicable element from the work, a meme shows the audience cares enough to participate in evolving and continuing the cultural text’s meaning. Furthermore, memes are the ultimate gesture demonstrating that a great – or at the very least, a memorable film – can still leap off the screen and becomes a part of a viewer’s life and vocabulary in a way they feel compelled to express.

This was certainly the case for Get Out, a product of thinking about race in the Obama era that arrived fortuitously at the start of the Trump era. Unlike most meme-related hits of the 2010s, Jordan Peele’s debut marks the rare film to achieve lasting online success based on the content of the film itself – not just marketing, trailers or other paratexts. Much of this stems from the fact that, unlike Bird Box or even A Star Is Born, the quality of the film Get Out itself is virtually unimpeachable. Peele pioneered a new subgenre he dubbed the “social thriller” and got pretty much everyone from the French cineaste magazine Cahiers du Cinema to Shea Serrano of The Ringer on board.

Like many a masterpiece, Get Out collapses seemingly paradoxical elements into a seamless viewing experience. It’s at once a tale of liberal white America’s contemporary blind-spots and animosities in a post-racial fantasy (“I would have voted for Obama for a third term, if I could”) and an acknowledgement of a centuries-old uncomfortable truth about race relations. Peele identifies that the United States is a country built on whites viewing the black body less for its humanity and more for the value they can extract from it. This largely unacknowledged reality slowly becomes inescapable over the course of the film as black photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) realizes there’s something more sinister going on at the family home of his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) than run-of-the-mill racist behavior. Chris slowly uncovers the dark secrets lurking underneath the polite exteriors of the Armitage manor, and Peele makes the horrors of both everyday white supremacy and deep-seated institutional racism both visually potent and viscerally terrifying.

The most obvious example of this remarkable double capability is the term that Peele has now bequeathed to our cultural vernacular: the Sunken Place. Reflecting on the term upon the release of his follow-up feature, Us, Peele described it as “a new term we have to aid us in the discussion of what appears, to me, to be black people choosing an ideology that is racist against black people.” The term conjures up the specific imagery in the film’s centerpiece hypnosis scene: a dark, seemingly bottomless void where a person of color can see out their own eyes but is apparently unable to respond to the terror they feel.

Yet Peele’s Sunken Place is such an evocative and symbolic realm that the deep-seated dread it represents can apply to any number of other situations. Peele has also referred to the Sunken Place as a metaphor for “the prison-industrial complex” and “the theater that black people are relegated to watching horror movies on the screen” as well as “the silencing […] the taking away of our expression” that exists for “any marginalised group that gets told not to say what they’re experiencing.”

It didn’t take long for Sunken Place memes to start popping up across social media once Get Out opened in February 2017. The film opened above expectations to $33.4 million thanks to hype from a well-received trailer and a then-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score. The producers could have just packed up and gone home after the opening weekend since the film more than recouped its $4 million budget. But powered by word-of-mouth, Get Out achieved an increasingly rare feat: an over 5x multiplier on its opening for a $176 million domestic haul.

How did Get Out remain in the top 10 at the box office for two months? People kept finding reasons to talk about it, and not necessarily even the weighty themes or content of the film. In the weeks following release, the #GetOutChallenge took off, inspired by a scene in Peele’s film where the character Walter (Marcus Henderson) runs across the grounds of the Armitage house with a terrifying resolve. Fans began to upload crazy scenarios of themselves performing similar sprints in real life. To Peele’s credit, he was quick to utilize the hashtag in his own tweets, letting people know he was in on the joke and wanted to act as participant and hype man.

But more often than not, the memes attuned to the country’s great a-woke-ning prevailed. “It just became instantly integrated into our everyday conversation,” noted Tiffany Vazquez, a content manager at Giphy. “A lot of these terms were so relevant to what was happening politically [in 2017].” The relative simplicity and familiarity of structure in Get Out lent itself perfectly to meme culture – specific enough to be memorable, broad enough to lend its applications elsewhere. Peele himself deployed Sunken Place tweets in a variety of contexts, using it both to describe a harmless encounter between Ryan Gosling and a fan at the Oscars as well as the eternal mystery of Ben Carson, then the newly-minted Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Memes more of the Ben Carson variety lingered on social media long after Get Out left theaters. The volume of posts mocking Kanye West as being in the Sunken Place following his Oval Office visit alone, which Peele himself participated in, inspired Kim Kardashian-West to respond, “Another dumb fucking Kanye West-Get Out reference. It’s like, people are so fucking dumb and stupid.” While she’s entitled to her personal opinions, of course, Kardashian-West is dead wrong about the Kanye-Sunken Place memes. They were a classic illustration of how, in the face of Trump’s racially incendiary presidency, there were always reasons to revisit the many ingenious ways in which Peele’s film bottled the national mood.

While the film engaged viewers of all stripes, Giphy’s culture editor Jasmyn Lawson noted its particular resonance among black audiences. “The best part of black Twitter to me is that we talk about our oppression,” she told Vulture, “but of course we always love to put a joke or a spin on it and find humor in the oppression, and I think the GIFs [from Get Out] allowed us to do that.” Because Get Out is not an explanation of America’s race problem so much as it is an illustration of it, smart viewers finished Peele’s work and extrapolated his film into our own reality.

Similar to the success of Deadpool explored in the previous “Smells Like ‘10s Spirit” column, Get Out represents a rejoinder to the idea that a corporate behemoth like Disney and Marvel can impose a top-down idea of what theatrically-released cinema will be. (At least, prior to the COVID-19 shutdown; all bets are off for what happens when activity resumes.) Both films exemplify the power of participatory culture, where viewers become active creators in film media rather than passive consumers. For Deadpool, that process took place before the film was released; for Get Out, it occurred after. This is an example of how a movie with an ear to the ground of public sentiment can provide a sense of shared language in a post-monoculture environment. Ironically, it’s through a propagation of “in” jokes only recognizable to those familiar with the memed property that we can find this elusive sense of cultural community online.

And, like many a good thing, the accomplishment of Get Out – box office revenue, awards, lasting cultural relevance – has inspired many a jealous imitator looking to achieve the same result with a less developed product. Many of them are quickly discovering that this quality cannot be faked or bought – for something to be meme-able, it has to fit into people’s lives in a way that cannot be forced. North Kingdom’s managing director Nina Amjadi noted that marketers need to focus on the terrain where moviegoers are actually engaged: less on creating appealing assets like a poster or trailer and more on “introducing a new meme format or GIF format.”

Manufactured meme machines could very well be the future ahead of us in cinema. If you need proof, look to the Billboard charts. What’s past in the music industry could be prologue to the film industry. Beginning with Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” in 2007, a dance or some kind of other shareable gimmick that fans want to imitate became “the common language of song promotion,” according to Wired.

Alarmingly for anyone who cares about the theatrical experience, the only people who seems to read the writing on the wall are streaming giants. (I’ll stick to movies because otherwise I’d have to delve into Baby Yoda, a frightening hybrid of the corporate synergy explored in my column on The Avengers with the nostalgia I detailed in the Jurassic World column.) Netflix’s entire social media presence is a veritable meme factory churning out endless variations of assets involving their originals. Memes played a big part of the massive worldwide viewership of Netflix’s Bird Box in December 2018 – 45 million accounts in 7 days, they claimed – but largely disappeared when everyone’s FOMO was cured by watching the film. People realized that the film’s visual of blindfolded people was largely all it had to offer and moved on. Is anyone still thinking about Bird Box a year later? No, unless perhaps you sustained some kind of injury doing an inane iteration of the #BirdBoxChallenge.

What’s different here is that none of these memes conferred importance to Get Out. (Hopefully it’s not a unicorn, and other films will be able to replicate this success.) But in a fractured media environment where everyone is watching something different, a critical mass of memes signals what constitutes a major conversation topic. Get Out is a particularly remarkable film because its conceptualization was simple enough to catch on in meme culture while also laddering up to more important, complex ideas about race in America.

“I thought it was impossible, that it would never work, that I could never make this movie,” Peele said as he accepted the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay recognizing his work on Get Out. “This is to all the people who let me raise my voice,” he continued as he went on to thank the producers and financiers who bankrolled the film. But that voice carried further not because of fancy studio marketing or a bigger production budget. It was amplified by people who saw the unspoken truths Peele dared to speak or visualize in Get Out and felt the need to incorporate the vocabulary he gave them into everyday life. Until TSA arrives to handle this situation definitively, at least we’ll have the memes to make us chuckle through the pain.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.