What Would Du Bois and Durkheim Say About "The Sunken Place?"

In this photo from Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror film Get Out, the protagonist, Chris, is falling into “The Sunken Place.” The Sunken Place is a state where your soul and mind are detached from your body, but you can still see what’s happening through a small window. This photo is Chris’s first time entering The Sunken Place when his white girlfriend’s mom, Missy Armitage, hypnotizes him after catching him smoking. Chris is able to see Missy smiling at him but is unable to control his body. Sorry to spoil the movie, but the Armitage family entices Black people to their plantation-like home under the guise of meeting their daughter, Rose. Once there, Missy hypnotizes them, allowing the father, Dean, to surgically transplant a portion of their brain with that of another person. This process traps the Black person’s consciousness in what is referred to as “The Sunken Place,” while the consciousness of the other person takes control of their body. The person who gets to take Chris’s body is selected through an auction, a clear parallel to slave auctions. Before the auction, Chris meets everyone looking to bid on him but doesn’t realize why they are there. Throughout the event, Chris experiences many microaggressive comments and people trying to feel and size up his body. He eventually meets another Black person there and tries to empathize with him, but he fails to realize that the man is in The Sunken Place, and the person controlling him cannot relate to being a Black man. 

In “Individuality and the Intellectuals: An Imaginary Conversation between W.E.B Du Bois and Emile Durkheim, Karen E. Fields visualizes a conversation between Durkheim and Du Bois related to their opinions on individualism and race. At one point in their imaginary discussion, they begin to discuss the potential of Durkheim’s qualité d’homme to improve the race problem, but Du Bois asks if “l’homme can possibly recognize l’homme in the abstract” (Fields 453). This question complicates Durkheim’s theory by adding the complexities of how racism in America has been constructed and how African Americans are often dehumanized. Du Bois continues to inform Durkheim of some of his personal experiences that inform his ideas about the perceptions of Black people’s humanity. Fields also discusses Durkheim’s theory of “effervescenes collectives” (439), which she imagines Du Bois applies to the commonality white supremacists feel with each other and their violent rituals. This idea also applies to the “double death” concept that is later brought up, relating to how individuals from marginalized groups can die from a physical threat because of a characteristic and also die socially. Overall, this article draws connections between Durkhemian and Du Boisian theories of collectiveness and double consciousness and how they can both inform each other to explain social phenomena that create and perpetuate inequalities. 

Many of these theories are played out on the screen in different ways in Get Out. Since this is my favorite movie, I could go on about all of the small details Peele includes that are representative of Du Boisian and Durkheimian theory, but I will only talk about the context of this particular photo. The Sunken Place can be thought of as a physical space representing the idea of double consciousness and double death. In this space, Chris has been stripped of his humanity, forced to give up his agency, and subjected to the control of a white person. The white person controlling him participated in a ritual that involved analyzing Chris’s physical characteristics and buying him like a slave. The white man felt a sense of common essence among the other people at the auction despite this auction being inhumane. The idea of double death is almost experienced by Chris, but he is able to escape the Armitage house. However, if he hadn’t, he would have lived out his days in a state of complete dehumanization and near death from half of his brain being removed in The Sunken Place, which is representative of the “double death” narrative. I might be biased, but I believe this film beautifully articulates the connections between double consciousness and double death in a similar way to Field’s imaginary discussions between Du Bois and Durkheim. 

Fields, Karen E. 2002. "Individuality and the Intellectuals: An Imaginary Conversation between W.E.B. Du Bois and Emile Durkheim." Theory and Society 31(4):435-462.

Peele, Jordan. 2017. Get Out. Image of Chris falling into "The Sunken Place." Retrieved April 4, 2024.