11/7/18 - Get Out and Lenses

We started out our half day class on Wednesday by going over a few upcoming things and a short review about the lenses we are applying to Get Out. First off, it was recommended that if you are uneasy about what to look for regarding social and political lenses, look over previous blogs (or my review of them below) for assistance. Another key point of note was a reminder that Ready Player One's Level Two and the 2-3 passages that answer the question "What does the text critique about contemporary American society or politics?" are due on Tuesday, so happy reading over the weekend! Remember, time management is important for these kinds of assignments, or else you may end up cramping 100 pages into one night.
With that, here are my quick notes on the different lenses:

Social Lens

• Helps to see social values in a text
• Sees community values
• Country
• Race
• Social Class
• Gender
• Focus on groups of people

Political Lens 

• Creating a view based on POWER
• Power dynamics, controlling groups or values, etc.

These were my notes from our quick review in class, but even these give a decent view of what we are looking for. For applying social lenses, we are looking for specific examples within Get Out that deal with topics like race, social class, and others that focus solely on the SOCIAL aspects of that. This could include how certain groups interact with others, or how sterotypes affect views of certain groups of people. Political lenses, however, focus on aspects that deal with what kinds of power these groups have. Does one group oppress another? Are the sterotypes from our social lense used against or for that group? These questions and others like it can help you pull good evidence from the film for each of these lenses. My tip is to apply each lense to a certain topic and start from there. For example, I have collected a lot of great evidence so far by looking at what the movie says socially and politically about race in this movie, as it is a prominent topic. While that's not the only way I've been looking at the movie, I've found that focusing on one topic can create a jumping off point for how to look at a text with these lenses. Also, rewatching scenes that we cover in class at home can help you look deeper into the text, allowing you to pick up on some details that you can add to your evidence for these lenses.

Regarding the movie itself, we started by rewatching the scene where Chris meets with the groundskeeper the morning after their run in during the night to about the 1:05:00 timestamp, so about 20-25 minutes of the film.

So how do these lenses apply to our everyday lives? We can use these lenses to look at both historical and current events, maybe even to tie them together. For instance, we can look at a current event, say the midterm election on Tuesday, in both a social and political standpoint. We can use a social lense to look at issues such as Florida voting to allow convicted felons to regain voting rights to see how that specific group is now being given another piece of normal life after serving their time, or use a political lense to see that this group is now being given back a say in our government. While this is just one example, most events have many sides to them, allowing for deep analysis and synthesis by looking at them through specific lenses.