The actor:	LaKeith Stanfield
The character:	Andre King
The film:	Get Out
The line:	“Get out! Get out!”

I’m old enough to remember when you could find a YouTube video that was so marvelously researched and cut together, like this one…as opposed to YouTube now, where if it has research it may as well get called underwater basket-weaving. This is a really sweet melange of people saying some variants on “Get out of there,” like the title suggests. It comes with expletives tossed in, there are a few plain “get out” iterations, some extra pronouns. Cliffhanger, Independence Day, The Wrath of Khan and…Spirited Away?… are all hanging out together with a bunch of other movies. The action movie is where the phrase is paramount, but that doesn’t preclude it from other genres where it can be used just as easily for humor.

(What’s most impressive to me about this video is not the sheer number of pictures represented, but the fact that the editor never caved and allowed a “Get out of here,” or some synonym to “Get out,” to slide in and pad the length. Respect.)

“Get out of there” is a movie phrase if ever there was one. Think about the last time you said “get out of there” to someone. If it wasn’t a child messing around with something s/he shouldn’t be messing with, then it was definitely an animal. Maybe this is a movie phrase, but I tell my cat “Get out of there” at least twice a day even on the good days. But “get out of there” the way these people are using it is an absolute rarity for most of us in our day-to-day. We aren’t on comlinks shouting commands. We aren’t trying desperately to remove people from life-or-death situations. The vast majority of us are simply not on submarines. That’s what makes it a great movie phrase. It’s obviously saturating the movies and television we watch, but that doesn’t mean that the phrase itself is canned. “Stop fighting with your brother/sister” is canned because parents say that all the time; hearing that in a sitcom has to send your average parent’s eyes rolling back into their skull. But “get out of there” is that perfect blend of familiar and unusual, urgent and invisible.

That video is pretty old, or otherwise you’d have to critique it for leaving out the most important command to “get out” not just in the 21st Century, but in the history of American movies. When Andre, who has gone missing after hooking up with Rose, shows up at this party at the Armitages, Chris is confused. He feels like he knows the guy somehow, but his recollections of him are definitely not of the him standing there. When Chris snaps a quick picture to send to Rod, Chris (and the rest of us) discover that photography brings out the Black mind trapped inside his or her own body, suppressed so that a white mind can control the body’s doings. “Get out!” seems like a warning for Chris, who is the only Black person chez Armitage who hasn’t been put under this mind control yet. But what makes this line so haunting is that it’s different from every single one of the “Get out of there” quotes in the video. It makes just as much sense to consider this line being spoken by Andre to the white person inside his mind. “Get out!” is not about flight but exorcism.