In 2018, when Kanye West began using his Twitter to extol his support of Donald Trump and question other, long-held political conventions, many fans openly wondered if he had been shanghaied to the “Sunken Place” from Jordan Peele’s award-winning 2017 mystery thriller Get Out. Kanye himself semi regularly addressed such rumors with various esoteric posts, but until now, Peele had yet to chime in, other than to joke that Kanye had inspired him to starting writing Get Out 2. However, in this month’s Rolling Stone cover story profiling Peele, he did provide his own take, which somewhat refutes the belief that Kanye is being controlled by his surrogate family, the Kardashians.
“However frustrated I am with what he’s doing, the artist in me is like, ‘He saw my movie!’ ” Peele says in the interview. “The thing about Kanye is, it feels to me that, whatever he’s going through, he’s trying to tell his truth. And there’s something magnetic about people who are trying to tell the truth. I might be wrong, but my feeling is that even when he’s saying something I disagree with, he’s trying to tell his truth, and that’s more than you can say about 90 percent of people.” Peele also explains what he thinks the Sunken Place represents in the discourse: “The Sunken Place is 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.”
While it’s true that Kanye does draw attention to himself and many do seem to hang on his every word, whether right or wrong, judging from most of his posts on the subject, it doesn’t seem like Kanye really has seen Get Out — or maybe he just didn’t understand it. In any case, although the intense criticism he received from fans, family, and peers didn’t seem to deter him from being so outspoken, his other recent experiences have convinced him to take a step back from political commentary.
