Highlighting and Deconstructing Blacksploitation Narratives

 The 1972 film The Thing with Two Heads is a transparent example of blacksploitation in speculative fiction. The plot centers around a white doctor who is terminally ill, but has come up with a transplantation technique where he can put two heads onto one host body to survive. The "volunteer" is a black man that the police have brought from prison and have given him the "choice" to be either executed or donated to science. Once the transplant has happened the white doctor wakes up and is upset to see he now has a black body, but accepts it as his means for survival.  

This horrendous exploitative film revolves around the narrative that black bodies are the obvious choice to be used, non consensually, to preserve or extend the lives of white men at any cost. 

The idea of using black bodies as a technology is discussed by Beth Colman in her article, Race as Technology, where she suggests that we need to critically examine and deconstruct the ways in which race is used as a technology in order to work towards a more just and equitable society. 

The 2017 film Get Out by Jordan Peel is an example of highlighting and deconstructing the narrative that we see in The Thing with Two Heads. In this film we have a similar situation where a young black photographer is visiting his white girlfriends family for the first time. The white people he is introduced to have a certain fetishizing fascination with his body, and cant help but non-consensually touch him and ask him questions about his physicality. We soon find out that the white family (and possibly the broader white community and police force) are in on taking black bodies for various reasons such as being cooler, faster, or stronger.  

Get Out parallels and remixes the narrative that takes place in The Thing with Two Heads and highlights the ways in which black bodies are seen as a technology for survival. By highlighting narratives like this, we can begin to deconstruct exploitative and dangerous narratives that exist in our society, and change how we think about them moving forward.