A early hint of the family's real opinions on black people can partially be found out when they discuss deer after Rose accidentally strikes one with her car. During the African slave trade, the people being sold were referred to by deer gender names instead of being men or women, in order to dehumanize them and reduce them to mere bodies. Later, we see the family run a silent auction for owning Chris as a slave via brain transfer, literally dehumanizing him in his own body. This also makes Dean's Karmic Death into a Stealth Pun: Chris impales him on the antlers of a buck.
Roman Armitage was beat out by Jesse Owens in the Olympics. Dean (his son) says "he almost got over it" when giving Chris a tour through the house. We later learn that Roman lives on in the body of the groundskeeper, whom we see sprinting at night as exercise. He clearly still hasn't gotten over losing to a black man, and now exults in having a fast, black body of his own.
When Chris accidentally flashes a bright light at Andre with his camera, causing his real personality to momentarily retake control, he is taken back to the house to calm down. However, Logan is attended to by Missy, the hypnotist, rather than Dean himself, the neurosurgeon.
The Armitages' strong dislike of Chris smoking makes more sense since they probably want his body to be as healthy as possible for his impending new host. It's also a believable excuse to hypnotise him.
We see Georgina messing with her bangs on several occasions. On second viewing, it's clear she's making sure her surgery scars are hidden.
Chris mentions the family household help acting strangely and asking uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Rose. Rose asks if he's worried they're jealous of the two of them. It's possible she means jealousy of their interracial relationship (which are stereotypically fraught with a lot of questions about status), or it's possible she means jealousy of the fact that they're both attractive and successful young people — Chris has Rose, a beautiful and wealthy young professional, and Rose has Chris, a handsome and accomplished artist. Or it's neither of those things, and Rose is using the subtle implication that Chris is reacting due to jealousy and conceitedness, as well as the implication that other black people don't like Chris, to throw him off from what's really weird about Georgina and Walter: they're possessed by her own white grandparents.
Missy is so curious about Chris' mother not just because it gives her an in hypnotically, but also acts as a check that he has no close family who will come looking when he goes missing.
Rose probably also does some research early in her relationships to make sure her targets have emotional wounds that her mom can use.
The term "stay woke" is commonly heard in social justice circles, particularly communities that discuss racism against black people, and essentially means to have an awareness and to openly acknowledge social issues rather than remain ignorant of them. It's a lyric in Childish Gambino's "Redbone," the song that plays during the opening credits, and it ends up foreshadowing the fact that in order to avoid suffering the fate of having control over his body hijacked, Chris needs to literally 'stay woke' and avoid being put to sleep.
A bit of subtle twistedly ironic humor is involved in how Chris kept himself from being put to sleep in the climax. For once, instead of being the reason for his servitude, cotton frees a black man.
Rod keeps mentioning Jeffrey Dahmer and how his victims were probably just expecting a good time before Dahmer killed them. 14 of Dahmer's 17 victims were people of color, and 9 out of those 14 were black. Dahmer himself insisted that this choice of victims wasn't motivated by racism, but simply by physical attractiveness and the convenience of targeting people who were local and unlikely to be missed — which is a little reminiscent of both Jim and Rose. Dahmer was also a disconcertingly-behaving alcoholic, like Jeremy.
Rose states that her father would vote for Obama a third time if he could, and he indeed says this using almost the exact same words. They've obviously used this line many times to put Rose's partners at ease.
Jeremy's story during the first night's dinner, about Rose reflexively biting her first kiss' tongue hard enough to draw blood, is an early indication that she is in on her family's scheme. The boy she kissed is implied to have been black, and white nationalist rhetoric tends to frame anxieties about racial mixing in terms of bodily invasion and "pure" whiteness getting corrupted by outside influences getting in. That she has such a visceral and violent reaction to him unexpectedly "slipping some tongue" signals the same anxieties.
Chris and Rose's wardrobe on the day of the party. Chris is wearing a blue shirt, Rose a red and white striped shirt. When they sit down together on a bench, their combined shirt designs form an American flag.
Additionally, most of the white party guests are wearing some amount of red, which visually groups her as a sympathizer.
Their specific colors also allude to their mindsets. The stripes on the American flag represent the original 13 colonies, and the Union (the blue part) has stars whose number matches how many states are in the US. Rose and her family embrace antiquated ideas about black people, while Chris’s views are more in line with the present era.
Missy uses a teacup and a silver spoon as her tools for hypnosis. Throughout history, tea has been a symbol of colonialism, with powerful white European countries like England oppressing populations in order to obtain and trade it to amass wealth. It also used to be a luxury of high society. Meanwhile, being "born with a silver spoon in her mouth" is an idiom regarding privileges afforded to people who have enjoyed wealth as an advantage their whole lives, which certainly applies to the Armitage family.
The white cult members arrive to the party driving in black cars. The white cult members who undergo the procedure are driving in black bodies.
When the flash from Chris' phone causes Andre to break free from Logan's (the White old man's brain controlling Andre's body) influence long enough to warn Chris to get out, Dean claims that the flash caused an epileptic episode. In Real Life, brain surgeons, like Dean, used to treat extreme cases of epilepsy, which is caused by bright flashing lights, by surgically separating the two hemispheres of the brain. This caused the affliction called Alien-Hand syndrome, which in some cases causes the person who went through the procedure to attack themselves with their own hand, and in all cases removes part of their body from their control.The other wiki goes into more detail.
Logan seems constantly disoriented and spacey. Considering that he literally has the brain of an elderly man, it could indicate that he is in the early stages of dementia or Alzheimer's.
After Rose hits the deer and the police officer asks to see Chris' ID and license, Rose is quick to jump to his defense, questioning the officer why Chris should show his ID if she was the one driving. On the surface, this is to show her standing up for him against the officer's racism. After it is shown she is in on the whole plan, she might have had another motive. If the officer had checked Chris' ID and then Chris went missing, the officer would have been the last to see Rose and Chris together before getting to Rose's house. Rose stopped the officer from checking Chris' ID to cover her own tracks and keep Chris being there a secret. No one else would know his name.
Not to mention there's been disappearances of young black men in the area. The cop might not have been trying to antagonize Chris, but check if he's one of the missing people they've been looking for.
Additionally, she's feasting on color then drowning them in white through a black straw. All this whilst hunting for fresh meat on the internet...Rose is sick, but she's consistent.
Also the way she eats. She takes one single Froot Loop and bites a piece off, not even eating the whole thing, before taking several sips of milk. Just a small bit of "color" that's heavily outweighed by the white - much like how the Armitages want black people just for their bodies, but controlled by a white mind.
The mind transferal is accomplished using the Coagula Procedure. An interesting choice of name. Aside from the obvious relevance of its meaning (suggesting a union of disparate elements), the Latin word is most familiar to English speakers through the alchemist’s maxim “Solve et Coagula” (“dissolve and coagulate”). Now, Word of God has it that the Armitage cult is descended from the Templars, a knightly order founded during the Crusades and then violently suppressed a few centuries later — among much else, they were accused of worshiping the demon Baphomet. Why am I telling you this? Dig up the standard depiction of Baphomet, the one by Éliphas Lévi. You’ll see a human-bodied, goat-headed figure with two words tattooed on its arms: Solve and ... Coagula.
The word "coagula" sounds similar to Caligula, a Roman emperor who would remove the heads from statues of gods and replace them with his own.
Jeremy interrogating Chris about his fighting skills seems like an indication of Jeremy's erratic behavior and inability to keep up the masquerade, but there's another possible motive: he's trying to gauge how much of a fight Chris is likely to put up, since Jeremy is the one who'll have to subdue him.
Why is the surgery room mainly lit by candles? As shown with Chris' camera flash, bright lights disrupt the suppression of the victim's consciousness.
The Armitages seem almost like a walking parody of the SJW "I don't see race, I love all black people" leftist, what with things like repeatedly bringing up how much they love Obama around the increasing bemused Chris. Of course they do: they're violent white supremacists who don't really interact with the world outside their cult. They only know non-racists through distorted strawman perspectives, so when they try to act like one that's what they do.
Rod is visibly a bit pudgier than Chris and, based on his wearing glasses, seemingly has at least slightly impaired vision. However, he's also shown to be pretty smart and quick-witted; nonetheless, Rose overlooked him for the slimmer, non-glasses-wearing Chris. Further proof that the cult doesn't care for black people and their individual traits and abilities beyond their bodies - Chris seems pretty smart too, but Rose clearly didn't care about that.
If Andre isn't killed to hide the existence of the program after the Armitages are killed, he's still trapped in his own body.
Furthermore, it's established the victims of the Armitage procedure are still present on some level, trapped within their own consciousness as their possessor enjoys the use of their new body — and the older woman with Andre is presumably his parasitic occupier's wife, acting intimate and flirtatious toward Andre and showing him off. Andre is still present and completely paralyzed as the Armitage family member currently possessing him enjoys all the fruits of being young, handsome, and healthy again. Think of the other older woman who lasciviously feels up Chris' arm while her elderly and infirm husband looks on. Rod wasn't wrong about sex slavery.
It's also likely that Chris and Rod will want to keep things quiet to avoid Chris getting prosecuted for anything, so telling the police about Andre is a no-no. Andre is most likely trapped until his death.
If the brainstem being left intact means a sliver of the original person survives in their body, what about the brain stem left in the "hijacker's" own body? Is enough of them left aware to sit in the Sunken Place wondering why it didn't work?
That brainstem would have likely died along with the rest of their original body...
Or that stem is carried over to the new body. Since it's part of the person's awareness, it's probably needed. So the host body ends having both stems, one active and one passive.
Chris received a hypnotic command to temporarily go into "the Sunken Place" when he hears the sound of a spoon scraping a tea cup. He still has this trigger at the end of the film, and there's no telling whether it can be erased or removed. This trigger, by the way, can be heard at almost every restaurant in America, since it's essentially just a spoon scraping against ceramic or glass.
Our first look at Rose and Jeremy's sibling relationship starts off with some amazingly embarrassing anecdotes, including Jeremy telling the story of Rose getting overexcited and biting a boy's tongue while they were making out. Biting it until it bled excessively.Given Rose's comfort with her own predatory behavior and her obvious pleasure at ensnaring Chris to be tortured into mindless slavery, are we so sure this was an accident? Is she not just cruel, but an actual sexual sadist? Word of God confirmed that she was aroused when Chris tried to throttle her at the end.
Jeremy counting "One Mississippi, Two Mississippi" as he has Chris in a chokehold. Just a sign of his erratic behavior? No. . . he's counting how long he has Chris' windpipe constricted, so Chris can't fake passing out to escape.
A white man saying this as he is strangling a black man is especially macabre given the notoriety of Mississippi's history of lynching.
Rose had numerous pictures of male and female victims, yet the only ones we meet in the film are Walter, Georgina, and Andre/Logan (the last one being kidnapped by Jeremy and not being one of the people in the pictures). That means there are many more people like Andre out there who are prisoners in their own bodies. And that doesn't even get into the idea that, as with most surgery, there could have been complications, and some of those people did not survive the procedure.
Inverted, actually, with the ending. Chris committed multiple murders (all in self-defense) but with such a bizarre situation that he would certainly be arrested, right? No, because all the police would find would be an illegal surgical house and a bunch of dead bodies with Walter at the end, holding the gun that he used to commit suicide. In all likelihood, even if they don't figure out the Armitages were up to something shady, Walter looks like he did it all in an escape attempt.
It depends on whether or not the fire spread fast enough to completely destroy enough of the house as evidence. Since the scene cuts to Chris escaping, it's hard to tell.
There's also a reason why Rod comes in instead of a cop as the canon ending — the fingerprints on Rose's neck would be enough to at least implicate that Chris strangled Rose to death.
The men in Rose's photos were all probably subjected to the Coagula process. Since the Armitages mainly seem to offer the service to close friends, you'd think some of those men (or at least their bodies) would show up at the party, but none of them do. Perhaps their transformations were unsuccessful, or they otherwise died trying to escape the house.
Alternatively, that party is mostly for the auction (of Chris) and the successful cases (save for Andre, who shows up with what we assume is his possessor's elderly wife) don't go to that party, since they already have their own African-American bodies under their control.
The unconformable subtleties of abduction of black people and having the elites perform a barbaric version of reincarnation with brains make many well-thought audiences perceive that there is an aspect of American history that refuses to die. The Confederacy doesn't exist as a political entity anymore, but it lives on the most infamous face of American systemic racism, which is still deeply rooted in the country in all its forms.
