in this moment Chris and the deer have their owncoagulation: fusing into one “buck” (and obviously Peele was playing uponthis terminology associated with the Black male slave), they jointly chargeand kill their enemy. Together, the “vermin” strike back

Chris makes use of thedead deer; another (more mystical) analysis could posit that the deer takesrevenge on the hunter, using Chris’s body as a vehicle

First, the conflation of the deerwith the devaluation of Black life nods to the long-standing tradition of usinganimals to speak back to the power structures upheld by plantation slaveryin the form of animal folktales. And second, this deer comes roaring back tolife. He gets his revenge on the family that made his noble head into a trophy.The taxidermied deer is a speaking animal that has a kind of second life, andthere are multiple ways we might read its importance in Chris’s escape

the deer strikes back

Like the trickster tales discussed above, the films we are lookingat here do not make animals the focal point, but use them as a means of“thinking with” humans.

The trickster is an animal low on the peckingorder (like a rabbit) who finds himself in a jam and must use his wits, charms,and other skill sets to outfox his more powerful enemies. He is an animalsurrogate that speaks softly of strategies for resistance

Wagner emphasizes thatsuch animal tales often provided coded ways of imparting strategies forresistance and that this story has historical connections not only to the tropeof the speaking animal from African trickster mythologies like the spiderAnansi, but also perhaps, to Aesop’s animal fable

remind us of the historical reduction of the human to the status of ananimal under transatlantic slavery, but also were used as a mode of resistancefor enslaved peoples

Rather than viewing fables as operating with a purely substitutivelogic, where the animal stands in for the human, recent criticism explores thepossibility that the fable can imagine relationality and even allyship amongspecies

lens of alliance, not solely analogy

Rather, the appearance of animals in some recentfilms highlights the unequal treatment of Black lives in America in a mannerthat continues the fable tradition, and simultaneously emphasizes the human

Theseworks encode various strategies of survival in an era in which Black livescontinue to be devalued

Any resistance must be sanitized soas to be tolerable” for the general audience. 5 But resistance also works not bybeing sanitized, but by being hidden in plain sight, coded as symbols legibleto some but not to all. The use of animal fables has a long-standing historydating back to slavery as providing such a coded language of resistance

Wagner notes that theweaker animals use their wits as a means of overcoming the unequal powerdistribution in the world they navigated

he “speaking animal,” which acknowledgesthe dialectic capacity of the symbolic animal of fables to stage a conversationabout subjugation and resistance, but simultaneously, to point beyond itselfto the reality of animal life.