The shot from Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” that probably pops into your head first — it was in the trailers and will no doubt feature in the Oscar reel — is of Daniel Kaluuya in close-up, his eyes open wide and overflowing with tears. It’s a pivotal moment, for sure, both in the plot and in Kaluuya’s performance: the big reveal and the first big emotional payoff. But it’s also a confirmation of the importance of those eyes to the structure and meaning of the film. They are perhaps its only reliable barometers of emotion, instruments of empathy and windows on the truth.

Chris Washington, Kaluuya’s character, is a photographer. According to a movie convention going back at least to “Rear Window,” this makes him a bit of a voyeur and also suggests a certain detachment from experience. He’s a watcher more than a doer, at risk of seeing too much. And “Get Out,” in every way, is about seeing and being seen, about Chris’s dual status as an observer of the ways of white people and an object of their increasingly sinister gazes.

Visibility and invisibility are central to the psychic history of American racism. Black men like Chris can be destroyed if they are seen in the wrong place (or if they look at the wrong person in the wrong way). They are also in constant danger of disappearing, of being erased, stolen, whited out. Chris knows all of this, but he would like to believe that he can wear this history, as it were, lightly. In the early scenes it seems as if he and his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams) haven’t so much “transcended” or “seen beyond” race as figured out a way to be different without being each other’s Others.