Nope (2022) Director: Jordan Peele
“Right here, you are going to witness an absolute spectacle.”
In his latest impressive horror film with a twist, Jordan Peele takes us to the outskirts of Hollywood and the Old West for a unique monster picture that blends several genres into one –cowboy westerns, science fiction, and horror. Daniel Kaluuya plays Otis “OJ” Haywood, Jr. who runs a stunt horse business for Hollywood productions together with his sister Emerald “Em” (Keke Palmer). They train and raise horses on their family ranch in the desert outside Los Angeles –OJ and Em are descendants of one of the first motion picture actors, Alistair E. Haywood, a fictional name based on the first person captured riding a horse (a black man whose true name apparently remains unknown to this day). Since the Haywoods’ Hollywood business has been struggling, OJ and Em have been reluctantly selling their horses to a man named Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child actor on a sitcom called “Gordy’s Home” which ended in tragedy when a chimpanzee named Gordy was suddenly triggered by the sound of exploding balloons and he became incredibly violent, murdering many people on the set except Jupe (Gordy was shot and killed by the police). Notably, Jupe watched this whole violent scene from behind a veil underneath a table. Now, Jupe runs a campy wild west show called the “Star Lasso Experience” where he lures a strange figure in the sky by displaying the Haywoods’ horses.
Soon, it becomes apparent to OJ, Em, and Jupe that a mysterious being is plaguing their ranch –it turns out to be a UFO of sorts. It hides in the clouds for extended periods of time until it grows hungry and then begins feeding on the ranch’s horses (the entity becomes enraged after eating a “decoy” horse statue). The truth of this unusual predatory alien slowly becomes apparent throughout the film, and once OJ and Em learn more about it, they decide to turn it into a cheap marketing stunt by desperately trying to capture it on film. The challenge is that whenever the alien appears, all machinery and electronics are disabled. Thus, they hire an unorthodox cinematographer named Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) who uses a hand-crank camera in attempt to capture the photograph the film.
However, OJ soon discovers that this alien (which he calls “Jean Jacket”) only seems to prey on people who look up at it. The key is to keep your gaze drawn elsewhere, or at least fight the urge to gawk. But what is Jean Jacket? Is it a flying saucer? A giant sand dollar? A balloon? Or a floating aperture? Whatever it is, we love to look at this incredibly strange and mysterious phenomena as it slowly unfurls throughout the movie. We have an obsession with spectacle, perhaps best demonstrated when a masked TMZ reporter suddenly arrives in the hopes of filming another spectacle for money. But even when Jean Jacket is actually filmed, the characters are still unsatisfied. They must film more, to capture it more fully, and in some cases continue filming it while being eaten alive. People want to understand this creature so they can comfortably place it into a box. At the end of the film, Em is finally able to photograph Jean Jacket using vintage technology at the hokey old west town, but only after she entices the creature with a giant balloon of Jupe which it then consumes and immediately chokes to death. In the end, the spectacle has consumed itself.
Filled with homages to classic science fiction, westerns, and horror movies (especially Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws), Nope offers a unique social commentary on our cultural obsession with spectacle, especially in the age of the exponential expansion of user-generated content on the internet, driven by pure exploitation. There is a tension in the film between characters either looking away or gawking at something, a frustrating conflict for a horror movie –after all, isn’t a blockbuster movie made for exploitative shock value? To what extent is it selling the artificial experience trauma for the business of spectacle? Or is it so serious that we have to look away? In order to gain fame and success in show business, people must learn to tokenize themselves. For example, Em and Jupe are more successful at selling themselves in Hollywood while OJ is not. He is shy, perhaps not unlike the elusive Jean Jacket, and he is complex –a black cowboy who is socially awkward, perhaps even slightly neurodivergent. But in many ways characters in the film are still pushed into easy boxes and even animals, like chimpanzees or horses, are simply reduced to cheap sideshow clowns in Hollywood. Nope reminds us of the commodification of living things in the entertainment industry –indeed, the very structure of the film is broken out into separate sections featuring cue cards that identify the names of animals who die in each. The synthetic fabrication of myth leaves many casualties. This whole movie offers an intriguing meta contemplation on the nature of blockbuster movie-making, and the many ways in which it exploits both humans and animals. In some ways, Nope seems to be a deeply personal reflection by Jordan Peele on his own craft as a blockbuster movie director. He questions to what extent he, himself, might be tokenized, and made to be a spectacle in the same way that his movies are. How can we avoid such a dire spectacle? Can blockbuster genre movies challenge stereotypes. Nope does not seem to have a definitive answer, but it simply encourages us to look away sometimes.
Thus far, I have loved all of Jordan Peele’s movies, and even though Nope is probably my least favorite of his three movies, I still found it to be a compelling cerebral puzzle and I look forward to what he decides to do next.
Nope was indeed particularly new for the alien monster thriller genre. Though we had to look up its actual meanings online after seeing it. Including how Nope was an acronym for ‘Not Of Planet Earth’. I went into it understanding that Jordan Peele was making a statement on how and why a spectacle-loving species like ourselves can be specifically vulnerable. In that sense, the alien is as metaphorically useful as the most thoughtful sci-fi and horror can thankfully still be in this era of storytelling. Having recently re-watched Alien, Nope certainly opens my mind to how unique the alien monster thrillers of today need to be to keep the genre thriving. Thank you for your review.