JORDAN PEELE’S NOPE AND THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE

Brendan Nolte

FTT 30030: Contemporary Global Cinemas

29 April 2024

        In the present Hollywood landscape, Jordan Peele’s Nope, in addition to his career as a whole, is an anomaly. The film is an original blockbuster feature made for 68 million dollars, directed by a black man on the third film of his career, with two black leads and a majority minority cast, and zero IP attached. I find it highly unlikely that a boardroom meeting at NBCUniversal five years prior to Nope’s release would have predicted the film to nearly triple its budget at the box office and make an appearance on the Studio Tour at Universal Hollywood. In this paper, I will explore the characters and themes of Nope along with scholarly and entertainment news commentary and interviews with the director in order to demonstrate how Nope has succeeded as both box office product and as a piece of art, along with being relevant and necessary to the modern era and thus the discussion of contemporary global cinemas.

Nope’s relevance as a modern example of auteur cinema cannot be understated. All too often the status of auteur is relegated to the arthouse and the ultra-low-budget film, which is in part how we have ended up with the slosh of blockbusters and popular cinema which Martin Scorsese famously described as “closer to theme parks than they are to movies.”^[1] Jordan Peele is one of the best and only examples of a working director who can be classified as an auteur with blockbuster-level ambition ability. Of Nope, Peele said that he “wrote it in a time when we were a little bit worried about the future of cinema, so the first thing I knew is I wanted to create a spectacle.”^[2] His love for the blockbuster as a style of filmmaking is clear here and in the numerous references to Spielberg throughout the film, while Peele’s cinephilia more generally shines through in his taking influences from the western, horror, and action genres in particular in Nope and his twisting of horror conventions in both Get Out and Us.^[3] Peele’s auteur status is supported by this use of genre conventions to explore socio-political issues, along with the fact that his films are centrally about black characters and their relationships to their world and each other. His high-concept storytelling which is akin to that of the blockbusters of the late 20th century similarly cements his status as one of the great living auteurs. In an article from Film Quarterly, Eleni Palis discusses how Peele rejects the “classical auteur’s singular vision, modeling instead a collaborative, deeply reflexive extratextual authorship”, which is demonstrable in his work style and his gracious embrace of outside influences.^[4] Nope is an essential piece to view because it offers a glimpse at what an optimistic future for Hollywood could look like and who holds the keys to that future, proving that a strong directorial vision can be positive in terms of both the artistic and box office product.

In order to properly contextualize Nope, I believe it necessary to understand the numerous cinematic lineages that collide within the film.

        Nope directly confronts African-American history in the film industry, with its two main characters supposedly being descendants of the “first movie star,” a black horse jockey.^[5] African-Americans have been making movies for over a century, beginning in the silent era when “independent producers made movies, known as race films, for segregated audiences.”^[6] However, black people both in front of and behind the camera have often been treated as disposable or of lesser value, with the trope of the black character dying first in horror movies and the general exploitation of black people on screen being something Peele has directly confronted in his films.^[7] Only extremely recently have African-American filmmakers been granted any status as having legitimate creative voices. Peele has discussed multiple times in interviews that Nope is a film that “could not have been made five years ago,” in large part because he “didn’t think they would ever let [him] do” an original UFO film with the representation and singularity of the vision behind the film.^[8] This speaks to how recently black creatives in the industry have achieved some semblance of the consideration they deserve and also how singularly ambitious Nope is as a project.

        Nope’s obsession with spectacle is formed out of the great American blockbuster. Whether it be the inspiration from Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T, or Jaws, and the numerous references to these throughout Peele’s film, or the heavy western influence, or the use of the 50s science fiction UFO film as a blueprint, or the manipulation of horror expectations, Nope shamelessly uses a vast wealth of cinematic legacies to craft its story.

But Nope is plainly not any one of these influences. When asked “If I were to come to you and say, ‘this is Jordan Peele doing Jaws,’ to me you would say what?” Peele responded “I would say thank you, and, I think it is Jordan Peele doing Nope.”^[9] His work on the film with Dutch cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who recently won his first Oscar for Oppenheimer, was essential to crafting the scale of the film, which feels massive despite its story for the most part taking place in two locations, and its otherworldly feel. Van Hoytema is well-known for his work with Cristopher Nolan, who is coincidentally the most famous example of a blockbuster-auteur. Peele’s use of so many genres in one film is important because he is able to draw on all of these sources and center them around the one thing that created the blockbuster phenomenon in the first place: the human obsession with the spectacular.

        It seems absurd that someone would spend 68 million dollars to shoot a film in order to discuss and often critique the entire concept of shooting a film, but Peele is doing just that here. A major piece of his message lies in the relationship between three species: predator, prey, and viewer.

The most obvious example of this lies in what we see of the cinematographer, Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), whom O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) hire to help them photograph the alien that’s hiding in the clouds above Haywood Ranch. When we are introduced to Holst as a character (not counting his brief appearance in the set scene at the beginning of the film, which really only serves to set up how O.J. and Em know him), he is running through footage of a crab and an octopus fighting each other, unflinchingly observing natural violence. Later in the film, after the Jupiter’s Claim massacre, we return to Holst in what is presumably his editing room. A news report on the incident plays in the background as Holst this time observes, again with a look of contemplation and intrigue, his footage of a snake constricting and killing a tiger. Holst’s appearances prior to the third act establish his character as being obsessed with both the filming and viewing of predator and prey interactions, and with what Emerald calls the “impossible shot.”^[10] Holst’s motivation for helping O.J. and Em is not only that he wants to be the one to get footage of the beast they call Jean Jacket. What he desires, and what piques his interest in his first conversation with Em, is to get a shot that no one else can or will ever get. He is so absorbed by the necessity to capture the predator at work that he becomes dissatisfied with mere photography. Herein lies his fatal flaw. At the end of the film, Holst et al. successfully capture definitive evidence of Jean Jacket’s existence. Yet, despite their success, Antlers drops the cryptic (to the other characters in the film) line: “the light is gonna be magic soon,” walks out of cover, and essentially invites Jean Jacket to eat him, all while rolling his camera.^[11] The obvious reading here is that Holst’s obsession with the predator and getting an impossible shot led to his demise, as he was evidently dissatisfied with the lighting and/or quality of their initial footage. However, Peele is also speaking here to an even deeper quality of the cinematographer, photographer, or viewer in general, and that is the selfish nature with which we project ourselves through a camera or even through our eyes. The impossible shot for Antlers Holst is not simply evidence of an alien lifeform. The issue is that, for him, the impossible shot is not evidence at all, but a creation. He needs to inject himself into the situation because his obsession has led him to identify with the predator. Holst’s great achievement, in his eyes, is that he photographs his own death, which we see not through his eyes but through his almost immediately destroyed footage, finally injecting himself into the natural order of which he was before merely a photographer. Here, for Peele, the act of viewing itself is a sort of predation.

On its surface, Nope is not as much of a characteristically African-American story as Peele’s first two films, Get Out and Us. Though its two main characters are black, O.J. and Emerald’s story on its face has little to do with their being black or the African-American experience. However, a second look tells us that, just like Peele’s other films, the black experience and the experience of our central protagonists are actually inseparable. During the opening credits we get a POV shot from the inside of Jean Jacket’s square eyeball, with the credits each appearing in a black rectangle at the center that slowly fades to reveal footage of a black jockey riding a horse. Jean Jacket’s eye is oddly reminiscent of the inside of the sort of camera which would have been used to shoot this footage. This is implied (in a slightly altered version of the real history) to be the first film ever made and the jockey (in an entirely fabricated version of history) an ancestor of Emerald and O.J. Haywood in the scene that follows.^[12] Herein Emerald asks “does anybody know the name of the black jockey that rode the horse?” to which she receives a resounding “no.”^[13] With this brief and easily missable moment at the outset of the film, Peele links what follows to the centuries of black experience being in front of cameras and treated as objects for viewing. When Emerald says that “from the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game,” she speaks not only for the Haywoods but as Peele for African-Americans at large.^[14] Black people in America have often, from minstrel shows to blaxploitation to everything horrific and empowering in between, been viewed and objectified as entertainment for an often white audience. I think for Peele in Nope the viewer and the camera are predatory for precisely this reason: they have so often robbed black people of their humanity. While there is nothing objectively positive or negative about the act of viewing, the Haywood’s story demonstrates that the obsession with spectacle often leads to violent dehumanization, a dehumanization of which black people in America have for too long been the victims. However, Peele’s story is necessarily one of empowerment. In an interview with GQ on the film, referring to the film as a revolution in itself, Peele said, “It’s about taking up that space. It’s about existing. It’s about acknowledging the people who were erased in the journey to get here.”^[15] While the film may not hold the same outright, biting social critiques of Peele’s first two, Nope simply being made and finding success as an original, Spielbergian blockbuster about two black siblings is in itself an act of resistance to the corporate, apolitical sequel and reboot machine which has infected Hollywood in recent years.

        In the scene on the film set at the very beginning of Nope, O.J, referring to the horse he’s in charge of, hurriedly warns the director: “Don’t look him in the eyes.”^[16] Apart from being a neat piece of foreshadowing, this line sets up one of the biggest questions the film asks, which I would phrase as: Why can’t we stop looking? Every predator or creature generally in the film is set off by viewership. The horse from this specific scene kicks back violently when it sees itself in the mirror one of the crew members holds up to its eyes. O.J later discovers that Jean Jacket is angered and likely only eats someone if they look at it, while everyone at Jupiter’s Claim learns this same lesson in a much different way: none can take their eyes off of the sky and are subsequently, horrifically consumed by the predator which Jupe believed himself to have wrangled. Peele asks two questions here, the first about the naturality of the viewing process and the second about its ethics. Being seen is maddening to the animals in the film because it is not a natural process to them. Animals do not have self-consciousness and thus do not ever perceive themselves in the sight of another the way humans do. Thus, he situates the human viewership and photography as being something alien to the natural world and upsetting to the natural order, leading to a second question as to whether the pursuit of photography and the kind of voyeurism that permeates our media-addled society is ethical or justified. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh’s article “Jordan Peele’s Nope: Saying no to the society of the spectacle” offers a thorough Marxist analysis of the film as a critique of the capitalist “society of the spectacle,” a phrase Peele has directly quoted in interviews.^[17][18] This situates our obsession with viewership as something more unnatural and manipulated by capitalist enmity of the other and better, with Peele saying quite bluntly that “the film is about the human addiction to spectacle and the monetization of it.”^[19]

Angel (Brandon Perea) asks nervously, before the execution of their big plan in the third act, “What we’re doing is important, right?”^[20] This serves not only as a question of the importance of photographing the extraterrestrial in the film, but as a meta-level question from Peele, wondering about the significance of his own work. The two obvious motivations for their plan that Angel lists are money and fame, which are fairly concretely the motivations behind most of the main cast’s actions. However, when he posits that hopefully they will save some people and the world, O.J and Em merely offhandedly agree with him. Nope wonders why, if our capacity to capture images and create spectacle is so important, are our primary motivators for doing so always lusting and selfish?

Ricky “Jupe” Park’s (Steven Yeun) character in the film serves both as another contribution to Peele’s warning about viewership and our identification with predators but also as an exploration of the effects of trauma and how we cope. There is exactly one moment in Nope in which a character looks directly in the eyes (or hole in Jean Jacket’s case) of a predator and comes out unscathed. In what is often regarded as the scene of the film, the chimp playing Gordy in the fictional sitcom Gordy’s Home, in which Jupe stars, is set off and goes on a violent rampage. He brutally disfigures Jupe’s costar Mary Jo Elliott (Sophia Coto) and dismembers and likely kills others offscreen. When Gordy discovers Jupe hiding under a table, he makes his way over to him slowly and methodically, as if trying to decide what he should do with the helpless boy.  Gordy finally reaches Jupe, the monkey’s visage partially obscured by the tablecloth, and offers him what Jupe perceives to be a fist bump. Just as Jupe is about to touch his hand to Gordy's, the monkey is shot and killed. When we see Jupe in the present day, his office holds an entire hidden room with memorabilia from this show, which he is evidently fond of and uses as part of a tourist attraction. It seems here that Jupe has turned this violent tragedy into part of his identity.

In a way this character is largely disconnected from the rest of the film. Jupe’s plotline has little-to-no impact on the main story of Nope. However, what makes Peele’s filmmaking so interesting and great here is that he is not as obsessed with the linearity of events and conventional storytelling as most blockbuster directors would be but instead finds himself looking to compound scenes in service of a cohesive experience which serves its themes.

While Jupe’s character is broadly irrelevant to the journey of O.J and Em, his story runs parallel to theirs to elaborate on Peele’s themes. The connection he felt with Gordy evidently influenced the connection with and power over Jean Jacket which he naively believed he had. Producer Ian Cooper has said that in the film, the “real villain is humanity's instinct to think they can put a party hat on a wild animal,” with Jupe being a near personification of this instinct.^[21] Jupe’s experience in Gordy's home was traumatic, and the rest of Jupe’s life demonstrates how our trauma can obviously impact but also pervert and seep its way into the rest of our lives. Details such as Jupe’s aliens at Jupiter’s claim resembling the cameras on the set of Gordy's Home, Mary Jo Elliott wearing a shirt with her child self’s face on it, and Jupe’s entire persona, which stems from a character he played when he was a kid, are all indicative of how the entertainment industry can corrode childhood and create adults whose entire lives are ghosts of who they were forced to be as children. I think this is especially potent in Jupe’s case because Peele juxtaposes the manner in which conventional traumatic experiences permanently alter a person with the experience of being a child actor and puts on display how these two experiences often run parallel in terms of the indelible mark they leave on a person.

        Mary Jo Elliott is especially exemplary in this case because her story is largely nonfiction. As a parallel of the real-life Charla Nash, a woman who was, though not a TV star, horrifically disfigured by a chimpanzee and became a media figure as a result and making an appearance on Oprah.^[22] The importance of this detail is that the horror of this situation, in the view of Nope, is not the woman, or the chimp even, but the fact that this reality was created by people spectacularizing the chimp for their own gain and then again shamelessly manipulating this poor woman, whose life has been in many regards destroyed, for their selfish monetary means. O.J. and Em at one point refer to the “impossible shot” as the “Oprah shot,” ostensibly meaning the shot which will get them a television spot, fame, and fortune.^[23] All of these details in conversation point to the eye of the storm in terms of Nope’s themes: the so-called “bad miracle.”^[24]

        The key to unlocking Nope is the idea that Peele refers to throughout the film as the bad miracle. It rears its ugly head in different forms: Jean Jacket’s existence, Gordy’s unexplained violent rampage, the shoe standing straight up on the set of “Gordy’s Home,” the football team fighting in the background when the main trio visit Copperpot’s Cove, and the Jupiter’s Claim massacre, to name the most prominent instances. Humans have always been obsessed with miracles: the unexplainable instances of divine providence. However, Peele here shows us that we are equally if not more so attracted to the arbitrary horror which takes place in our everyday lives. If the human obsession with taming the untamable is the villain here, the bad miracle is that untameable wild animal which inspires our obsession. We think we can somehow conquer the existence of these contingent events of violence, death, and terror if we are able to film and make them seen or connect with the arbiter of the bad miracle. However, the truth of Nope, which for my mind is much scarier than any alien or UFO, is that human nature is just as violence-obsessed as the rest of nature, and our spectacularization of the bad miracle, as influenced by capitalist motivations, is in no way inherently virtuous and is quite often the exact opposite. Thus, Nope the film is itself the bad miracle with which Peele is obsessed, carrying within it the spectacularly horrific which blurs the line between the image which draws our perverse eye and that which instantly causes us to look away and say, “nope.”^[25]

        In all, I would include Nope in the canon of essential modern cinema for a number of reasons. It is a fantastic example of an up-and-coming auteur, an example of modern African-American cinema, and an example of the now rare original blockbuster. Its thematic density and attention to detail in developing both its themes and characters are unrivaled, especially on this big-budget level of filmmaking. And, finally, Nope is able to use its postmodern, conscious compilation of influences to offer a biting critique of not only the film industry but the concept of filming and viewing itself, which is especially relevant to our media-addled society in which it seems our devices keep us under constant surveillance.