Nope (2022)

Jordan Peele is something of an anomaly within the industry, in more ways than one. He creates real films for people who appreciate the art of filmmaking, but strangely enough, he manages to achieve commercial success as well as more accolades than probably any other contemporary horror auteur with each totally original IP. His films are sold on nothing more than the quality of his previous films, and yet the public is more than willing to trust him time and time again. It’s strange but undeniably uplifting in a culture where it seems no one is willing to try anything different, behind the camera or sitting in the audience.

I really enjoyed his monumental Get Out, I appreciated and enjoyed parts of his flawed, but interesting Us, and I’m now here to tell you upfront that I'm outright stricken by his newest masterpiece, a strange mix of western, sci-fi horror, and examination of America’s history of violent bullying and cultural genocide. Oh, sorry: what I meant to say is that it’s an examination of the way Hollywood exploits its talent, and particularly the talent of black artists, and then throws them away when they’ve no longer any use for them. Or perhaps it’s about both things at the same time, who’s to say? What I can say is that I was riveted by the whole thing from start to finish, and that this could, if not outright top Get Out, at least be considered as strong in very different ways.

The film follows Otis Haywood, Jr. (OJ for short) as he picks up the pieces of the family business that his father leaves behind when he passes suddenly from a freak accident. OJ is left entirely to his own devices to resume business with all his father's old contacts and start making money again unless he wants to just throw it all away and go work at McDonald's, and we somehow know OJ would never do that. He’s a silent cowboy type who enjoys working with animals, and so there really is no other way forward for him but to make some phone calls, mail some letters, and try and run Haywood’s Hollywood Horses Ranch all by himself. 

In fairness, though, he’s not completely alone, as he has his sister Em to help him take over the business side of things. You see, she’s the talker, and she’s pretty good as well. Despite this, their first gig doesn’t go so well, and the future of their endeavor quickly starts to look grim. Word travels fast, after all.

Luckily, a savior appears in the form of Ricky Park (just call ‘em Jupe,) former child star, who wishes to continue the arrangement that he had with OJ’s father: he’ll buy any slightly worn horse they have, for top dollar. Of course, OJ agrees, however he begins to have suspicions of just what Jupe is doing with all those horses, and that’s saying nothing of the strange air of unease that hangs in the air as of late, felt ever since Otis Senior’s death by mysterious falling debris. It’s even spooking the horses. All will be revealed, however, come the unveiling of Jupe’s new show, the “Star Lasso Experience!”

Head in the clouds

Now, I have to say I really enjoy this film’s script, and a big part of it is thanks to the many great characters on display here. We’ve got OJ, a personally-relatable ranchhand with a stoic exterior; his sister, someone who's out there putting in work doing just about anything and everything she can to make a name for herself in Hollywood; Angel, a Geek Squad-esque minimum-wage employee with a bad attitude and a broken heart (who also happens to have a strong interest in conspiracy theories and the supernatural;) and of course, there’s Jupe himself. Jupe is a big part of this film’s appeal for me, as so much attention was paid to avoid making him anything approaching a traditional “villain” per se despite the many ultimately reckless things he does in the film in the pursuit of stardom. The most obvious reason for this is that he has an obscenely traumatic backstory that provides the film with its most disturbing and talked-about scene: the bit where a chimp that Jupe worked with as a kid slaughters the cast of a sitcom in a rage brought on by a combination of flashing lights, popping balloons, and anxious eye contact, stopping to cruelly finish off a little girl by (offscreen) ripping her face off with his teeth. To make things worse, the chimp’s brains end up splattered all over Jupe before the incident is over thanks to the police. So it hardly even need be said: the dude’s had it rough, but the way he deals with his trauma is extremely unhealthy (he processes it through various pop culture parodies that apparently referenced the incident back when it was a public spectacle) and his takeaway from the experience ends up being entirely incorrect; namely, that he’s special in some way, possibly even chosen by God to tame an animal that man has yet to encounter... Ultimately, he’s a tragic, fascinating figure, and I appreciate the depth of his character.

As a film, Nope lands firmly in the horror-with-an-unobtrusive-vein-of-comedy category, like Peele’s Get Out, though this film doesn’t have much in the way of cutting satire like that one. I stress this because I felt Us really screwed that balance up, throwing the tone into disarray; a problem that is not present in this new film. Here the humor almost works more than anything as a way of injecting humanity into the film without diminishing its horror and, in fact, enhancing that horror by making us actually care about our ragtag group of misfits.

To state simply that the film is well-directed fails to do justice to what Peele ends up achieving. The whole production feels like this delicate, open-air ballet of slick camera moves, subtle sound design, and gorgeous wide-angle photography that wouldn’t be out of place in any old Western flick. And the pacing, the editing… every element is given plenty of room to breathe. I counted several instances where the way the score and the sound design interacted with one another would catch my attention, and I would find myself just floored at the coordination that it all must have taken in order for every element to come together this beautifully. And lest you think he can only play single scattered notes and make unholy noise, Michael Abels pulls out the most triumphant slice of Morricone-inspired melodic scoring you’ll ever hear for the end credits; it gives me butterflies every time. Supplementing all of that is probably Peele’s most interesting and obscure mix of licensed music yet, with more than a few that I’m keen on hearing in the context of their original albums at some point later on down the line. Unfortunately, the man still simply cannot say no to blatantly referencing his forefathers, and at least one inexcusably cringeworthy moment bears this out, but come on: what’s two seconds in a two-hour film, really?

"I will set thee as a gazingstock."

The big takeaway from this film ends up being that Peele can stage a horror setpiece unlike any of his contemporaries, whether small scale or IMAX, and he makes them stick thanks to striking and imaginative imagery. Early in the film, the image of coins and keys falling from the sky and embedding themselves into various squishy objects acts as an early hook. It's like a visual question mark that hangs over the opening half-hour or so. Something impossible that can't be explained; a "bad miracle" even. Then there’s Gordy’s aforementioned rampage, possibly the most disturbing thing Peele has ever cooked up for us, perhaps because it's so believable and very loosely based on real-life horror. It’s certainly something you won’t be able to forget for a while. And that's just two spoiler-free examples.

*spoiler alert*

But we all know what the real setpiece moments are: there’s the infamous “digestion” scene, with its extremely claustrophobic feel and stark cuts to black in between each shot, furthering the sense of disorientation on the audience’s behalf; but can it really compete with the “raining blood” scene, where Jean Jacket angrily regurgitates the half-digested remains of the Star Lasso Experience audience onto the Haywoods' property, seemingly aware that it was they who set out the horse decoy that has become stuck in its throat? But I'll do you one further: can either of those terrifying moments truly compare to the moment where Jean Jacket reveals its true, biblical form? (Notice how its ultimate form throws up something cubic when it senses prey? Doesn’t it almost resemble a camera shutter?)

*end of spoilers*

The big thing that people will probably know about Nope from the marketing hype around the film is that it's a new take on old sci-fi tropes, and taken just on those terms alone, I think the film is a success. Its big million-dollar idea was enough to impress on its own, but that was obviously not enough for Peele, who surrounds it with a rich variety of other filmmaking hooks that you just wouldn’t get in other, high concept-style Hollywood films. I won’t spoil what the creature or creatures are that the protagonists are up against, but I will say that it or they are unquestionably effective. It or they somehow manage to both reference classic sci-fi while also reimaging it in a totally new way. And it’s not even just the creature itself: a big part of the reason it's so spooky is the way Peele frames it in every shot, the way he shows so little, and the way that he keeps finding ways to demonstrate its (or their) movement without actually revealing it (or they) at all. It’s almost like the dance I’m trying to do right now in order to avoid spoiling anything. Overall, while I find the way it’s (or they’re) dealt with to be a bit done to death at this point, I can’t argue that it works and provides a nice satisfying cap to a film that can please a crowd while tricking them into watching a deep, allegorical film about any number of controversial subjects.

Don't look now

And with that, let’s get into all the juicy subtext this film juggles, and why I think it’s probably Peele’s best yet, if not necessarily his most inspired. There are any number of aspects to consider, and only when you put them all together do you really see what he was going for. But those who are into easy answers won’t find any here. This isn’t as direct as something like Get Out, and it isn’t as obviously allegorical as something like Us. Here, I get more of a Stanley Kubrick vibe ala Eyes Wide Shut or something, where the meaning is much more elusive and far from concise, requiring a detailed analysis of each major theme.

*spoiler alert* 

The thing that most everyone can agree on is that Nope is heavily concerned with spectacles and the making thereof, especially in the public sphere. You know, media circuses and the like. Things that would go away if only people would look away, but yet they just can’t help themselves. This can be seen most obviously with the behavior of Jean Jacket, where it only eats those who look at it, yet no one can tear their damn eyes off of it whenever it's around.

A related question: why is it easier for humans to process trauma once it’s been turned into entertainment, whether we’re talking cracking jokes to hide a wounded interior or ravenously devouring the details of the latest matricide the way one might read a pop novel so that you never have to consider the hard ugly truths about humanity that such moments elucidate? We see a great example in the film when Jupe reveals that he let a couple sleep in his Gordy’s Home shrine for a massive amount of money, not long before he begins to explain what happened that day that Gordy flipped out and can only express it in references to comedy programs that referenced the incident in jest. So there’s some genuine psychology going on in this film, and it’s intriguing to boot.

And then there’s the Hollywood angle. Now, this is not exactly subtle stuff, seeing as Jean Jacket is literally a meat grinder, but I don’t mind as it rings true nonetheless. This is where a lot of thematic content dealing with wild animals and respecting them comes into play, because of the way Hollywood often exploits these animals. Even the act of simply replacing live animals with CG is viewed as an act of control by a stubborn system that would rather cut you out entirely if you’re not willing to play by their rules. But it isn’t just animals either; one of the first images in the film is of a black man riding a horse, which is popularly considered the first ever moving image, and the film points out that pretty much no one knows this man’s name, despite the fact that he could be considered the very first stuntman there ever was. The implication is that Hollywood has a long history of exploiting minorities and their talents just as much as it has its animal actors, without even doing them the decency of memorializing their contributions. I also find it interesting that Jupe considers Jean Jacket to be part of a race of so-called “viewers” who endlessly consume everything in their path.

Ultimately though, all of these ideas lead to the final one, the mother of all themes: Manifest Destiny (see also that documentary about The Shining that's full of shit.) You see, Nope is really about America, and its old habit of consuming other cultures and peoples and assimilating them into their own by way of attempting to “civilize” them. It’s a story about imperialism then, above all else, and our country’s bloody history of trying and failing to control people that were better off respected as equals, relying on a mutual agreement rather than exploitative tricks and threats of violence. 

*end of spoilers* 

"Five stars, Angel."

This is a film about all of these things, and probably more to tell you the truth. Nope is a mature enough work of storytelling that it seems to encourage multiple interpretations without ever coming across as frustrating or incomplete, and as a result, it sticks around in the memory banks much longer than his previous work, driven by the multitudes of questions you’ll have after a first viewing. And so whether it’s by the measure of its screenplay, Peele’s direction, the many incredible performances from industry vets like Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Oz Perkins, etc, or even the incredible sound design and empathetic score, Nope is Peele’s most accomplished cinematic creation yet. Sure, it doesn’t have the more emotional, autobiographical angle that Get Out did, but it contributes lots of other things in the absence of such. Whereas that film was intimate, Nope is blown up and writ large on the biggest screens in the world, while somehow losing none of its power or quality in the process.