So, Jordan Peele’s Nope has confused the hell out of a lot of people, for understandable reasons. Few filmmakers would inspire an angry, frustrated tweetstorm from Logan Paul, wondering what the hell is going on in this movie. However, his confusion shouldn’t be read as a stand-in for what the average moviegoer’s — after all, how many of us have taken shots in the face from Floyd Mayweather? But it’s not the kind of film that makes things dramatically clear, though I’d argue it’s still plenty entertaining even without delving down into the subtext. It’s a movie that spends much of its time relying on subtle suggestions for the audience to piece together its grander meanings. It continues the descent into subtext that Peele began in Us, which now feels like a conscious reaction to how well put-together Get Out was. In the week or so since I saw the film, I’ve been having fun conversations with friends (online and otherwise, you know who you are, and thank you for talking with me about this), and honing a working theory of what exactly Nope is all about, at least in my own view. Yes, I know some of you are saying, this is every movie ever and you are a critic and this is your job, and you’re right. This silly prologue is a roundabout way to suggest that those who haven’t gone to check it out yet might want to double back and read my original review and, more forthrightly, say that there will be spoilers in this article.
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The most obvious reading of Nope is that it’s about man’s tenuous relationship to non-human intelligences and, fitting well into the tradition of the giant-monster movie, what one does when the assumption that man is “master of his domain” is challenged by either his hubris (witting or unwitting) or by the limits of his physiology. In contrast to some takes I’ve seen online about how Peele, in essence, demands the natural world bend to his dominance (which are genuinely brain-breaking in their inability to parse subtext), it’s key to remember that his leads aren’t poachers or big game hunters or slaughterhouse barons: they are horse trainers, stressing through action a humble attitude towards the animals they care for. They’re cognizant that an animal can kill you quick, wittingly or unwittingly, and as such, they maintain careful respect along with their curiosity, even when it comes to Jean Jacket. It’s when their advice is ignored (as the cast and crew do on the set of the movie Kaluuya is providing horses for at the start) or the animal nature of the creature is totally obscured by a false sense of security that’s aided by fictions (the Gordy debacle, though one could apply that to the film set as well – horses are cute, right?) that the worst strikes: The horse nearly punts an actress through the uprights, and the cast of a popular sitcom is maimed and mauled by both a chimp and SNL writers. It’s also important to remember that their aim isn’t to kill the creature, a la Jaws, but rather to capture it on film, to “prove the impossible.” Though it’s masked with a veneer of finance — getting this money will save the ranch — it’s also about proving to themselves and the world that they aren’t crazy and engaging in minor experiments and other acts of discovery to work out a thesis, a curiosity-centric impulse from a similar wellspring as Muybridge’s when he did those experiments. Jean Jacket’s accidental death is a fun play on the ending of Jaws, with the “shot” that ignites the gaseous insides of the creature’s maw coming from the souvenir camera inside the well, but the meaning would be the same even if it didn’t die.
It’s not the same as someone off camera plugging poor Gordy after his rampage, putting a creature out of its misery as a way of reasserting man’s control of its environment (ensuring safety, above all else). Still, they’re united in their effects on Jupe. Yuen’s storyline is one of the most outright bizarre to some folks, given that it only suggests the comparisons between the two rather than dragging them out. For all of his perceived personal failings, Jupe is a tragic figure: A product of Hollywood scraping at relevance and nostalgia after the Gordy incident upended his career. His office is both figuratively (in the case of the ever-present memorabilia of the other show he was in as a child being littered around his office) and literally (the Gordy room) a museum, and the only suggestions of him having any real success after his youth is a poster for a reality show about the Western-themed park he’s running with his family. His survival was pure luck, but I don’t think it gave him a “main character complex” any more than being a child actor would have. I see the pivotal fist bump as a genuinely sad reminder of Gordy’s essential natures: Terrified animal and emotional primate all at once. Simply because one took over at a moment doesn’t mean the other stopped existing. The experience of that day, of course, had psychological effects on him. Still, he’s not wholly defined by “trauma,” as one might be: he was famous, wishes to be famous again, and when he encounters Jean Jacket after it stole one of OJ’s horses, he figured he’d become famous once again — Oprah famous. But, as Peele would probably point out, the Gordy incident has been well-scarred over and replaced by a “spectacle”: A representation of reality through media that has superseded the actuality of the day’s events in Jupe’s mind. This is why he focuses so heavily on the minutiae of the SNL sketch in telling the Heywoods about it — what might have been a coping mechanism brought on by both the shock of that level of public exposure (and cruelty) and the emotional wounds of the experience.*
So, when he attempts to create an outdoor show at his tourist trap, it’s a reflection of how far he’s come from that terrible time on set, under the bloodstained table: He’s attempting to master the uncertain, to create an emotional experience for his audience that will wow and move them, while hoping that they manage to stop by the gift shops on their way out (his truly fucked-up choice is to involve his kids in the promotion of said event, by making them dress up as chimp-like aliens). This is foolhardy but understandable: He’s attempting to reclaim his place in the universe and impress folks once again, having lost the things that made him marketable when he was successful. His Achilles’ heel is his lack of experience with animal life and the fact that he doesn’t know that Jean Jacket isn’t a ship full of wandering E.T.s that he might be able to shake hands with and feed Reese’s Pieces to or that the circumstances of the phenomenon mean that putting on a show in which everyone has their eyes trained on it as it descends from the sky is like putting an audience of Beggin’ Strips in a little Lego coliseum for your beagle. Beyond all of that, though, Jupe is a manifestation of Peele’s nightmares, and not just in the now-viral tweet where he mentioned he once dreamed of a baby chimp attacking folks — the nightmares he has about being an artist in general. Jupe is an actor past his prime and has moved on to being a showman, a creator of spectacles, and his failures ultimately kill him (and his audiences) because of his ignorance and lack of experience. When clothed in that context, the film’s resolution becomes even funnier: An effigy of Jupe (so as to not distract from the horror of his death) meets Jean Jacket, and explodes inside of him: a metaphorical fist-bump that annihilates both.
So if Jupe represents Peele’s greatest nightmare as an artist — going from failed TV actor to desperate and involuntarily dangerous showman — the story of the Heywoods operates, in a way, as a hopeful counterpart. The Heywoods practically have cinema in their DNA, with their great-great-grandfather being the subject of Muybridge’s experiments: in essence, the first screen actor, up there with the workers leaving the factory in the Lumiere Brothers’ first works in the medium. Their transition to behind-the-scenes work is a less-perfect comparison to Peele’s autobiography, but I tend to see it, as well as the allusions to films like Buck and the Preacher and other Black westerns, as representing the lineage of Hollywood, Black and otherwise, and OJ’s nervousness at filling his father’s shoes mirroring an artist’s own self-conscious doubt that they’ll be able to continue making meaningful contributions to an art form that they love. When Jean Jacket reveals itself, the quest to capture it on camera becomes a mirror of the filmmaking process and the various technological methods in which they try to reflect forms of electronic distraction: Handy tools, obviously, but ones that are easy and obscure the truth of the process. Digital cameras don’t work (either by electronic failure or by ill-timed praying mantis), modern film cameras are ultimately too fragile, hand-cranked inventions, like the one that Holst develops, are also limited by their weaknesses, and it takes Emerald, in Hail Mary stroke of genius, and the well-bound camera to finally achieve “the impossible” and capture the spectacle on film. She, in essence, has become Muybridge, with the sequential stills slowly documenting Jean Jacket’s moves towards the balloon: back to basics in the most fundamental way, a step forward in both human knowledge of the cosmos done in the most elemental way.
When OJ, presumed dead, reappears at the end of the film, triumphant, on horseback, the shot works on three levels. First, it reveals immediate narrative relief — thank God he’s OK! — and provides the natural resolution to the story. Second, it fulfills his arc: He’s framed in a way mirroring how we are introduced to Otis Senior at the beginning of the film, and his evolution into the kind of man his father was is confirmed for us through this suggestion. But on a broader thematic level, he represents Peele’s transformation into the man behind the camera: a black filmmaker replacing Muybridge, filming a black man on a horse, but questions about the horse’s movement do not define the image: It is squarely focused on OJ as subject, with his personhood as the emotional locus. This is when Nope becomes transcendental and becomes Peele’s most interesting film, as well as his most, though obscured through fiction, autobiographical, and I’d also wager his most outright meaningful.
* This, of course, might explain the moment involving the suspended sneaker, which feels like a combo of high strangeness and the flashbulb-like nature of memory during traumatic events: Jupe sees the shoe and focuses on it, with its inherent impossibility adding an ephemeral terror to a violent moment. And the very fact that it’s a detail that only he would know, and take care to recreate in his showroom, reflects that it remains a fact that he can’t quite codify through fact or language, being a reminder of the event as it was.