Nope

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Keith David

Director: Jordan Peele

Writer: Jordan Peele

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We live in a world where our lived experience of reality has come to be largely shaped by what we see on our screens, what French philosopher Guy Debord famously described as a society of the spectacle. He wrote, “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”. We are each of us compulsively drawn to spectacle, to images that compel us, and with the ascent of mass media, digital media, and social media, the images created by their representations of reality have come to usurp, or at the very least distort, our very conception of reality itself. We are no longer active agents in the world, but witnesses to it; to exist is to observe and be observed, and to live isn’t to be but to have. This idea was central to Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, but in that instance it wasn’t done very well. The theme of spectacle and how it perverts our relationships with ourselves, each other, and our reality is depicted with far greater insight in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. Spectacle is also a core tenet of Jordan Peele’s Nope, a spectacle unto itself that illustrates what it is to live in a world of all-consuming spectacle where none of us are able to look away.

The third and most ambitious work in Peele’s filmography thus far, Nope is also the most difficult of his films to pin down. It is more straightforward narratively speaking than either Get Out or Us, telling a story that is of itself rather than a pronounced allegory, and yet it doesn’t really telegraph what the story is actually about; you have to work for it. Race and racism do inform the themes, as they do in Peele’s previous titles, but they are not central to what the story is saying, making it a departure for the filmmaker in that regard. The film is, as is Peele’s wont, a work of genre cinema as a sci-fi picture with elements of horror, yet in terms of tone, Nope doesn’t quite play as the sci-fi horror that the adverts made it out to be. Peele made his start in sketch comedy before taking up the mantle of prestige filmmaker and while Get Out and Us both clearly have satirical leanings, Nope is, I would say, the first of his films to be outright comical. Which is to say that the themes and tone of Nope defy easy categorisation; it is a blockbuster that is at once satirical and sincere, entertaining to watch and yet perplexing in ways that I’m still struggling to put into words.

The movie is primarily about OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em Haywood (Keke Palmer) who are trying to keep their family business afloat after the sudden death of their father Otis (Keith David). It was OJ who witnessed his death as he was struck by a mysterious object from above. Where that object came from, nobody can figure out. The Haywoods’ business is in training and handling horses for film productions, a trade that’s already in decline what with the rise of digital effects. Thus OJ has to resort to selling some of the horses to Jupe (Steven Yeun), a child-actor-turned-entrepreneur who runs a Western theme park. Like OJ and Em, Jupe has some traumas of his own and he has since learnt how to make a buck out of the deal. And that’s what the brother and sister think to do when they discover that something that looks an awful lot like a flying saucer is stalking their ranch and poaching their horses. They concoct a plan to get a photo of the UFO, a high-quality one that’ll set them apart from the conspiracy nut-jobs turning up with blurry smudges, and sell it to the whoever is willing to pay them a fortune. To that end, they will need the help of the local electronics store helper Angel (Brandon Perea) to set up some security cameras for them and famed cinematographer Antlers (Michael Wincott) to help capture the money shot.

Images and the meanings they carry are at the forefront of the film’s preoccupations. As a filmmaker, Peele has always been deliberate in his use of images, particularly in the way they so often evoke and are tied to facets of Black history in America (think, for instance, of how the hero in Get Out escapes in the end by picking some cotton). Here, he takes it a step further with a movie that not only draws on the power of images but is constantly interrogating their meaning. The idea is raised on the outset with the very image where it (by which I mean cinema) all started. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge used 12 cameras to capture the image of a horse as it galloped past them. When assembled and viewed in sequence, these images gave the illusion of movement, giving birth to the moving picture. Today, you can barely open a textbook on film history without reading Muybridge’s name, and even the name of the horse, Sallie Gardner, has been documented, but the identity of the African-American jockey in the picture has been lost to us. In the movie, Em and OJ claim to be descendants of the jockey, who went on to form the Haywood ranch, the only Black-owned horse trainers in Hollywood. By drawing our attention to this image in this context, Peele makes a point about the history of Black erasure in cinema, but then goes on to jump into larger questions of the power and weight of such images.

Now, when Debord wrote his thesis on spectacle, it wasn’t so much the technology with which we are able to filter reality that he opposed than it was the commodification of it all, and that too is an idea that Peele grapples with. It’s there in the way these characters go about their actions and understand their realities. When OJ and Em set to try and capture actual, tangible proof of alien existence, there is an excitement for the endeavour and an understanding of the effort and craft that will be required, but their interest lies not in the discovery itself and certainly not in any sense of duty towards the protection of humanity from a potential threat. They’re in it for the payday, just like Jupe, who has made his living commodifying an episode from his past, one so deeply traumatic that the only way he can even talk about it is by referring to the SNL sketch that came out shortly after. There is an inescapable sense of uneasiness throughout the movie, and one gets the sense that it is an extension of Peele himself. There has always been this tension in moviemaking as an industry, particularly on a blockbuster level, where movies are works of art that also exist to make money. A spectacle cannot exist without an audience, which is to say that a film on this level cannot get made unless the studio thinks it can sell it, and that awareness is ever present in Nope.

Yet the movie is a blast, one made with a level of craftsmanship indicative of a love for the medium. Shot in IMAX, the film earns the label of spectacle in the truest sense. The word awesome comes to mind, but not in its contemporary usage. To be struck with awe is to be overcome with an inspired sensation of both fear and wonder; Nope is awesome in the way that 2001: A Space Odyssey is. It is mesmerising and unnerving at once, with its vast empty landscapes and deafening silences speaking towards some entity both great and terrifying that lurks behind the shadows and beyond the clouds. Had Close Encounters of the Third Kind been a horror movie, it might have looked something like this. Kaluuya with his introverted charisma, Palmer with her uncontainable energy, and Yeun with his deeply haunting presence, are all terrific, but the magic is in how Peele captures them, with that same sense of awe that Spielberg consistently manages to inspire in his performers. Even with its bleakness and cynicism, this is a heartfelt film; for all the ambivalence it reserves for movies as a moneymaking product, it is still itself a shining work of pure cinema. Even if I’m still not sure I fully got this movie, and I sure as hell haven’t managed to make sense of it in my writing, I never for a second doubted it.

★★★★★