There was a Bible verse at the beginning of Jordan Peele’s new film Nope. It was from Nahum, one of the Old Testament books. It said something about creating a spectacle out of the mess we lowly, sinful humans have made. But I choose not to see it. My religious upbringing was filled with spectacles of devotion, martyrdom, and crucifixions that I’d rather look away from.
Nope opens in the middle of a messy spectacle. There’s a bloody set of legs on what looks like a soundstage where they’d film a sitcom, stadium seating for a studio audience to sit although they are emptied, and a chimpanzee wearing a birthday hat. The chimp’s mouth and fingers are drenched in blood. He rests against the side of a chair as a lamp shade rolls on its axis toward a static POV camera. Then, the chimp whips his head toward us, staring at us, his next prey. But off to his side is a tennis shoe, standing straight up, balancing miraculously against every notion of gravity, and there’s the slightest drop of blood on it where the big toe would be. Put that aside for now.
OJ (played by Daniel Kaluuya) is the eldest son of a man named Otis (Keith David) who is the owner of Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, a horse-training ranch for, well, horses trained to be in Hollywood films. Otis, OJ, and OJ’s little sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) are descendants of the Bahamian man who was famously the first person ever captured in moving image, riding atop a horse. One day, OJ happens upon his father in the ring with a white horse named Ghost. OJ hears screams somewhere in the distance when, out of the clear blue sky, an assortment of metal objects come raining down, one of them striking Otis in the head. OJ rushes his father to the hospital, but it’s too late. A quarter has lodged into his brain via his empty and bloody eye socket where his eye ball used to be. The last we see of Otis is his shocked and mangled face. But put that aside for now too.
Since their father’s death six months ago, OJ and Emerald are having a tough time getting work for their horses, so they begin selling them to Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former television star who now runs an Old-West theme park of sorts near the Haywood ranch. He’s the television star whom the chimp was staring at while he sat under the prop table as his cast mates were slaughtered before his eyes, a child star of the 80s who has washed up into the deserted hills of California pimping out his image and trauma for ticket sales. And it’s selling quite well. So much so that fanatics of his pay upwards of fifty thousand dollars to spend the night in a secret room in Jupe’s office surrounded by memorabilia of bloodied costumes from that horrendous day on set, photos of Jupe as a boy, and in a glass case at the back of the room, that balancing shoe.
Back at the Haywood ranch, OJ and Emerald begin their close encounters with the third kind, and Peele doesn’t keep them secret. We immediately see the UFO, begin to pick up on its functions and tactics, and the siblings do what any sane person would do in the 21st century if they spotted proof of alien existence: try to get it on video so they can go viral and make money from it.
There’s a cooky, UFO-obsessed Best Buy employee, a self-serious director of photography, and a TMZ reporter all trying to get their shot of the flying saucer. There are flashbacks to OJ’s time with his father, learning the ways of horses and how they respond to fear. There are gruesome images of a crowd of Jupe’s fans being choked down by the saucer which we find out is actually some flying, alien animal scavenging this specific area for the last six months, lured by Jupe —who has been feeding it the horses he bought from OJ and Emerald—as part of his new carnival act. Jupe, the man who’s entire life has been defined by one gruesome spectacle of violence he witnessed as a child now profiting from another induced spectacle of violence he crafts for show in adulthood.
It’s another poignant metaphor from Peele. But the moment of clarity inside the film comes when OJ is trapped inside his truck as the alien being hovers above his home, regurgitating bloody waste that rains down from above. As the saucer floats over to where he’s parked, just above him, he opens his door, looks up at the mouth of the beast, then closes himself inside his car and mutters “nope” signifying that if one simply looks away, there is no spectacle to behold at all. Therein lies the answer to the riddle of the alien and possibly “spectacle” as a concept as well. It knows when it’s being looked at and it preys on those who look.
Throughout the film, OJ is constantly making sacrifices for the good of the family’s horses. He continues to care for them as though they were making him any money. He risks his life going back to the house to feed them after he and his sister were almost sucked up into the alien’s mouth. He’s attempting to preserve his family’s legacy, but this driving motivation seemed to be muted in the midst of a visually and sonically overwhelming film. We get very few moments between the siblings that ground their relationship in anything other than as alien-hunters. But the the idea finds its home at the very end of the film in Emerald when she leaves behind the Polaroids of the alien, the only proof that her and OJ’s plight is real, as she sees her brother whom she believed to be dead appear out of a flurry of dust. They have one another. They don’t need anything else.
If you can, see this film in IMAX, so you can see the spectacle of the contours and colors of Daniel Kaluuya’s face. It’s one of cinemas greatest additions of the last decade. See Keke Palmer’s frenetic energy radiate off the screen and almost materialize in front of you. These are perfectly awesome spectacles.
As I was settling into my seat, the previews began, and the first one was for the movie Till, an upcoming film about the aftermath of the lynching and brutal murder of Emmet Till. We know the story, we know of his mother’s insistence that the morgue photos of her son’s brutalized face and body be shown to the public. We’ve seen how that narrative recycles every time a black person is killed by police. We also see the way Britney Spears is going about things on her social media post-conservatorship. We can open Twitter and see people we know having sex with other people we know. We live in the time of the 24-hour news cycle. We can watch livestreams on twitch of disturbed young men slaughtering classrooms of innocent children, and we can watch the security footage of the thirty police officers standing by doing nothing except sanitizing their hands as the children scream in terror. All spectacles—for better or worse—to behold. But a spectacle’s wonder wanes. Whether by desensitization or plain boredom, wonder wanes, and if those who would exploit such spectacles know this, they are also incentivized to produce more brutality, more mess, more spectacular spectacle just to keep us watching, and after a certain point of inundation—when image becomes spectacle and spectacle becomes iconography, as are the famous photos of Emmet Till—we shouldn’t need such imagery any longer. That is not to say we aren’t living through unimaginable horror now, but our access and ability to behold such horror is unlike any other time in human history. The algorithmic machine that feeds on our spectatorship is much more advanced than our human ability to withstand looking and looking and looking.
In revealing flashbacks of Jupe’s, we see the events that lead to Gordy the chimpanzee’s murderous outburst. How a popping balloon set him off in fear and he terrorized the cast and studio audience at the sitcom taping. How Jupe watched from under the table as Gordy went on his rampage, but when the chimp finally noticed Jupe, the unexpected happened. Gordy approached Jupe in peace, reaching out his bloody knuckles to touch Jupe’s hand. Jupe extends his hand, seemingly an olive branch to Gordy who now seems calm. But then blood spatters onto the table cloth and Jupe’s shirt. A shot rings out. The chimp is dead and Jupe watches the chimp’s head explode. Horror on top of horror. Spectacle born of spectacle. And he’ll spend the rest of his life wondering why he kept looking, why he didn’t just look away, how that shoe was balancing all by itself.
Nope speaks to this sick fascination with looking. With making others look. And it’s a damn good statement.
A damn good statement. A damn good review.