Nope (2022)

directed by Jordan Peele

USA/Japan/Canada

130 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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It took me a long time to get around to watching this - its theatrical run was while covid was even more of a significant risk than it is now - and I had to contend with rampant spoilers in the meantime. I spent a lot of time scrolling really fast past gifsets. I thought I had seen some things about it that constituted major spoilers, but as it turned out I had done something that I don't know if everybody else does or just me: I'd seen very tiny details from a film and constructed a whole story around them in my head almost unconsciously, leading me to believe I knew the plot, when in reality the actual film was totally different. This is one of those movies where reading about it pales in comparison to seeing it, so I'm going to discuss spoilers freely and recommend that you skip all this and just watch the thing. I also must say: I used to live around this part of California and it kind of is just like that. I would not at all be surprised if there were aliens living out there.

We kind of "cold open" into Daniel Kaluuya's character, OJ, witnessing his father's death in front of him in circumstances that are almost impossible to explain. A nickel, apparently shot at high velocity, embeds itself in his brain, killing him. We also see a house key embedded in the side of one of his horses, the implication being that some extremely high-speed hail of small objects fell over the ranch the night OJ's father died. This is a bizarre occurrence and a perfect way to start off the film, because it doesn't actually reveal anything about the plot or the creature that will come into play later, but still primes us for something utterly strange and new.

I think Kaluuya does an incredible job playing his character for the simple fact that there's a palpable sense of him being a different person before his father's death and after it. And when I say "before", I mean in the literal two or three lines of dialogue he has at the beginning of the film. It's nothing short of impressive how he manages to convey such a change in personality that even though I only saw his "before" self for a very scant amount of time, I was still conscious throughout the rest of the film that the version of him I was watching seemed different. His performance is subtly physical and he conveys the sense of somebody who is uncomfortable in the public eye, somebody more suited to his horse ranch, to the solitude of being with his own family, with his horses. Keke Palmer as his sister, Emerald, is almost the exact opposite, but her performance is just as good, she's so cool and easygoing that it feels like there's no wall between the viewer and Emerald as a person.

This is a movie about cycles of consumption. It's about seeing and being seen. Nothing embodies this better than Steven Yeun's character, Jupiter. A former child actor, he sets up an apparently successful Old West-style theme park experience in the California desert with his wife and children. But in the past, in his role on a fictional late-'90s sitcom called "Gordy's Home", he was witness to an incredibly disturbing trauma that should sound at least somewhat familiar because it is taken from a real-life event that I think probably lives rent-free in the brain of everyone who's read about it. Gordy was a chimpanzee, and as Jupiter tells it, one day one of the chimp actors portraying him "reached his limit". Jupiter does not go into the gore in his own recollections, but we see in flashbacks - and we know from real life - that this was nothing less than total carnage, leaving a woman permanently disfigured, and possibly more people dead in the fictional account of the event. We see Jupiter hiding under a table, watching everything, probably eleven years old at most. And we see how this shaped his life to come.

I don't think I've ever felt like I could understand the psychology of a character more, not by having it explained to me but simply by their actions, than I did with Jupiter. A word repeated throughout this film is spectacle. Jupiter constructs his entire life around being the spectacle, taking what he witnessed and internalizing it. Early on in the film, he tells Emerald about how the Gordy's Home incident was made into a Saturday Night Live sketch, and he tells her with reverence - not a hint of bitterness, not a hint of trauma, it is genuinely the highest honor to him that his ordeal has been turned into comedy fodder. Because it keeps him in the spotlight. As long as what happened to him is consumable, he doesn't have to look directly at it. He can instead frame it as the spectacle. He becomes the spectacle as a defense mechanism, because if he makes himself into something to be consumed, he is immortal as long as there are people to consume him. But it can't last forever. You can beg and plead to be seen, to be looked at, but as we'll see repeatedly throughout Nope, you can never, ever be the one doing the looking. Jupiter tells the SNL story while sitting in front of a commemorative T-shirt from Cape Canaveral, which of course includes the Challenger on its list of shuttles.

Race is not absent from this movie's concept of who is being seen and who is seeing. In fact, I think it's at the center. I know there are probably elements here that I'm not even aware of because I'm viewing this as a white person. Nope builds itself around a sequence of images strung together by Eadweard Muybridge of a horse being ridden by a jockey, often hailed as the first motion picture (the images shown in the film are not his first horse film, but a later, presumably better-looking sequence). The jockey - a Black man - is lost to history, almost definitely intentionally. In Nope, an identity for him is created, a Bahamian named Haywood, and OJ and Emerald's family are his descendants. So this is not only a movie about movies, about seeing, about consuming and being consumed - it is inherently a movie about the Black experience of being consumed. The story is the same from before the beginning of Hollywood through to today: white audiences will eat up simulated Blackness, will go wild for stories about cannibals in the jungle and caricatures of everything they fear about Blackness, but should that Blackness look back, should they be confronted, everything becomes chaos.

This is represented in the Viewer. A creature that consumes everything that beholds it, a giant eye (or what looks like an eye) scanning the landscape for what it perceives as encroachments upon its territory. By its very existence it is looking, but if you look back, it devours you.

The absolute genius of this is that not only is it an allegory for media consumption and race in Western filmmaking, it is also a deeply scary movie. It is horrific in a different way from Us or Get Out, in that its horror is actually, legitimately not of this world. It's also drastically less humorous: Peele's previous two films were similarly allegorical and serious, but there were moments of levity in them to be sure. Nope is practically a vacuum of humor (although that TMZ guy eating shit on the bike was pretty funny). The Viewer is really just ghastly: this unknowable, massive thing that watches you and refuses to be watched in turn, scooping people up whole and then flying around broadcasting their screams as they're being consumed alive. It's ghastly as an entity and it's also ghastly because nothing I just said about it couldn't technically be said about the machinations of the movie industry when you're an actor of color.

This is basically a perfect movie. If I had to find anything at all I disliked about it - and this really is the smallest thing - the interstitial title cards bothered me. They looked stock somehow, like a template that comes with a video editing software or something. Apart from that, it nails everything it tries to do. Seeing the Viewer unfold to its full, nearly incomprehensible form was breathtaking. OJ's final ride, with the best use (I guess one of the only uses) of Exuma ever put to film. Emerald's Akira slide (I cheered). And when he thinks he's not coming back, OJ's "I'm watching you" gesture to Emerald is deeply, deeply meaningful: In a world where everyone begs to be seen, where everyone is concerned with seeing the latest spectacle and becoming the spectacle themselves, in a "look at me" world, with that gesture he's saying "I'm looking only at you". Not "see me", not "I want to be seen". "I see you".