First Contact
I saw Jordan Peele’s latest film NOPE this weekend and absolutely loved it. It’s one of these movies that stuck so deep in my head that I just want to talk about it with everyone and read every review and piece of analysis I can find. Unfortunately, the first thing most people have said to me about NOPE is that they heard it isn’t that good and there isn’t a single review I’ve read that touches on the aspects of the film that excited me the most. So, given that NOPE is a film all about looking, this Second Look is filled with all the things I wish people were saying about the film. Advance warning that what follows is entirely made up of spoilers and this is a film that I think greatly benefits from a dry watch so if you haven’t seen NOPE, go watch it and then read this after!
Second Sight
Let’s start with race because that’s what Jordan Peele is most known for cleverly incorporating into his films. At first glance, the racial themes are not as prominent in NOPE as in Peele’s previous films, but at second glance they are just as present and poignant as ever:
NOPE follows the Haywood family, owners of Haywood Hollywood Horses and the ancestors of the first “actor, stuntman, and animal wrangler,” an unidentified Black jockey depicted in Eadweard Muybridge’s assembly of moving photographs. NOPE is about spectacle, and in particular the relationship of Black people to spectacle, how they observe and are observed and the power gained and lost in each position. Peele makes this very clear from the opening scenes: the Haywood’s claim to fame is that their ancestor was the first Black body depicted in motion. When Otis Haywood is killed by falling debris we are shown an arresting shot of his half-mutilated face, evoking the open-casket funeral of Emmet Till, a choice by his mother Mamie to make “the world… see what they did to my boy.” After Otis’s death, we’re shown the uneasy reaction of the white commercial crew when they’re introduced to Otis Jr. as “OJ,” alluding to the televised trial of OJ Simpson, a nationwide spectacle received very differently by Black and white audiences. In the eyes of the crew, the spectacular associations of OJ’s name gives his reserved nature an unpredictable and violent quality.
OJ and Em cope with their father’s death, it’s clear that they’re coming to terms with the precarity of their family’s position. Otis Haywood was a Black man with significant land and property holdings, as well as close industry connections. With a white patriarch, those things would easily pass on to the younger generation but the Haywood kids are immediately confronted with the difficulty of holding everything together as industry, neighbors, and a territorial alien all try to literally snatch it out from under them. Though OJ and Em react in different ways, the solution they come to together is to document the alien, to choreograph a visual spectacle that may be arresting enough to allow them to survive. When we zoom out from the narrative, we can see that Peele is using NOPE to think through the history murder of Black people by the State and society. When Philando Castile, George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice were being murdered, the only thing people knew to do was what Mamie Till did: document and disseminate, make their deaths into a spectacle, something that cannot be ignored in the hope that it will save the next person.
But there is danger in seeking spectacle. As OJ says of the alien, “it won’t eat you if you don’t look at it.” The quote is just as much about white supremacy as the danger of seeking spectacle and OJ understands the importance of keeping your head down, saying “nope” to staying alive in America, the central conflict with his outgoing sister Em. What the siblings realize is that to do more than survive, to win the day, you have to find a new way of looking, to keep one eye open and one eye closed.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
There’s more that I want to say than I can fit into the column (or have time to write) this week so I’m going to make this a two part review. If you haven’t seen NOPE yet, go do it now and I’ll see you back here next week where I un-Peele the rest of the film. 😉😉😉
[PART 2]
Last week when I ran out of space to talk about all the parts of Jordan Peele’s NOPE that I loved, I ended with the different ways of seeing the film’s characters adopt, either out of choice or necessity. Before I dive back in to wrap up my thoughts on this cinematic monster, a similar warning that this column is assembled entirely out of spoilers, so if you have yet to NOPE please do so before continuing.
The film, everyone says, is about spectacle, about seeing and being seen, watching, being looked at, and everything between. Two characters from the film, the young Jupe on the set of Gordy’s Home, and his co-star Mary Jo at the premiere of Star Lasso, have their vision slightly obstructed by sheer veils. Jupe hides under a sheer tablecloth during Gordy’s rampage and Mary Jo, who survived Gordy’s attack, wears a veiled hat to hide her disfigured face. The obvious symbolism here is that the characters’ perspectives are partially obscured or colored by their experience on the set of Gordy’s Home, and that certainly rings true with both characters confident in their safety in the presence of Jean Jacket. But veils also are a way of seeing without being seen: Jupe hides under the tablecloth because, until Gordy gets close, he can’t see behind the fabric, and Mary Jo is able to see from beneath her hat without revealing her face until Jean Jacket’s winds whip the veil away.
Jean Jacket is similarly veiled, for most of the movie it wraps its fabric-like body around itself into a saucer shape and even in its fully revealed form, its endlessly undulating body promises that there must be something more behind its gauzy green opening. Discussions of Jean Jacket’s body also invite comparison to cameras: in the opening credits of the film we are shown what looks like the interior of a camera with the film of the black jockey superimposed at the center. Later this is revealed to be an organ within Jean Jacket’s body and the square rhythmically flashing opening that Jean Jacket displays when unfurled is similarly camera-like, neither an eye or a mouth but seemingly both, an aperture.
And this is the beauty of an alien that is more metaphorically than biologically constructed: Jean Jacket is spectacle embodied, it wants to be observed and challenges viewers to really look at it, to understand it by way of looking. But in looking, the viewers are themselves captured, captivated, absorbed, and consumed by the spectacle. Jupe is taken by Jean Jacket because he is a man already consumed by spectacle, having built his entire life and family around it. Filmmaker Antlers is similarly taken, but not in a way that feels horrifying or non-consensual, but ecstatic. Antlers believes we are not worthy of the perfect shot and in swooping into Jean Jacket’s aperture with camera rolling gives himself over entirely into the spectacle he’s spent his life pursuing.
There is a lot in NOPE about seeing through cameras, symbolized primarily by one-eyed characters: The TMZ reporter wears a mirrored helmet with a single opening and the giant balloon that finally does Jean Jacket in shows Jupe winking, with one eye open and one eye closed. You could maybe read something moralistic into this, that Jupe and the TMZ reporter along with the Star Lasso audience are too busy looking through cameras to “really” see. But I like to think of this one-eyed sight as just another different way of seeing, one that can be good and bad.
The ultimate instance of this one-eyed camera imagery is in the Winkin’ Well, an attraction at Jupiter’s Claim where you can take a giant polaroid looking down a well. Emerald eventually uses the Winkin’ Well to capture the Oprah shot of Jean Jacket, cranking the well several times before finally succeeding. The one-eyed Winkin’ Well is essentially a gigantic film camera, with an aperture and flash at the end of a long lens-like well. Emerald must crank the wheel for each successive shot, like a manual film camera, and ends up with a sequence of images that advance through time, just like the images of her horse-riding ancestor. You even have the jockey of the cowboy Jupe balloon “riding” Jean Jacket, who is of course named after a horse. The final pop of the balloon, reflecting the flash of a camera and the Gordy’s Home balloons that set the entire plot moving, is the perfect pay-off to the film. Emerald’s effort to operate this huge and slow camera so romantically encapsulates the herculean effort of filmmaking. It’s the perfect shot.
There’s so many more thoughts I have about this film, like how characters are purposefully named so the humans can’t be distinguished from non-human and how the perspective of the camera is an eye itself and makes the audience it’s own character, even when taking the veiled perspective of Jupe or the bird’s-eye perspective of Jean Jacket. And even though NOPE stands for Not Of Planet Earth I’m convinced that Jean Jacket isn’t an alien at all but a sky-dwelling species that explains images of angels and ascension to heaven.
Jordan Peele is kind of an impressionist filmmaker in the way he takes different ideas and images and weaves them together into a work. Themes of animal agency, cinematography and Blackness all run throughout NOPE and commingle in surprising and thought provoking parallels. Oprah chimp-mauling victims rub elbows with the Flying Purple People Eater, the wacky waving inflatable tube man, and Corey Hart in ways that don’t directly make sense but make for a provocative watch. I think people may not like NOPE because they expect it to be one thing, an alien invasion flick or a monster movie or a meditation on the Black experience but it’s not just one thing. There aren’t easy moral themes that can be pulled out, or easy connections between everything because the audience has to work to build those connections themselves. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea but its certainly the kind of spectacle I can get behind!