In 1954, Alfred Hitchcock made a movie that implicated its’ audience in the act of watching it, that directly cast the viewers as voyeurs, spying, as its’ main character does, on people and their actions non-consensually. It subtly questioned the psychology behind our desire to look at things, to watch; especially that which is discreet or unusual, that which we shouldn’t be attracted by. The film was Rear Window, and so pervasive was this notion about it, that it is the most cited piece in Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” -the one where the “male gaze” theory comes from.
The most glaring influence on Nope, the new movie from Jordan Peele, sometimes acclaimed a modern Hitchcock himself, is the work of Steven Spielberg and early M. Night Shyamalan; and yet Rear Window was perhaps most often on my mind while watching it. Because this movie too is about our desire to watch, but not only that -to exploit, to sensationalize what we watch. To capture those things from which we can’t look away and in so doing, immortalize them. That’s what the movies do, right?
Jordan Peele is one of the few filmmakers in the modern Hollywood industry willing and able to be bold, not just in his narrative but his thematic ideas -while still turning out products that work as general entertainment. It’s fast made him one of the most compelling, provocative figures in the movie industry. Such conversation pieces his films are -they linger in the mind so well. And Nope maybe most aptly captures that thrilling quality, even as it makes turns that won’t agree with everybody. It is not a simple film by any means. But it sure is a wild one.
Peele, like Hitchcock, targets his audience in his exploration of the theme of spectation, but also himself and more openly, film as a medium -which is an intimate and vital part of Nope down to its’ core essence. Its’ lead characters are supposedly the descendants of the man featured in Eadweard Muybridge’s galloping horse prints -one of the first and most famous early experiments in motion picture development. They run a ranch outside of Hollywood where they keep and train horses for use in movies and television, a business they have inherited from their recently (and mysteriously) deceased father (Keith David). An early scene sees them on the set of a commercial, where an irresponsible cameraman gets his lens too close to the horse Lucky’s eye, resulting in him being spooked and nearly injuring some of the crew. An earlier scene set in 1996 gives a glimpse into the carnage on another Hollywood set that had likewise failed to account for the dangers of employing an animal for entertainment. Out of both of these incidents a key lesson is not learned.
Sold as a movie about extraterrestrials, Nope is, in the classic vein of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Signs, more about the human fixation with aliens than the aliens themselves, and it is directly tied in with what we see of showbiz animals. Our need to exploit the strange for profit and spectacle is the driving force at play. Not long after O.J. Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) spots a flying saucer, his sister Em (Keke Palmer) determines that capturing it on film is the solution to their financial problems –people will pay handsomely for clear evidence of UFOs. But in their and others attempts to document the otherworldly entity, only terror can come –because this thing, whatever it is, does not want to be seen.
Peele’s lambasting of Hollywood’s irresistible scopophilia comes both overt and with subtlety. A chief character is a cinematographer who just can’t not point his camera at things -similarly a TMZ scout, even to the end is concerned primarily with getting a picture of this alien. The film even opens with a Biblical passage about spectacle and chaos. Alongside these are darker notes: the cameras in an empty TV studio still rolling through violence, and for that matter, everything to do with Steven Yeun’s Jupe Park, a former child star and quietly the most disturbing character Yeun has played since Burning. This is a man who could never let go of the traumatic incident he witnessed as a kid and so has chosen to milk its’ infamy well into adulthood to maintain a degree of his former fame. Because there will always be those eager to engage with that shocking story –a Saturday Night Live sketch to make light of it. Just as there will always be people watching film of predators gruesomely killing their prey. And look at the industry of true crime documentaries.
The point is that we have created figures like Jupe, and that’s a bit unsettling. And Peele knows he is by no means innocent of perpetuating imagery through film meant to draw on our morbid fascinations. There are a couple bleak sequences in this movie, all the more uncomfortable when confronted in this knowledge. We are made to sit in it, question it and its’ implications about human nature. That has been a recurring theme in Peele’s work and it’s captivating to see him wrestle with it in new ways.
Of course aesthetically he approaches the film in an old way, openly drawing on classic alien invasion pictures and Spielberg blockbusters. The films’ whole mood in its’ attitude towards the flying saucer brings to mind Close Encounters very sharply -the ranch looking out to an open California desert even evokes that same natural omnipresence of that climax at Devils Tower. There are a few notable allusions to Jaws dotted across the film -that kite tail as a signifier of the alien presence for example is a good one; and of all things Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is referenced subtly but distinctly as well. Cinema, being a major focus, is also the movies’ language -there are touchstones to Signs, The Day the Earth Stood Still, countless old westerns (Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher plays in the background of a scene to remind audiences of the black cowboy tradition), and even The Wizard of Oz to be found. This film is indebted to the legacy of cinema as much as it interrogates it, and Peele infuses his citations with an ample amount of his own personality. And he does well to remind us in a couple key sequences how good he is at laying out suspense -I think of one scene in a barn that plays cleverly with shapes and darkness. In these endeavours he is aided by the photographic expertise of Hoyte van Hoytema, who frames each critical moment with palpable anxiety.
The cast is great: reuniting with Kaluuya from Get Out proves exceptionally beneficial, the pair have such a strong dynamic together that shows through in his performance. Palmer leaves the greater impression though as the assertive, funny wild child of the siblings, not nearly as invested in the family business as her own enterprises and preoccupation with the UFO; a greater avatar for the movies’ themes of chasing grim spectacle could not be conceived. As with any a good alien invasion flick, there must be a paranoid conspiracy nut -here he’s a Fry’s Electronics salesman played by Brandon Perea, who plays him amusingly as the nearest audience surrogate. Michael Wincott gets a worthy showcase, and as before mentioned, Yeun’s performance is chilling.
The movie is called Nope. It is named for a meme created by black audiences, the movie’s only direct signifier of racialized coding, and seemingly has no other meaning. It is uttered just twice. Maybe it is a dare, maybe it is a prediction of audience expectation, maybe it is a subversion of that, maybe it is just an enigma. But it suggests something wrong, something bad. And we are drawn to it because it suggests that. You got us again Jordan Peele!
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