Jordan Peele's Masterful Nope is a New Kind of Movie About the Film Industry
I don’t just write books: I LIVE them. For my 2009 debut The Big Rewind I endured hilarious decades of trauma and crushing failure just so that I would have something juicy and entertaining to write about.
Following Phish and Insane Clown Posse for 2013’s You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me didn’t just change the way I saw music, myself and the world: it damn near re-wired my circuitry.
When I was working on Weird Al: The Book, The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al, I saw everything through the prism of “Weird Al” Yankovic and when I was working on The Joy of Trash, I was obsessed with the concept of transcendent garbage.
I’m deep into writing The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about American movies about American movies so I am, predictably, obsessed with motion pictures about the film industry.
So when I learned that Academy Award-winning fright master Jordan Peele’s feverishly anticipated new film would be about space aliens and the movie industry I was overjoyed.
I think so much of Peele that I make a special point of putting on a nice shirt and seeing his new movies with my wife in a theater. That might not seem like much for a man who has been writing about film for a quarter century and has been praised by the likes of Roger Ebert.
But it’s important to remember that I am a weird hermit these days. I’m like Howard Hughes at the end but without money. I rarely leave my house. I seldom see new movies. I don’t interact with the public. My fingernails are now several feet long and I urinate in mason jars but that doesn’t really have anything to do with Nope.
In hindsight, I’m not sure this piece is an article about an important and provocative new film from an audacious contemporary master or a desperate cry for help. It’s probably a little of both!
Nope is indeed a movie about movies but it tackles the business in a fascinating and revelatory manner in part because it’s as concerned with the “business” part of show business as it is the “show” part.
The Haywood family, the heroes of Nope, can trace their roots in the film business to the very beginning, to when an ancestor served as the subject for what is widely considered the first motion picture, of a black jockey on a moving horse.
Over a century later Otis Haywood Senior (Keith David), son Otis (OJ) Jr (Daniel Kaluuya) and daughter Emerald (Keke Palmer) make a living training horses for movies, television and commercials.
OJ and Emerald are a study in contrasts. Emerald is the bubbly, ebullient saleswoman of the family, an inveterate performer who is always on. OJ, meanwhile, is all brooding intensity and laconic stoicism. He’s a man of few words for whom work is everything and everything is work.
He’s more comfortable with horses than human beings but after his father dies in a freak accident it falls upon OJ to step up and handle more of the business side of his family’s operation. This brings him into contact with hotshot cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) and Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yeun).
Ricky was once the star of a popular sitcom co-starring a chimpanzee who went crazy during filming and unleashed a bloody massacre the poor child actor was lucky to survive.
The more you know about animal actors, the more understandable the chimp’s rampage becomes. The chimp goes insane with violent, murderous rage but he spares Ricky because they’re both doomed to be mercilessly exploited by adults motivated exclusively by greed and self-interest.
Peele remains in total control of his material. The set-piece where the chimpanzee wreaks bloody havoc on his human tormentors is like a virtuoso short film, rich in atmosphere and inference but low on explicit gore.
The alien in Nope is ultimately just another animal looking for food and shelter; the parasitic Uber-capitalism of show-business is the real monster. It’s a measure of OJ’s quiet strength that he’s able to work in show-business without being corrupted by it.
Then one fateful day an unidentified flying object with a rapacious hunger for horses and other living things appears and the Haywoods embark on a quest to become the first filmmakers to film a close encounter of the alien variety.
They set out to make the Zapruder film of UFO sightings. Just as their ostensible ancestor was at the very forefront of cutting-edge motion picture technology, they want to be pioneers in documenting incontrovertible evidence that life exists on other planets and is keen on snuffing out lives here if that’s what it takes to survive.
On a fundamental level Nope is a story of survival and the desperate, extreme things animals of all stripes will do to stay alive and prevent obliteration, if only for the moment.
The UFO of Nope looks and moves like a conventional Unidentified Flying Object from a distance but is, in actuality, a Lovecraftian horror. Instead of metal and steel and engines, the beast from beyond has muscles and skin and flesh and mandibles to devour and crush.
Because the alien in Nope is an animal OJ understands it intuitively the same way that he understands horses. He wants to break the UFO the same way he can break a strong-willed and defiant horse.
To assist them in their bid to become revolutionary documentarians the siblings recruit the services of the aforementioned Antlers and Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), a tech-savvy employee at an electronics store.
They want to capture the ultimate spectacle and are willing to put their lives on the line for it. Nope is obsessed with how we process trauma and pain, how we transform the ugliness of real life into the hokey make believe of show-business.
Yuen has a great monologue when his character is asked about just barely surviving a brutal massacre and instead of talking about what was obviously the most agonizing, painful and traumatic experience of his life he talks about a Saturday Night Live sketch based on the incident in granular detail.
He talks about each cast member and who they played, saving his highest praise for Chris Kattan, who channeled Mango to play a chimpanzee intent on killing every human he sees.
This speaks to how we as a culture process collective and individual trauma: as fodder for five to eight minutes of mediocre sketch comedy to be mindlessly consumed and instantly forgotten.
That is not true of Nope. It’s not as immediately satisfying as Get Out or Us but it is a film of untold depth and richness. It’s an experience, not just a movie. There’s never been a movie about the film industry quite like Nope. We’ll likely never see the likes of it again. Peele is a true original and Nope marks a natural progression in his journey as a pop storyteller of the highest order.
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