'Nope' and the Act of Looking

[Major spoilers ahead for Nope]

Corporate entities like to talk about “consuming content.” We are the consumers, and they create the content. Critics and artists tend to bristle at the term “content.” Here’s what Oscar-winning writer, director, and producer Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water) had to say about “content” as well as “pipelines”:

However, “content” does provide a useful shorthand in the sense that when the masses have trampled the gates of who creates entertainment, there’s no shortage of venues for what constitutes entertainment. As recently as twenty years ago, the barriers were pretty well defined. You had movies in theaters and in video stores. You had TV shows on television and cable. You had music on the radio and on CDs. Yes, these elements were beginning to come online digitally, but largely through piracy, not through a legal marketplace. More importantly, these forms of entertainment went one way: from creators to consumers.

Jordan Peele’s third feature, Nope, is an incisive media critique about the age of “content” in which we live. While media theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman despaired of what the age of television was doing to American society, we now live in what could be deemed an age of hyper-television. All of the walls have broken down with streamers offering both movies and television with branches into YouTube, podcasts, etc. More importantly, in the age of social media, we have become both creator and consumer. Never before have we been inundated with so many images because we now have the means of production in our hands, yet also consume the images of others readily and without much thought.

For Peele, it is the unthinking consumption of images that becomes deeply troubling. It’s one thing to present ourselves to the world as we’d like to be seen, but it’s another when representation loses all meaning and everything turns to exploitation. Peele, one of the most thoughtful filmmakers working today, knows that exploitation is nothing new to filmmaking. What’s changed is that we’ve gone from simply exploiting animals to becoming the animal. We may be a predatory one, but once the camera has turned on us, we become no different than the horses who serve as chapter headings or the tragic chimp Gordy.

Eye in the Sky

The most potent symbol in Nope is what Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) calls “The Viewers.” What we’re initially led to believe is a flying saucer beaming up horses turns out not to be an alien spacecraft but an actual alien organism that looks like a giant eye. The eye is hungry, and more importantly, it only devours what looks at it (it needs, as we in the biz would call it, “engagement”). When it’s done feeding, it regurgitates its prey, showering the Earth with inedible objects and, in arguably the film’s most horrific image, a torrent of blood from its victims.

Siblings O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer), as a plan to save their family’s business, want to get a shot of the creature and sell it. The “Oprah” shot they call it (as all things here are cloaked in a media reference point, including the name of our hero, “O.J.”, a name that simply means “Otis Jr.” but is now laden with meaning completely independent from Otis Jr. except he’s a black man named “O.J.” in a post-O.J. Simpson Trial world). In this way, looking becomes an act of ownership. If the Haywoods get a good video of the creature, they can become rich. If the creature gets a good look at anything it perceives as organic, it will eat it.

But Peele keeps wanting us to pull one step back, to get as basic as possible. His opening image of Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion” is, like all motion pictures, a series of photographs, and “The Horse in Motion”, although some would quibble that since the images could not be projected, they did not count as “movies.” However, keep in mind, that what we’re talking about is the act of looking, and Peele isn’t trying to teach us about the history of Muybridge as he is about what it means to exploit an image. If you’re looking at a black man on a horse, what do you think? What does that image mean? In terms of personal stakes for the characters, it represents a history that’s about to be lost. If they can't save the ranch, they’ll lose their birthright. In terms of the film’s larger thematic resonance, it means that we’re telling ourselves different stories when we see an image. When we fail to think about where an image comes from and what it means to “consume” it, we are “The Viewers.” If we don’t respect where an image comes from and how it was created, we’re damned to repeat the same mistakes and systems of exploitation.

Jupiter’s Claim

The most fascinating sub-story in Nope belongs to Jupe and the chimp Gordy. The opening audio clues us in to a horrific kind of event involving a chimp, but the film slowly reveals what happened to Jupe and Gordy. In short, Jupe was a child star who now owns a Western-themed amusement park. He has also taken sight of the alien, and believes that he can harness it into an attraction as long as he keeps feeding it the Haywoods’ horses.

For Jupe, we have to rewind all the way back to his childhood and how his trauma becomes his doom. He was the star of a popular movie and a successful first season of a television show. Early in the second season, the chimp, Gordy, got scared when some balloons started popping under the hot lights, and attacked the cast. Jupe hid under the table and watched the whole thing. At the moment it looked like he could peacefully greet a calmed Gordy, security shot Gordy in the head with the animal’s blood splattering over young Jupe.

But cut to the present day, and Jupe, relaying this story, can’t tell it honestly. When relaying what happened to Emerald, Jupe simply talks about a Saturday Night Live sketch where they parodied the event. The media event has now superseded the brutal truth. The brutal truth is that an animal was mistreated, freaked out, ripped a young girl’s face off, and killed at least one actor before being shot in the head. The media image is a little SNL sketch that now serves as a shorthand for Jupe, who carries the dual burdens of feeling responsible (as people who experience trauma as children typically do) and trying to assuage his guilt with new entertainment.

It’s no mistake that Jupe’s amusement park, “Jupiter’s Claim”, is a testament not to the truth of the Old West but to the constructed image from movies and TV shows. It’s the Old West we made up in our minds because we didn’t want to reckon with the truth because the truth is complicated, and (in a foreshadowing of how the alien is eventually killed), tougher to digest. This carries over into Jupe’s personal life. He knows no one wants to hear the truth about what really happened on set that day. And yet the moment where he and Gordy almost touched hands has led Jupe to believe that he could have controlled the situation (My read and the read of others on the shoe standing on its toe is to note that this is Jupe’s memory and it’s deeply flawed; there’s no reason to trust that Gordy would have acted peacefully to young Jupe, but he’s constructed that image in his mind to justify his current actions of trying to control the alien).

Jupe, a child actor (arguably another form of exploitation), someone who lived his formative years in front of a camera and being looked at, only understands the construction of images as a way of giving people what they want. Compare that to O.J., who has also been in the entertainment industry since he was a kid, but it was behind the scenes working with horses. O.J. understands that the second you quit respecting an animal, things can go wrong very quickly. That’s why Jupe, his family, and his audience end up getting devoured by the alien while O.J. is smart enough to know you don’t look directly at the creature or think it can be tamed to perform.

An Honest Look

Perhaps the neatest trick Peele performs with Nope is to indict the audience without coming off like a hypocritical scold. It’s incredibly difficult for a filmmaker of all people to chastise others for making and watching videos. But where I think Peele takes umbrage is when we, like Jupe, make and consume these images mindlessly or in a way that prevents us from any kind of work or reckoning. If we’re swimming in an age of content where we take and make images, then we’ve created another kind of exploitation where we’re all on camera and no one thinks about the ramifications.

Peele, because he’s very good at his job, essentially argues two things: first, that there’s nothing inherently wrong with entertainment. Nope is thrilling, funny, adventurous, and pulls heavily from such cinematic landmarks as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Akira. It is a joy to watch, but like Peele’s previous movies, he doesn’t simply want to offer empty imagery. He wants us to think about what we’re watching and our culpability in systems of exploitation. The mechanics (consciousness transplants, the tethered, aliens) are supernatural, but they stand for immediate and real things.

So what’s the solution? How do the Haywoods avoid perpetuating the same system of exploitation? They have to see each other honestly and lovingly. If there’s one place where I think Nope falls short, it’s here simply because I don’t think the film does enough to cement O.J. and Emerald’s relationship. The siblings are clearly estranged with O.J. feeling like the burden of the ranch has fallen on him, especially after their father’s death, and Emerald, feeling like she was cut out from the business, has tried a multitude of other entertainment pursuits with her effervescent personality. The culmination of the movie has O.J. and Emerald teaming up to beat the alien, and in a moment that should be charged with meaning, they make the “I’m looking at you” sign, a way of saying, “I see you, and I got you.” But I don’t feel the film really gets there with that relationship. Others may feel differently.

Either way, that look is clearly the core signifier of the entire movie. When Emerald finally “captures” the creature, she does it with the camera in the well at Jupiter’s Claim, taking a series of still photographs, just like “The Horse in Motion,” except this time a Haywood is now behind the camera rather than being exploited in front of it. More importantly are the images that close out the movie. In its final moments, Emerald looks straight down the barrel of the camera. It’s a shot that has been done nowhere else in the movie, and if Peele chose to end his movie this way, it would be a damning statement on the audience. We, “The Viewers”, have been captured. If it were possible to put us on screen at that moment, that’s where we would be. We have gone from consumer to the consumed.

Instead, Peele goes one step further to a more hopeful image. Emerald is looking at O.J. on his horse. We’re back to a Black Haywood man on a horse, but the entire meaning has been changed. We took one image, “The Horse in Motion” and transformed it over the course of this story to make the rider heroic. In a world where a man like O.J. was relegated to either the background or the punchline, Nope says this is our hero. He is the strong, silent type like Gary Cooper in High Noon, but weighted in a world where Black men typically didn’t get to be depicted as heroic cowboys (even though they existed).

The genius of Nope is that in a film that’s all about how we fail to consider what images mean, Peele’s movie only works if you consider its imagery. He has made a picture loaded with symbolism and metaphor. It’s a movie that demands our mental engagement rather than just letting images wash over us with no thought to how they were made or where they come from. It’s not a mistake that the climax of the film is about making sure that the alien is captured with a hand crank camera rather than the ease of anything digital (and even that is too easy at the cinematographer (Michael Wincott) gets sucked up into the alien because he’s too obsessed with the Golden hour rather than simply getting the shot, hence the series of photographs from the well). Peele implores us that when we are compelled to look, we must look thoughtfully and honestly. Otherwise we’re just consuming content.

What I’m Watching

• Feel free to keep up with the films I’m watching by following me on Letterboxd.

• On the TV side, I watched Exhibit A (Netflix) and found it pretty compelling in terms of the junk science used to convict people. When you watch a docuseries like this, you can see yet again that the purpose of our justice system isn’t to achieve justice but to imprison people by any means necessary as a source of cheap labor that can be kept in a cycle of impoverishment and imprisonment.

• I also watched The G Word with Adam Conover. I agree with Conover’s politics, and I think the show is valuable insofar as looking at various government agencies and how they succeed or fail, but the format grates on me. I understand the need to make things “entertaining”, but I felt like I was watching Sesame Street for adults. The show also feels like a tonal mess where you have wacky gallows humor shining to Conover doing his super serious voice. Ultimately, it feels in line with stuff like The Movies That Made Us where the show runners won't address the audience like they’re adults who can understand serious things without being bored.

• Finally, I’m in the middle of Squid Game right now. I’ll have more thoughts when I finish it, but for now, I think it’s fantastic and worthy of all the acclaim it received.

What I’m Reading

• I’m currently in the middle of Jewish People, Jewish Thought by Robert M. Seltzer, a history book that I’m enjoying, but it’s a bit of a beast, so I’m slowly going making my way through it.

• I also read Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 1: Legacy by Dan Abnett, and it was a bit of a letdown. I know that the Guardians in the comics have their own convoluted legacies (as comics origins tend to be), but I far prefer what James Gunn and the recent video game did with the characters. Speaking of which…

What I’m Playing

• The Guardians of the Galaxy game for PlayStation 5 is terrific. The only reason I’m not making my way through it faster is I’m watching so many movies right now.