Jordan Peele’s Nope is a UFO story where characters aren’t concerned with killing an alien so much as capturing it on camera. In that regard, it’s an extraterrestrial thriller that feels very much in sync with our zeitgeist, one whose chief preoccupation revolves around our struggles to process singular, horrific happenings in an age when they are so swiftly commodified into something sellable, scrollable, and endlessly watchable.
Daniel Kaluuya plays OJ Haywood, Keke Palmer his sister Emerald. They’re the descendants of the Black jockey immortalized in Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion (1878), a man whose name (unlike the horse’s and its owner’s) has long been erased from history. The Haywood siblings own a ranch in Agua Dulce, where they train horses for film appearances. But business is drying up, and a neighbor—former child star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun)—wants to buy them out. That is until a flying saucer starts stalking the ranch; determined to record it and nail an Oprah-style “perfect shot,” OJ and Emerald set out to parlay the close encounter with the unknown into an unlikely route to fame and wealth.
Peele’s scope is arguably wider here than it was in Nope’s predecessors, Get Out (2017) and Us (2019). His third feature deals with a vast array of motifs, themes, and cultural and cinematic references, not to mention different storylines—some sketched more convincingly than others. Indeed, one may argue the film struggles to coalesce into a cogent, persuasive whole, as if it were distracted by its many detours and ideas. As Robert Daniels contends at Polygon, “Nope’s larger issue lies in the ways in which Peele’s script perpetually stops short of adding up all the moving parts into a whole.”
It feels as though Peele is stuck between trying to craft an entertaining blockbuster monster movie and wanting to carve out greater thematic depth from his fascinating premise. […] “Nope” is an idea more than a story. It’s a collection of individually captivating scenes, as opposed to an intriguing whole. It’s a handsome picture, but Peele is far too impressed with its handsomeness to work on populating it with fully felt characters.
Daniels’s suspicion finds an echo in Stephanie Zacharek’s TIME review, in which she argues that Nope, “enjoyable as a spectacle but conceptually barely thought through, is all over the place.”
Peele can’t take just one or two interesting ideas and follow their trail of complexity. He likes to layer ideas into lofty multitextured quilts—the problem is that his most compelling perceptions are often dropped only to be obscured by murkier ones. He has an eye for dazzling visuals, but it seems he comes up with the visuals first and tries to hook ideas to them later. […] In “Nope”—as in his last feature, the otherworldly horror film “Us”—he makes us believe he’s working up to some complex and powerful thesis only to switch gears every 20 minutes or so and jerk us in another direction. And to leave us, in the end, wondering what it all means.
There’s no denying the film’s diluted plotting, its many digressions and disparate narrative strands. But Nope does have a throughline, and that would be what the Ringer’s Adam Nayman calls “the idea of catharsis through entertainment,” something that Peele “doesn’t so much advocate as examine.”
It’s a thin line between profundity and pretentiousness, and by framing “Nope” with a Bible verse disparaging the voyeurism and exploitation of popular culture—“I will pelt you with filth, treat you with contempt, and make you a spectacle”—Peele perhaps falls on the wrong side of that boundary. Still, there’s something admirable about a director who thinks enough of his audience to confront (and even confuse) them instead of just cranking out virtuoso set pieces.
Bumptious as that Bible quote may seem, it speaks to the overarching critique Nope orbits around. As David Sims observes at The Atlantic, Peele is first and foremost interested in examining “why the easiest way to process horror these days is to turn it into breathtaking entertainment.” Nope, David Ehrlich echoes at IndieWire, is “a thoroughly modern popcorn movie for and about viewers who’ve been inundated with—and addicted to—21st century visions of real-life terror,” that rare blockbuster that “satisfies our morbid appetite for new horrors better than any multiplex offering in years, but only so that it can feed on our fatal inability to look away from them.”
Which is to say, as A.O. Scott suggests at The New York Times, that “the main target of [Nope’s] critique is also the principal object of its affection, which we might call—using a name that has lately become something of a fighting word—cinema.” And for a film that feels heavily indebted to Spielberg—Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are some of Peele’s key references—Nope “turns on an emphatic and explicit debunking of Spielberg’s most characteristic visual trope: the awe-struck upward gaze.” Indeed, the film weaponizes the “Spielberg Face” (a term judiciously dissected by video essayist Kevin B. Lee): in Nope, characters gaze skyward not in wonder but in fear, unable to look away even as they know the dangers involved.
More broadly, Scott’s remarks shed light on the kind of tension Nope radiates throughout: the film is, at once, committed to point out the shortcomings of mass media while also reveling in its power. As Justin Chang writes over at The L.A. Times,
“Nope” is a movie about the challenge of getting the perfect shot, an aim that Peele shares on a practical and artistic level—there’s no shortage of well-framed, jaw-dropping images—even as he cautions against it in the abstract. The four-letter title, which the characters mutter under their breath at moments of heightened anxiety, also functions as a kind of warning. In a sense, Peele wants to use a Hollywood genre template to mount a critique of Hollywood barbarism, to lay bare the callousness of an industry that grinds dreams into dust and exacts a lot of unseen collateral damage. And because the audience plays its part in this vicious cycle, Peele means to complicate the very act of watching, to suggest that it can have its moral costs as well as its undeniable pleasures.
This is also why pegging the film as less provocative or racially charged than its predecessors feels somewhat misguided. In Nope, Kambole Campbell perceptively notes at Empire, “the audience itself becomes a vast monster, demanding to be entertained by personal and historical trauma, commodified for their viewing pleasure.” And in distinguishing between the making of entertainment for such a ravenous beast—“bloodying its teeth with the spectacle of other people’s lives”—and the act of filmmaking for yourself,
…the mythmaking of the Haywood ranch dovetails with Peele tearing away classic cinematic imagery from white-supremacist, manifest-destiny roots. The director repurposes it as a spectacle of the more triumphant kind, framing Kaluuya as a cowboy in a bright-orange “The Scorpion King” crew hoodie. In defining such liberation he wrangles film and television production history as the Haywoods do horses, pulling in all of his favorite cinema and lovingly demolishing and rebuilding it. Nope is as much a celebration of what’s great about film as it is a parody of its monstrous tendencies.
But if Nope really is about “the crisis of looking,” as K. Austin Collins aptly dubs it in his Rolling Stone review, it’s a crisis that’s suffused in irony. After all,
“Nope” may be a horror movie in which the most damning thing you can do is to look—but the key to the movie’s conceit is in the irony in wanting to be seen: in which the Black descendants of a man whose name has been lost to movie history find themselves eager to be handed the reins of their own story and given a chance to tell it themselves, for once.
Anyone familiar with Peele’s oeuvre will know that issues around the ownership of images have long been at the forefront of his films. As Richard Brody argues at The New Yorker, Nope may offer its characters very little backstory, but that’s only because it continues a theme the director launched in his first two features: “the recognition of history—especially its hidden or suppressed aspects—as backstory. [...] Acknowledging and extending cinema’s legacy while also redressing its omissions and misrepresentations of history is the premise of Nope: the responsibility, the guilt, the danger, the ethical compromise of the cinematic gaze.”
And in a superb exegesis over at Seen, Kelli Weston traces the beginning of that project in Get Out, more specifically, in the way Peele’s debut made the liberation of its psychically trapped Black victims contingent on the disruption of white image-making. “What distinguishes Peele’s films from the prodigal crop he inspired is perspective,” as the director “aligns himself with his Black characters and, more precisely, Black audiences,” his films pivot on a desire “to evaluate Black people in their relationship to cinema and spectacle.” Nope continues the project:
Not unlike Chris in “Get Out,” [OJ and Emerald’s] efforts to capture footage of the UFO hovering above the family ranch implicate a troubled relationship with the camera’s glare—a desire to control the image rather than be controlled (or, more aptly, transformed) by it—a dynamic affirmed when OJ resolves that they must not look directly at the saucer: “Don’t look…don’t look…” Emerald whispers as she flees its crosshairs. Naturally, UFOs and alien invasions invite questions of colonialism, and Peele liberally references Hollywood westerns (cowboys and aliens) but, once again, at the center of this work is Black people looking. For among their many spoken and unspoken codes, the siblings share a faithful salute: two fingers pointed at their own eyes and then the other’s. I see you.
Far from Peele’s least confrontational film to date, Nope leaves audiences to wrestle with an uncomfortable question: how do we reconcile the knowledge that so many of today’s spectacles are built on exploitation and erasure with our enjoyment of them? And it does so while following a makeshift crew as they struggle to defend something as inalienable as a right to rescue one’s own story from oblivion.
The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about a topic in the wider film conversation.