Nope (2022) is Jordan Peele’s most entertaining film yet. It may not feature the complex social commentary of his earlier films, but it is a lot more fun. Nope is also the first time that Peele ventures beyond the boundaries of the traditional horror film to fuse elements of the Western and Science Fiction film with that of horror. The result is as varied as its kick ass soundtrack (I love the Exuma music cue) though nonetheless highly entertaining.
Peele draws on sources as diverse as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977), Hearts Of The West (1975), Signs (2002) and the pilot episode, Encounter At Farpoint (1987), of Star Trek: The Next Generation to tell his tale of a couple of siblings out to prove a UFO sighting over their late father’s ranch is real. Essentially there are two films happening in Nope. One is about Daniel Kaluuya and Kate Palmer trying to film an alien being and the other is about the behind the scenes perils of having an animal on a movie set. Peele truly excels at creating tension in the main plot regarding a UFO while the secondary plot line or concept represents a broadening of the director’s range.
What Peele offers in Nope in terms of science fiction may be engrossing and entertaining but it’s hardly original. Peele, like M. Night Shyamalan, relies so heavily on genre conventions and narrative gimmicks that his films rarely merit a second or third viewing. The aspects of Nope that deal with Kaluuya’s character “OJ” working on set or the horrors of the Gordy’s Home taping in 1996 are far more engaging on an intellectual and emotional level. “”OJ”‘s scenes on the set of a commercial pinpoint an inherent racism that is still systemic in the entertainment industry. The viewer can only look on as “OJ” endures micro-aggressions and humiliations with a learned stoicism.
The schadenfreude of watching “OJ” is later internalized within the narrative of Nope itself. Ricky Park (Steven Yeun) fetishizes his traumatic experiences on the set of Gordy’s Home to the extent that he is removed from them almost entirely and joins the audience of Nope as a fellow spectator. Both OJ’s and Ricky’s experiences, traumatic in different ways, are immortalized to some degree on film as well as within the larger scope of Nope itself.
For Peele Nope is a film about the necessity of a record of a harrowing event to the witness as well as the spectator. In Nope small communities form around these traumatic events caught on film that parallel the external community of the film’s audience at large. The sail ship like alien being provides this angle of Peele’s investigation into schadenfreude. However, the very nature of this plot thread is so fantastic that, unlike these other elements, it remains intangible and abstract to the viewer.
