The Möbius Strip Storytelling of NOPE
KNITTING
A flying saucer, a malevolent creature swallowing humans while hardly sighted, a monster whose fatal weakness is discovered almost by chance and then exploited to great effect.
Nope has, with good reasons, been compared to everything from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Jaws-in-space to Signs. Like Arrival, Nope’s mainframe may seem linear, but pieces within it are out of time, and its themes circle back on themselves to knit the whole, so you have to stand back to see the full pattern. Nope dissects American agitprop, Westerns, and filmmaking, becoming particularly pointed where all three mythologising forms intersect. Its opening scenes are film sets on a film set, two of many Matryoshka filming configurations throughout the film, as people watch each other, a creature, and themselves through old TV clips, camera viewfinders, news footage CCTV, and flashbacks. In many respects, it resembles Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell, an attempt at disentangling the knotty trues and outright lies of family, personal narrative, filmmaking, and the fictions all those weave, before concluding the very unravelling of those things necessarily creates more: a self-perpetuating loop which snarls around us all.
In growing degrees through his three very different features, Jordan Peele's interest in self-mythologising and how we – humans in general, Americans in particular – form narratives. These tales ensure our survival, as we teach children how to act, what to be afraid of, These stories consolidate power, as in political propaganda. These stories declare what has been, but the degree of accuracy should always be contested, and who is declaring should be interrogated: what is being told, but also what is being left out, and who does it serve?
TROJAN HORSE
Before it was de rigueur for influencers to transition to actors, athletes to turn reality show millionaires, sex tape stars to host talk shows, actors to run for President, sketch comedy performers to become Academy award-winning directors, etcetera etcetera, vice versa, there was OJ Simpson. Simpson won a Heisman the same year he had his first [uncredited] TV roles, and went on to trade on his sports prowess to star in pictures, one of the first and still most famous athletes-turned-actors.
One of the first interactions is between Kaluuya’s character and an older white actress-playing-an-actress. She asks his name, then widens her eyes and gapes at the Black man who replies "OJ" – reacting not to his two-syllable response but the historical weight she applies to those letters.
Minutes later there is catastrophe, and OJ is replaced, the event as much an excuse as reason for his dismissal. As he leaves the lot, a green-painted wooden horse with orange-tape-exes is wheeled through the backlot door, the better to replace OJ’s real animal with an artificial construct, the better to be replaced again in post-production.
In that scene is a seemingly-insignificant character with a couple lines, a bored Director of Photography who never once looks at his viewfinder. This DP will become a crucial character in later acts, until ultimately his decision to do what he knows damn well he shouldn't to ‘get the shot’ costs him his life. ‘Why didn't he just NOT LOOK!?’, we want to shout at the screen.
But we know why. Not looking is one of the oldest and hardest simple impossible tasks: it feels and maybe is superhuman to resist the desire. If you yell ‘don’t look!’ in a locker room, heads instinctively whip towards you, eyes involuntarily widen. Orpheus's inability not to look for just the duration of one walk cost him his love. In the Old Testament – a tome quoted at the very start of Nope – Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt through her inability to keep this simple command.
The Old Testament also contains one of the most famous accountings of a series of plagues: locusts and frogs and hailstones fall from the sky; water is turned to blood; farm animals die; sudden supernatural darkness falls; the Angel of Death kills firstborn children, but passes over those who have taken certain precautions.
TALISMANS
Anyone who has played sport or has an Italian grandma or has read enough literature or has stumbled over a peculiarly-shaped rock has a lucky item, a token, a symbol, a ritual they swear by. Nope pays special attention to the meaning we imbue our items with, and the strength they – and we – get from that assignment.
When OJ rides out to confront the monster, he wears his father’s crew sweatshirt from the set of The Scorpion King; a film he wryly notes replaced all its horses with camels, the same way his horse was replaced with a wooden form which could be transformed in post-production.
Most of Em's – short for Emerald, as in the city in The Wizard of Oz – fashion choices represent brands and bands who've challenged mainstream narratives the way she wants to; The Jesus Lizard, Prince, French boots popularised in the US by punk bands.
In the 'real' or at least most objectively-lensed depiction of Jupe's horror, much of the specifics are seen through a gauzy green tablecloth overhanging his hiding spot; a green scrap which is visually similar to an unfurling appendage of the movie's main monster in the final act.
‘Objectively lensed’ is a complicated phrase for the sitcom murder scene, which is shown from different perspectives throughout the film. The framing jumps between outside Jupe's vision, and Jupe's first-person POV; always clear which we are in, while giving us similar vision both times. Nope plays with point of view many times, moving from shots from a character’s perspective to a completely “neutral” shot which is only the audience’s. The editing of the perspective shifts make clear ‘who’ we are with, while the shifting itself keeps us off keel. Witness, for example, the camera in medium close-up on Em’ horrified face – which give us what she and Angel are experiencing – before switching to a medium reverse (point of view) looking at a window where torrential rain turns red, then switching to an exterior wide shot (audience only) where we see the house becoming soaked in falling blood.
The Haywood house is the main location, and it is loaded with talismans: vinyl records, photos of Otis Haywood Sr. and the debris which killed him, childhood ephemera of OJ and Em. The house’s decor includes posters of Sidney Poitier in Buck and the Preacher, a classic Western which both furthered and criticised American self-aggrandisement, a film which both utilised Poitier and Ruby Dee to further its own ends, and was invaluable in them creating their own success and making headway towards equality in the film industry and society. An equality not yet achieved but closer to us than it was before, closer than perhaps those involved in creating it could see, further perhaps than we can.
HEADLINES
What is our individual culpability in creating social monsters? What was the contribution of the public in the three ring circus which was OJ Simpson's court case? What is our responsibility as individuals and the whole when faced with something incomprehensible, fascinating, and terrible; something which grows only if we feed it?
As OJ Simpson's case was sensationalised by headlines and wannabe lookeeloos drove journalists to swarm lawyers like plagues of locusts, so do people flock to stories of death and ruin and potential creatures in Nope. A TMZ reporter shows up trying to make a buck, the harbinger of a swarm of journalists who flock to the ranch at the end, which is not unlike the way Em and OJ attempt to make their fortune off footage of a creature who doesn't like to be looked at. Angel descends upon the Haywood ranch until he is accepted, determined to get a piece of the action he had no part of, not unlike the locusts, not unlike scavengers who collected scrap from the Columbia and Challenger shuttle disasters in order to sell off other’s misfortune for their gain.
That last incident referenced implicitly in two scenes where debris from house keys to an In-God-We-Trust-side-up nickel fall, and explicitly in one of Jupe's mini-museum posters. Everything loops in on itself, the nesting dolls giving birth to larger dolls to start the process.
Jupe's habit of telling tales and self-mythologising, his simultaneous self-aggrandisement and distortion of a true history too horrible for him to fully conceptualise let alone recount, as wonderfully depicted by Yeun in a performance equal parts circus ringmaster and arrested-developed manchild.
The way Jupe sells his own trauma is him performing the way writers are commanded to mine their worse and most horrific histories for their stories – nay, for the mere slim chance at telling and selling their stories to someone who will actually put them on a big screen. Something akin to unpacking your familial estrangement, sexual history, childhood trauma, individual understanding, and personal demons, to people you met five minutes ago when they offered you a coffee and made clear your creative future hung on your responses to their probes. Something akin to recounting all the microaggressions and overt racial abuse you've experienced in glass-panelled board rooms to powerful execs just for the shot at filming your first feature, which success proves people were hungry for it.
Those execs salivate over someone's personal history the way we look directly at Jupe's bloody experience, and the horrors of bystanders being sucked up a plasticine oesophagus. Perhaps Peele would have called his film Don't Look Now had that title not been taken by the superb 1973 horror film, which like Nope has far more symbolism than jump scares.
REFLECTORS
The silver motorcycle helmet – which reads as a spacesuit helmet – is a double-double, sat on the head of a double-double. The actor wearing it is also a filmmaker, who has starred in several films and written multiple thrillers. His face is never seen, being completely covered by a helmet of dual purposes. The first is obvious, as TMZ reporters within this film as well as our reality are the next evolution of the vultures who circled OJ Simpson’s trial, trying to be anonymous while violating others' privacy. The second part, of course, is the silver orb with a singular eye-hole looks disconcerting, its reflectivity allows OJ to accomplish looking at the monster indirectly; triggering it to attack without bringing its ire down on his head.
Though characters use vehicle rear-view mirrors to look at things, and large shiny globes serve to startle animals, the shiny surface of the paparazzi’s helmet is the only time a mirror is used in a horror-traditional way; even then it is not exactly conventional. As his Twilight Zone foray suggests, Peele is not trying to break moulds, so much as pour more modern materials into them.
Modern readings envelop modern psychic understandings, of PTSD, of depression, of the genre of film you are in. OJ and Em reference Oprah as casually as Area 51, and the film nods to our and their knowledge of The X Files and teenage pranksters. Meanwhile, Kaluuya is one of our most arresting, magnetic performers, especially since 2011 when he broke out internationally as the pivotal figure in Black Mirror’s second episode “Fifteen Million Merits.” If you're seeing Nope, you've almost surely seen at least Get Out plus a handful of his other films, so his presence being essentially dead air – especially compared to the manic energy of Keke Palmer’s Em and ‘please notice me’ perfection of Brandon Perea’s Angel – is all the more striking. We know what he does give in almost every performance.
Nope understands our pop culture literacy and wields it as both joke and weapon. Our knowledge of Kaluuya external to the film we’re watching conveys the depths of grief and depression OJ feels as much as anything.
BEHEMOTHS
No film is perfect. Not one which seeks to entertain at a ‘popcorn level.’ Not one which seeks to be “one for them” which makes money or “one for me” which feeds the creative soul. Not one which seeks to examine and address a myriad of themes and cinematic motifs and historical injustices. Certainly not one which takes aim at all of the above.
Let it be said Peele doesn't examine his own growing mythology – self-generated, perpetuated by the Hollywood machine, kaleidoscoped by public perception, digested, then projected back to us through his next film – he references Us with the totem-esque large shears on Jupe's desk; a place of mundanity within the mini-shrine Jupe has built to filmic lore and specifically his own legend.
All these Easter eggs are from an initial cinematic viewing; this film is clearly full of tiny details which will reward repeat looks. The one thing I felt could grow more wearisome on repetition is the chapter break / titles, which felt both overly insistent and entirely superfluous. Yet, to group words and ideas which all loop in on themselves and inform parts of earlier paragraphs, I've used a similar device here. Headings loosely create structure when there’s no cohesive way to talk about them all at once, forcing the reader to finish the whole to understand how they work separately yet together.
Sometimes, it just works.