I've very much enjoyed the last decade-plus of allegorical movies such as Aranofsky’s Mother!, Corbet’s Vox Lux, Aster’s Midsommar, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The point, for the ones that work in my estimation, is to be clear and true to your vision from beginning to end and have a surface narrative that holds together under the weight of a crowded symbolic space.
With Nope, there are multiple layers of meaning to sift through and even interpretations that the writer probably didn't intend, which is always both fun and mystifying. Then there's the version that I haven't seen mentioned at all yet (or, haven't found via googling yet) wherein perhaps the most engaging allegory is that of trauma with the main antagonist being a tulpa. We'll get to that.
It stands to reason that you will need to have seen this movie in order for anything I say going forward to make sense. If you haven’t — stop, go watch, and come back scratching your head. There simply isn’t the time for a masterclass on the basic plot, although it could use one. We have to dive right in.
The shell of the narrative is that a UFO has been spotted over the skies of Agua Dulce, CA and is possibly responsible for the sudden death of Otis Haywood, Sr. as well as ensuing disappearances of horses from the Haywood’s Hollywood Horses ranch. Otis’s adult children, OJ and Emerald, set out to capture the UFO on film but encounter myriad setbacks, including a terrifying encounter after a show at a nearby amusement park goes massively wrong. Though they call in reinforcements by way of tech nerd Angel and classic cinematographer Antlers Holst, the flying object refuses to be captured on film and eats — yes, eats — what little evidence there is. After a final showdown, Emerald manages to get a photograph, and Jordan Peele manages to leave everyone shaking their heads in…wonder? Confusion? Frustration? Awe?
If you watch Nope literally and believe that the surface level of narrative is the only one, this will lead to the most confusion especially as the plot reaches the climax. This is because everything that is shown, and nearly every line of dialogue spoken, has a double or even triple possible meaning. (This is a hallmark of the types of movies I will be reviewing) It’s sort of like watching an extended metaphor wrapped in an allegory that’s pulling a second shift as a subgenre, and without the filmmaker coming out and telling us their intentions, these movies will always be an unfinished 4D puzzle that you keep coming back to to try and plug just one more gap.
With Nope, obviously there's a cautionary tale in here somewhere about never truly being able to tame wild animals, be they primates or aliens, and the carnage our hubris creates which bystanders then must be left to clean up and recover from. Where does our instinct to 'tame' come from? what does it say about us as a species? and so on.
Peele himself confirmed that a major theme is 'spectacle' as it relates to Hollywood. There are enough references to spectacle in the movie, along with the setting and gigantic hints like a character named OJ, that we can start to piece together that it might be a morality tale about the downside of fame. He also mentioned “the violence of attention,” and since he skyrocketed to fame with Get Out, we can assume he has put some, if not much, of his personal experience of Hollywood, especially as a Black man, into this movie.
With there being so much to dissect, let’s get my main theory excavated first.
* * * *
A young Ricky Park watched an animal savagely beat and maim his costars and who knows how many bystanders on the set of sitcom Gordy’s Home in 1998. A chimp who had always behaved accordingly - for almost two seasons - with whom he had fist-bumped, held hands, likely hugged, split a banana - went from zero to ten billion, from angel to devil, from ‘yes, the world makes sense’ to ‘no, nothing about this world will ever make sense ever again’ right in front of Ricky's eyes and all for the single pop of one balloon. Ricky’s entire world vanished at essentially the snap of a finger and was replaced by an immeasurably crueler, colder, definitively godless place.
He survived by chance; he never looked Gordy directly in the eyes, as those who were killed and most horribly beaten surely did. He hid under the set’s dining room table and fixated on costar Mary Jo Elliot’s shoe, a Ked which was standing straight up, as advertised. It was better than watching Gordy rear around and fling himself on top of her for one last go because she whimpered too loudly, and likely tried to implore him with her eyes, tried to appeal to his humanity. But Gordy was a chimpanzee. Not a human. He didn’t have humanity. He saw her eye contact the same way his ancestors a million years ago did - as aggression.
After taking out one last cast member who foolishly tried to run off the set, Gordy was done. The rage that the popping of the balloon set off in him was finished. He was no longer upset. Now he wondered why everything was so quiet. He signed, “Where's funny family?” As if he had amnesia, Gordy looked around blankly as if...as if he had no memory of what he’d just done. He’d simply done it, and now it was over. Nature fulfilled.
Then he saw Ricky. But it was through the veil of the dining room table’s green tablecloth, and so therefore, not direct eye contact apparently. He approached, just good ’ol Gordy again, and reached out his right paw, dripping with scarlet blood, for a fist bump. Ricky very slowly started to reciprocate, and then right in front of his eyes — a bullet to the head for the chimp. The animal’s blood splattered onto Ricky’s face and clothes. He just stared.
The next time we see Ricky he goes by Jupe and owns the Jupiter’s Claim tourist attraction. And he seems to be doing well for himself; he’s married with three kids, just had a reality TV show air, and his pleasant personality seems right for the adult outcome of a child who witnessed such trauma but got all the help money could buy. People move on, right?
When asked about that day on set, he uses the SNL parody skit version, “Bad Gordy,” to completely distance himself from the event while still being able to describe the absolute brutality of it. He keeps an entire memorabilia room too, including the single Ked, likely a bit of morbid fascination that you would allow someone with such a past.
And all would be well and good, then. Except, people don’t just move on. And there’s a UFO in Agua Dulce.
What is a tulpa? It’s an entity created in the mind, acting independently of and parallel to your own consciousness. They are able to think and have their own free will, emotions and memories. This is, of course, a modern take on the concept which in Theosophy dates back to the early twentieth century and originates in the Vajrayana concept of the ‘emanation body.’ (Thanks, Wikipedia! But I also listened to a cool Monster Talk podcast episode about tulpas) I’m probably loosely borrowing the term here but I can’t believe Mr. Peele doesn’t know about tulpas.
There are some hints as to Jupe’s role in the spectacle of the UFO once we start to watch from his traumatized perspective.
First, the UFO — later named Jean Jacket — is UFO-shaped when you see it from most angles. But when you see it from underneath and very up close, it is so obviously the shape of a cowboy hat. There's even a little tear in the brim on one side. That more people don't talk about this enrages me. I mean, not Gordy levels of rage. If I may skip briefly to the movie’s climax — when Jean Jacket is hovering over OJ, the way the camera swoops is in such a way that the hat is situated over OJ’s head. Watch for it and tell me I’m lying. Anyway, Ricky’s breakout role was a TV show called Kid Sheriff, which is how he got the role on Gordy’s Home (decidedly not a Western-themed show).
Second, when Jean Jacket is looking to feed, it makes popping sounds. I know this because I had the subtitles on and it said very clearly, ‘popping sounds.’ You can hear them as well but you might miss them and how they are placed within Jean Jacket’s routine. Obviously the most important pop in the movie was the one that set Gordy off. (Upon a subsequent watch, I also interpreted the popping as a sort of attempt at language)
Third, the rampage on set lasted six minutes and thirteen seconds, according to Jupe. When he’s speaking to the crowd at the Star Lasso show, he tells them that he first saw the UFO at exactly 6:13 in the evening.
Fourth, it’s not revealed until the final showdown that Jean Jacket is made of a very fine fabric. Angel, their adopted tech nerd, gets caught up in tarp and barbed wire, and the wire is what saves him when Jean Jacket picks him up. You hear the twanging sound as it tries to imbibe the barbs - it sounds like guitar strings. Heavily plucked guitar strings indicating something is terribly wrong. (Not to mention they pluck the melody to “batter up”) Angel gets spit out and Jean Jacket begins to billow and unfold like a paper cutting, and that is when we see it is made of fabric similar to the thin tablecloth on set.
What does this have to do with the concept of the tulpa?
Jupe, in my opinion, was psychologically damaged far beyond what we are led to believe. In another nod toward reality, Peele makes obvious references to the woman who was mauled by her friend’s chimp (it wasn't even her chimp) in 2009 and then went on Oprah wearing a veil; it was grisly. I was psychologically damaged just reading the details. I fully understand why he took that and used it in this movie as a triggering event for what Jupe/Ricky would do next.
I think he detached so far from not just the experience but any processing of the experience, any emotions related to the experience, anything firsthand at all — sights, sounds, before, after, deaths, funerals — that it was all shunted to a dark corner of his brain and locked down. The brain can’t just do this forever, though, and though we see in numerous cases that victims of childhood trauma are able to grow up relatively adjusted, they can start to break down again in adulthood.
Jupe would have to do something with the experience and the emotions, but he was incapable of dealing with them. He did not know how to tame them. They were a wild animal threatening to consume him if they got loose. Lucky for him, his desire to hide from the beast was just that much greater than the beast itself and, in this fictional world, all of that incredible psychic energy that built up was projected outward literally as a tulpa, in the form of the cowboy hat UFO. That would explain why it had characteristics that were specific only to him, like the popping sound heralding violence.
That’s how he discovered it at 6:13. That’s why it was content to hide in a cloud - a visual representation of mental/psychic space now that it was no longer in Jupe’s head.
And that’s why he intuitively sought to tame it, to finish what he could not accomplish while it was inside of his mind.
Instead of being allowed to do the hard work, young Ricky’s caretakers shielded him from confronting the horror; or, Ricky himself refused when prodded. Those things aren't going anywhere. They don’t die - the unconscious is a timeless place. They will find a way out of you eventually, either in inappropriate behavior towards others, or in neurotic ticks, or in an obsession, or an addiction, or maybe a tulpa, who’s to say.
So that means that in my main theory, Nope isn't directly about the problem of spectacle or the violence of attention. It's about the damage that is done when you know you have a problem and instead of facing it, you just go, “Nope.”
The collateral damage is real, in case you’re not convinced. Jupe’s wife and children were among those sucked up by the UFO, as well as Mary Jo, she of the veil. They were victims of Jupe's inability to engage with what happened that day, devastating as it was, and on the big screen it played out as a spectacle, rather than in a suburban home somewhere.
So, anticlimactic as it seems, maybe Em releasing the Lil’ Jupe balloon was a resolution that makes sense. A version of Jupe — Ricky — without any trauma was able to destroy the tulpa, since the adult would never be able.
(Why did OJ survive? Perhaps the green square is the key. When Jean Jacket is fully formed and staring OJ down on the road, its eye is a green tasseled square lashing outward with the sound of snaps — green like the dining room tablecloth that Ricky made eye contact with Gordy through. If Jean Jacket has Gordy’s impulses, then it makes sense OJ would be able to look directly at the green eye and stay safe as Ricky did)
Another strong nod to the nature of Jupe’s externalized trauma is the conversation OJ had with Em where he wonders, “What if it’s not a ship?” And the very next scene is the full-length Gordy’s Home massacre. One could, if one were inclined, almost feel as though the director were begging us to make the connection.
Another very similar edit is when Jupe is in his office preparing for the first official Star Lasso Experience (this is actually led into directly from the end of the massacre) and practicing his lines. He takes a deep breath and says, “What if I told you—” Then the screen cuts to a title card: Lucky. And I felt that it was as if Jupe were about to tell us a story, maybe not a literal one, but one born of experience. So imagine my surprise when the Star Lasso Experience played out in much the same way as the Gordy’s Home massacre. You had your basic pre-show stage setup with the producer warming up the crowd (“I said are you ready?!”), keeping them entertained as they did with live studio audience sitcoms back in the day; although there aren’t perfect parallels to the GH actors, Jupe’s three kids did run out to perform a small song and dance right before Jean Jacket showed up early. It (the UFO) did not perform as expected and instead murdered everyone, leaving just one living creature — the horse that was initially used for bait, Lucky. The Star Lasso Experience was just another reenactment of the Gordy’s Home massacre.
In some ways Jean Jacket also represents the voracious and unpredictable appetite of media consumers, and during his monologue Jupe does mention believing they are being surveilled by an “alien species” he calls “The Viewers,” and that he believes they trust him, otherwise none of them would be there. This is something a producer might say more literally as, the ratings are high so people obviously like our show, otherwise we would be out of a job.
But I digress. Jupe was sucked up too, and Jean Jacket lived to eat another day. Your trauma lives after you. We are not innocent. Trauma does not self-contain and it breeds in the wild. While we cannot tame it completely, we can enter into an agreement with it — especially since it was never our choice to experience it in the first place, which is part of the darkest, most powerful sadness roiling in this pit. If we avoid this necessary function of psychological existence, we hurt more than ourselves and in that way we are complicit, and that is a deep and tragic irony.
As someone putting herself out there with a pretty far-out theory for a well-known movie, I have battled with how to reconcile the tidiness of the tulpa concept with Peele’s insistence regarding the film’s nature of spectacle and the “violence of attention.” But the Star Lasso Experience brought me another key.
In speaking to the audience, Jupe says, “Just to be clear, what we saw was a flying saucer, no doubt about that.” And has that not greatly affected our many attempts at interpreting this movie for over a year now? It’s always a UFO (at best a “creature,” never a cowboy hat), never anything else even when the director uses tricks to pulls us in the other direction, even when the main character wonders otherwise. Is this the “violence of attention?” Is this the problem of spectacle? That we are distracted not by what we see with our own eyes but what we are told to see? A cinematic card trick — hear how I describe what’s in my hand? Good. You don’t notice what’s really in front of you.
Sitting in Jupe’s office several days before, OJ attempted to work out a deal to buy back some of the horses he’d sold to Jupiter’s Claim when times were rough. What only the silent omniscient narrator knows at this juncture is that those horses are long gone, eaten by Jean Jacket during Jupe’s nighttime taming sessions. To get himself out of an incredibly awkward position without having to explain himself, Jupe takes immediate advantage of Em’s interest in the M.A.D. Magazine cover of Gordy’s Home framed on the wall and offers to tell her the story of the massacre. (Which he then only does secondhand) He offers spectacle in order to distract from the uncomfortable truth he does not want to admit, and then speaks of trauma through the lens of storytelling.
This, then, might explain why Jordan Peele said in an interview that the character he most identifies with in the movie is Jupe.
* * * *
What’s not a mystery is that Peele’s first two movies dealt with the sociopolitics of being Black in America, and Nope isn’t necessarily any different. There’s a strong and consistent allegory of the Black experience in Hollywood throughout the movie that I’d like to talk about next, keeping in mind that it’s done skillfully enough that it could also apply to women and other minorities. Also please keep in mind that as a complete outsider, I have to speak in huge generalities, myths, legends, and rumors.
Essentially we need to see three generations of Black Hollywood labor represented by the Haywood family: Otis, Sr. is the Sidney Poitiers and Josephine Bakers; Otis, Jr. (OJ) is the Denzels and Halle Berrys; and Emerald, as the youngest, is the Key & Peeles, the Nicole Byerses, the Kevin Harts. Each generation had/has their pros and cons: Otis, Sr. built something very special but fit too neatly into the overarching system; OJ is a workhorse and gets the job done, but lacks the passion to change the system; and Emerald is a renaissance woman but has her hands in too many different pots (no pun intended) to see the bigger picture.
And what of their great-great-great-grandfather Alistair Haywood? He is the original Black American labor, slavery. The existence of this iconic jockey image as “the first assembly of photographs in sequential order to create a motion picture” serves as the perfect metaphor for our original work: captured, repetitive, ceaseless, owned, and forgotten. When the title credits roll and we are (unknown to us at that point) inside Jean Jacket’s blue room, encroaching with a Melancholia-like crawl toward the black square, the screams we hear are those of slaves; the wavy blue fabric is the water surrounding the slave ships in the Atlantic where so many died and so many more would wish they had. Very slowly they take us beyond their terror to the next era of Black exploitation, where we are allowed to focus in on Alistair Haywood, racing endlessly, never able to stop, never autonomous, always the property of someone else, of whoever plays the image. From this perspective it’s almost like something out of Black Mirror.
If the Haywood family are metaphorical generations, then the horses themselves may be their archetypes. Lucky, for example, is the copacetic horse that survives against all odds (and is not too unlike OJ himself); Ghost represents the immature ingenues, unwilling to learn, who quickly screw themselves out of their own futures; you’ll remember Ghost is sucked up by Jean Jacket during Jupe’s perfect nighttime dress rehearsal. Em says of the horse’s personality: “Ghost talking ’bout ‘I ain’t listenin’, I ain’t trained, I can do whatever the f*ck I want’.” Poor Clover is snatched up as punishment for the offering of a plastic decoy horse in order to get evidence of Jean Jacket’s existence — which leads us to what exactly Jean Jacket (henceforth and hereinafter sometimes referred to as ‘JJ’) represents in this allegory.
JJ is the system, but not the one we see — the part we cannot see, the part which truly controls the Hollywood which endures. These are the people we hear about, of whom we speculate, but as peons never truly can prove pull the exact strings that keep the puppets dancing the way they are meant to. It is no wonder JJ hides in a cloud that has purposely come into existence, that is obviously unnatural, that does not move while real clouds shift and change all around it as is their nature. Angel, their adopted tech, speaks to this in metaphor when assuming JJ is a UFO with all the attendant coverup that comes with that mythology:
Angel: You know they don’t even call them UFOs anymore? It’s f*ckin’ UAPs now.
OJ: Why they gotta change the name?
Angel: They're trying to keep us in the dark. Remember when they declassified all that UFO footage a couple years ago? Yeah, well people started paying attention. So they changed the name to UAPs. No one knows what the f*ck a UAP is, so everyone lost interest.
OJ: I saw that, that Navy clip. Couldn't really see it, though, could've been better.
Angel: It's shitty footage of exact proof that there's an alien civilization out there in the universe.
JJ is real. The Hollywood puppet masters are real. But we never can prove it. And this is exemplified in JJ’s insistence on not being captured on film — on never being identified and outed. While the decoy horse from Jupiter’s Claim works, it only angers JJ as it can’t be digested, and Clover is the sacrifice taken as a reminder that the parameters set by the system will be enforced. I’d be amazed if Peele didn’t have an actual actor or small cohort of actors from a certain era in mind here.
OJ and Em’s plan was doomed to fail anyway, as JJ controls the electricity and can ensure no cameras or cell phones work in its presence. It even puts a praying mantis on the lens of one of their security cameras on the roof (because you can’t tell me that was a coincidence). The revolution will not be televised.
There’s something here too about capitalism being the latest version of enslavement. Emerald wants to get “the money shot” even though “the money shot” is literally what killed her father; if the horses represent Black archetypes in Hollywood, their sacrifice to the system (Jean Jacket) is symbolic of the harnessing, and smoothing over, of their unique talent and will via contractual agreements to abide by the rules.
Other supporting characters serve their metaphorical purposes as well. Antlers Holst, for example, is the old cinematographer that OJ and Em meet on the set of the ill-fated commercial shoot where Lucky got riled up. To me he represents a faded star from Old Hollywood. When Em calls him, he is at home, reviewing old black-and-white footage of animal predation (in one instance there is a remarkable upset when a snake is able to consume a tiger). He tells her, “I got a superb lemon tart in the oven I'm about to serve to ten of my closest friends,” which is a nice nod to mid-twentieth-century culture and I’m pretty sure lemon tart is code for like, the bomb.
Angel, being the techie, is the production aspect of moviemaking, and he also plays a sort of mentor role as well (which I’ll touch on later). Although, I can’t escape the nagging feeling he could also represent some of the Latinx experience in Hollywood, just as Jupe could be portraying aspects of the Asian experience, because casting is as intentional as every other choice in making a movie — but I need to stay on the path.
* * * *
Why does the Star Lasso Experience go so horribly wrong? Because the puppet masters had begun to feel that not only had they been spotted, they were being manipulated. Once they discovered the pattern and recognized the bait, they — or rather, Jean Jacket — called the chickens home to roost. Then JJ moved on to the Haywood house with a clear message: I will not be tamed, and here’s a little blood and guts for you just in case you think I’m not serious. This makes the scene where JJ hovers over OJ in his truck so fascinating: is it a warning or an invitation? The hugeness of the creature is keeping back the rain, affording shelter to OJ should he step outside of the truck and agree to terms. But the giant hole, which never looks more like a pupil than it does here, also seems to be loudly saying, you will be next if you try to get proof of me one more time. OJ says what any rational person would say in these circumstances, especially a Black person: “Nope.”
The color green is important in this movie because it is the color of money, and when they speak about entering into an agreement with a “wild animal” they mean signing a contract to agree to mutually beneficial financial gain, the only thing that will ensure that both parties keep at bay (but especially the party with the power). Gordy the chimpanzee had no ability to sign such an agreement and the Gordy’s Home massacre represents both sides of a coin Peele has tantalizingly presented us with: who is Gordy, and who are his victims? Is it puppet masters/Black Hollywood, or is there a scenario, during a time of revolution when much was bitterly learned, when the scenario was Black Hollywood/puppet masters? If you can start to shift the structure of the allegory a bit, you may be able to frame the movie with JJ as Black Hollywood (especially since the provocatively named Star Lasso Experience was created just for him) — but that’s where I leave you with that. :)
Ricky and Gordy staring at each other through the green veil of the dining room table setting is a foreshadowing of OJ’s final showdown with Jean Jacket. I refer back to the green square when JJ is billowing in full, luxurious white angel mode, and how each “blink” of the green tassels came with the sound of a whip — taking us back to the slaves again, so we do not forget.
OJ never looked directly at JJ until it had morphed into its next manifestation, and presented the green square as its new eye. Whether or not OJ knew he would survive, I’m not certain, but he did survive because he was willing to metaphorically sign the contract, to offer himself up for taming (which he had resisted until this moment) for an exchange of green, and as a result Jean Jacket too was tamed at the prospect of gain. In my mind, OJ both lost and won, because he merely repeated the pattern of those who came before him — nothing new had been achieved, at least for his part — but his role allowed Emerald to get away and be the generation that broke down the barrier concealing the truth for the first time.
Emerald being able to get a single photograph of JJ right before it swallowed the Lil’ Jupe balloon was a victory because there was finally proof of the mechanism that controlled not just Black Hollywood but all of Hollywood. Without that photo, no one would ever have believed them, and that was the entire point. Our suffering has not been an old wives’ tale. Our shattered dreams and the opportunities stolen from us are not mere bedtime stories. The oppression of triumph and the absence of representation are not fuzzy, grainy videos that have been disavowed. What has happened to us, and has been happening to us from the beginning, is real.
* * * *
There is so much more to Nope, so many small frames and isolated sequences that make up the larger whole that are worth recognition and scrutiny, and I will mention just a couple here to show what I mean.
The morning after the Star Lasso Experience, when Em and Angel are attempting to escape the house to OJ and his truck without alerting Jean Jacket, OJ is standing at the open driver’s side door with his head bowed and his right hand patting his thigh. The first couple of times I saw the scene I thought he was cruelly calling them over like a couple of pets, but then when I really saw what was happening — it was like the start of a race. He was saying quietly and forcefully to himself, “Focus here, focus here,” and patting his leg, which is not unlike what a jockey might do to keep their horse as calm as possible in the stall of a raucous starting gate. Then when Em and Angel had reached the truck, the speed with which OJ jumped in and drove off was impressive. The urgency with which he had gotten them out of there was as lightning-quick as the start of a race and OJ was both jockey and horse. That level of detail in a scene that otherwise has no overall impact on the movie is just astounding to me.
When everyone (OJ, Em, Angel, and Antlers) is at the house brainstorming how to capture JJ on film, this gem of a verbatim conversation happens, which I will then break down:
OJ: [of Jupe] He got caught up trying to tame a predator. You can't do that. You got to enter into an agreement with one.
Antlers: Yeah...ask Siegfried and Roy.
Angel: Asking as someone who was in the house when the shit went down, how do you enter into an agreement with a UFO, alien entity or whatever the hell you want to call it?
OJ: Call him Jean Jacket.
Antlers: How 'bout we send old Jean Jacket some fresh horses at golden hour and see what happens.
Angel: [nixing motion] These are horse people.
Antlers: Err…why not just set them free?
OJ: [immediately] We're not doing that.
Antlers: Who's gonna go down there and get the star out of his trailer?
OJ: Me.
I love to see this as a woman’s experience of fame, especially let’s say pre-1970s, and naturally given through the eyes of a group of men attached to a rising female star, including for example her agent, her partner, and a club owner. There has been some trouble recently, probably because she did something women weren’t allowed to do, like wear pants, and now they have to play it right for the press and make sure her next performance is an unquestionable hit. The question is inevitably asked: by golly, how do you talk to women? The club owner suggests they do what usually works in these situations, the partner go in and rough her up a bit and put her back in her place. But the agent says “Nuh-uh. You can’t suggest that, he’s one of those liberals.”
Cleverly, the club owner retorts, “Well if it’s like that, then why don’t you just let her make her own decisions?” And the partner nixes that idea immediately; after all, he’s for the idea of women’s rights, not the implementation. The club owner simply wants to know who is going to go and make sure their ingenue plays by the rules and gives them all a good show, and her partner agrees to somehow get the job done.
There are many, many more scenes like this in Nope that I urge you to look for the next time you watch it; for a while I struggled to weave everything together into a majestic allegorical tapestry but then I realized, sometimes a writer just has a great idea and lets it ride on its own for a few minutes. The scene above does not make Nope a feminist manifesto, and you can replay it as being about a minority rising star or even just some post-Disney Channel kid who already thinks they’re playing with all aces. That’s the beauty of a well-written metaphor.
Nope is on many people’s list of favorite horror movies of the 2020s and for good reason, but it becomes orders of magnitude greater when you stop to ponder the message beyond the literal surface narrative. With a small cast and a beautiful California backdrop, the movie is imminently rewatchable for all the small things that would be impossible to lay out unless one were to, say, write the book on Nope.
And if you were going to write a book about Nope, you might include the fact that OJ was a horse the entire time. You might dissect why the sudden appearance and departure of TMZ Guy is one of the cleverer sub-subplots of the film. You could even speak of the Gordy’s Home massacre as a metaphor for family trauma and PTSD; wax rhapsodic about all of the different functions of the colorful “balloon” people; or even let loose with another wild major interpretation: that Nope is Peele’s experience of getting Get Out made, reimagined.
Since it’s my Substack and I can do what I want, I think I’ll cover all of those topics next. :) (Paid subscribers can continue and comment - free people, this is your sign!)
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