‘Nope’ is a joyful defense of capturing spectacle for the right reasons

By Jake Skubish

This review is full of spoilers.

Just three movies into his filmography, Jordan Peele is already known for a set of distinct cinematic elements: psychological horror, social commentary, and the intricacy of his puzzle box screenplays, which always reward repeated viewings. What Peele is not typically associated with is joy. He is praised for his films’ splendor but has been seen primarily as a cultural critic, an artist who enhances genre tropes and plot twists with incisive commentaries about our most entrenched societal defects.

Nope, his genre-defiant western-sci-fi-horror-comedy epic, is a departure from that mode of admonition. Working on a much grander scale than in Get Out or Us, Peele manages to cast judgment on those acting in bad faith before pivoting to a celebration of creativity and familial connection, and a rejection of self-exploitative image-making. Nope is his least accessible film thematically, swapping exposition for visual grandeur in his most accomplished, sweeping movie yet.

Typically mum on the meaning of his own films, Peele himself suggested an important distinction from his previous work in an interview for Essence. “It's so tricky being considered in the vanguard of Black horror, because obviously Black horror is so very real, and it's hard to do it in a way that's not retraumatizing and sad,” Peele said. “I was going into my third horror film starring Black leads, and somewhere in the process I realized that the movie had to be about Black joy as well.”

The critical reception to Nope, while lauding Peele as an auteur, has been disappointingly ignorant to the film’s joyfulness. Indiewire focused its analysis of the film on the “awful power” we lend tragedies “by sanctifying them into spectacles,” and our “fatal inability to look away from them.” Vox zeroed in on the personal failings of a society glued to its devices, citing how “a culture built on spectacle can only get more spectacular, coaxing us to always look at it, to never tear ourselves away, to gorge ourselves on it.”

These reviews position Nope as yet another artifact of cultural damnation, a reasonable interpretation considering the film opens with a calamitous Bible verse. Before the action begins, the text of Nahum 3:6 appears on screen: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” Nahum was prophesying how God would punish the city of Nineveh due to its rampant vices, describing it as a “city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder.” The implication for Nope then, is that Peele is suggesting humanity will realize a similar fate due to our own propensity to reframe reality into indulgent, ugly spectacles.

Peele is certainly interested in the ramifications of documenting spectacle and turning it into entertainment. Yet the true meaning of Nope is much more nuanced than the facile reading that Peele is shaming us for being on our phones too much. The genius of Nope is its enlightened understanding of the difference between what it means to chase and capture spectacle for the right and wrong reasons. The characters of Nope who falter do so because they are mired in a mindless, self-aggrandizing pursuit to mine spectacles for their own gain. But OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) come out on top because they have the fortitude to abandon the false promises of fame and greed, instead trying to capture the imagery of spectacle in order to honor their family and reclaim ownership and representation in a more meaningful sense.

The Haywoods own a horse ranch in Agua Dulce, a desolate town 40 miles north of Hollywood made gorgeous by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema. The family rents its horses for film productions, a business run by OJ and Emerald’s father Otis Senior (Keith David). Otis Senior dies in the film’s opening scene in a freak accident: miscellaneous objects begin falling out of the sky and strike him. Peele lingers on the recovered evidence after Otis Senior’s death, showing the object that cut Otis Senior down: a nickel. From the beginning of Nope, Peele suggests that money is dangerous, and fatal.

This opening also establishes a key difference between OJ and Emerald: OJ bore witness to his father’s demise, and Emerald did not. Kaluuya moves forward from this scene with a stoic performance, a purposefully understated demonstration of the emotional weight he is carrying. Soon thereafter, he shows up to a film set tired and unpracticed at leading the work. OJ struggles to continue the family business after his father’s death, but must do so out of financial necessity. Emerald does not feel similarly burdened: She pointedly tells OJ that the business is her side gig, not her priority. We come to learn that she felt unseen and unvalued by Otis Senior, and is more interested in the ascendant possibilities that Hollywood claims to offer than in continuing any legacy her family might have on the town’s periphery.

Straining to keep Haywood Hollywood Horses afloat and threatened by competition from CGI animals (a force made villainous in various forms throughout Nope), OJ begins selling the family’s horses to Jupe (Steven Yeun), a former child actor who now runs a Wild West-themed amusement park named Jupiter’s Claim near the Haywood property. Jupe starred in a 90s sitcom called Gordy’s Home about a family with a pet chimpanzee named Gordy. (The name of the sitcom is a clever double entendre — it indicates that Gordy is part of the family but also implies possession, that the humans believe they own the space but do not. This theme returns in other ways in the film.)

The sitcom was short-lived for tragic reasons: in an episode in season two, when a bundle of balloons popped on set, Gordy went berserk and violently attacked the cast. Young Jupe survived the rampage but was traumatized by the incident. It is telling that Jupe, whose real name is Ricky, continues to go by the name of one of his characters into adulthood; having never reckoned with his trauma, he can hardly bear to maintain his true identity. Upon Jupe’s desk when we first meet him sits the scissors from Peele’s previous film Us, a film laden with ideas about burying one’s true identity, as if Jupe is his own Tethered.

In the present day, Jupe is only able to recount the Gordy tale to OJ and Emerald by referencing an SNL parody of the incident. “It was a spectacle,” Jupe tells them. “People are just obsessed.” Jupe opts to mine that obsession for profit, commodifying his trauma into a sellable product. When showing OJ and Emerald the perverse showroom he has built to honor the sitcom, he tells them, “I usually charge a fee for this.” He informs them that a couple paid him $50,000 so they could sleep there for a night. If Jupe is not going to face his trauma head-on, it seems, he is at least going to make some money off of it.

And what does Jupe want all those horses for? He has seen a UFO, and figures the object is yet another spectacle he can sell to an audience for profit. From the grounds of the Haywood ranch, OJ can see the lights and hear the intercom coming from Jupiter’s Claim as Jupe prepares for this close encounter of the profitable kind by coaxing the UFO out with the horses as offerings. Jupe tries to buy the entire Haywood ranch for this endeavor (Emerald, with no allegiance to her family’s legacy, asks OJ how much they could get for it), but OJ turns Jupe down. OJ does not yet know about the UFO but has had his suspicions about the oddity of his father’s death, and as he gazes across the expanse toward the strange activity at Jupiter’s Claim his face suggests a resigned knowledge of the horror to come. A trained animal wrangler, OJ has a preternatural sense of the danger in provoking a predator.

When Jupe’s attempts to draw out the UFO lead OJ and Emerald to have their own encounter with the object, Emerald has a similar impulse to Jupe: Profit by commodifying the spectacle. If they can capture the UFO on camera, she tells OJ, they could sell it for at least $100,000. (She describes this image as the “money shot.”) When she tells OJ they’ll need to buy high-tech security cameras to get the shot, he replies, “You know I’m broke, right?” OJ is uninterested in chasing the fortune that might come with selling such an image, but goes along with the plan in order to preserve his family’s property.

Emerald is cautioned against this chase by Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), an esteemed cinematographer who agrees to help OJ and Emerald capture the UFO on video. “This dream you're chasing, where you're at the top of the mountain, all eyes on you? It's the dream you never wake up from,” he tells them. Yet even with this awareness Holst allows himself to be consumed by the UFO, which turns out to be not a ship but a living creature. Holst is so enamored with the idea of transforming reality into glorious, cinematic imagery that he is willing to let that pursuit destroy him. In his free time, we see Holst watch nature footage of animals devouring one another; in trying to capture reality as pure as that on camera, he becomes the doomed prey within such footage.

A similar fate befalls Jupe: He succeeds in drawing out the creature for his show; it then promptly consumes him and his entire audience. “What if I told you in about an hour, you’ll leave here different?” Jupe asks the crowd at Jupiter’s Claim. It wouldn’t even take that long; everyone is soon inhaled by the beast. (My favorite small detail from the film: an hour after Jupe delivers this line, Nope ends. Peele is in total control of this story.) After the beast departs the loudspeaker at Jupiter’s Claim declares, “It’s closing time. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” The territorial battle between the creature and the people of Agua Dulce echoes the title of Jupe’s 90s sitcom, Gordy’s Home; when we push nature too far for our own enrichment, we relinquish agency over the space we thought was ours.

Both Holst and Jupe attempt to harness the spectacle for personal gain, and end up destroying themselves in the process. The creature in its own way falls victim to the same self-destructive impulses, sucking up resources regardless of whether it can handle them and haphazardly spitting them back out if they don’t digest well. This weakness leads to its own downfall and causes the death of Otis Senior, and suggests this excessiveness is a natural impulse humans must deliberately work to overcome.

This scolding of humanity, however, is not the ultimate lesson of Nope. While characters like Jupe suffer the consequences of trying to harness spectacle for self-gain, the back half of the film flips that lesson on its head, proposing we can chase spectacle for reasons beyond ourselves. The motivation for Emerald turns sharply when OJ suggests that they name the extraterrestrial creature “Jean Jacket.” Jean Jacket was the horse Emerald felt was her responsibility as a child, until Otis Senior instead gave a film gig with Jean Jacket to OJ. By naming the beast Jean Jacket, OJ communicates to Emerald that she is seen and valued, and that they have a family legacy to carry forward as equals. “What we about to do,” OJ tells her, “They can’t erase that.” Repeated exchanges throughout Nope show OJ’s workaholic tendencies, and Emerald’s opposing lack of interest in work. But that changes once the plan in the third act is put into motion, because she now has something personal to work for.

A second viewing of Nope calcified the emotional weight of Palmer’s performance, particularly in this final act. She stands out immediately as a burst of comedic energy, but that exuberance serves to mask the trauma she is saddled with and finally lets out in the film’s conclusion. At the beginning of Nope, Haywood Hollywood Horses is her self-proclaimed side gig. By the end she dons a Haywood family t-shirt (OJ wears a Scorpion King hoodie, the film he got to work with Jean Jacket on), and she labors to capture an image of the alien not for profit but to defend the land her family owns. Trespassing onto the Haywood property during the finale is a TMZ reporter who Emerald tries to turn away, and her contrast with this intruder further highlights the shift in her motivation. Is there any more pure distillation of gawking for profit than TMZ?

Emerald’s transformation does not mean the Haywoods don’t plan on selling the image of the beast, which Emerald manages to capture by depositing a coin into a novelty photo machine at Jupiter’s Claim. A coin cut down their father in the film’s opening scene, but saves them in the film’s finale; money seems not to be an inherent evil if it is put toward the right mission. This ending also suggests that Jupe witnessing the alien six months prior is what led to Otis Senior’s death in the first place; Jupe had been attempting to draw the creature out for his show, and the coins that rained down on the Haywood ranch came from a visit the creature made to Jupiter’s Claim.

“Nobody fucks with Haywood!” Emerald screams as the monster finally bites off more than it can chew. Earlier in the sequence OJ and Emerald make a poignant gesture to communicate they fully see one another, and now OJ reappears in front of Emerald on horseback, beneath a sign reading “Out Yonder.” They are masters of their own frontier, owners of their own legacy, and that is what matters.

OJ and Emerald’s accomplice in the attempt to capture an image of the alien, an employee at an electronics store named Angel (Brandon Perea), shares with them a motivation to carry out the mission for some greater reason beyond himself. “What we're doing is going to do some good,” says Angel. “Besides the money and the fame. We can save some lives.” This is in contrast to how Jupe responds to seeing the creature, and raises a key concept in the film, which OJ dubs the “bad miracle.”

“What’s a bad miracle?” OJ asks Emerald, peering into the night sky after realizing something is out there. “They got a word for that?”

“Nope,” she replies matter-of-factly.

OJ is trying to articulate what it means to witness something spectacular but know that it will produce rotten consequences. Crucially, what makes these miracles bad is not their existence but our response to them. After discovering a cloud in which the alien has been hiding, OJ remarks that he’s probably been looking up at that cloud for months. It’s not until Jupe attempts to harness the creature for profit, though, that problems ensue. The Haywoods, after all, have owned that ranch for generations.

The Gordy’s Home tragedy is also a bad miracle. In the midst of the horrifying attack, Jupe is drawn to something that seems miraculous: a single shoe, standing upright, seemingly defying physics. Jupe preserves the object in his shrine to Gordy’s Home, along with an image he proudly points out of himself and Gordy inventing the exploding fist bump. (The word “exploding” here is deliberate, and given a wickedly different meaning by Peele in the flashback sequence when Gordy is shot in the head while attempting a fist bump with Jupe). As with the alien years later, Jupe tries to take a menacing phenomenon and turn it into an image he thinks he can control. Rather than reckoning with reality, Jupe traps himself in a false existence by attempting to exploit something he has no control over.

It was not lost on me that prior to the screening of Nope theaters were showing a trailer for Till, a cookie-cutter biopic about Emmett Till. “They have to see it for themselves,” Till’s mother Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler) declares in the trailer, as Till tries to position itself as an Important Film For Our Times rather than a smoothed-over, exploitative act of turning pain into spectacle made for consumption. The Till trailer coincides with the release of the trailer for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, in which Marvel at least seems to be making a more humble attempt to honor Chadwick Boseman while extending its web of corporate IP into infinity. Perhaps if critics missed the joyful catharsis of Nope’s conclusion we shouldn’t blame them; converting Black trauma into profit-generating spectacle is Hollywood’s standard mode of operation. It’s what we are used to seeing.

Peele is operating on a different level, though, and actively working against what we expect to see. (I was annoyed that the final trailer for Nope showed the UFO in its full glory until seeing the film revealed it was just another example of Peele toying with our expectations.) He is a filmmaker working within the studio system to tell stories overflowing with creative detail, films made with an uncompromising vision. And like the Haywoods, he is doing so with a sense of the history that came before him, attempting to reclaim ownership of a space from which voices like his have been marginalized. Posters for Duel at Diablo and Buck and the Preacher, westerns from the 60s and 70s starring Sidney Poitier, adorn the walls of the Haywood ranch. Decades later, with Nope, Peele is reclaiming the frontier, just as the Haywoods are reclaiming their family legacy decades after an ancestor appeared in one of the earliest images of cinema without credit.

Peele ventures into this reclamation project with an unabashed love for spectacle. He is as visually creative and precise a director as any filmmaker today, and the complex ideas embedded within his screenplays never crowd out his ability to also be our greatest entertainer. Like the UFO in Nope, Peele’s films fly above the rest of Hollywood, defying expectations, making reality a little more spectacular by creating unique, transcendent spectacles on the director’s own terms. It’s a joy to watch.