Jordan Peele's Monsters - The Media is the Message in "Nope"

Jordan Peele is easily one of the most exciting directors working right now.

There have been a lot of fresh faces popping up over the past few years. Greta Gerwig stepped behind the camera and wow’d audiences with her intimate explorations of life in Lady Bird and Little Women, Ari Aster and Robert Eggers quickly cornered a niche market in arthouse horror with movies like Hereditary and The VVitch, Chloe Zhao even won Best Picture for Nomadland which is probably her first widely-received film. But I don’t know if any of these up-and-coming successes have quite the level of notoriety that Jordan Peele has already achieved. He practically became a household name after his first movie, Get Out, which became something of a cult classic overnight. Of course, Peele isn’t necessarily new to the scene, having gathered a lot of internet fame with his sketch comedy Key and Peele, but the pivot from TV comedy to respected film director is still a major one. Releasing in 2017, it rode the wave of “horror as metaphor/commentary” that had been building up, and became the runaway hit that no one was expecting.

Get Out is truly a perfect film.

I think part of what gave Get Out such wide appeal is how accessible it is. Like, I’m not against calling it horror at all, but it’s not nearly as unsettling as Hereditary, The Babadook, or other movies that had been getting traction in that field. Peele relied a lot on his comedy roots, making Get Out a genuinely fun watch while also being a delightful thriller. Because most of Get Out is more thriller than horror, to the point where when I first watched it I realized just how much I loved the thriller genre. Get Out has a near-perfect script; every piece of that movie is either set-up or pay-off. It’s not scary so much as it is tense, a lot of building elements slowly coming together until it finally explodes in its cathartic finale. More than that, Get Out’s straightforward script makes for a very digestible movie. Hereditary is vaguely about the impact of grief on this suburban family, but a lot of it explodes into wild and uncomfortable directions that don’t quite seem to support the movie’s actual themes. Get Out, however, is laser-focused, and borderline unsubtle with the way it talks about race relations in America and the commodification of Black bodies. That’s not to say Peele doesn’t pack a lot of thematic weight underneath Get Out’s hood, just that everyone walking away from that movie knows what it’s about. And so Peele’s debut hit big with a large audience, being a fun and delightful thriller unpacking topics of microaggression and racial privilege in a very accessible way. Quickly, the whole world became locked in on what he would do next.

The fact that Lupita didn't get any sort of award season recognition for her performance in Us is truly wild to me.

In 2019, Peele put out Us, which is simultaneously very similar to Get Out and extremely different! I wasn’t in love with Us the first time I saw it. I certainly enjoyed it; Peele continues to inject his films with a sort of humorous world-weary sensibility that keeps everything fresh and engaging. Yet Us not only dives deeper into the horror well which I wasn’t stoked for at the time, but it also has a much looser script. Where Get Out was tight and contained, and pulled all of its elements into a clean conclusion, Us is much more ambitious. It starts off pretty tight but grows more and more over the course of the runtime, with an ending that has global implications. Get Out’s themes and metaphors were clear from the outset, but Us feels the need to sit the audience down and explain its premise, and even then it doesn’t quite feel like it’s sticking the landing. As any good movie in 2019 (and some less good ones), Us is broadly about class conflict. It turns the upper class and lower class into very literal, physical divides, but tries to pack that division with so much LoreTM that the point starts to get lost in the details. Rewatching it, I certainly like Us a lot more, but you have to engage with it by taking the metaphors as metaphors instead of trying to work out the mechanics of how this world works. Once you do so, you reveal a fascinating narrative that dares to ask if the figures we designate as monsters are just victims of our prosperity, if our comfort is really just their confinement – and if so, how much can we blame them for what was to happen if the tables were flipped? Us was a lot more divisive than Get Out partially because there are no real easy answers. It tests where you’re placing your sympathy and asks how you engage with the world around you. Us isn’t nearly as tight or as accessible as Get Out, but its sheer ambition does a lot for me.

Not to get too hyperbolic, but most directors would probably kill to get an image and performance this good.

If nothing else, Us reveals just how masterful Peele’s visual eye is. Peele’s movies are stuffed with instantly iconic imagery on the level of The Shining. Stuff like Daniel Kaluuya in that chair, eyes wide-open and crying, or two Lupita N’yongos staring each other down while surrounded by rabbits. This talent aids him as he spins together incredibly action beats supported by clear setups and pay-offs, making the audience feel like they’re piecing the story together as they go. Moreover, he has a knack for bringing out the best from his actors. Kaluuya and N’yongo are both incredible leads, but he also gets amazing performances out of Allison Williams, Winston Duke, Elizabeth Moss, and every other actor that falls under his direction. Even if I didn’t love Us on my first watch, it didn’t deter me from being excited for whatever Peele was going to bring to the table next. And when the early promotional material for Nope suggested a high-flying UFO flick centered around Black film history, you better believe I was there for it. But would Nope have the wide appeal of Get Out, or would it continue the trajectory of Us, becoming more and more ambitious until it lost any sense of accessibility? A lot of people have made comparisons between Peele and another introspective horror POC director, M. Night Shyamalan. Their careers have followed fascinatingly similar trajectories, and some worried that Nope might be his Signs, divisive ending and all.[1]

There's something really refreshing about this cast. All of their chemistry feels so natural and earned.

Let me just say, Nope is an absolute blast.

I’m going to throw a big ol’ warning here that this is a hard one to talk about without getting into the weeds a little. As always, I try to avoid spoiling new releases here, but my honest recommendation for this one is to go into Nope knowing as little as possible. So even while I’m going to dodge the bigger plot points and reveals in this article, my flash-review is simply – go see it. Have you been longing for just a big, fun blockbuster? Do you want a movie that will thrill and excite you? That will have you laughing and cheering and jumping out of your seat? Nope hits big on all of that. Do you like a classic, Spielberg-ian monster flick? Do you like Jaws, or Jurassic Park, and that general shift from “tense build-up with fun scares” to “huge exciting action set-pieces with a delightful cast of characters?” You’ve got to see Nope. Are you interested in a movie that talks about the sensationalism of modern media, especially with the ubiquitous nature of social media and how it tries to commodify our lives? Nope is your movie. That’s my basic teaser. Nope rules.

But if you want just a small peak behind the curtain, I’ll keep going. No spoilers, I swear. But let’s talk more about Jordan Peele.

Steven Yeun is having a great career, and is a delight here.

It occurs to me, having now seen Nope, that Peele’s movies are less about “the monster” and more about how society responds to “monsters.” Like, in The Babadook the monster is grief, and the movie is just about like, here’s this monster that represents grief, what do you do about grief? But none of Peele’s movies are quite that simple. The joke about Get Out is that the monster is white people, which is a pretty reasonable summation, but the thing about Get Out is it’s talking about race in a very specific way. It’s not just “it’s scary to live in a white world,” it’s about how white liberalism has this sinister tendency to appear to offer a helping hand to Black people while really just co-opting them for their own means. It’s operating in the same kind of territory as Knives Out, where you have these people claiming to help Marta but there’s a layer where it’s all just tokenism and they don’t actually see her personhood. That’s not, to be clear, suggesting that Get Out is appealing to any sort of “colour-blindness,” but rather the point is very much about how rich white people tend to commodify others. Sure, white people are the monster, but it’s more involved than that (and of course there’s a lot of other points about racial tension that can’t be summarized under that blanket). Us is actually a lot easier to talk about with this angle because we’re led to believe that the monsters are these scary people dressed in red and attacking people with scissors, but the final turns of the movie intentionally lend them a lot of sympathy and humanity and suggests that part of the real problem is the fact that we viewed them as monsters in the first place. I mention all of this because Nope is on a similar train. I think there’s going to be a lot of talk about “what the UFO represents” or whatever but I’m not convinced Nope actually cares about that. Or, to be more precise, I’m not convinced that’s the main thing that Nope cares about.

Keke Palmer, though, is the really runaway success here. She breathes such an energy into every scene she's in.

See, rather than follow in the footsteps of Get Out or Us, Nope feels to me like a real synthesis of the successes of both. It’s able to maintain the wide reach of Us’ ambition while keeping everything tied tight around one point like Get Out, and that results in a movie that has a lot of moving pieces, thematically while still running as smooth as butter. So there are a couple of things that the UFO ends up mapping onto, and a lot of this is suggested by the various ways that Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ and Stephen Yeun’s Jupe end up relating to it. But possibly more important than that is the way that all of the characters fantasize about how this phenomenon could bring them fame. People are less interested in the possibilities of alien life than they are that alien life could make them rich – and they’ll do whatever it takes to bring about that success, even if it means risking their own life, or their own mental health. Jupe is traumatized by the events of his past, but they’ve brought him so much notoriety that he’s willing to capitalize on that trauma rather than cope with it. At its core, Nope is commenting on the rampancy of media. It delights and entertains, but it also threatens to draw people into obsession. It’s easy to assume that we are in control, but who are really the Viewers? As social media takes a larger and larger part of our daily life, it demands that everything we do become “content.” Nothing is worth experiencing if we don’t have a picture to prove it. It’s the showman who has command over the audience, so are we the “predators” or the “prey?” What sort of partnerships are we entering into?

Everyone thinks they can control the message. Even Daft Punk.

This isn’t the first time that an alien monster movie has taken on these sorts of dynamics – after all, Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey, a prequel to the 1987 classic Predator, has just been released on streaming. But here, Peele is able to use a similar metaphor to shine a light on Hollywood’s practices. Many of the characters in this movie have a relationship with animals in film, and those relationships shine a light on the way they see these apparent interstellar invaders. Some believe they have a master over the animals they are on set with, others believe that your relationship with an animal is simply a forged bond of mutual respect. One has to wonder if Peele is deliberately drawing this discussion about animals with his conversation about modern media. Truly, our online spaces feel more like living, vibrant creatures than machines these days. It’s increasingly funny to see out-of-touch billionaires or business executives jump into the internet thinking that they can wrangle mastery over it, only to get unexpectantly bitten or bucked off. At the same time, there is a certain horror in the knowledge that nobody really knows what this whole internet thing is or what the long-term consequences will be. A lot of good has come out of it, certainly, knowledge is more accessible than ever, and people have been uniquely able to bond and find common interests or revel in shared struggles. But the corporate sensationalization of everyday life is daunting. We’re already at a point where people are trying to turn art into a conversation of “ownership” and “monetary value” rather than inherent beauty. I can’t help but also be reminded of the current mess with HBO Max and Discovery, where HBO’s new ownership is willing to cancel fully finished movies just because they think the tax break is worth more than releasing a film for people to see. We all think that we’re in control, and it’s slowly suffocating us.

Palmer and Kaluuya have a perfect brother/sister dynamic in this movie. They are amazing together.

But part of the beauty of Nope is that it doesn’t end on that note. While arrogance is a clear and certain downfall, Peele celebrates not only those who live in respect of the dangers around them but also the aspiring young creatives who forge into the unknown even when it’s at great risk. If Nope is a movie about the industry, it’s one that is aware of its own roots. Peele is still a young creative himself, full of ambition and awe of the untamed unknown. Rather than try to control forces more powerful than them, Peele’s protagonists have to learn to abide by their rules. And, of course, it’s in limitations that art fully flourishes. Nope is full of appreciation of the trailblazers who learned to make a lot out of very little – many have pointed out just how Spielberg-ian this film is. It owes so much to the structure of Jaws, a movie that starts as a tense horror monster movie but eventually transforms into a gleeful sailing adventure with high risks but higher rewards. Naturally, Jaws itself was famously a movie that flourished under limitations. How different would that film’s legacy be if we had been able to see the fake shark puppet the entire time? I also need to shout out Michael Abel in this time, because he’s truly become Peele’s secret weapon. Abel has composed for all three of Peele’s movies, but usually his score sits in the background, building tension until it reaches its breaking point. Here, however, Abel is allowed to flourish as the John Williams to Peele’s Spielberg. In the climactic moments of the movie, the score explodes with Williams-esque fanfares that nod to Close Encounters. Even then, Abel folds the brassy eruptions with the Wild Western sensibilities of Ennio Morricone in possibly my favourite musical moment of the year. Together with the incredible cinematography of Hoyte van Hoytema (a modern legend whose work you might remember from Christopher Nolan’s last few outings – Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet), Abel and Peele convey a real sense of heroism from this exciting, charismatic group of young creatives. While Nope is wary of unchecked and undeserved power, it is downright celebratory of those who are able to navigate these spaces and create something that is not manipulative, but instead is truly original.

Why are we not casting Daniel Kaluuya in everything? We should be doing that.

At the end of the day, that’s what Nope is. Beholden to its origins, but still transformative, exciting, and new. It strings together wildly imaginative set pieces into an electric ride that thrills and delights. Peele hasn’t lost his touch for creating immediately iconic imagery – the shoe? The rain? There’s so much here. And the themes I’ve touched on in this article barely feel like they’re touching the surface. While Us was compelled to sit down and explain its metaphors, Nope’s strength is in its confidence to let the audience put together the details. Because of that, Nope is surprisingly reflective, casting light in various directions like a mirrorball while still tying everything together tightly. You could give me just about any interpretation of this movie and there would probably be enough evidence to make it compelling. Peele isn’t slowing down – I get the feeling like he’s just hitting his stride. It's truly wild just how different each of these three movies feel - Get Out is a tense, nail-biting thriller, Us is an all-out slasher, while Nope is mostly just a high-soaring monster movie, though it's not without its own scares. He's only getting better. And considering how good his movies are already, I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Anyways, trying to talk around this movie without spoiling it is hard. So see it now and then call me when you have, because Nope is wild and very worth talking about.

It's somehow just now occurring to me that this is probably an E.T. nod. Spielberg everywhere.

[1] Gonna take this moment to recommend Mikey Newmen and Siddhant Adlakha’s video on M. Night, because it’s a shame how underappreciated Shyamalan’s work has become: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GCppxDw-Cw