While waiting to see Nope, I’ve been watching the promo videos and interviews to stay sufficiently hyped up, and so I’ve seen and read a lot of gushing praise of Jordan Peele and the movie itself. Peele is frequently and breathlessly called a “visionary,” and the movie is described with all sorts of review blurbs calling it a love letter to the Hollywood blockbuster and a direct successor to the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg.
I don’t know how much I agree with that. That’s not a slam against Peele, who I like a lot, or Nope, which I enjoyed very much. It’s more that treating the movie with too much reverence — even for marketing purposes — misses out on a big part of what makes the movie unique. It’s an imaginative, well-crafted, and thoughtful movie that is still completely accessible.
There’s a tendency among cinema studies types and eager film buffs making video essays to treat the works of Hitchcock, and increasingly, the “classic” movies of Spielberg, as case studies in The Ineffable Art of Cinema, forgetting that they were at least as focused on The Joy of Going To The Movies. It’s the same mindset that sees “crowd-pleasing” as derogatory1The thing that annoyed me so much about Martin Scorsese writing op-eds about how Marvel was killing cinema was his revisionist history about how much Hitchcock was making art for art’s sake instead of “franchise pictures,” which makes Hitchcock sound like an insufferable auteur instead of a director who frequently talked about his responsibility to the audience.. Both Hitchcock and Spielberg made movies with audiences in mind, always conscious of how best to manipulate them. (In a good way).
After seeing Get Out, Us, and now Nope, I feel like Jordan Peele isn’t so much carrying on that tradition as responding to it. That’s largely based on Key and Peele, which always had segments that felt as if they were coming from people who loved movies and were having a blast being able to use a whole production crew to make their own. That’s the vibe I get from Peele’s movies: they’re not just made with the audience in mind; they always feel like Peele wants to be right there in the audience watching them with us.
So when I say that Nope is “kind of a mess,” I don’t mean it as a bad thing. Just that I think the enthusiasm and unrestrained creativity come through more than anything else. It doesn’t feel like it was made with, for instance, Spielberg’s economy of storytelling, in which everything that’s not essential to the core story is excised early in the process. But it’s also not like Quentin Tarantino’s digressions or extended references or rambling dialogue, which don’t really fit into the story but still feel like essential elements of the style2The thing that made me think of Tarantino was Jupe’s extended story about a fictional sketch on SNL starring Chris Kattan. It seemed weird and overlong and clumsy, and I’m still not quite sure how much of that feeling was intentional.. Instead, Nope feels like it’s been over-stuffed with ideas, back-stories, and extended lore. It feels like the result of a brainstorming process where ideas that didn’t quite fit weren’t rejected, but instead worked over and hammered on until they fit.
And it does all fit, somehow! A lot of the movie feels like a sequence of weird or unsettling images mixed with subplots that are weird or unsettling because they feel so incongruous, but they all eventually settle down into two main thematic threads: the need to coexist with nature instead of trying to control it, and people’s obsession with fame and spectacle. By the end, the two ideas play off of each other in a way that’s left open to interpretation3Hence the depressing over-abundance of too-literal NOPE ENDING EXPLAINED! videos on YouTube. and is much more nuanced than you’d expect if it were nothing more than a pastiche of summer blockbuster, horror, and sci-fi cliches. Ultimately I was left with an inexpressible feeling of the value of experiencing and sharing instead of achieving and controlling.
Even if I’m just talking about one thing I like, I don’t want to make it sound like the value of Nope is all in the ideas and not the execution. The performances from the leads are great, especially Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as polar opposite siblings: one a force of pure charisma and the other a force of near-silent, stubborn integrity. There’s a ton of fantastic art direction and character design, images that will be as unforgettable as Us‘s scissors and Get Out‘s tea cup. And I’m not at all knowledgeable about cinematography, but even I could appreciate how the bulk of the movie was set at night and so perfectly captured the feeling of a night outdoors.
But ultimately the thing I liked best was that it felt like a big, tangled mess of disparate ideas and images that a filmmaker was so excited to finally get the chance to share with us.