Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022) (Patreon)

I get the sense that maybe Jordan Peele would like to work outside of the confines of genre, but his backers won't allow it. I say this in part because the first 20-30 minutes of Nope is a rather tedious "slow cinema" prologue, the sort we often find in M. Night Shyamalan films, although Shyamalan does it better. The main problem with Nope as I see it is that it feels less like a complete movie and more like a wall of Post-It notes, with individually intriguing ideas all sort of mashed together without much secondary revision.

Within the overall context of an alien monster movie, we dive in and our of the following themes: the commodification of wild animals; trauma manifested as a compulsion to repeat; the role of Muybridge and his pre-cinematic zoopraxoscope as a tool of scientific inquiry; that scientific inquiry mutating into mass entertainment; the contributions of Black craftspeople to the entertainment industry, and their historical erasure; the au courant fascination with Black Western iconography, and the elision of Black cowboys from official iconography; even corny 80s / 90s sitcoms, like ABC's "TGIF" lineup, as conduits for dominant ideologies like domesticity and blended families, seemingly freed from the social frictions of race and class. (Did I miss anything?)

One of the oddest aspects of Nope is its cinematography. The film, of course, explicitly thematizes image-making, not only in the role of the Haywoods as showbiz animal trainers. Once the alien is discovered, all common sense evaporates and the film's main characters all become obsessed with securing photographic evidence of its existence. More than this, they are after the "Oprah" moment, that suitably dramatic, incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial life. In time, Emerald (Kiki Palmer) reaches out to an industry professional, Antlers Holst (Michael Winnicott), a cinematographer specializing in capturing "the impossible."

There are a few aspects of this concern in Nope that are conveyed with some actual flair. The coin-op photographic well at Jupiter's Claim recalls the sequential images of Muybridge and Marey. And in fact, the deployment of electric sky-dancers throughout the valley -- a sort of used-car-lot version of a Christo earthwork -- obliquely refers to the trip-wire exposure devices that Muybridge placed across his studio to produce his motion-study snapshots. 

But what none of this really explains is why Peele and his eminent cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoyema, shoot so much of the film so dark that its Black stars are barely visible onscreen. This must be a choice, and the best I can figure is, Peele aims to make a conceptual parallel between capturing the alien and the inability of Western image technologies to properly visualize Black people. That is, making the Black image has been so negligible from a historical perspective that the technology itself developed around that incapacity. So in terms of film history, Peele is making "alien" images, ones centered on Black people who have never been cinema's preferred subject. And instantiating Blackness on film is not unlike securing proof of life, evidence of the "aliens" in our midst.

This is merely conjecture, and none of it really accounts for the frustrating experience of watching Nope and seeing its lead actor's face consumed by the dark of night. It's possible that this, too, speaks to the limitations of genre as a means of generating a Black cinema. Monster movies demand the dark, a place where scary things can go bump, only revealing themselves and the danger they pose later on. On the one hand, Peele's films have been significant precisely because they have demonstrated the artistic and commercial viability of genre films centered on Black performers. But on the other, maybe he's asking us to recognize that these films quite literally provide a limited picture, that they obscure as much as they show.

But then again, part of what makes Nope somewhat unsatisfying is that Peele is not obviously committed to any of these ideological readings. After all, it is Jupe's inflatable cartoon self-portrait that defeats the monster, and Emerald uses the master's photographic tools to secure the elusive image. She gets her Oprah shot. So is Peele putting us through the paces of a disquisition on the marginality of Black people to the industry, only to engineer a "win" in the end? It feels phony. And that's why Nope is simultaneously Peele's most ambitious film and his least artistically successful.