Genre and Spectacle in Jordan Peele’s Nope

by Eda Gokcen.

Frames from 'A Horse in Motion'

Jordan Peele’s distinctive talent and style in filmmaking is arguably best represented through his most recent horror Nope (2022) , as an audiovisual portrayal of Picasso’s renowned quote "Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist." He reinvents not only the Black legacy and credibility erased within Hollywood’s racist past through the film’s storyline following the fictional descendants of the Black Jockey riding the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion” (Muybridge, 1878) but Peele also revitalizes the genres of horror, science-fiction and Neo-Western through his synergic use of tropes and conventions. Nope is the third and final part of Peele’s existential horror trilogy conveying a critique of our addiction and desire for spectacle by exploring our complex relationship with the unknown as a thrilling but frightening example. Contrary to the first two films of the trilogy (Peele, Get Out, 2017) and (Peele, Us, 2019) , it provides a more ambiguous form of social commentary which raises questions for the audience rather than answering them, and therefore, can be frustrating or confusing for the more passive spectator hoping to enjoy just another scary alien film (proven by the controversial media star Logan Paul’s lengthy review on Twitter).

The Gordy Tape Opening in Nope, 2022, Monkeypaw Productions.

This ambiguous commentary on spectacle culture is established through the opening scene with the disturbing video tape of the fictitious 90s sitcom show “Gordy’s Home” where Gordy the chimpanzee puts an end to his own exploitation in the name of spectacle, by attacking his co-stars and crew members upon being triggered by the pop of birthday balloons used as props in the set. The only unharmed survivor of the massacre is the antagonist Ricky Jupe Park (Steven Yeun), who is a retired child actor and owns Jupiter’s Claim, a stereotypically Western amusement park where he continues the traumatic pattern of exploitation in the name of spectacle as he feeds the horses he buys from the Haywood’s to the alien. Gordy represents the conventional horror genre and symbolizes humanity’s complicated fascination for spectacle in which we tend to have an inability to look away even when we are physically repulsed or terrified. Jupe and his theme park represent the Neo-Western genre and the consequences of this fascination and desire which are hinted through the bible verse Nahum 3:6: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” in the opening credits. Bringing us to the best for last, the sci-fi iconography and representation through an incredibly unique ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' (updated term for Unidentified Flying Object) nicknamed Jean Jacket by the protagonist siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) after one of their horses. Jean Jacket symbolizes the insatiability and vile nature of our addiction to spectacle, while OJ respects it like one of his horses and learns to not become its prey but others in the film including Jupe end up in “the most nightmarish environment possible with bouncy castle from hell energy” as they get eaten up by the celestial wind creature.





These synergic representations of genre tropes within Nope can be better understood through Rick Altman’s explanations of genre emergence as he suggests “either a relatively stable set of semantic givens is developed through syntactic experimentation into a coherent and durable syntax, or an already existing syntax adopts a new set of semantic elements”. The professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature in the University of Iowa argues that genre is made up of semantic signs or signals within a film and a syntactic element within the storyline or ideologies of the film in his 1984 book titled “Film/Genre” (Altman, 1984). He provides explanations of the contradictions within the existing genre theory by the likes of Levi Strauss, a French anthropologist known for his structuralist theories of binary opposites. Altman critically states that “not all genre films relate to their genre in the same way or to the same extent” and that within one singular film, “the same phenomenon may have more than one meaning depending on whether we consider it at the linguistic or textual level”. The linguistic level refers to the primary semantic meaning of the film’s components such as the iconography of a flying saucer or the cowboy costume of Jupe, serving as easily recognizable tropes and conventions previously established within their genres. As for the textual level, this is the secondary syntactic meaning which such components “acquire through a structuring process internal to the text or to the genre.” which can be the underlying ideological comment Peele makes about consumerism or the broader philosophical questions around spectacle. Although Altman argued these points in the 80s, they apply to today’s cinema far more than previous waves of filmmaking, with the rising elevated horror sub-genre also referred to as arthouse horror, exemplified by Peele’s complex and multilayered masterpiece. This term began spreading around 2019 with critically acclaimed examples like Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) reinventing the idea of horror that is identifiable and recognizable to mass audiences. Maintaining semantic elements but forming a more metaphorical form of storytelling that employs strong craftsmanship and artistry rather than cheap and tacky jump scares reused over and over by several horror filmmakers in the past. Through a close analysis of Nope, we can see how this theory of genre evolution and hybridity allows Peele to focus on different aspects of the wider metaphorical meanings of his film regarding the exploitation and monetization of spectacle.





Gordy and Horror:

Gordy's House Title shared on Twitter, @JordanPeele.

The choice of placing the Gordy video tape right in the very beginning of the film is brilliantly explicit as Peele visually tells his criticism about spectacle culture while making the audience an example of it. The use of blocking with the tablecloth and furniture props of the set of Gordy’s Home frustrates the audience desiring to see the horrifying spectacle of Gordy’s actions. Additionally, the use of little Ricky’s (Jacob Kim) POV shots, the dripping blood from Gordy’s fist-bump initiating paw, the horrifying sounds of thuds, grunts, screams, squelches of blood and flesh contrast with the ambiguity created through the blocking and the moments of silence. This allows Peele to create a conventional horror scene on the linguistic level while also directly addressing the textual question of why we feel such a strong urge to see behind the tablecloth and beyond the position of Ricky, when we feel such strong disgust and horror by the conventional techniques employed. The pop of the final standing balloon as Ricky’s POV shot pans across the screen away from the closed door where the final victim is attacked by Gordy, is a small metaphorical detail emphasizing the consequences of exploitation. Balloons are the quintessential empty spectacle used for entertainment, they represent not only Gordy but also Ricky as the token Asian actor, and even Jean Jacket as various characters from Ricky Jupe himself to the TMZ reporter (Devon Graye) and the filmmaker Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) try to exploit it for their own benefit of monetized spectacle. Therefore, the horror genre and its conventions are used to depict the consequences of reducing people to tokens and putting them into boxes. Explaining the duality of our complex relationship with spectacle and especially images of horror, Peele states “We fear Gordy but we don’t hate Gordy” in an interview with Empire (Butcher, 2022). The empathy we feel for the victims of exploitation as well as acts of violence can sometimes cause us to not want to look as we hold onto our cinema seats or hide behind a cushion while watching the disturbing spectacle, nevertheless we’re fascinated by it.

Peele’s production company named Monkeypaw is a reference to a short story by W. W. Jacobs in which the horrific events are left to the imagination of the reader and this technique of ambiguity creates the terror required for the horror. This essence of terror is “the gut-deep dread of the awful possibilities” (Morgan, 2022) states Morgan in his essay on unseen terror, distinguishing between terror and horror through this idea of ambiguity the former requires, and Peele’s understanding of this dynamic is present throughout Nope but especially in the Gordy scene dominated by the horror genre. Similarly, Peele makes use of this idea in one of the following scenes where we see a mid-wide shot of OJ from behind panning up to reveal the night sky he gazes on with one of his horses, and we hear the faint sounds of Jean Jacket’s victims screaming. The sound designer Johnnie Burns uses sounds of the horse nickering and grunting as well as the wind in the same way the cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema uses blocking to hide the element of horror and create sonic ambiguity. This develops into terror as the audience is aware of the first attack on OJ’s father but not yet aware of the predator itself. OJ’s gaze over the sky is directly inspired by Martin Brody’s (Roy Scheider) gaze on the water in Spielberg’s 1975 masterpiece Jaws (Spielberg, 1975) where the terrorizing sound and visuals of the water are merged with the cheery and playful sounds of the public beach.

The most visibly clear shot of the Gordy video tape is a close-up of the fist bump from a side angle, hinting at the grown-up Jupe’s trauma coping mechanism of turning his own personal experience into a spectacle and therefore detaching himself from it. This is evident in his dialogue with the Haywood siblings as he tells the story of what happened through reciting SNL’s rendition of the massacre, rather than a first-person narrative speech of his own POV, which is perhaps too terrorizing for his Western style brand but fits perfectly into Jordan Peele’s brand of horror. This is a prime example of what (Debord, 1967) means by “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” in his book The Society of The Spectacle. Steven Yeun comments on the dynamics of Hollywood and the effects it can leave on individuals like himself as well as his character Jupe, “Sometimes it’s easier to be the projection everybody wants you to be than it is for you to resist and fight that every day” (Yeun, 2022). This philosophical criticism of Hollywood’s corruption and exploitation of its contributors can also be seen through a textual analysis of the syntactic use of the Neo-Western genre and the backstory of the showman antagonist.

Jupe and Neo-Western:

The Western Iconography in Nope Trailer, 2022, Monkeypaw Productions.

Asides from films like Jaws , Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Speilberg, 1977) , or Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) , Peele was also greatly influenced by No Country for Old Men (The Coen Brothers, 2007) in terms of both semantic and syntactic approaches to depicting the Neo-Western elements of the film best represented through mise en scene and ideology. No Country is a deconstruction of the Western, raising distinct ideological questions in an ambiguous manner and leaving plenty of sonic and visual space of emptiness and silence for the audience to reflect upon. The setting of the vast deserted American West and the costume tropes of cowboy’s boots and hats are perhaps the most recognizable semantic nods to the traditional Western. Peele conceptualizes this further into the Neo-Western as he places the typical town associated with the genre into an amusement park which remains in Universal Studios as a permanent attraction for admirers to visit. On a more syntactic and textual level, Peele states clearly that “this film is more than anything about the Hollywood mythology of the wild west, not only the sugarcoating of the barbarism of it, but also the erasure of the black cowboy” in the same interview with (Yeun, 2022) by Entertainment Weekly. While Jupe uses the Western genre for profit through Jupiter’s Claim, blind to his own exploitation within Hollywood and continuing the very same corruption that caused his own trauma, OJ on the other hand, respects and honors his past and heritage. OJ’s costume of the bright orange crew hoodie from the set of The Scorpian King (Chuck Russell, 2002) is a small detail hinting at this respect for his father’s and ancestors work as he tries to keep the old family business alive. Additionally, another detail within the mise en scene is a poster of Buck & The Preacher(Sidney Poitier, 1972) in the Haywood’s house as one of the few black cowboy films of Hollywood. This reference also symbolizes the growing relationship between OJ and Emerald as Buck and the Preacher are initially distant but fighting together against their common enemy brings them closer, much like how Jean Jacket brings the two siblings closer together as they get closure and revenge on their father’s sudden death.

Jean Jacket and Science-Fiction:

A shot of Jean Jacket in Nope Trailer, 2022, Monkeypaw Productions.

The hybridization of Westerns and science-fiction has been popular for decades with examples like Star Wars: A New Hope (Lucas, 1977) seen as one of the greatest and most influential films of all time. Additionally, images of futuristic spaceships or UAP’s have also been reinvented in several different versions throughout cinema, yet Peele is still able to revolutionize and hybridize such recognizable imagery of these well-known genres through his brilliant use of cinematography, visual effects, and sound. The cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema is well known for his collaborations with Christopher Nolan where he has proven the diverse capacities of IMAX cameras to be used in more a traditional sense as well as the grand scale blockbuster action or superhero films associated with them due to their difficult size. The decision to shoot 30-40% of the film with these cameras allowed Peele to fully transport the audience into the immersive world of the film, while the rest was shot with Panavision 65mm on the wide frames of Kodak film stock. It was important to shoot on film with the highest image resolution possible to create the sharper look Peele was after, allowing his audience to gaze through the meticulously designed sky similar to the more traditional cinematography technique of deep focus. Additionally, the taller aspect ratios of IMAX screens were chosen for greater storytelling and further immersion into the world of Nope, as the audience is forced to look up to spectate the vastness of the film much like the characters looking up at the sky where Jean Jacket hides.

Given the geographic limitations of the Californian desert, Peele and his visual effects team had to resort to digitally creating and choreographing the clouds where the predatory wind creature awaits his next prey to attack. Furthermore, Peele wanted the sharpness of his image to continue into the night scenes of the film, so they used an Arri Alexa 65mm camera shooting in infrared mode and the Panavision shooting in colour during the day, digitally combined to achieve the night sky which appears the way human eyes see at night rather than a traditional camera does. Moving on from the environment of the creature to its sound design, Peele chose Johnnie Burns based on his work in Jonathan Glazer’s British independent film Under The Skin (Glazer, 2013) starring Scarlet Johansson playing an alien disguised as a human, learning to become one. The sound in Nope is naturalistic and domestic, modified slightly to sound out of place and create ambiguity. Simplicity of sound can also be associated with heightened awareness which becomes engaged when one notices a potential danger, therefore naturally tuning into the singular sound terrorizing them. Using this technique in film helps to build this terror and uncertainty as the audience may not actively realize the background noise is reduced but will subconsciously recognize this and associate it with potential danger as the calm before the storm. This simple sound of terror is necessary for the horror to be truly memorable and epic as it builds up the tension and the horror anticipated by the audience. The screams coming from Jean Jacket were designed by mixing screams of joy and thrill like on a roller coaster, with screams of horror the audience would expect, this mixture creates a newer and deeper sense of unsettling horror as Peele continues to revolutionize Hollywood’s well known genre tropes.

Lastly, the visual design of Jean Jacket is the ultimate reinvention of the semantic sci-fi iconography of the flying saucer, as the creature’s initial ambiguity builds up the terror of possibilities, the much later reveal of its ability to transform its shape acts as a shock factor, and its insides as the final horror spectacle. During the opening credits, we zoom into the heart of the creature where the Muybridge motion picture is shown, this is another example of Peele being deliberate and explicit in his social commentary and criticism through visual storytelling. The decision to make the opening of the creature a square adds another layer of uneasiness as this shape is often only found in inorganic structures, so the sharp angles are instinctively off-putting like some of the angels seen in Neon Genesis Evangelion (Hideaki Anno, 1995) which have a much more minimalistic and futuristic design than previous sci-fi examples like Alien (Scott, 1979) . Peele is also known for his biblical influences in his films, so the biblically accurate depictions of angels were among the inspirations for Jean Jacket’s final look as well as the flowing motion of sea creatures such as jellyfish inspiring the mobility of the otherworldly wind creature.

Conclusion...

“Genre is a thing to subvert” states Peele as he wants his audience to feel not just fear when viewing Nope, it honors horror as Peele’s favorite genre but isn’t completely defined by it. This is due to the hybridization and synergy of sci-fi and Neo-Western elements that are at times depicted traditionally and semantically, but for the most part deviated from and evolved through a new lens of Peele’s artistry and syntactic commentary.

by Eda Gokcen, January 2022.



Bibliography

Altman, R. (1984). Film/Genre. London: Bloomsbury Collections.

Butcher, S. (2022, August 30). Jordan Peele On Nope’s Gordy Sequence: ‘It’s About Feelings Of Rage’. Retrieved January 5, 2023, from Empire: Read Here...

Debord, G. (1967). The Society of The Spectacle. Paris: Editions Buchet-Chastel.

Morgan, M. (2022, 10 7). Unseen Terror: how uncertainty feeds our fear. Retrieved 1 7, 2023, from Art of Conversation: Read Here...

Yeun, S. (2022, July 20). Around the table with Jordan Peele and the cast of Nope. (E. Weekly, Interviewer) Retrieved January 5, 2023: Watch Here...

Muybridge, E. (1878). The Horse in Motion. Stanford University .

Peele, J. (Director). (2017). Get Out [Motion Picture]. USA.

Peele, J. (Director). (2019). Us [Motion Picture]. USA.

Glazer, J. (Director). (2013). Under The Skin [Motion Picture]. UK.

Hideaki Anno, K. T. (Director). (1995). Neon Genesis Evangelion [Motion Picture]. Japan.

Lucas, G. (Director). (1977). Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope [Motion Picture]. USA.

Russell, C. (Director). (2002). The Scorpion King [Motion Picture]. USA.

Scott, R. (Director). (1979). Alien [Motion Picture]. USA.

Sidney Poitier, J. S. (Director). (1972). Buck and the Preacher [Motion Picture]. USA.

Spielberg, S. (Director). (1975). Jaws [Motion Picture]. USA.

Same Author
How Hooper’s 1974 Masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Slashes Audience Expectations.
by Eda Gokcen
Same Tag
Film Censorship in Hollywood: The Hays Code.
by Ruby Gerhardt Greco
Random
Please Stop the Terrible Hallmark Movie Invasion.
by Isabel Hodges