Thank you for attending our outdoor screening of NOPE with the MFA Boston! Read some more of our reflections on the film’s themes below.
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SOME THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE MOVIE NOPE
BUT THERE IS SO MUCH MORE
By Lisa Simmons, Artistic Director of RoxFilm
*potentially mild spoilers below*
The film deals with many themes, but at the center of it all is the theme of spectacle. The text that opens NOPE is Nahum 3:6: I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle. A verse from Nahum, one of the Bible’s least-quoted books. Just before this verse, Nahum describes Nineveh as a lion’s den, the “city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims,” a place with “galloping horses and jolting chariots,” full of bodies of the dead. Basically, Nineveh arrogantly chews people up and spits them out (a reference to Hollywood). Spectacles are barbaric, as they strip the autonomy and dignity of a living thing for the entertainment, amusement, and invasive curiosity of others. To bear witness to a spectacle is not always an experience of wonder.
The action takes place in Agua Dulce, about a 40-mile drive north of Hollywood. There, siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) run Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, named for their great-great-great grandfather Alistair E. Haywood, who rode the horse in the first moving picture ever made.
Alistair Haywood’s character is Peele’s invention, though the film in which he rode a horse, was made by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878, is real. We know the name of the horse (Annie G) but not the jockey, a troubling reflection of the erasure of Black horsemanship in history. Peele’s reference is to say, history remembers the horse but has lost track of the jockey’s identity, which is sort of Nope’s point.
This is partly a film about how frequently Black film history has been pushed out of memory. In the ranch house, you can glimpse posters for the films Duel at Diablo and Buck and the Preacher, the first Westerns that Sidney Poitier starred in and directed, respectively, in 1966 and 1972. Buck and the Preacher, in particular, was groundbreaking for casting Black actors as main characters. Coupled with the Haywood connection — and the fact that it’s still hard, 50 years later, to get a movie made starring Black actors that isn’t about trauma in some way — NOPE points to Hollywood’s history of shoving inconvenient histories aside.
In the end, the title of Nope might be its thesis. Maybe Peele is calling out the messiness of human nature, where we look at the world around us, recognize the looming cloud as a threat, and instead of confronting it, we say, "Nope," and go back to looking down, ignoring the horror that's oncoming.
Jupiter’s Claim also has some symbolism to it. It’s very much about how Hollywood has made a mythology out of the Wild Wild West. He stated that movies have sanitized the time period and that it not only erased the Black Cowboy but also toned down how brutal the time was. It also also ties in with the Kid Sheriff poster that we see, and it shows how Jupe has very much played to this simplified version of the time period.
Through the lens of spectacle, NOPE teaches lesson after lesson about the greed of Hollywood, the insatiable hunger of capitalism, the false promise of legacy that a spectacle offers, and who and what we are willing to sacrifice for the spotlight.
Everything in this film means something from the t-shirts that characters are wearing to the soundtrack, to the scenes that are influenced by other horror and “alien” films to actual tv shows and true government name change from UFO to UAP. There is nothing in a Jordan Peele movie that doesn’t have significance.
Any other thoughts or reflections come to mind? Share them with us on social media and tag us at @roxfilm #roxfilm!