Jordan Peele (2022)

I emerged from Curzon Richmond needing a Wikipedia plot synopsis and – worse – an Armond White review.  I hoped his predictable vivid antipathy to a Jordan Peele picture would dissolve some of the nervous tension of watching Nope.  White duly obliged and so did Wikipedia, which defines Peele’s third feature as an ‘epic science fiction horror film’.  It did sometimes make me want to scream but out of boredom rather than fear.

Wikipedia’s label omits an important genre component of Nope:  the Western.  The action, which takes place in the present day, is centred on a remote ranch in California, the site of a distinctive family business.  After the death of Otis Haywood Sr (Keith David) in the opening minutes of the film, his son OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and daughter Emerald (Keke Palmer) take over the reins of the business, wrangling and training horses for movie and television work.  Haywood’s Hollywood Horses is the only set-up of its kind owned and run by African Americans.  (Hayward [sic], by the way, was the forename of Jordan Peele’s late father.)  The Haywoods’ few neighbours include Jupe (Steven Yeun), who wears cowboy outfits and runs Jupiter’s Claim, a theme park where visitors can pretend to be in a Western.  The set-up strongly suggests that Peele’s interested in the Wild West as a money-making vehicle – with particular reference to the involvement of ethnic groups not usually associated with the commercial Western.

On the wall of an office at the ranch is a poster for Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher (1972), a Western in which the title roles were played by Poitier and Harry Belafonte.  But the Haywoods’ family connection with horses and film-making is – as Emerald explains in a pitch for a TV commercial – uniquely long-standing.  As part of the pitch, she shows one of the earliest moving-picture images, created by Eadweard Muybridge in the late nineteenth century.  It shows a galloping horse ridden by a Black jockey:  he was, says Emerald, Alistair Haywood, her and OJ’s great-great grandfather.  It’s an intriguing connection and, though fictitious, acquires the semblance of truth because Muybridge’s ‘The Horse in Motion’ is real and the horse’s rider really was Black.  Jupe, in the Korean-American person of Steven Yeun, isn’t similarly connected to his low-budget Westworld domain but his fictional backstory is also fascinating.  Jupe was once Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park, a child actor in ‘Gordy’s Home’ – a hit TV sitcom of the 1990s until the title character, a chimpanzee, went berserk on set, attacking and maiming his human adult co-stars while the terrified Jupe hid under a table.  The show was recorded before a live studio audience:  even as Gordy wreaked havoc, the illuminated studio sign kept up its flashing cue ‘Applause’.

Peele accumulates instances of human exploitative abuse of non-human creatures and the latter’s revenge.  The mayhem on the sitcom set happened because the performing chimp was frightened by the pop of balloons (it was Gordy’s birthday).  At the filming of the TV commercial, OJ’s warning to the crew not to spook their horse by shining a light in its eyes goes unheeded:  the animal reacts violently and the Haywoods are fired on the spot.  At the centre of Nope‘s plot is a UFO, which appears to be the cause of Otis Haywood Sr’s peculiar death at the start:  a coin falls from the sky and penetrates his eye and brain.  The UFO – shaped like a flying saucer but reminiscent too of a ten-gallon hat – subsequently sucks up horses on the ranch.  When Jupe uses a horse as bait to get the UFO to perform at Jupiter’s Claim in front of a paying audience, the thing in the sky obliges by devouring Jupe and his customers instead.  With the help of tech geek Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), OJ works out that the UFO is no spaceship but a territorial creature that eats anything that looks directly at it.  OJ starts referring to the thing as ‘Jean Jacket’, after a horse his father could never tame.

This much (or nearly this much) I gleaned from watching Nope; it seems pointless to include further plot details that I only discovered afterwards.  I can’t know how many of these I missed through picking up no more than intermittently what people on the screen were saying.  In her first scene, when Emerald is making the Haywoods’ pitch, Keke Palmer’s delivery is refreshingly distinct.  Once that public speaking is over, she’s the chief offender in the indecipherability stakes.  It’s not a question of volume – Emerald’s usually excited voice is loud enough.  Making out the words, though, is a different matter.  Daniel Kaluuya is less of a problem if only because OJ, in keeping with his Western hero quality, is a man of relatively few words (one of them the film’s title).  Besides, Kaluuya is expressive in other ways, to a greater extent than anyone else in the cast.  Although I don’t like Nope, I was once again impressed by its lead actor.

In his hostile review of Peele’s Get Out (2017), Armond White described Kaluuya’s ‘dark skin/bright-teeth image’ as ‘inadvertently recall[ing] the old Sambo archetype’.  Noting that ‘Surely Spike Lee would have recognized the resemblance to Stepin Fetchit, Mantan Moreland, and Willie Best, the infamous comics who made their living performing Negro caricatures during Hollywood’s era of segregation’, White suggested that Peele seemed ‘too caught up in exploiting modern narcissism to notice old repulsion’.  Even at the time, I thought White was probably wrong to think this inadvertent and Peele’s subsequent work – Us (2019), now this film – settles the argument.  It seems that Peele casts Kaluuya both for his acting skill and precisely because his facial characteristics evoke the egregious treatment of Black performers during Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’.  In Nope, the weight of Kaluuya’s melancholy presence does more than reflect OJ’s particular circumstances.  It also situates him in racially exploitative cinema history, the exposure of which is evidently essential to Jordan Peele’s own film-making.

Armond White is right, though, when he censures Peele for the naming of his latest protagonist (‘Every time OJ is addressed, Peele achieves an unearned cultural frisson’) and compares his approach with Quentin Tarantino’s in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019).  Like Tarantino’s worlds, the world of Nope is defined by ‘movieland history’ (White again), which limits its impact – even its immediate impact.  Unlike Tarantino, Peele isn’t, since Get Out anyway, a naturally talented storyteller.  As with Us, the themes of Nope sound promising on paper – an alien entity’s force field is a location peopled by Hollywood ‘aliens’, and so on – but they don’t play out interestingly.  As a piece of horror cinema, the few minutes of the ‘Gordy’s Home’ subplot are much more gripping than the UFO-or-is-it stuff that makes up most of the film’s 130 minutes.  (Inside the chimpanzee costume is Terry Notary, whose extraordinary simian antics also briefly enlivened Ruben Östlund’s overrated The Square (2017).)

Get Out was a deserved critical and commercial success, and a dual surprise.  Peele, who had worked predominantly in television comedy, gave evidence of precocious film-making skill in a genre you wouldn’t have expected from him as a first-time director.  His second film was another racially charged horror movie and the result much less effective, although Us (2019), like its predecessor, was a big box-office hit.  Peele was thus established, even before writing and producing the remake of Candyman (2021), as a purveyor of smart-aleck horror and Nope proves it’s time he tried something else.  For a while, the film is more tonally varied than Us but it’s also longer and, by the halfway point, has turned into a bombastic spectacular slog.  As with Us, I saw Nope through with difficulty.  To this cinemagoer, the title of his auspicious debut is starting to sound like warning advice on sitting down to watch a Jordan Peele film.

18 August 2022