A man walks into a desert amphitheater, his red cowboy suit clashing against a cloudy sky. As a computer pumps an orchestral score through strategically placed speakers, he turns to address a scattered crowd.
“For the past six months, my family and I have borne witness to an absolute spectacle,” he announces, emphasizing “spectacle.” A former child star, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) gained notoriety from a hit sitcom. Now the proprietor of Jupiter’s Claim, a western-themed amusement park in the California wilderness, Park can only gesture toward the success he once enjoyed. But with his latest show, dubbed the “Star Lasso Experience,” Jupe hopes he’ll make it back to the big time.
With the exception of the movie’s oft-exclaimed title, “spectacle” might be the most frequently used word in Nope.
What follows Jupe’s speech is one of the most memorable sequences in Nope, the latest thriller from writer and director Jordan Peele. With unflinching dexterity, Peele and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema juxtapose the terror of encountering a being from beyond with one of the most claustrophobic scenes ever caught on film. It’s a spectacle, but not the type that Jupe had in mind.
With the exception of the movie’s oft-exclaimed title, “spectacle” might be the most frequently used word in Nope. From the opening Biblical epigraph from Nahum 3:6 (“I will pelt you with filth, I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle”) to the comments hurled at protagonists O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald “Em” Haywood (Keke Palmer), Nope is deeply concerned with dissecting the nature of making a scene.
While Nope directly references Steven Spielberg classics Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it also draws on many of the ideas in French media theorist Guy Debord’s 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle. Written as a collection of aphorisms, The Society of the Spectacle analyzes the relationship between representation and society under late capitalism.
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles,” Debord declares in the first aphorism. Driven by a relentless need for something new and a desire to turn people away from reality, spectacles become the new primary form of social cohesion. “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images,” argues Debord.
Dazzling images, and our dependence on them, drive Nope, primarily in the relationship between O.J. and Em.
The siblings inherited their father’s company, Haywood Hollywood Horses, after his unexplained death.
As Em explains to uninterested Hollywood execs after a failed commercial shoot with one of their horses, they are descendents of the Bahamian jockey featured in the first moving picture, “The Horse in Motion.” Though history remembers the photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, the man on the horse goes unnamed and uncredited, much like O.J. and Em’s efforts to preserve his legacy.
While the taciturn O.J. loves working with the horses, he lacks the social skills to keep the ranch afloat, especially as the entertainment industry pivots from living animals to CGI recreations. Em, his outgoing younger sister, knows how to lay on the charm, but the preferential treatment her father showed O.J. leaves her feeling excluded from the business.
When what seems to be a UFO hovers above the Haywood Ranch and its neighbor Jupiter’s Claim, O.J. and Em think they’ve found an answer to their woes. With the sometimes-unsolicited help of tech-savvy Angel (Brandon Perea) and that of temperamental cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), the Haywoods risk their lives to capture the spectacle on film and cash in.
Like with Chris Washington (Kaluuya) in his breakout Get Out, or the upper-class Wilsons in his follow-up Us, Peele never condemns his characters for living within systems of inequality. Rather, he gives them room to challenge the economic conditions that make them chase spectacle—even as he refuses to turn away from the resulting destruction.
_____________________________________________________________________________
No one would call this quartet any type of real society. O.J. and Em have their shared history and genuine sibling love for each other, but neither seems all that pleased to know Angel. And Holst condescends to them, coming to their aid only in his ego-driven efforts to get “the perfect shot. They come together solely for the spectacle, called by the sight of the phenomena’s effects and held together by the promise of riches and esteem.
For Debord, these types of mercenary relationships are all that’s left under capitalism. “The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them,” he writes. Under this subjection, authentic relationships fall away. There is no reality to ground connections, not even the reality of shared trauma.
That’s most clear in the movie’s striking subplot, involving Gordy’s Home, the late 90s sitcom starring Jupe and a trained chimpanzee. Peele laces flashbacks to the show throughout the movie, eventually revealing an incident in which a popped balloon upset the chimp playing Gordy, sending him on a rampage. While the chimp attacked the other actors, brutally maiming and disfiguring at least one of them, young Jupe survived.
As an adult, Jupe has buried his trauma with fond memories of the fame the attack granted him. When Em asks Jupe about the incident, he wistfully recalls not the actual attack, but a Saturday Night Live parody of the horrific incident. When he prepares to launch his Star Lasso Experience, Jupe invites his maimed co-star to the premier, showing no regard for her suffering.
In Debord’s formulation, the spectacle is all-consuming, something that can only be disrupted through radical acts of disruption.
With its classic sci-fi premise, Nope repeatedly frames spectacle as danger. Characters sacrifice their lives in pursuit of something bigger than themselves, an overwhelming sight, and the dreams it can bring to life. But as Peele himself explains, Nope is itself an act of meta-spectacle, a Hollywood blockbuster that skillfully deploys striking IMAX imagery and a moving score from composer Michael Abels. The director knows how to wring responses from his audience, whether horror at an apparent alien invasion or chuckles at Em’s motor-mouthed commentary.
For Debord, such a response cannot be a surprise: When analyzing the spectacle, “one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle.”
In Debord’s formulation, the spectacle is all-consuming, something that can only be disrupted through radical acts of disruption.
While fans theorized the title was an acronym for “Not Of Planet Earth,” Peele admitted a quotidian inspiration: it’s what people watching the movie shout at the screen. In the tradition of classical theater and especially horror cinema, Nope shows viewers images that will bring them together in moments of panic or humor. The catharsis comes not from any resolution on the screen, but in the way viewers reject characters’ destructive actions.
Nope may be a spectacle, a Hollywood blockbuster designed to thrill and sell movie tickets. But is it a distraction that draws viewers away from reality, severing the ties and connections that would allow them to think critically and reject the economic systems that seek to undo them?
The answer is right there in the title.