Nope
A new American Gothic. Almost
So just to clear things up, I have a good looking family. That doesn’t change the fact that some of them are barbarians. So while we look good in all sorts of social media we are subject to all kinds of typical drama and foolishness when it comes to this and that. My wife and I have a running joke that whenever the words ‘white’ or ‘black’ come up in normal conversation we’ll say “Why does it have to be white?” or “Why does it have to be black?”. Try it. It’s good fun to mock racial bullshit. Aside from that, I still have a $300 monthly cable bill because everyone in the house is a film junkie. I guarantee you that one of the four of us will know the names of Danarys’ dragons, or the most pathetic Korean heroine. Yeah. Everyone in my next generation family is some kind of critic, and sometimes about the most artistically pathetic popular productions. Don’t get me started about the baking shows. Thank God none of us are into Shark Tank. But, try as I might, I could not keep my kids away from the deepities of Key & Peele. That’s the level of their racial sophistication, which I can forgive. It’s not like they pretend not to be in a magnificent black American family (ahem) even though none of them has ever really lived in the ‘hood, although one has been in the Marine Corps, which has few aesthetes.
With this in mind, it became an absolute necessity that we go to see ‘Nope’ on its opening weekend. As I write this, since several of them are over for one of our 8 annual parties, I am including them in this piece. Like for millions of others in that affluent segment, films like ‘The Harder They Fall’ and ‘Get Out’ are tops. The nephew that nominated Tyler Perry got booed, and Peele got props all around. ‘Black Panther’ was meh, and nobody had a favorite Spike Lee. That’s the top of the flavor iceberg. All of them who have seen ‘Nope’ are very pleased. Despite the fact that it’s a horror film, or actually more like a thriller, I came along to the Dine In theatre with the fam who all wore matching t-shirts. We munched loaded tots.
The simple fact of the matter is that this is an artistic film. It’s not just a movie. Peele has one of those Tarantino like heads for the visual art. I consider him an artist with just the right amount of filmic vocabulary to make a popular movie that is more than a simple exercise. Let’s dispense with the blah blah because I’m not trying to be overly clever. He and Robert Eggers are the owners of the contemporary American Gothic. Christopher Nolan is not dark enough. Cronenberg is too far out there. I think Raimi is cliche. Mann doesn’t want to get under our skin. Peele has the eye.
The first thing that you need to know is that this film sounds extraordinary. There are auditory things going on this film that emphasize the distance between somebody who is watching somebody else who is definitely in an unsafe space. As a film that employs horses in wide open spaces and large parcels of sky, I felt that it was so very unusual that distance has never been so well communicated by actors needing to shout at each other. Shouting is all over this film. When it comes to the creature, it’s next level. But even in the close in shots between the protag and various horses, you’ve got to wonder if they were just fortunate to get the horse to emote something appropriate to the mood or if the nickers and snorts were dubbed in.
The unforgettable thing about this film is that it has the most mysterious and magnificent source of terror since Cloverfield. It’s frightening, real and incomprehensible. When it covers those great distances in a heartbeat, it is breathtaking. It is like no other monster, alien creature, diabolical weapon or human psychopath I’ve ever seen on film. It is zero percent cheesy and it is genuinely horrific in a completely unprecedented way. There’s nothing like it. In the style of the film, the sounds that it makes are unique. They are spooky and they are overwhelming. The only way I might think to describe them is if you could imagine the sound of a massive grunting blue whale’s battle cry. And yet it’s not overdone using those same notes. You are hearing a bully’s entire language of threat. It both paralyzes you and makes you want to scurry.
The previews ahead of this film were demographically stereotypical. Blaxploitation 2.0 is doing well for Viola Davis, who will ultimately get to decapitate some ‘colonizer’ in a pith helmet, or is it a powdered wig? I forget. Mark my words, there is going to be nothing so emblematic of these reductive days as ‘The Woman King’, coming to a high DEI scoring corporate owned theater near you.
As for the black authenticity of ‘Nope’ it doesn’t try hard. Aside from some gratuitous smacks against the fatuity of Hollywood Freak Show and its derivative freak shows, ‘Nope’ gets allegorical in multiple dimensions without becoming pretentious. That’s because it’s a filmmaker’s film, that even reflects upon the multiple levels of capturing true human drama on wax, on VHS, on 4K video, on IMAX, on silver oxide plates. It comments on filmmaking itself and how we have become addicted at enormous cost to the thrill of watching controlled violence.
The allegory and story within a story of ‘Nope’ involves a bloody chimp and a traumatized child actor who becomes a sideshow seducer. Yeah it’s kind of deep when you think about it, but you don’t have to think about it. You can just watch it one time through and be truly creeped out by the flashback to a severely gruesome act of violence, then come back and think about it later. I didn’t really bother, but the kids went back to YouTube to hear their favorite explainers go over some of the finer points.
‘Nope’ didn’t need to establish too much complex empathy for those who may or may not die over the course of the story. There is more than enough mystery, scenery and suspense via artful camera work to keep you attached to what’s going on. The environment itself is a player, and while I can’t say that I’ve seen Moonlight, there is something perhaps new and magical in this filming that gets black actors at night in a way that is artful and unique. Every shadow is perfect. Plus, how can you not give props to a film that finds a place for Otomo’s classic bike slide?
I generally am more or less disgusted or at least displeased by pop culture. I behold it at weird kind of Stoic distance considering the thermodynamics of a crowded out highbrow. I think Family Guy is just wrong, but I’m willing to debate it. I have little need for the stories that circulate within the pop Overton Window, but think seriously at times that our next generation would simply pawn all of ‘our truth’. I don’t have any romantic sentiments for Carpenter, Craven or Romero and quite frankly rewatching Hitchcock left me flat aside from Rear Window. I must confess that I was throwing up in my mouth having accidentally channel flipped to ‘In Cold Blood’ one late evening in my late teens. I can’t really think of anything that might frighten Americans into less barbarity. I guess I’m not so big on the true aim of Gothic horror, but I do like to see evil punished, don’t I? Have I even lost hope for the literature of film? I found I couldn’t write much about Denzel’s Macbeth more than the perfect deliciousness of his “Is this a dagger I see before me?”. What a tremendous scene. Nor did the witty fun of Wes Anderson’s latest leave much of an impression in the memory foam of my mind. I’ve given that part of my mind away to music. Yet Robert Eggers gets to me.
Rick Beato has taught me to appreciate the guitar and the art of the pop song. So there may be hope for me in following what excellence might arise from this genre of film my offspring has found so compelling, although they tend to love the Korean variety like ‘The Wailing’.
I watched it having missed only the first 15 minutes and was captivated by the honest helplessness of the police officers in the face of dark magic and the restraint evident in Korean rural society as compared with our jaded urban enforcers. ‘The Wailing’ is a mystery that ends in mystery, whereas Peele’s dramas end with an American ending - where the mystery is cleared up and the innocents survive, mostly.
It seems to me that we need that harsh ethical lesson that puts American adults in conflict and contrast with the unknown and unfathomable that we properly see as predatory evil. That’s why films like ‘Nope’ are so superior to the juvenile antics of the last season of ‘Stranger Things’ I will ever watch. I also think that the visceral mortality of the characters of ‘Game of Thrones’ gave us something captivating, at least until John Snow came back to life and that Starbucks cup appeared like magic. Don’t you think it’s proper that James Bond is dead? I do.
Putting my black cultural aesthetic hat on for a final moment, part of the brilliant wit of ‘Nope’ is how it plays on its very surface with the tropes of black characters in American horror films. In consonance with those, the first person to die in the film is the first black man we see. By the time the protag has time to face the deadly antagonist, his laconic ‘nope’ is just the perfect response. But his reticence is not cowardice, but a deep cultural wisdom that his contemporary world dismisses. He is not homespun, he chooses the integrity of his knowledgeable life and its business despite the fact that most everyone around him is distracted by the limelight seductions of Hollywood. Nuff said. Exceptional film. Might not work on the flat screen unless you have the serious speaker system. See it in a Dolby theater with the vibrating seats.