Two. It's Alien.
August 5, 2022
Jordan Peele's Nope begins with a scene that plays out almost entirely in audio. It's a live studio taping of a family sitcom in which the characters are celebrating a birthday with their pet chimpanzee, Gordy. What happens next is seemingly abrupt, though not surprising to anyone familiar with the real-life horror stories of people who keep primates as pets. There are only sounds: A loud pop, the incoherent sounds of terror, the vocalizations of a distressed chimpanzee—which alternate between manic screams and quieter hoots, the latter insistent and almost plaintive.
We know what happened before we see a single frame. And we don't need to bear witness to this gruesome episode because—as old horror movies and Werner Herzog taught us—nothing about it could be as horrible as what we've imagined. The chimpanzee curiously prods a lifeless foot and for a moment we're allowed to believe that he's approaching some understanding of what he's done; that he feels mournful, perhaps. But those are human thoughts and human feelings. They are the ways in which we perceive and experience and make sense of the world around us.
In those opening moments, I felt the same as when I read the harrowing New York Magazine story about Travis, the chimpanzee who notoriously mauled a woman named Charla Nash. Travis was an "actor" who appeared mostly on television shows and was kept as a pet by Sandra Herold. Born in 1995, Travis spent his entire life around humans. He adopted human behaviors, such as watching TV, brushing his teeth, and wearing clothing. And then one day he just "snapped"—at least that's what it looked like to most people. Primatologists will tell you that a chimpanzee does not "just snap." To view Travis' behavior through that lens is reductive and ignorant. (The same could be said of almost every woman on the Oxygen series Snapped.)
Nope revisits the Gordy scene when we meet Steven Yeun's Ricky, one of the child stars in the sitcom Gordy's Home! Showing siblings OJ and Em (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) a hidden shrine devoted to the infamous incident, Ricky recalls what happened that day. Peele creates a jarring contrast between Ricky's well-rehearsed version of events, which conveniently glosses over the gruesome details, and the actual incident, in which a young Ricky is clearly traumatized by this incomprehensible act of violence.
What I feel for that chimpanzee (which is, thankfully, computer-generated) is not something I can easily define. It's similar to the way I feel when I read a social media post about an injured kitten rescued from oncoming traffic, but not quite. The feeling is more and deeper. It's dread and horror and the despondent frustration of a senseless tragedy that could've been avoided. More than that: It's the distinctly terrible, visceral feeling of recognizing that this moment of violence was, for the chimpanzee, an entirely natural response. Nature ultimately overcame years of socialization and human "nurturing."
There is a limit to what humans can understand about animal behavior. Our communications with animals are essentially non-verbal; we are speaking two entirely different languages, each with its own syntax. Addicted as we are to the meaning-making of storytelling, we ascribe our perceptions and feelings to animals to make sense of what is otherwise senseless. In our own lives, these attributions are harmless—our cats chirp and we think they are happy, they snuggle in our laps and we believe they love us. We come up with little stories to attach meaning to every sound and gesture.
And we feel confident in making these attributions because we believe humans are the superior species.
Recently, The Globe and Mail published a piece titled "Consider the Octopus." In it, author Erin Anderssen interrogates our understanding of sentience and our perception of animal intelligence. She interviews octopus researcher Jennifer Mather, who offers numerous examples of octopuses exhibiting highly-intelligent behaviors:
“Have you heard about the coconut shell-carrying octopus?” Dr. Mather asks me during one of our Zoom calls. “Well …” This particular octopus was observed by researchers carrying two halves of a coconut shell, as it went hunting for crabs—a trip that took it far from the cover of its den. Out in the open, the octopus would conceal itself under the shells, hiding from sharks. It planned ahead to bring protection and camouflage. It had prepared for the future. And it used a tool, a skill that requires sophisticated thinking.
The majority of people accept the theory of evolution, but humans still generally behave as though we are entirely separate from the animal kingdom. In actuality, we are more closely related to some animals than others (chimpanzees, for instance) based on the recency of our shared ancestry. Humans and octopuses began evolving away from each other about 600 million years ago. "Our last common ancestor was a primitive worm-like creature," Anderssen writes, "and from there the octopus went its own way, in the darkness of the deep sea."
Anderssen then quotes a passage from Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds that illuminates something humans seemingly refuse to understand:
If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over.
Animals are not intellectually inferior; their brains are just different. One more quote from Anderssen, and I promise I will move on:
Perhaps it might inspire an instructional instance of human curiosity: Should we assume dominion over an exceptional brain that developed parallel to our own, in a foreign place and against the odds? Do we too often assume that thinking differently means thinking less?
I first read this article about a week before I sat down in a movie theater to watch Nope, and several months into a period of my life in which I have become aware of an increasingly acute sense of empathy (I think?) for animals. It's like my biological clock is finally ticking, but—much to my mom's disappointment—all the hands are pointed toward... not-humans. In the most basic sense, I am concerned about animal welfare. (Enough to stop eating meat most of the time, but not enough to give up my weekly burger appointment. Progress, not perfection, etc.)
These aren't new feelings for me; they've just intensified over time. Sure, Edward Scissorhands was human-like, but he wasn't a real boy (the guy's heart was literally a cookie). When Edward moves into the suburbs with Kim's family, people are initially frightened because he's different. Those differences other him, and while the neighbors mostly seem to accept him, they never consider him an equal. Due to a lack of socialization and his under-developed verbal skills, Edward's behaviors are up for interpretation. He is treated like a simple child, feared, and—in at least one upsetting instance—fetishized. Because he cannot articulate his feelings and experiences in a language the people around him understand, he is a blank screen on which to project a more preferable narrative.
Ultimately, Edward's existence says more about human behavior than it does about his own. In a way, Edward Scissorhands is an allegory for our relationship with nature. (Or it's just, you know, Tim Burton using Pinocchio as a framework to explore his own traumatic coming-of-age as a shy industrial goth.)
Nope presents a triptych of other, better parallels: Between the Gordy incident and the alien mischievously hovering above OJs ranch and the eccentric Herzogian filmmaker desperate to capture the unfilmable—a moment of pure animal ferality.
The socialization of primates (and other exotic species) is a morbid exercise in futility. In any case, humans can only ever make empty gestures toward dominance, yet we continuously delude ourselves into believing false narratives of control. It is this hubris that allows someone to believe that a chimpanzee is a member of their family; that they understand and can effectively communicate with a chimpanzee; that they can trust the chimpanzee to behave and react the way a human would; and that they are in control of the chimpanzee.
When that false narrative is violently punctured, it is hubris that allows them to act surprised.
Three: It's exploitation.
August 9, 2022
It doesn't take long for Nope's OJ to make the connection between animals and aliens—unsurprising for the stoic cowboy who finds it easier to relate to horses than humans following his father's death.
For Ricky, and every generation that came up in the shadow of the O.J. Simpson trial, exploitation is the natural way of things. As a child star, exploitation was presumably modeled for him by greedy parents; in turn, and with no other effective coping mechanism, he exploited his own trauma for profit. Now, Ricky makes the fatal, hubristic error of believing—as the chimpanzee's trainers did—that he can control and exploit an alien species.
He doesn't care about the horses he sacrifices to his newest attraction, or the audience of gawkers in the stands—including the former co-star who survived the Gordy incident (and whose heavily scarred face evokes Charla Nash, the real-life victim of Travis the chimpanzee). They are sentient props who exist to serve Ricky's narrative.
And that narrative is spectacle. In cinematic terms, spectacle refers to an impressive, compelling achievement; a feat of visual storytelling, the likes of which have never been seen. It is commercial entertainment on a massive scale. It is the blockbuster film. Spectacle, like its descendant spectator, comes from the Latin spectare—to observe or behold.
Ricky's other critical error also happens to be one of the few indicators of his humanity: mistaking exploitation for spectacle. In this, at least, Ricky is hardly to blame. The two words have become increasingly interchangeable in both film and social theory. If you've taken a class on either, you're likely familiar with Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. Published in 1967, Debord's critical theory expands on Marxism with damning prescience:
The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.
The spectacle is the commodification of real, lived experience. It's the stories we read and the movies and TV shows we watch. It's the silly memes we post in an attempt to distill our personalities into digestible little chunks of digital ephemera. It's the misguided belief in being the only person who can truly relate to this extremely popular television or movie character. The spectacle is "it me."
It's also one of Nope's most salient influences and a recurrent focal point in numerous reviews. Debord's theory nearly functions as the narrative engine of the film, from the alien as a passive, undiscerning consumer to the degradation of society from "being into having, and having into merely appearing." Debord shrewdly describes this degradation as the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."
Nope's relationship to The Society of the Spectacle has been written about extensively and with good reason. More recently, I've found myself similarly contemplating society's relationship with exploitation. Debord was wrong in the sense that there doesn't seem to be any single historical moment we can point to as the moment when commodity completed "its colonization of social life." An optimist might say it hasn't happened yet.
At the very least, we have witnessed a prolific series of events in the last 30 years that corroborate Debord's theory—many of which involve women. Tonya Harding. Monica Lewinsky. Lorena Bobbitt (Peele even produced a documentary series re-evaluating the sensational media narrative around Bobbitt). Amy Fisher. JonBenet Ramsey. Anna Nicole Smith. Nicole Brown Simpson. The most recent addition to this esteemed canon is Amber Heard, who seemingly exists to prove that we've learned absolutely nothing despite the countless documentaries, films, and TV shows made about her predecessors.
The aforementioned O.J. Simpson trial not only stoked our collective obsession with dead white women and how they got to be so dead, but also serves as the origin story for the Kardashian media empire and the rise of reality television. As the latter gained prominence, the concept of self-exploitation as a viable career path became more mainstream. You can almost trace the exact moment when exploitation supplanted "reality" to the premiere of The Real World: Las Vegas.
Exploitation has become the predominant language of America. And maybe we shouldn't be surprised, given that it feels like the only way to have a chance at accumulating wealth in an extreme capitalist society.
It's also become a genre in and of itself, with its own spectrum of sub-genres—my least favorite is the sort of self-exploitation that requires participating in a Trauma Olympics where we publicly relive the worst things that have ever happened to us in a senseless attempt to legitimize our humanity. Sometimes it feels like there's no way to opt out of the performance; it is both compulsory and compulsive.
Perhaps that's why Nope's Ricky is compelled to turn the alien of mass consumption into an attraction. His childhood trauma has steadily decreased in value and Ricky's attempt to capitalize on his name with a lazily-conceived theme park isn't exactly a success. When we have nothing left to exploit in ourselves, we exploit others.
If Peele only examined exploitation through Ricky's eyes, the result would be intensely cynical. Because we accept exploitation as a language, a form of currency, and an entertainment genre, we also easily accept the actions of Keke Palmer's character, Emerald. She is Nope's avatar for gig workers; an entire generation of young people for whom every skill is a potential revenue stream. It's no longer enough to simply work. You also have to be your own publicist, accountant, and manager—not coincidentally, there is no human resources department.
Em carries (or at least conveys) the energy and optimism required to be a successful participant in the gig economy. Every interaction is perceived as an income opportunity. So when she learns of possible alien activity at the family ranch, her natural impulse is to capitalize on it.
To do so, she enlists a Fry's employee (Brandon Perea) and an aging filmmaker named Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott). Holst is the last of a rare, dying breed—a guerrilla filmmaker who would likely count Werner Herzog and Monte Hellman among his contemporaries, and who is old enough to remember a time when exploitation was a cinema sub-genre.
Ethically speaking, Holst isn't diametrically opposed to Em's plan. His ambitions are adjacent: Holst has spent his career in pursuit of filming the unfilmable, of capturing the impossible shot. While taking a call from Em, we watch Holst tediously edit footage of animals engaged in violent conflict in the wild. Classically, he is the only man for the job.
Holst's hubris and ambition place him at the intersection between Em and Ricky. For Holst, exploitation is a tool; for Ricky, it's a learned behavior; and for Em, it's simply innate.
Science has now proven that human behavior is not merely the result of individual genetics, but that it is also influenced by epigenetics—heritable changes in phenotypical genetic expression. In extremely simple terms, epigenetics refers to environmental or external influences that basically "switch" certain genes on or off. An experience—good or bad—has the power to change us on a cellular level, dictating how we respond and adapt. These phenotypical (observable or biochemical) traits can then be passed on to offspring, disrupting the binary of nature vs. nurture.
For example, some studies have found a link between restricting caloric intake during pregnancy (through dieting or disordered eating) and an increased risk of neuropsychiatric disorders (including eating disorders and ADHD) in offspring. Changes in genetic expression can impact behavior patterns and increase the risk of developing certain diseases or disorders—at both the individual and intergenerational levels.
With that in mind, I reconsider Debord's theory on the degradation of society and the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life." Somewhere along the line of human succession, perhaps a gene was switched on that forever altered how we perceive and interact with and relate to media (and maybe each other). With each passing generation, genuine expression is increasingly eroded until we're left only with spectacle.
Jordan Peele has disrupted this binary by creating something that is both: a work of genuine expression about spectacle.