Nope: Jordan Peele continues to articulate hidden aspects of power politics

 

Nope, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Jordan Peele, Meaning of Nope

Nope dropped last summer, and, though I was interested in seeing it and have enjoyed Peele’s two previous feature films, Get Out and Us.  The second was disorienting enough, and so clearly in the horror genre, that it was both difficult to write about and scotched the reluctant wife’s interest in seeing Nope.  After seeing a review that suggested the horror element was deemphasized and after she had heard from the reluctant stepdaughter that it was a good film, we decided to watch it last night.

Nope is a violent film and deeply disturbing.  Neither of us was very surprised to discover that the reluctant wife had nightmares last night.  She does not remember the content, only that she awoke to the fear that she would see a bloody chimpanzee staring at her.  And this is a central image in the film, one that is hinted at early but lies, I think, close to the core of understanding one layer of the multilayered film.

In addition to being violent, this film is complicated and, despite being extremely well made, disjointed in ways that made it very hard to piece together.  On one level, it is a basic western film.  OJ (Otis Junior: Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer) are brother and sister trying desperately to save the family ranch (OJ more than Em) after Otis Senior is mysteriously killed.  It is also a film about the aftereffects of trauma, and the splotchiness of the narrative, and the returns to such things as the bloody chimpanzee where we learn a bit more each time about that scene, mirror traumatic memory systems.

There are two twists.  One, OJ and Em are black. They are the great-great-great-great grandchildren of the first person to be filmed in a moving picture – the jockey on the back of the horse filmed by Edward Muybridge.

The second twist it that it is not the bank that is trying to repossess the land; the land is being haunted by an extraterrestrial form that looks, when it can be glimpsed, like a flying saucer, but turns out to be a voracious flying octopus.

So, this is a black science fiction western movie.  But wait, there’s more that makes it complicated to understand… 

The ranch next door is where the true evil lies, but we don’t discover this until we are so deep into the movie and so scared of the extraterrestrial flying octopus that we don’t recognize how evil it is at first.  It is the latter day theme park/ dude ranch owned by the now grown child actor who was terrorized by the bloody chimpanzee when the chimpanzee was a character in the child actor’s sitcom.

I hope you can understand why we were trying to puzzle through how the film hung together (which it clearly did – but how?) and wondering what Peele intended.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a thriller.  We were on the edges of our seats, just as one should be in a horror film, but why?

In the reviews we read, Peele stated that he intended Nope to be a metaphor for our addiction to spectacle.  He intended a morality play with OJ and Em as the embattled movie industry trying to hang onto the old fashioned story telling that movies have been to good at, and the ranch next door as CGI promising the allure of bigger and better spectacles. 

The metaphor works – you’ll have to trust me on that, I haven’t articulated all of the elements that tie the two together, but I just didn’t resonate with this reading of the movie.  There was something more terrifying and unsettling about the movie than this level of read would suggest (even though I can resonate with it as being, in my profession, like the war between therapists who are trying to help their clients find meaning in their life – a complicated and difficult process that requires relying on therapists to think on their feet and therefore is tough to study scientifically – and the scientists who would tell therapists to do exactly what they say they should in order to help patients get rid of their symptoms – essentially turning therapy into a form of psychiatric medication.  In this reading of the metaphor, thinking therapists own the family ranch...).

My reading of the film came to me this morning.  It is idiosyncratic and may not have been at all what Peele intended, but I think it may be valid (and is not in competition with what he has proposed, but is, perhaps, complimentary to it).

A key to the movie is eye contact.  OJ discovers that the monster is drawn to eyes – or representations of eyes.  It is what pulls the monster out of its lair and how it discovers its prey. 

Twenty years ago or so I participated in two versions of a runaway slave enactment.  In both versions, we were instructed, as runaway slaves, not to make eye contact with any white person.  To make eye contact would be enraging to a white person and would evoke their wrath, so we were to keep our eyes pointed downward.

This was very disorienting.  I immediately lost 20 IQ points.  It was harder to understand the meaning of words when you couldn’t see someone’s face, and it was also hard to read their emotional intent without having access to their body language.  I felt myself to be afloat in the world, even before having to withstand some of the insults and the terror that were part of the enactment.

Of course, in traditional psychoanalysis, the analyst sits out of view of the patient.  This was traumatic for an early patient of mine and I have adjusted my consulting room since then so that the patient can see me if they choose, but also so they can easily look straight ahead and have me be, at best, in the periphery of their vision.

In the film, OJ is the quiet, industrious brother.  Em is the flaky, outgoing sister.  Em’s trauma was having the horse that was to be hers taken away when she was a child to be trained for a movie.  She stood upstairs looking into the training arena, willing her father to look at her, but he wouldn’t.  It was OJ who had his eyes on her – who knew of her pain.

OJ is sensitive to the horses and their needs, but not so good at managing relationships with human beings.  He works more on feeling his way through interpersonal spaces, not asserting himself; he does not look others in the eye.  He is smart about people precisely because he doesn't look directly at them but senses them instead.  It is he who figures out that the monster is attracted by eye contact, and he devises a plan to capture the monster on film based on this understanding (capturing the monster on film will allow the kids to keep the ranch because they can sell the photos to Oprah and become rich and famous).

Jupe (Steven Yeun) is the grown-up child actor next door.  He had eye to eye contact with a monster: that bloody chimpanzee.  The chimp became enraged on set when some balloons from his birthday party started popping.  He proceeded to maul some of the other actors and crew.  Those who were able ran from the room, but Jupe was forced to cower under a table and watch the chimp’s rampage with nowhere to escape to.  There was a sheer table cloth that came over the side of the table and would have hid the upper half of him, more or less, from the chimpanzee.

After the chimp has attacked and hurt others, and when the chimpanzee is alone with Jupe and the now nearly unconscious costar of the sitcom on stage, the chimp finally catches Jupe's eyes through the sheer tablecloth and approaches him.  We are afraid for Jupe.  But somehow, seeing Jupe through the cloth, Jupe’s eyes don’t insight the chimp in the way that, presumably, other’s have.  The chimp is able to make contact with Jupe, not as another victim, but to remember their shared language and offers the fist bump that has been an indication of their previous affectionate relationship.

Eye contact can, apparently, go both ways.  We can see the other as another animal - as prey - and we can find them, attack them, and consume them when we identify them.  Of course, the chimpanzee is insighted by fear - the balloon popping is scary - and when we are afraid, we project our aggression onto others which frees us to attack them (think of war and slavery here).  On the other hand, making eye contact also allows us to empathically connect with others -  we experience our shared humanity.  It is dangerous to make eye contact with those we assume are other - they may turn out to be made of the same cloth we are.

Unfortunately, Jupe, who has been terribly traumatized by the situation on stage (as has the current audience), decides to hide that part of the experience and to, instead, pass it off as something that he had more mastery over than he actually did.  In fact, he turns the experience around to indicate that he is the “chosen one” who is immune to being destroyed by powerful creatures.  This allows him to lure the monster in to feast on the horses that he has bought from OJ in a spectacle for paying customers.  OJ, of course, has no idea that his horses are being consumed.  It is only when his second best horse, Lucky, refuses to leave the cage when the monster arrives at the appointed hour, that Jupe and all of his paying customers are consumed.

It seems to me, then, that Jupe may also be representing the white man (and it would not be beyond Peele to hide the white man in an Asian actor).  This white man misunderstands his survival of contact with the dangerous other – the chimp in the case of Jupe, but the African slave in the case of the white man – as due to some inherent superiority on Jupe’s/the White man’s part. 

Jupe didn’t learn that the monster is drawn out by seeing into the eyes – which I can’t help saying are the windows to the soul, but also mirrors of the soul – and didn’t learn to be cautious and canny about how to manage monsters. OJ, as a horse trainer, but I think, more centrally, as a black man, knows that eye contact incenses the monster.  He decides that the eye contact will happen on his terms, so that he can draw the monster out to be seen and to be shown to the world.

If you are still following me, then, the monster is really a representation of voracious white people.  The people who are drawn to uppity (eye contact making) people of color and are incensed by them and consume them.  But those white people are tricky.  They hide in plain sight.  You wouldn’t know that they are dangerous (The monster pretends to be a fluffy white cloud – you only know that it is not a cloud because it does not move in the wind, perhaps a metaphor for those whites who are not willing to give up their privilege).

One other feature of the monster is important.  It sucks the electricity out of the air, rendering modern technology useless against it.  OJ must ride a horse – he must be a real cowboy – to defeat the monster.  I am now getting, perhaps, too taken with my metaphor, but it seems to me that this might be a  commentary on the ways in which modern whites are figuring out how to undo modern curbs on their behavior – the voter’s rights act, for instance – and it will be up to people of color and their allies – OJ and Em enlist the aid of a Latino tech operator and a white cinematographer to try to get the picture.  Ultimately, though, it is the old analog system, run by Em, that ends up working to get the needed image.

I don’t know if Peele is telegraphing that we will need to return to nonviolent demonstration to capture the monstrosity of white aggression, but this film seems to be making a case for that, at least in my mind.  The destruction of the monster comes not because the cowboys want to kill it, but because they want to publicize what it is doing.  Its own rampant hunger is what ultimately does it in.  As Ruth Bader Ginsberg quoted Sojourner Truth saying, the goal is not to harm men, but to get them to "take their feet off our necks".  It is their own hunger to destroy that will, in this reading of the allegory, destroy them.

The piece that doesn’t quite fit into this analysis is the chimp.  The chimp must ultimately be, I think, symbolic of the white man and his aggression, aggression that gets projected onto the people of color.  Could it be that the chimp represents the white man pretending to be civilized and that the pretense of civilization is a very thin veneer  over his essentially untamed bestial qualities?  Freud would not argue with that assessment.  And, if you grant me that we are barely on top of our most primitive selves, but we pretend to be holier than others, they become receptacles for what we cannot tolerate seeing in ourselves - our monstrousness - our unbridled rage and entitlement.  And we project that outwards - assuming that it is others, not ourselves, who are the danger.  Could the chimp have been afraid and imagined that everyone was going crazy after the balloon popped?  Could he have seen the fear in their eyes and imagined that it mirrored his state, not realizing that he was the one who was scaring them?

Part of what sets the movie into motion is a moment when Lucky has a mirror put in front of his eyes and he starts to buck, scotching a job that might have helped save the ranch.  When we see what lies within us, when we see our fears mirrored in others, we react instinctively, if you will.  

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