"I know you all think you live in all the times at once, everything recorded for you, it’s all there to play back. Digital. That’s all that is, though: playback. You still don’t remember what it felt like." – Shinya Yamazaki in William Gibson's All Tomorrow’s Parties
While Jordon Peele's Nope (2022) is many things--a modern take on the classic monster movie, a study of spectacle, a comment on our relationship with nature, a reminder of the erasure of the Black presence in cinema--it's also a critique of our media-saturated society. My interest in media drew me in to that aspect of the film over any of the others. If you've seen the trailer, you know that the main characters are Hollywood horse wranglers, descendants of Alistair E. Haywood, the black jockey in Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 series of photographs of a horse running, one of the first motion pictures ever recorded. The technological mediation of experience is less of a theme of the movie and more of a condition of the environment it's set in.
[Please note: If you haven't seen Nope, but plan to, there are spoilers galore below.]
I first started thinking about technological mediation in high school. A friend of mine had rented a video camera, and we were making goofy videos with it. In one of the shots on one of those VHS tapes, there’s a close-up view of a photocopied picture of me in a Malcolm X pose that I had pinned on the bulletin board in my room. Watching that tape on my parents' VCR, I remember thinking about the layers in that image: It was grainy playback on a cathode ray tube of a magnetic tape recording of video imagery of a manipulated photocopy of a photograph of me imitating one of my heroes. Thinking through the layers of that mediation stuck with me.
There's a scene in Nope where former child star Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yuen) is explaining to Emerald (Keke Palmer) and O.J. Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) what happened during the “Gordy’s Birthday” episode of the sitcom Gordy's Home when a chimpanzee, finally set off by birthday balloons popping, ravaged the set, killed most of the cast, and maimed his co-star. Intercut with clips from the massacre, Jupe tells the story by describing a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Chris Kattan plays the rampaging Gordy. We never actually see the fictitious SNL sketch. We're watching Yuen play Jupe in describing a sketch spoofing a sitcom in a movie. Foreshadowing aside, the layers in this scene struck me in the same way the photocopied image described above did: one event filtered through one medium after another before it is experienced. With all of our screens and things, we take such layers for granted. Ironically, this is one of the scenes in the movie least laden with the apparatus of film.
In Andrew Patterson's The Vast of Night (2019), phone operator Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick, pictured above) and radio DJ Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz) come across an errant frequency on the airwaves that turns out to be alien in origin. Like Peele, Patterson layered the movie with references and homages to other science fiction classics. The call sign for the radio station Everett works at is WOTW, which stands for "War of the Worlds," the classic H.G. Wells book that became the classic Orson Welles radio play. There is a Twilight Zone motif that runs through the story via an introductory voiceover and intermittent TV screens. The tiny New Mexico town the story is set in is called Cayuga, which was the name of Rod Sterling's production company. Peele, of course, has his own connections to Sterling's Twilight Zone, and like the rest of his movies, Nope has its own nods to the nerds (e.g., a Northern Exposure hat, "Circle J" trailer, 6:13, Angel's Earth, The Jesus Lizard, and Rage Against the Machine t-shirts, etc. You can read about those elsewhere online).
As The Vast of Night unfolds, telecommunication and recording devices abound: Fay's new tape recorder, the telephone switchboard, the radio station, old magnetic tapes, an old camera, etc. The presence of the aliens is discovered through some of these, and others are used in failed efforts to capture evidence of their visit.
Recording devices are rife in Nope as well, mostly those related to filmmaking, capturing action in motion. Cameras are everywhere: movie cameras, security cameras, cellphone cameras, digital cameras, and even an old flash camera in the bottom of a well. The eye/mouth of the "unidentified aerial phenomenon" even looks like a camera, as does the helmet worn by the TMZ motorcycle man who shows up during the climactic sequence of the movie, but is quickly vanquished by the alien, all the while begging O.J. to save his footage. Though the rest of the characters here are trying to capture and capitalize on the spectacle at hand, this motorcycle guy represents the pure tourism of the tabloid, the clickbait culture much of the internet has devolved into. He embodies Nahum 3:6, the Bible verse that opens the movie: "I will pelt you with filth, I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle." Those last two lines could've been Muybridge talking to his jockey on set.
In addition to lenses, screens through which to view the images captured by the cameras and windows through which to see the outside world are plentiful. The one pictured above frames a particularly poignant moment in the movie, but there are many more. Angel (Brandon Perea) announces the arrival of the alien by saying, "It's heeeeere," an obvious reference to the arrival of the ghosts via the TV screen in Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982). It's a whole world seen through lenses, windows, and screens. Jupe even refers to the aliens as "The Viewers."
Em might have gotten the money shot at the end of alien battle, but it meant less to her than seeing that O.J. has survived. The medium is the bad miracle. The latent lesson of Nope is that as much as we might want to mediate the moment, to capture and capitalize on the spectacle we experience, we can't take the feeling with us.
Most of life's great scenes happen outside of lenses and screens, uncaptured by media of any kind.
More Science Fiction and Horror
Though there's nothing about Nope in it (Peele's Get Out does get a brief mention however), my newest book, Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, draws inspiration from scary science-fiction and horror movies like Nope, as well as heavy metal music. Eugene Thacker says,
"Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious 'working-through' of contingency and finitude. Escape Philosophy takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence."
So, if you're into any of that kind of stuff, the book is available as a beautifully menacing paperback or a FREE open-access.pdf from punctum books.
If you got yours already and feel compelled, please do tell the others. Thank you!
Thank you for reading and responding.
More soon,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com