Jordan Peele’s latest punishing comedy exploits race anxiety, again, to no good effect.
Is Jordan Peele’s new horror-comedy Nope Hollywood’s answer to the Afrofuturism trend that’s all the rage in the museum and art-house worlds? Peele’s latest black-experience story line presents adult siblings, the Holloways (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer), who suffer the inequities of the contemporary film industry: career difficulties, historical erasure, plus otherworldly vengeance in the form of menacing extraterrestrials.
Peele’s red herrings and narrative loopholes seem made to order for black academics — the sucker emcees influencing Millennial race culture — as well as those filmgoers who fell for the guilt-and-grievance thrill ride of Get Out. He channels political blame into the apprehensiveness of The Twilight Zone. This time it’s his big slap back at the Hollywood institution, imitating the Coen Brothers’ self-critical A Serious Man and Hail, Caesar! by quoting the Jewish Bible’s book of Nahum 3:6: “I will cast abominable filth upon thee, and make thee vile, and will set thee as a gazing-stock.”
Oscar-winning ingrate Peele understands that today’s film industry enjoys being castigated for the onus of racism. That explains making a $68 million movie that boasts a black male protagonist named OJ. Every time OJ is addressed, Peele achieves an unearned cultural frisson. It’s a form of punishment as entertainment for both sides of the O. J. Simpson controversy.
Just as Get Out cautioned that interracial marriage was a source of our culture’s hostility, Nope’s punishment anticipates Hollywood’s downfall as Nahum predicted: “Because of what Jesus has done, because he has defeated sin and death, trouble will not defeat us a second time.” Yet Peele makes no credible religious observance; OJ and his sister Emerald profess no connection to spirituality — whether black Christian gospel or the Yoruban beliefs considered genuine among fashionable Afrofuturists.
Instead, Peele believes in Hollywood. Nope deconstructs movieland history as a fable, like Quentin Tarantino did in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But Nope’s junk pile of references combines movie and TV lore to no particular effect. (It goes from Eadweard Muybridge’s 1880s zoopraxiscope, seen under the credits, which captured the time intervals of a man riding a horse, to the ’90s TV sitcom Gordy’s Home, about a domesticated chimpanzee.)
“Pop changed the industry,” OJ says about his father (Keith David), son of the jockey in Muybridge’s experiment, who started his own business as a film-industry horse wrangler. Still, the remaining Haywoods feel displaced. They sell off horses from the declining family business (OJ and Emerald are too distracted and socially isolated to maintain success), and their vast landholdings provide no reparations. As existential victims, they bear witness to the prophesied divine retribution against racist Hollywood that’s been coming in stages via a hovering spaceship (recalling District 9).
OJ and Emerald combat the vicious aliens who suck up and spew out the cultural detritus of their lives, displaying Peele’s interest in black hysteria and paranoia. This is noisier than Us, but full of similar cheap shots (from mischievous children dressed as clown-aliens to sitcom actors traumatized by a childhood incident). Peele mixes modern racial anxieties with sub-Tarantino pop-culture trash, yet his concoction is ultimately inexpressive. The banal “Sunglasses at Night” only adds puzzlement to the soundtrack, whereas Dionne Warwick’s “Walk On By” recalls the peaceable, long-lost sound of black American sanity before the current reset.
OJ and Emerald embody two styles of black American stress. He’s taciturn and laconic, she’s loud, outgoing, and prone to CPT tardiness. Peele’s attempt to reanimate black stereotypes depends on Palmer’s edginess (since Akeelah and the Bee, she has grown into Pearl Bailey womanliness) and Kaluuya’s appearance. Kaluuya’s bright eyes and dark skin focus Peele’s colorist obsession. Kaluuya’s literal blackness, featured in a shaded, climactic close-up, is almost indiscernible even in IMAX, making his countenance inscrutable. This allows white and black reviewers to project subjective political significance onto Kaluuya/OJ.
Peele’s third feature outing, Nope keeps pace with the recent exacerbation of American race consciousness in those abominable TV series Them, Watchmen, Home, The Underground Railroad, and Lovecraft Country. He caters to the academics on black Twitter by imitating the Afrofuturist sci-fi treatment of black history first commercialized in the Wachowskis’ The Matrix.
Nope betrays the social insights of Britain’s Attack the Block (2011), in which West Indian youths protected their ghetto turf from an alien threat — a double-barreled satire on colonialism smarter than Alice Diop’s We (Nous). Its patriotic highpoint showed a pre–Star Wars John Boyega sliding while hanging on to a gigantic Union Jack. Attack the Block was exciting and funny; Peele’s humor is weak, and he falls back on horror tricks when he can’t make coherent meaning. The secret to Nope lies in the old Cedric the Entertainer joke about different racial responses to calamity – with OJ’s reticent “Nope,” when the aliens attack, as the voice of black reason.
Maybe Hollywood truly deserves the damnation Peele promises for bankrolling mountebanks such as himself, Ava DuVernay, and Spike Lee who persistently exploit race anxieties. At least the Afrofuturists outside the industry work at concocting an alternative belief system to Hollywood orthodoxy, adding hipster hermeneutics. Peele is stuck in mainstream media orthodoxy: OJ and Emerald share an inside joke — “It ain’t Oprah” — based on viewing life as TV. It’s the same measurement of perceived reality as “the sunken place” in Get Out.
The Afrofuturists reimagine destiny to justify a desperate view of history. Their inauthenticity doesn’t attract a popular audience because the intellectual pretense reneges on offering a sign of hope. Peele’s Hollywood movies attract viewers but then betray them. Nope is not even as suspenseful as M. Night Shyamalan’s aliens opus Signs, but it is a sign that Hollywood Afrofuturism has no future.
