*ddileo

I saw the recently released film ‘Nope’ twice in the past week. While I am a self confessed UFO person, I found myself thinking less and less about the “alien” aspect of ‘Nope’, and way more so on the animal / human relationship angle. It s fascinating when a movie brings you in for one thing and you leave heavily thinking about a totally different aspect of the film.

Anyways, I wanted to get some concrete thoughts on the record. After thinking about the relationship between animals and humans for a few days, here are some thoughts that make sense to me regarding ‘Nope’.

Spoilers below…

The control of animals for entertainment was a consistent theme throughout this movie. OJ and Jupe were each shaped by formative experiences with animals, but in very different ways that led them to take different approaches when dealing with the alien.

OJ understands that you don’t ultimately control the animal, you make an agreement with it, and you have to respect its rules. On the movie set at the beginning, none of the other cast or crew took OJ seriously when he tried getting them to respect the horse–they just wanted it to perform for them, and when they didn’t treat the animal with respect, it kicked.

Jupe, on the other hand, had his experience with Gordy’s Home, where the chimp was not respected, there was no attempt to make any sort of agreement with it. They put it in uncomfortable clothes and stuck it on a set with lights and applause and popping balloons, and demanded that it perform for them, and foolishly expected everything to be fine. Obviously that didn’t work out, but Jupe took the wrong lesson from the tragedy.

He went on to make a bunch of money off of the ordeal, and all these years later, he still can only see Gordy as a vehicle for entertainment. When Emerald asks him what happened on set, Jupe just tells her to watch an SNL sketch. For him, Gordy might as well have been a guy in a chimpanzee costume performing a part. Its media. Part of his failure to learn the proper lesson might be because the chimp, even after its rampage, was still affectionate towards him–and what he takes from that is a feeling that he is uniquely capable of getting animals to perform as he intends. What he doesn’t realize is that Gordy approached him calmly because he was not a threat–he was hiding, making himself small, the tablecloth was covering his eyes. Gordy didn’t attack him because he was, inadvertently, respecting Gordy’s rules. But Jupe doesn’t understand that–he thinks it’s just because Gordy likes him. He’s attributing the agency of a performer to Gordy again, as though Gordy were an actor in a suit and not a wild animal.

So, the alien. The reveal that it’s an alien creature and not a UFO is important–its not intelligent beings piloting a ship, just like Gordy isn’t a guy in a chimpanzee costume. It’s an animal. Ascribing human logic or reasoning to it is a mistake, its a creature with its own rules and we can learn to roughly understand those rules, but we can’t project OUR rules onto it.

Jupe never understands this. He doesn’t care to learn the creature’s rules, he wants it to follow his, and he wants it to perform for him. The creature doesn’t like to he looked at, and Jupe fills rows of bleachers with people to stare directly at it. It’s putting a chimpanzee on a TV set all over again. Something is bound to go wrong, you can’t force a wild animal to follow a script it doesn’t even understand.

OJ, on the other hand, understands this. Once he learns that the “UFO” is actually an animal, he knows that he can learn it’s rules, and form a set of rough agreements with it. OJ isn’t trying to project human agency onto the creature, he knows he can’t make it play a part or follow a script. He has to figure out how the creature operates, and then work backwards from there.

There’s a lot going on with this movie, but that’s what resonated with me the most. Jupe is a really good foil to OJ in this regard.

‘Nope’ is very different than I think most expect. It has many popcorn movie moments a summer blockbuster should, but there is a much deeper movie here than an alien flick. And that’s a good thing.