Another Nope (2022) Thought

What does it mean to be consumed? I am thinking of the moment after Jupe and the tourists are swept into the maw of Jean Jacket. When they are screaming, confused, trapped. As Jean Jacket hovers over the Haywood house, someone shouts and begs to be let out. Of what? Do they know that they are in Jean Jacket, the beast? That they are being digested? When Jean Jacket silences them, do they understand finally? There is something so horrifying, so visceral, about being in the maws of something and not even knowing it. Having your fate known by everyone but you.

And then I am thinking of the Haywood ranch. Of OJ and the horses, him slowly selling them away to Jupe, and thinking he can just buy them back. But the horses are already gone; Jean Jacket eats every single one of them. Jupe knows this, but lets OJ make his plan. He doesn’t tell OJ that his ranch is half-eaten, bleeding out in front of him. That he and Jean Jacket have been chewing on the Haywoods the whole time.

I am thinking about that horror, of being someone else’s meal, profit, plan, and of not knowing.

Jupe, 2017, by Cecile Baldewyns

oprah shot

I will make you a spectacle

Alien.

The character of Jupe is the most interesting character in Nope in my opinion. He was exploited as a child in Gordy’s Home and developed PTSD from Gordy’s massacre. He then grows up to shove his feelings deep down and sort of paint over the trauma that he experienced, and exploits animals like he was exploited in his childhood in a sort of cycle. Jean Jacket is a metaphor for his past catching up to him, representative of Gordy, in a sort of cosmic test attempting to see if he learned from the shows mistake, which he didnt! This failure of the metaphorical test results in his death at the hands (or rather mouth lol) of Jean Jacket, or more fittingly, his trauma!!!

When we meet OJ & Emerald Haywood, they’re the last standing among hunted peoples...protectors of the last of the land, the traditions, the blood. To build the necessary world & spark the beginning, to be erased from it... This is an Indigenous ache, to not be able to go home & to have no choice but to try.

I don’t want to talk about the monster, about the unrecognizable or the unfamiliar. There is a danger sitting across you & I in our most fearful moments...the intimate strangers who know best our vulnerabilities, those for whom we set the table. I want to talk about the man who feeds the monster. ...as his imperviousness to the same evils he let upon us finally becomes true delusion, as we agree that this violence will not save even one of us, I am glad that Jupe died.

Kihnindewa. Excerpts from I'm Glad Jupe Died: An Afro-Indigenous Reflection On NOPE (2022)

I have a lot of thoughts about the parallels between the Haywoods' story & real world afro-indigenous experiences, and how Jupe parallels real world dynamics between non-Black people of color & Black people (& anti-Blackness as an alleged means of survival). Especially the latter. So I wrote something about it!

I also have a public article on this (to expand on these thoughts & discuss even more, like Black hypversibility) in the works, but for now you can access the full piece & so much more here.

the fact that jupe literally tried to train jean jacket by playing the whole spectacle speech and turning on the lights every time it came to eat at his park at night, preparing it for the lights and sounds at the actual performance, thinking he can do it right this time, unlike with gordy...........

More Nope (2022) Thoughts

Nope is about the uncontrolled. The idea that you can conquer it, the reality of circumstance.

A balloon pops. A chimpanzee is riled into violence. Jupe survives the chimpanzee’s attack. A shoe sits on its heel.  These are all by chance, a random collection of events, the creation of trauma. The media fanatacizes it, obsesses over it, feeds on it. Makes it so Jupe can’t escape it. Years later, Jupe cannot escape it, lives in that single trauma. But by profiting off of it, by telling the story, he thinks he controls what happened to him. What the world did to him and that moment. He thinks he’s conquered the chaos.

He treats Jean Jacket the same. This creature comes to his ranch, by chance, and this time Jupe tries to own the narrative immediately. He thinks if he gives the voyeur the horses, attention, care, he has bonded with it. He has gained its favor. He can make it his. But the same chaos that let him survive lets him die this time. And in that last moment he stares at the beast and he is bewildered. He doesn’t understand why that happened to him, why that chimpanzee went wild. And he doesn’t understand why Jean Jacket eats him now. He is in the eye of the storm, wondering why it would rain.

someone might’ve already made this, but I just kept picturing this meme as I watched that scene

“What takes place in me stays there.” - Frank Bidart

SURPRISE

Perfect girl in skirt wearing suspenders.

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dare I say it. I could fix him

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