NOPE (Jordan Peele) / Regarding the Pain of Others (Susan Sontag)

“there is a lion in my living room” - clementine von radics // ricky “jupe” park in nope (2022) dir. jordan peele

if we were to look at it through a racial lens, I do find it very interesting that Jupe’s wife is white. that the audience at Star Lasso are majorly white. that he’s basically robbing the Haywoods, a black family, of their horses to feed them to an alien creature for white people’s entertainment. that he was the token asian adoptee in sitcom as a child. the model minority. fitting himself back into a system that used and failed him as a child, so he can find some semblance of respect and power as an adult man, only to still be swallowed up whole.

careful what you wish for

devil house by john darnielle / nope dir. jordan peele

this is how the movie went right

original post:

NOPE (Jordan Peele) / personal essay / Blind Spot (Teju Cole) / The Writing of the Disaster (Maurice Blanchot) 

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Nope (2022) Dir. Jordan Peele | Nope (2022) Trivia found in IMBD | Yzur (1906) By Leopoldo Lugones

NOPE (Jordan Peele) / Blind Spot (Teju Cole)

Jupe when he sees an uncontrollable force of nature: pspspspspsps 😙

Jupe swearing on his wife and his children’s lives that he’s telling the audience the truth and then all of them dying gruesomely

NOPE (2022) + Evil Counterpart

Something I haven’t seen a lot of people talking about in the Nope fandom is how every adult in the audience and on set leaves Jupe to die when the attack starts. This is the pinnacle of exploitation. When Gordy starts attacking everyone flees; nobody thinks about the innocent child trapped on the stage with him as he rampages. So many people made the decision to let this child (who has no idea what to do in this situation; hell most adults wouldn’t know what to do) stay on this set with a raging predator and protect themselves. I know it’s instinct to protect yourself to some degree, but this adds to the idea of spectle and exploiting people/animals for entertainment. Jupe was literally nothing more than an object for them to laugh at; the audience was using him for entertainment, the directors and producers were using him for money. Nobody expected him to come out of that room alive, and the saddest part is nobody cared. Children don’t have the capacity to evaluate the safety of the environment they’re around; they depend on adults to do that. All of those directors and producers and cameramen knew that Gordy could become dangerous someday, but Jupe trusted him implicitly, trusted them that he was safe. 

In the end, Gordy reaches out to him. Part of the reason for this is probably because he didn’t make direct eye contact, but I think there’s something symbolic about it too. They were both put in danger on that set, they were both confused and scared and alone, and the people around them were only exploiting them with no care whatsoever for their safety or protection. It makes sense that Jupe would trust an animal more than a person - the people who were supposed to keep him safe failed him. 

I feel like this also is super relevant to the way child actors are treated today. Jupe was put in an environment where he was actively exposed to a predator every single day. People put him in this position; he didn’t choose this. He didn’t know the dangers. He was exploited and he was hurt for it, left alone when the predator attacked. I feel like this correlates with all the children who are abused on movie and tv show sets who nobody stands up for when the predators come for them. People knew Gordy was a predator and they let him around Jupe anyway. People know that certain people in the industry are predators, and we let children around them anyway.

This movie gave me a lot of feelings. Feel free to let me know what you think!

Jupe is a fake cowboy.

So, I just saw Nope with some friends for Halloween and it became all I could think about recently. One of the things I realized is that Jupe and OJ are foils of each other in the most funniest ways possible: Jupe is a fake cowboy, OJ is a real one.

What do we know about OJ? He’s a horse trainer, it’s his passion, he would risk life and limb to save his horses. He knows what they like, what sets them off, how to calm them down, how to tame them. His familiarity with animals is what helps him figure out what Jean Jacket is and what sets her off. He's the first to really understand Jean Jacket. When they need to bait Jean Jacket out, he goes out on his fucking horse and stares that bitch down, even though he knows its what pisses her off. He has a standoff with a fucking kaiju and comes out alive. He’s a working man, always busy, always wears a hoodie and trucker’s hat because it’s practical. He’s lives in the desert, out in the middle of nowhere, in the frontier. It’s so out there and nowhere that it’s where Jean Jacket hides. He’s broke, he’s selling his horses to Jupe to make ends meet. He’s a loner, he’s an outcast. He keeps his cool, even when’s scared out of his mind. He’s gruff, he speaks sparsely but intently, he’s brave. He’s a cowboy.

Jupe, though? Jupe is a former child actor who owns a western-style theme park. He wears the gaudiest, glitziest cowboy outfits you’ve ever seen. He’s never touched a horse in his life. He doesn’t give a shit about them, he treats them like food. He gives this spiel about taming this wild chestnut stallion before the show but it’s all bullshit. When he’s trying to sacrifice Lucky to Jean Jacket, he tries to usher it out like it’s a fucking dog. “Get out. Come on, do it, now!“ Lucky doesn’t budge an inch, he commands no respect. He’s buying OJ’s family horses just so that he can kill them all. He’s pressuring OJ to sell his land, his family ranch, to him, for his theme park. He had a traumatic experience with a chimp on a TV show, and because that chimp died before it could do anything to him, he thinks he’s special. He thinks he’s chosen, he thinks he’s tamed Jean Jacket - this predatory, alien beast, like you would tame a wild stallion. He’s one of the first people we see die to her. He’s a liar, a sell-out, a thief, an exploiter.

Jupe dresses up like a cowboy, likes to acts like one, but he’s pretend. He’s not a cowboy, he’s a land baron. If Nope was a classic western he would be wearing a mustache and a monocle. He’s nowhere near the cowboy he thinks he is.

This is why Jupe dies to Jean Jacket while trying to exploit her, and why OJ comes out alive even when he’s pissed her off. Westerns were always about the frontier, the unknown, which is why sci-fi and horror work oddly well with the genre. Jean Jacket represents the unknown, a spectacle of the unimaginable a new frontier. She’s alien and dangerous and completely uncontrollable. OJ, the broke working man who works with horses and lives out in the frontier, respects the unknown, understands it, works within it’s rules. Jupe, the land baron theme park owner, tries to market it, commodify it, exploit it, turn it into a spectacle, and it’s ultimately what kills him. You can’t tame the unknown, you can only try to understand and respect it.

A land baron could never understand the frontier - the unknown - the way a cowboy can. God this move is good.