“What’s a bad miracle?” asks the character O.J. in writer/director Jordan Peele’s 2022 film NOPE. “They got a word for that?”
The word Peele seems to be offering as an answer is “spectacle,” a term repeated throughout the movie. The film’s opening epigraph is a biblical quote from the Book of Nahum: “I will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” Later, in the spiel Jupe (played by Steven Yeun) gives at the live show he hosts at his theme park, he states, “Every Friday for the last 6 months, my family and I have borne witness to an absolute spectacle.”
NOPE is an odd amalgamation of genres: neo-Western, science fiction, and horror. At the same time, it is deeply conceptual, concerned primarily with the notion of spectacle, and its relationship to Hollywood. The movie follows siblings Otis Jr. (O.J.) and Emerald Haywood—played by Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer—as they struggle to maintain their father’s ranch after his sudden and tragic death.
The Haywoods train horses to work in film and are descendants of the very first man captured on film, the Black horse jockey in Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion. But after their father’s bizarre death (a nickel falls from the sky and impales his eye) and being fired from a set when a horse reacts negatively during a shoot, O.J. sells one of the horses to their neighbor, Ricky “Jupe” Park. Jupe is a former child star who now operates a Western-themed amusement park called Jupiter’s Claim. When a UFO is spotted in the vicinity of their home, O.J. and Emerald set out to capture it on film, while Jupe tries to lure it into his live show at the theme park.
What Jupe and the Haywood siblings have wrong, though, is that the thing flying through the sky is not actually a UFO at all, at least in the sense that it is not an object. More accurate would be the use of UFO as an Unidentified Flying Organism. The thing in the sky—which O.J. and Emerald name Jean Jacket after one of their childhood horses—is alive. It is a predator that hunts by swallowing up people and horses and discarding the inedible material it sucks up with them (hence the nickel that killed O.J. and Emerald’s father.) Most importantly, it has no interest in performing for them.
Peele then positions animals in Hollywood as the embodiment of spectacle, creating a parallel between Jean Jacket and Jupe’s childhood on the TV sitcom Gordy’s Home.
When Jupe was growing up, he was a TV star on a family sitcom that featured a chimpanzee named Gordy. One day during a taping, the chimp actor reacted violently to the sound of a balloon popping and attacked the cast and studio audience, beating people to death and pulling their flesh off, before being shot in front of Jupe. As an adult, Jupe capitalizes on this childhood trauma by charging guests to go into a hidden room full of Gordy’s Home paraphernalia.
Jupe witnessed a spectacle turned catastrophe, but what the film seems to be offering is that there is little difference between the two. Our association with spectacle is largely positive. Oxford dictionary defines it as “a visually striking performance or display.” Its negative connotation is mostly one of ostentatious showiness, negative through the lens of a kind of cheap vulgarity, not violence. Peele, on the other hand, argues that there is something violent, something exploitative, at the center of spectacle. That, like an animal actor that finally snaps after being made to prance and perform, inherent to spectacle is an explosion, a bursting of the damn, a catastrophe.
NOPE is not the only work of art to interrogate spectacle in this way, and it finds an unlikely ally in The Great Gatsby. Gatsby, too, is fascinated by spectacle, and the dark underbelly it seems to demand. Gatsby’s parties are nothing short of spectacular: beautiful, radiant, and endlessly surprising, they glitter and twinkle, demanding attention. F. Scott Fitzgerald even plays on the use of the word “spectacle” via the spectacled eyes of Dr T.J. Eckleburg that watch over the Valley of Ashes from a giant billboard.
The Valley of Ashes, then, is the natural counterpoint to the spectacle of Gatsby’s parties. A landscape of horrid industrial pollution, men toil and suffer among the soot, smog, and ashes that are produced as a result of the technological innovation needed to illuminate Gatsby’s parties. The connection does not stop there. In Fitzgerald’s short story “Absolution,” which is widely regarded as a precursor to Gatsby, a young boy goes to a priest for confession and is told instead to look at an amusement park. Fitzgerald identifies something in amusement parks that captures the nature of spectacle: beautiful and wonderful, yes, but also hollow and exploitative.
Similarly, it is Jupe’s theme park in NOPE where the film’s most climactic scenes take place. When Jupe uses the horse he bought from the Haywoods to bait Jean Jacket into appearing at his live show, the creature obliges, but sucks up Jupe and all the other spectators into its maw, consuming them whole.
O.J. realizes that, like an animal, Jean Jacket sees direct eye contact as a threat and reacts aggressively. He and Emerald are able to photograph Jean Jacket when they herd it into the abandoned theme park and capture an image of it with a manual camera in the park’s coin-operated wishing well. Eyes turned away, they immortalize Jean Jacket on film, a spectacle for the world to marvel at. Jean Jacket dies when, antagonized by a balloon of Jupe winking, it consumes the balloon and explodes when the helium bursts inside it.
Fitzgerald, too, imagines disastrous violence as part of spectacle. Linked to Gatsby throughout the novel is the presence of seismographs, a device used to detect earthquakes. In Chapter I, Gatsby himself is compared to “one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.” In Chapter V, upon being reunited with Daisy, Gatsby nearly knocks a broken clock off the mantelpiece at Nick’s house. In the 1920s, defunct clocks were often used as the central component of seismographs.
Of course, it is not a natural disaster that kills Gatsby, but premeditated murder, enacted by Wilson and facilitated by Tom Buchanan. In this act of violence, Fitzgerald is particular in his language. Despite only two people being killed, his word choice carries an enormity to it, a nauseating power. Moreover, his language implies witness, observation—an audience. He says, “It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.”
What Fitzgerald offers here is that for every one of Gatsby’s spectacular parties, there is a Valley of Ashes. That for the massive energy needed to generate an amusement park above ground, an earthquake lurks below. That for Gatsby’s extravagant, ambitious life is the holocaust of his death. That spectacle does not just precipitate a disaster or catastrophe; they are one and the same.
NOPE makes the same argument. One might think that the spectacle is the show the animal puts on before it snaps, but just as easily can the spectacle be the snap itself. Jupe cannot help but stare as Jean Jacket descends upon him, just as he cannot help but make money off his own horrific childhood trauma. Hollywood is known for capitalizing on our taste for horror, taking the unimaginable and making it cinematic. Peele argues that perhaps the real spectacle is the tragedy itself, the thing we salivate for, the thing to which we turn our eyes and stare at.
To learn more…
Watch:
NOPE, written & directed by Jordan Peele (2022), streaming on Peacock
Read:
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
McGowan, Philip, The American Carnival of The Great Gatsby, Connotations Vol. 15.1-3, 2005.
