NOPE: a cut-up critical conversation about Jordan Peele’s recent movie

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as OJ and Emerald Haywood in NOPE (courtesy of Universal Pictures)

by Dennis Leroy Kangalee & Maxx Pinkins

(l to r) Dennis Leroy Kangalee and Maxx Pinkins

In the first of a series of “critical conversation” pieces, artist-writers Dennis Leroy Kangalee and Maxx Pinkins distill their reactions to Jordan Peele’s film NOPE in a succinct and honest slice of criticism.

Maxx Pinkins: The first time I saw the film was in IMAX at the TCL in Hollywood. As I walked out, I caught up to an older Black couple and asked them what they thought of it. The woman responded bemusedly, "I have no idea what the hell I just saw, but I know people on the internet will be posting their theories soon, so I'll be looking online." Her male companion offered no follow-up. Even though the woman failed to make any meaning out of the movie, she understood its cultural significance: reaction videos.

Dennis Leroy Kangalee: Yes, which is what movies in all over are becoming.  That’s why I’ll take Sammy Davis Jr., “Sanford and Son” and Robert Townsend at his weakest any day over a ‘Jordan Peele’. I simply don’t get what the fuss is, but I suppose every generation has red herrings. But, alas, as young people tell me “It isn’t made for you, Kangalee!”  Whatever that means.

Pinkins: From youtubers, and hidden messages and symbols explained and deciphered by acolytes of the Room 237 brand of film criticism. In the NYTimes, A.O. Scott says "the main target of Nope's critique is also the principal of its affection," drawing the concluding that "the moral of Nope is 'look away,' but you can't take your eyes off it." Scott would have us believe that "look away" can be considered a moral.

DLK: Red herrings. Oblique metaphors. Hollow symbols. Film school tropes and industry techniques with a “Black” assertion? What does that even mean??

Why can’t “woke” filmmakers and their generation simply say what they feel, want and think directly? (Because they don’t relate to or appreciate acting, behavior or the capacity for cinema to simply render mystery.)

Pinkins: The sovereignties, the authorities, the world-mights of darkness, the spiritual forces of wickedness (Ephesians 6:12), they would have us look away from their evil deeds, rather than document them as evidence with our cell phones. But then we should give the devil his due, for they themselves do not look at what they are doing. Or maybe they just don't know how to see.

The eye functions as an observer. And all films deal with spectacle, as all dance deals in touch and all poetry deals in sound. But the films that best use spectacle as theme offer more than shallow observations, rather, they point out the inherent difficulties with the act of observing itself. The troubles caused by observing passively or without first extracting the beams from our own eyes (Matthew 7:5). In “Minority Report” Spielberg shows the ways that sight can deceive, because of our existing biases and our unwillingness to look hard and long at the truth. In the work of Godard, the act of seeing always comes with a moral obligation, the inner response to outer darkness.

DLK: Why can’t “important” socially conscious films just rely on strong staging, acting, and dialogue?  Isn’t cinema already allegorical enough (as opposed to theater which at least contains living blood, sweat and tears)? I have never liked Jordan Peele’s films. I simply don’t relate to them aesthetically. I feel the same way about lots of filmmakers who stuff their films with disingenuous allusions and “deep” references.  I think poetically, but not symbolically. I never have. Which is what irritates people about my own criticisms or approach to art while it aligns with others. I like Hitchcock and Kubrick. But I don’t decode them like millions of people do. I see more meanings in an actor’s performance than a filmmaker’s puzzle.

Another thing I despise is puzzles. I don’t want a puzzle. I want chills. I want a poem or movie or song to just give me a unique feeling, it may affirm my sensibilities or not. Who cares. I don’t find politics, human relationships, or what people do to each other abstract. To me they are clear as day. And that is both deep and accessible to anyone.  I think the task is finding authentic ways of rendering that.

Pinkins: There is a fundamental fallacy in Peele’s emphasis of "seeing" when it comes to Black people. What can Peele show us, or what can we see that we don't already know and fully understand? In an era of police murder documented by amateur filmmakers, what significance does Peele make of a Black man who owns a whole ranch of land, and has inherited a family business going back several generations, trying to take a picture of the sky in order to gain a profit by it?

Had Peele directed his critique at his own prejudices rather than at the guilty conscience of an industry he willfully exploits to enable his work, we might learn something about the contradictions of ambition and aspiration for a Black man in America. But Peele only shows, he doesn't tell.

courtesy of Universal Pictures

DLK: I think young artists are compelled to be overly concerned with meanings and profundity. I was at 21. But Peele nor his critics are 21. One has to grow up! If you think symbolically, so be it. Be who you are. And then the bullshit detector won’t go off!

Pinkins: This merely shows the Obama effect. People have had their senses dulled, by the dazzling display of rhetoric and the clean image of our first Black president and first lady. This has seemingly obviated any meaningful discussions about race.

Worse, it has obscured any potential clarity such an event might offer. It numbed us, and now that the effects have worn off, we still have no more information than we did before. Racism exists, but what can be done? Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community?

one of the movie posters for Jordan Peele’s hotly anticipated 2022 film “NOPE”

DLK: If Peele’s goal is to patronize and flatter millennials, in general, and White Liberals, in specific, he is doing a phenomenal job. Nope is a good title. As I say “Hope is Nope with more hair.” And the emperor here is not wearing any clothes or hair. In fact, there is no emperor. Peele is talented and cynical and is brand unto himself.

Pinkins:  Nope functions less as an allegory of Hollywood or race or cinema, which would require substantive symbols and evocative abstractions, but rather as a romantic expression of concrete freedom. Which terrifies far more than Frankenstein or Mr. Hyde.

The message of Peele's film and his success in Hollywood makes a far more chilling and complex meaning than the images in Nope. Namely, "Nothing, not your race, your gender, your sexual orientation should prevent you from pursuing your goals, even if your goals have no positive effect on the objective world other than getting rich."

DLK: It would be nice however if he would just make films that are admittedly enabling the master’s house as opposed to this “fugazi” political consciousness that millennials seem to champion. It’s not Hollywood’s job to free us. That’s our job. And the job of artists. Stop looking under stones that were handed to you. You have a garden of your own.

Pinkins: Yes, social commentary and cultural critique become irrelevant when personal ambition acquires validation. In a nutshell: Freedom From Accountability. 

A more appropriate quote to open the film would have been the opening remarks from Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities, the whole is vanity." The book concludes by saying "God shall bring every deed into judgment concerning all that is obscured, whether good or whether evil."

May the Lord show mercy on Peele.