A Film Analysis
Photo credit: Karen Zhao (via unsplash)
Jordan Peele has curated a filmography of horror movies that are hair raising, goose bump inducing, and will leave your mind utterly confused each and every time. At the bare minimum, he is able to portray humans as the real perpetrators of social destruction.
Peele has once again brought back the meaning behind the quote, “fear the living not the dead”, in his latest film “NOPE”.
A movie made just as meticulously as all its predecessors, Peele continues his reputation of creating films with meanings that go far deeper than what we see at surface level. The audience left the theatre visibly satisfied, with the impression that they had understood the film; little did they know that what they had just witnessed was not a movie of an alien spaceship hovering over humanity as a threat to its existence, but rather a perfectly sewn metaphor of the centuries old colonialism.
History speaks volumes of the oppressive and suppressive colonisation of the world by the European nations. Peele has given us a revised lesson of just this. Now, let’s revisit some of the scenes and collectively exclaim our “ooh’s and aah’s” as we uncover the links to this underlying theme that you may have missed.
A UFO symbolizing colonizers,
A cloud remains still in the sky, looking down upon a horse ranch. As night and day pass, it remains right there. The spaceship was hiding behind the cloud, waiting, preying.
What is this UFO symbolizing?
Could it be a representation of society’s oppressors?, of colonialists looking down physically and metaphorically upon the inferior (race)?
What is often considered to be the cowards’ way to fight, it hides and then attacks when its target is at its weakest.
Triggering the UFO,
Looking up at the UFO appears to be what triggers it to come for you, almost as if it feels threatened. Perhaps a reference to the revolutions, uprisings, and revolts carried out by the oppressed placing themselves eye to eye with their oppressor.
The spaceship appears to be killing people as a way to mark its territory. Needless to say, this further reflects the parallels to the territorial expansion plagued by early colonialism. It eliminated all that came in its way and spat down the waste. It drained its prey of sweat and blood, leaving them with nothing but their own wasted, useless resources. The people and places were left in shambles at the hand of their oppressor.
“Gordy” the chimp,
Later, on a TV set, there is a chimp that displays a similar reaction when it hears the word ‘Jungle.’ Jungle, a chimp’s natural habitat, and the TV set, a jail, imprisonment. Similar to the slavery and captivation of those under the colonialists rule.
An end to racism?
NOPE ends when a human shaped balloon enters the spaceship, deflates and destroys it from within.
Was Jordan Peele perhaps implying that to end racism, a racist mind must be cleaned from within?
Crazy as it sounds, the human form of the balloon was of a coloured character.
The takeaway,
Peele never disappoints and never fails to incorporate current social issues into his films; so subtle that it doesn’t provoke rage but rather, it encourages a healthy conversation or at least a thought.
His filmography, which consists of, Get Out (2017) a film based on slave labour of the cotton pickers, and Us (2019) that found inspiration from the 1986s’ Hands Across America charity event; both have an underlying social commentary, thus it can be assumed that Jordan Peele has once again put forth a Social Horror.
*This is only an interpretation of the movie and any piece of art is open to individual interpretations and analysis.
