Nope

Abstract

Abstract Jordan Peele's Nope (2022) features a shape-shifting and Cthulhu-esque alien that feeds off settlers and other arrivants in the California desert. Focusing in particular on the Haywoods, a family of Hollywood horse wranglers descended from the otherwise anonymous Black rider on the horse of Eadweard Muybridge's famous Animal Locomotion Plate 626, Nope can be read as suggesting the ubiquitous nature of anti-Black violence. Furthermore, this essay will suggest that the informe nature of the alien, referred to in the film as Jean Jacket, and which eventually reveals itself to be something like a giant jellyfish, also mirrors the way in which Blackness has historically been—and continues to be—treated likewise as informe, or what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson refers to as “plastic.” In other words, Nope suggests that Blackness is linked in the white Western imagination to plasticity and animality, as made clear by the restaging in Peele's film of the Muybridge sequence, but now featuring Jean Jacket and OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya). Finally, by exploring Blackness as effectively “alien” to white hegemony, Nope suggests a Black cinema that appropriates that “alienness” and one that becomes a vernacular/informal countercinema that resists white supremacy.