I believe that nobody can really keep their cool when faced with the grotesque and the impossible. But after losing your cool, you can find it again. This is the hero’s real test — how to go on.
I thought about this when I saw Jordan Peele’s Nope the other day. It’s a wonderfully made film about the practicalities of facing the impossible, learning how to make it play by your own rules, and, finally, telling it to fuck off.
Nope is much more oblique than some of Peele’s other films, in parts so delicately crafted that you can miss out on the message if not concentrating. In that sense, it’s not a summer movie per se. But summer is waning in the northern hemisphere, the harvest moon will soon be here, my own personal marker of a turning season, and it’s time to take stock.
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The war in my native country has raged on since February of this year. I’ve lost friends. I’ve lost my footing. Being thousands of miles away means I’m safe, but also frequently lonely. Most of my friends who haven’t been impacted by war don’t quite know what to say to me, and I don’t want to overburden them. A lot of friends who have been impacted by war in the past just want to move on from it. I want to annoy them even less.
Most of my friends who haven’t been impacted by war don’t quite know what to say to me, and I don’t want to overburden them
This is why the story of the Haywood siblings, which is at the heart of the film, was so comforting to me. What do you do when a monster comes for your home and for what you love? You’re terrified, of course. Then you realize that you have work to do.
I loved that the Haywoods were not driven solely by pathos, or even solely by survival instinct. They decided to make the monster work for them and turn it into a character in their own story, not the other way around. They had a sense of humor about the horror of their situation — and a practical eye. In the year 2022, that strikes me as more powerful than your regular “final girl” horror trope.
Nope weaves many narratives, one of them about the concept of the bad miracle — a seemingly implausible or even impossible event that is not uplifting, just ugly and inexplicable. The human mind is remade by bad miracles, but it all depends on how. Do you buy into its hype? Let it turn you insane? Or do you push through it to the other side of trauma? I like that Peele is prompting his audiences to ask themselves this question, because, in a way, I’ve been asking myself the same damn question for months.
I think few people will argue with me when I say that the world seems crazier than it did a few years ago. The government has admitted that UFOs are real, for example — a point that Nope makes sure to mention — and that it doesn’t have a solid explanation for them, and most people didn’t give a shit, because of how upside down things have felt down here.
Russia’s war, in some ways, feels like an extension of the same macabre plotline to me, especially as more people give in to nuclear hysteria, the so-called president of Russia included.
Not making eye contact with the monster, not giving your game away, is a solid strategy. Equally solid is accepting the bad miracle for what it is. It’s among us whether we like it or not, terrorizing the landscape, feeding on people. It comes in different forms, all threaded together by a predatory instinct.
One of the reasons why horror like Nope is a great vehicle for exploring trauma is that the genre has a sense of humor about itself. If you’re exhausted by predators, you probably know what I mean. Laughter can be a protective magic, it shields the mind. It makes the hard work ahead of you easier. I’m grateful for it always, but especially grateful right now.
Image: Kevin Gill