Jordan Peele defines alien as alienation from others in 'Nope.'
Aliens are a staple monster in the horror genre. From Alien to The Thing, aliens have been a beloved creature in the genre for some time. So Jordan Peele’s Nope is a welcome addition to a celebrated subgenre. The film follows siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) as they try to uncover the origin of mysterious occurrences on their family horse farm. They discover there’s a creature lurking in the clouds and set out to capture footage of the alien as proof. The film is ostensibly about aliens but as the story unfolds we begin to question just what an alien is.
In a traditional sense, aliens are extraterrestrials. Creatures from far-off worlds descending upon our own with their own designs. They are intelligent beings that possess a benevolent or malevolent will toward humanity. They often want to kill us for their own reasons. But this is where Jordan Peele challenges this usual notion of what an alien is. What if the alien had no intent? What if an alien is simply an animal, unaware of the harm it does? What if it was an alien in the truest sense of the word? Peele creates aliens for us that are defined by our inability to comprehend them and their inability to comprehend us. It’s a definition of alien rooted in an experience of alienation from others. And so through Nope we come to understand that an alien can be more than just extraterrestrial.
While Jean Jacket is referred to as an alien by the characters in the film, its origins are completely unknown. While we assume its incomprehensible, Eldritch form means it must be extraterrestrial in origin, we have no idea what it actually is. OJ and Emerald try to rationalize what they’ve seen by attributing it to an alien but Jean Jacket behaves in much the same way any other animal would. It feeds like a wild animal, grazing over the land it calls home. It spits out the materials it can’t digest. It follows the same patterns as horses in regard to eye contact. Jean Jacket is alien not in the traditional sense of being extraterrestrial but in the more foundational sense of being something we cannot fully comprehend. The inner machinations of its mind, what it wants, and what, if anything, it intends toward the people around it are all devastatingly unknown.
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Gordy is the key to understanding how ‘Nope’ redefines what an alien is. Gordy is a chimpanzee, or rather a group of chimpanzees, cast to play the same character on a lovable 90s sitcom. But when an accident occurs on set, Gordy goes berserk attacking the cast and crew to a degree that the show was immediately canceled. Gordy is not an alien in the traditional sense at all. He’s an animal, one with behavior similar to a human's, and one who has been trained to work with humans. The people on set falsely presume that their closeness to Gordy and the fact that he’s trained somehow makes him knowable. That their connection to him can somehow overpower or reprogram his nature. But as the incident proved, they didn’t “know” Gordy at all. At the end of the day he’s still beholden to his nature. He’s still an animal, an other, an alien. He is not something humans can fully understand even if he’s trained. Aliens are not just little green men with big eyes coming down on flying saucers, they can be earthlings too. The horror comes from never truly knowing what they think.
Jean Jacket and Gordy are often paralleled by the film. And we see this through how Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) tries to connect with both of them. Despite seeing Gordy’s rampage, the gesture of Gordy holding out his hand in a practiced fist bump has given Jupe the false belief that he can form a special connection with these animals. He has a strange reverence for Gordy even years later, keeping a shrine to the failed sitcom in his office, and after forming a habit of feeding Jean Jacket, his hubris makes him believe he can control it. Jean Jacket and Gordy are parallel experiences for Jupe, expressing a belief that he will be able to eventually learn about and control these creatures. But he fails to understand their alien nature. They will never be something he can engage with on the same level as humans, they will always be wild. Though their appearances are completely different, Jean Jacket and Gordy are equally alien to humans.
Even the human characters aren’t free from the descriptor of “alien”. Though they themselves are fully human they experience a degree of alienation from others' comprehension and recognition that is similar to what the aliens go through. OJ is a skilled trainer but when he’s on set for a film he comes across as awkward and the crew members seem reluctant to work with him. He understands the horses well because he understands how different they are from himself, and he knows the rules to follow. But it seems he struggles to connect with other people in the same way and this leads to him being ostracized on set. He’s alienated from other people almost as much as Jean Jacket or Gordy, but Em is able to reconnect with him in a way that makes the both of them less alienated. Emerald is alienated to a lesser extent than OJ. She lacks connection to her family due to her father’s neglect of her and by her massive list of job titles, she doesn’t seem to have a very firm spot in the world. She wants to be an actress but as we know her she is adrift in the world, she latches onto the hunt for Jean Jacket on this quest for fame in her endless journey to find the recognition she was denied by her father.
While OJ and Em are made to feel alien from others, they are still understandable to us as the audience. But the person who exists at that boundary between human and alien more than any other is Jupe. Jupe named not only his theme park but himself after his sitcom character. He distances himself from his real identity by clinging to the beloved, sanitized fictional character people know him as. And we see through his attempts to tame Jean Jacket that he’s struggling for a sense of control. He’s alienated not just from himself through his morphed identity but also from the audience and other characters in our inability to comprehend why he does what he does. How could he ever hope to control an Eldritch being that lurks in the clouds? From his final speech introducing Jupiter’s Claim's guests to Jean Jacket we see he has a sense of connection with this creature. Why? We can only guess. Jupe is a human character beyond our comprehension. A man tied down so deeply by the roles he’s been given that he feels a kinship to other alien creatures.
Nope deconstructs our usual cinematic definition of alien by taking it beyond appearances or place of origin to turn it into a more nebulous identity. An alien is defined by their incomprehensibility, through the feeling of being alien to others. The horror of this concept is from how unknown it is. No matter how hard we try we cannot fully understand the machinations of another creature’s mind. The most we can do is, like OJ, understand their behavior and work accordingly. But the film makes clear that knowing a creature’s behavior is a far cry from truly knowing it. In Jordan Peele’s Nope, we can all be aliens.
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