Smart and sharp. Fans of shit will want to miss this one, for it is emphatically not shit. Few films draw together such broad influences or mix them so confidently. Neo-western, plus Hitchcock, plus genre UFO flick, plus highbrow Baudrillardian meditation on filmic imagery, plus 90s monster anime, plus what else ya got in the fridge?
Many missed the movie’s theme, which seems straightforward to me.
Nope is about mankind’s desire to control wild things via language, to recontextualize the world of dripping teeth and claws into something safe, something human, something we can control and exploit.
This is illustrated in the movie several times. OJ’s horses are harmless entertainment…until they’re not. Gordy is a funny wacky sitcom monkey (clearly inspired by 1951’s Bedtime for Bonzo)…until he’s not. These are wild animals. The metaphors humanity has recast them in are shallow and easily broken. Savage ancient eyes swivel wildly inside the smiling-face masks. We live around things can kill us. The usual solution (shutting our eyes and wishfully imagining that there aren’t also teeth inside the masks) can turn abruptly fatal.
The film is replete with references to extremely early pre-Hollywood cinema. Another one I thought of is 1903’s Electrocuting an Elephant, which documents the death of Topsy, a Coney Island circus elephant that (lazily quoting Wikipedia) had “killed a drunken spectator the previous year who burnt the tip of her trunk with a lit cigar”. What was going through that man’s head? Maybe he thought he was safe. After all, he’d paid for a ticket. Surely the elephant wouldn’t dare harm a paying customer of the circus.
The deadliest animal in the film is Jupiter, who kicks off everything with his amusement park wheeze (or so it’s implied). But note that he could have justified his actions. He had everything under control, bro! Trust me, bro! Nothing had ever gone wrong before, bro! And don’t you work with animals too, bro? That, again, is applying human logic to an alien world. A wild animal has not signed a contract and it is not bound by any natural law to perform as you expect. A cat will merrily play with you. Then a chance hand movement triggers a sparking cascade of neurons, thousands of years of domesticity crash like invalid code, and it lashes out. In that impulsive moment, it wants to destroy you. It’s only cute because a cat is too small to kill. If it was the size of a tiger, your guts would be outside your body. Nobody who ever picked up a snake thought they would get bitten by it.
A few years ago, I noticed people treating their pets as if they were human. Women would call their dogs “fur babies”. They’d talk to their dog in a coochie-coo baby language, as though their dog was a human infant. And when their pitbull mix attacked someone, they’d react with shock. That’s not how they raised their little guy to behave! Imagining a human face on a strange and alien thing comforts us, and affords us an illusion of control. But wildness still lives underneath, and can bite through that illusion as suddenly and finally as it can bite through you.
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