Reconsidering Jordan Peele's 'Nope'—Filmstack Challenge #5
A Critical Reassessment Through the Lens of Synecdoche
First of all hello! Second of all, goodbye August? It feels like this month just got here and we’re already bidding it adieu. That chilly fall air is already taking hold of early mornings and the evenings—jacket weather is firmly arriving. I’m off to Las Vegas next week for some downtime, and I’m excited to be back out West!
I am very late in my response to Filmstack Challenge #5 but better late than never!
The Prompt by Dario Llinares
So, for this challenge, I would like you to share a conversation, an article, a podcast, an interview, or any experience that gave you a redefined insight - and therefore a renewed appreciation of a film.
This could be as fundamental as completely changing your mind about a film you didn’t like on first watch (as I alluded to in the title), or it could be a subtler moment: reading, watching, or discussing something that allowed you to access a different way of thinking about a film, or even about cinema as a whole. It might even be a fleeting spark of perception that made you absolutely have to see a film you were previously indifferent about.
I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Critics at Large from The New Yorker. The guest of the day was critic Richard Brody and the topic at hand was How to Watch a Movie. The first half of this discussion with host Vinson Cunningham centers on the auteur theory and how that proliferated in France since there were stronger bonds between the arts and literary circles.
At the 31 min mark Brody talks about synecdoche and his theory about how A Great Film Reveals Itself in Five Minutes:
…reading a few pages of any really good book should astound and delight, and send a reader to the beginning to devour the book whole… Synecdoche is the fundamental experience of art, the sense that a random fragment contains a lifetime of experience and suggests the depth of a soul. That’s because this is the fundamental experience of life—no one knows anyone completely, and no one comes in at the start. But the person you see for an instant and can no longer live without, and whom you can imagine spending a lifetime getting to know, is pretty much what makes life worth living.
I found his five-minute theory to be fascinating:
Put in the DVD of “Vertigo” or any of the other top-ranking films in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll—“Citizen Kane,” “Tokyo Story,” “Rules of the Game,” “Sunrise,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “The Searchers,” “Man with a Movie Camera,” “Passion of Joan of Arc”—and fast-forward ahead randomly, then watch for five minutes. Those five minutes won’t show you everything you need to know about these movies, but they should suffice to do the essential thing: to arouse admiration, astonishment, and love, as well as the hunger to see the whole movie and anything else that Hitchcock, Welles, Renoir, Dreyer, and company have to offer. In fact, any five minutes of such movies would show something fundamental about movies themselves, about the essence of the art.
Cunningham shares how he felt this while watching the opening sequence of Highest 2 Lowest, which opens with a gorgeous montage of the New York skyline as seen from downtown Brooklyn, and the beautiful glittering view of sunlight playing off the glass buildings, all of this is soundtracked by Norm Lewis's "Oh What A Beautiful Mornin'." I was also a fan of this scene and it really locks you in for a ride and a preview of how sound and music will shape this film.
All of this made me give Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) another chance and to challenge my own critical response to the film, which was not very positive. The discussion that Cunningham and Brody have in that podcast did give me a lot to think about regarding how I was processing Nope and the individual aspects of the film that I did enjoy even if the film as a whole didn’t work for me.
I had tried to watch Nope a few years ago but made it maybe 20 minutes in and gave up because the pacing for the first 90 minutes is taxing, to me it felt like a slog to sit through. I will say the film’s opening sequence is intriguing, a father (Keith David) and son (Daniel Kaluuya) are ranchers outside in a horse pen tending to their stock when an assortment of random objects fall from the sky and a quarter dollar embeds itself into the father’s eye and kills him. After that we're left with Kaluuya giving a very subdued performance as his character deals with the death of his father and the financial pressures of running the ranch on his own. Around the 90 minute mark something finally snaps him into action and he comes alive again with purpose and is ready to destroy the alien being that’s feeding off the town’s people.
One of the more visually arresting moments in this film that would fit into Brody’s five minute theory was seeing the humans being processed through the alien’s intestines (or mouth or maybe throat?), it’s so weird and something you’d never think about, so to see it visualized was kind of funny and bizarrely interesting. Also, oddly it’s one of the visual moments that stuck with me, it’s not gross by any means it’s just funny to consider once you realize where the humans are and what is happening to them, they’re being eaten.
Another standout visual moment for me was the colorful air dancers aka inflatable tube men set against that deserted western backdrop. It was such a great contrast and I love the idea of putting something so odd in a place where you’d never expect to see it in the first place, it looks like some kind of land art wherein the landscape becomes a canvas.
I really love the synecdoche framing and thinking about the moments in a film that are astounding, so although I was not enjoying the pacing, I was a fan of the sound design, it was the thing that was keeping my attention and I began to “hear” the film more strongly than I was “watching” it. That said, the cinematography is pretty great and I think I would have enjoyed this a lot in an IMAX or Dolby theater just by virtue of how good the film sounds and looks.
Overall, this synecdoche framing of appreciating the pieces versus the whole helps you become a more avid and knowledgeable film watcher, offering a way to discuss film that goes beyond Rotten Tomatoes scores or Letterboxd ratings. Zero-sum thinking has infected the ways in which culture at large processes things and reintroducing nuance is important now more than ever.
Filmstack News
You can watch me in conversation with this month’s Filmstack Challenge curator Dario Llinares on his podcast Cinema Body/Cinema Mind, where we got into chatting about the impetus behind this blog, film marketing, AI, my journey into film appreciation and my moviegoing habits, as well as how bullish I am on Substack helping to strengthen interest in long form critical writing as larger media orgs eliminate those positions in a very late pivot to video focus.
“One of my favourite strands of Swabreen’s thinking: a push to take authorship seriously once again. She’ll happily read her own experience through a film, but she also is fascinated with what the filmmaker intended. That stance - neither death-of-the-author nor fan-service absolutism - is a vital and healthy corrective to discourse economies that reward the hottest take over the most generous reading.” — Dario Llinares
A new writing challenge was introduced by Ted Hope—this one is the Filmstack Inspiration Challenge and the goal is for various authors to share 25 days worth of consecutive posts on the topic of what inspires them. I will be sharing my post for this challenge on 9/11! If you’re interested in participating, DM Le Fou Films and pick a date to share your post.
Anti-Brain Rot also got a nice shoutout in Sean King O’Grady ’s post on the newly launched Filmstack Inspiration Challenge, where he selected the Filmstack community as one of the things inspiring him at the moment.
Amanda Sweikow has created the Filmstack Challenge Database, a handy way to read all of the entries for the various challenges that have been prompted thus far! Amanda will also be helming next month’s Filmstack challenge.
Thank you for reading! Until next time.
I really enjoyed this piece- thank you for writing it! I like the whole concept of synecdoche and hadn't heard it explained like this before but - I think I agree with it in theory? I do like when Art is in some ways be kind of fractal like, so a portion of it should mirror the expression of the itself in its fuller form. Like, even in a runway show, that one piece of the collection works as part of the whole and on an individual level too. They both say the same thing.
Before Nope, I listened to a Podcast about "Sky Jelly Fish" which are a phenomena reported all over the world, they are a kind of obscure cryptid, so I was delighted Peele picked them up- there is a fair amount of folklore behind them. It's here- https://beliefhole.com/living-sky-creatures-monsters-above-us/
Onto Nope- I adore it- like I really loved it when I saw it. It hit a lot of marks for me in terms of how gorgeous it looked and sounded. The performances were top tier and I was not prepared for that reveal- that the UFO was actually a being.
I read OJ as being an Autistic man, with this deep sensitivity to animals- he is subdued, almost unreadable in parts, the lack of eye contact- it felt very neurodivergent coded for me but I'm probably biased towards seeing that.
Emerald was such a joy to watch, but then Keke Palmer just eats up every scene she's in, in the best possible way.
Even the *side characters* like Ricky, Angel and Antlers felt so full and real to me. The world felt so well considered and built.
Weirdly I think Nope is Jordan Peele's best & most mature movie, even if it's his least buzzy. He avoids the tonal shifts that were in his first two movies. Those were funny, but also detracted from the overall experience.