There may be a lot more to unpack with Jordan Peele’s Nope than what appears on the surface, especially in light of some recent comments the writer-director made about his film that seem to tease toward a possible sequel.
Peele’s cryptic insights have inspired us to break down the most talked-about moments from Nope, which has proven to be a film ripe with fan theories and metaphorical interpretation.
What’s with the impossibly-balanced shoe after Gordy’s rampage?
Perhaps the most talked-about discussion point in Nope revolves around the meaning behind a stray shoe that is standing upright, in a impossibly balanced manner, during a flashback scene. The scene in question occurs when we see a flashback of Steven Yeun’s Ricky Park witnessing a chimpanzee massacring his co-stars after being startled from some popping balloons underneath the hot studio lights on the set of a sitcom called Gordy’s Home. The child-aged Ricky, played by Jacob Kim, survives the incident by hiding underneath a table. But we see the character examine a blood-spattered shoe from one of his co-stars that seems to defy gravity with the way it happens to be standing upright following the mayhem. Years later, Yeun’s adult Ricky has that same shoe preserved in a glass case and similarly positioned in the same upright pose, the blood stain still present on it, as part of his macabre secret museum dedicated to the massacre.
When Ricky describes the incident to Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ Haywood and Keke Palmer’s Emerald Haywood, he doesn’t paint a picture of the massacre using his own memories. Instead, he gives a description of the fictional Saturday Night Live sketch that lampooned the tragic event, with Chris Kattan playing the part of the chimp known as Gordy. This underscores a theme in the movie about the subjective nature of memory — for instance, in the collective cultural memory illustrated by a comedy sketch — of major events, especially catastrophic or tragic events. Might Ricky’s recollection of the tragedy by way of recounting a comedy sketch, rather giving than a beat-by-beat first-person account, hint that the balancing shoe was merely a figment of Ricky’s imagination? This is all still up for debate, but Peele has nevertheless remarked on the speculation while still keeping the interpretation open-ended.
When asked by The New York Times for an explanation for the meaning behind the balancing shoe, Peele said,
“It’s the question I get the most, which kind of makes it the question I’m least inclined to answer with anything defining, at least at the moment.
“But I can say, from a character-driven standpoint, the scene is about a moment in which a dissociative psychological switch gets flipped for the character. It is about a moment that changes something within you.”
Did OJ really die?
At the end of Nope, it would appear that OJ conquers the odds by surviving his encounter with the creature known as Jean Jacket, even though he had previously baited the alien into chasing him so that Emerald could escape. But the brevity of OJ’s re-emergence at the end of the film — after Emerald apparently defeated Jean Jacket by causing it to choke on a balloon — and the fact that only Emerald saw OJ has led to a fan theory that OJ was merely an apparition and a figment of Emerald’s imagination, suggesting that he actually did not survive.
We still don’t know the definitive answer to this question. However, Peele has addressed it, albeit somewhat cryptically. When he was asked point blank in the NYT interview about whether OJ is merely a vision in Emerald’s mind at the end of the film, Peele said,
“I think I made a film that has a very clear sequence of events as to what happened. I think it is very clear, and I will leave that at that.
“When a story works, it’s because I’m tapping into a story within somebody. What I find interesting is, what did you first think? I know what I thought, but what you thought is what’s more important to me.”
Arguably, this is a great response since it still leaves room for either interpretation — that OJ survived or he did not — striking at the heart of the film’s theme of the nature of events being subjective based on an individual’s experience.
What happened to Antlers Holst’s footage?
One loose thread from Nope that we hope to see possibly addressed if a sequel happens is whether or not the footage survives from the temperamental cinematographer, Michael Wincott’s Antlers Holst. In the film, devices that use electricity are rendered useless in the presence of the creature known as Jean Jacket. Thus Antlers utilizes an analog film camera to capture the “money shot” of the creature. Not only does he succeed, but Antlers takes it one step further and exits the campout on the hill alongside Brandon Perea’s Angel Torres. Antlers takes the camera, mutters something to Angel about them not deserving the impossible, goes to the top of the hill, and captures an even more close-up shot of the alien immediately before he and possibly the antique camera are apparently sucked up as its latest meal. This would seem to imply two shots of the creature exist, imprinted on celluloid somewhere.
It’s not entirely clear whether Jean Jacket actually consumed the camera itself or if the device merely fell to the ground and is still laying on the hill somewhere. But even if the creature did consume the camera, that doesn’t entirely rule out that it might show up again at some point.
With Jean Jacket routinely spitting out the inanimate objects carried by the people it eats, such as the key that fell from the sky that killed Keith David’s Otis Haywood Sr. at the beginning of the film, does that mean the alien would have expectorated the antique camera, and its accompanying footage, at some point?
By the end of the film, Emerald eventually does secure her “Oprah shot” of Jean Jacket by using the novelty well camera that is perpetually pointed at the sky at Ricky’s Wild West attraction Jupiter’s Claim. However, that was just a still image and we can’t help but wonder whether she and OJ eventually secure the lost Antlers footage, which presumably captured the creature in full motion, for their inevitable media tour that serves as irrefutable proof of extraterrestrials visiting Earth.
Did Jean Jacket actually survive — and is there more than one?
One point of criticism Nope received from some reviewers was that the alien threat known as Jean Jacket, who is a space manta ray-like creature that resembles a traditional flying saucer in its more contained form, seemed to be defeated a little too easily at the end of the movie. We are led to believe Jean Jacket choked on a runaway Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade-sized balloon that is let loose by Emerald from Jupiter’s Claim theme park. However, did the creature truly die in that scene?
Since the creature can obviously change shape from one form to another, could Jean Jacket merely have reverted back to a “hibernation” state at the end of the movie, after being temporarily injured? That appears to be exactly what the creature’s designer, CalTech engineering professor John O. Dabiri, implied in a recent interview. When asked by Thrillist if there was any part of his conversations with Jordan Peele about Jean Jacket that didn’t end up making it into the final movie, Dabiri made an eyebrow-raising remark as part of his response:
“Here in this story, there’s one Jean Jacket that we see. Suppose the question is, is Jean Jacket really one of one, or are there others? Is Jean Jacket actually dead?
There’s a species of jellyfish that’s called the immortal jellyfish, because if you damage it or otherwise harm it, it goes back to almost like an embryonic form, and hibernates in that state, and then comes back later when conditions are more favorable. I’m not the movie maker. But if it was me, I would say there would be some interesting opportunity to ask the question of whether we’ve seen the last of Jean Jacket.”
Who is ‘Nobody?’
We’re kind of cheating with this last entry since Michael Busch’s ‘Nobody’ is a character who did not ultimately have a scene in the finished Nope film, but he is listed on the movie’s IMDb page. Nevertheless, the character could be seen in a couple of brief clips in some of the trailers for the movie.
Nobody appears very briefly at the 02:17 mark of the second U.S. trailer (below).
He also appears at the 1:02 mark of the very-spoilery final trailer for Universal Pictures Australia (below).
In both clips, the character is seen serenely walking toward some kind of unseen danger that a crowd of people is running away from. This all appears to be taking place on a studio backlot, indicating it could either be during Gordy’s rampage in a flashback scene or during some other cut scene, perhaps one of Jean Jacket wreaking havoc in an urban setting. Either way, the situation itself, as well as the character’s name mysteriously being called “Nobody,” makes us wonder if he has some kind of extra-terrestrial connection.
It would seem whatever his story is, more might be explained about it in a possible sequel to Nope. As Peele explained to NYT when confronted about the Nobody character, he said,
“The story of that character has yet to be told, I can tell you that. Which is another frustrating way of saying, I’m glad people are paying attention. I do think they will get more answers on some of these things in the future. We’re not over telling all of these stories.”
We were totally satisfied with Nope as a standalone film, but now that we know about all of these apparent teases for a potential sequel, we would absolutely say “yep” to strapping in for another ride in this intricately complex world.
