As noted, there’s a lot going on in the story with several themes at play, but I’m just going to…

As noted, there’s a lot going on in the story with several themes at play, but I’m just going to focus on what I think is the central theme: Spectacle. In fact, the movie and script begin with this Biblical verse from Nahum 3:6: “I will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.”

In an interview to promote the movie, Jordan Peele said this: “The word we used the most on set, was spectacle. There’s something magical to it. There’s also something insidious about it. It’s impossible to work in this industry for very long without having scars of moments where you feel like you were exploited or feel like you were infantilized or erased. What’s terrifying about these scars is it’s all wound up in the quest for attention. Fame is destructive to people who don’t have a secure system.”

This takes us back to something I noted previously: This is a movie with spectacle that is also critiquing the role of spectacle in cinematic storytelling.

Hollywood knows the value of spectacle. In fact, I wrote an Go Into The Story article entitled Hollywood’s New Four-Quadrant Movie Model and one of those four quadrants is Spectacle. Big visuals translate into entertainment and nowadays with VFX and computer generated imagery, there is no limit to what filmmakers can portray on screen. But if the focus is so much on spectacle so as to deviate from developing complex characters and compelling circumstances, then what appears on screen can be nothing more than eye candy with no actual emotional substance.

Moreover, there is a kind of pull spectacle holds on people, a power to make us look even when it’s neither justified or authentic. In this respect, it can be “insidious” as Peele says.

In the movie Nope, every character gets caught up in the spectacle of the Alien. Ranging from OJ, who has the most reservations about tracking the Alien (apart from his desire to contextualize his father’s death) to Holst who is lured toward the Alien by his own obsession with capturing images on film, including violent ones, each is motivated by the emerging spectacle of what transpires from on high.

But it’s Ricky who has the most complicated relationship to the spectacle of the Alien. On the surface, he appears to have processed the trauma of the Gordy incident, but he has not. It’s telling that when asked by Emerald what happened on the TV set, Ricky talks about it in reference to an SNL skit about the actual event. That, I think, represents a safe space for him to touch upon his own past. The fact he think he can control the Alien by offering it animal sacrifices is tied in some twisted way with the experience he had when Gordy proved humans cannot really control animals. Combine that with the fact that Ricky is making money off his fame from that TV series and the notoriety of that violent event, while using the Alien to make even more money from his live shows … it’s all reflects a very twisted set of psychological dynamics at work in the character’s emotional makeup.

Yes, there are other themes: Capitalism (while a coin from the sky kills OJ Senior, Emerald uses coins she finds on the ground to pay for the camera in the Winking Well to photograph the Alien); the erasing of Blacks from cinema history (the “nameless” jockey in the Muybridge video who, as it turns out, is OJ and Emerald’s great-grandfather); Westerns as a movie genre; Horror as a genre.

But ultimately, I think the story is grounded in the theme of spectacle.

Next: Dialogue.