In an interview that has gone viral in several places, Jordan Peele stated that he had five films planned on what he referred to as “social demons.” As he stated in the interview:
“The best and scariest monsters in the world are human beings and what we are capable of, especially when we get together. I’ve been working on these premises about these different social demons, these innately human monsters that are woven into the fabric of how we think and how we interact, and each one of my movies is going to be about a different one of these social demons.”
What is striking in this formulation is that Peele uses the term “social demon,” labeling films that are seen as political as social instead. Franck Fischbach has argued that social films are distinct from political films; while the latter often depict the political process, people, and structures, social films deal with the relations of power and authority that pass underneath the institutions. It is there where we can find our social demons.
Now that we are halfway through this series of films, it is worth asking what are the social demons in each film.
With the first, Get Out, the answer is fairly obvious. It is racism or, more specifically, racism that reduces black people to their bodies. This reduction is thoroughly ambivalent in that it contains both an overestimation of the powers and capacity of the black body in terms of sexual and athletic prowess, as well as denigration of the black person as just a body whose talents and accomplishments are natural givens of the body rather than accomplishments of the mind. In other words, the racism it depicts is a thoroughly twenty-first-century version in which the prowess of black athletes and musicians is celebrated, but this celebration is separate from recognition, and constantly undermines it. Throughout the film, as Chris (Daniel Kaluyaa) meets his girlfriend’s family and friends, they discuss his physique with admiration, even attributing his success as a photographer to “his eyes,” reducing the talent to the body. This reduction is literalized in the plot of the film as we learn that Chris is going to have his brain removed, and he will literally become the body for the highest bidder. It is hard to describe this film as having a subtext, its theme is its plot, and it stands as a powerful symbol of the persistence of racism in a world that claims to have bypassed it.
Us, Peele’ second film, left some in the audience unclear on what the allegory was. It envisions a world divided between people living lives of relative luxury, with the film being set in vacation houses outside of Santa Cruz and “the tethered” living lives of squalor underground. That the tethered are doubles of the people living above only serves to underscore the arbitrary and unjust nature of the very division between rich and poor, which is to say that Us is about class, about class as a position that we are subject to, and the violence with which we cling to our place or struggle to transform it. Us is not about class in the same way that Get Out is about race: its ideas about class are conveyed through the visuals of the different worlds and the identity of the people that inhabit them. As much as the films are two instances of a series, they also represent the transformation and development of what it means to present a social issue, from the subtext of a plot to the allegory of an aesthetic.
Peele’s third film, Nope, would seem to be even more oblique. Its story about the owners of a horse ranch outside of Hollywood and their attempts to document what appears to be a UFO does not have the immediate social dimension as the plot of a wealthy family kidnapping black people to make them their new bodies or even that of doubles living underground. The first clue that Nope is about something else, something more than UFOs, appears before the film begins, at least visually. The film opens with an epigraph from the Old Testament, the Book of Nahum: “I will pelt you with filth, I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle.” This odd statement stands over the film as a riddle. It becomes clear only later, as it is developed, and as we meet the central characters. The film centers on Haywood Hollywood Horses, a horse ranch that supplies horses to the motion picture industry. The ranch is run by Otis Haywood (Keith David) and his children OJ (Daniel Kaluyaa) and Emerald (Keke Palmer). They have two connections to the spectacle. First, as Emerald makes clear in her pitch to clients, they are the descendants of one of the first people captured on film. The unnamed and unknown jockey in Eadweard Muybridge’s “Horse in Motion” is the great-great-great grandfather of OJ and Emerald. As much as they could be described as “Hollywood Royalty,” this is a legacy without title or claim. Their connection to the history of images does not guarantee them a career providing the image of horses in the present. OJ and Emerald still have to fight for every job, something which is increasingly difficult in a world where movies do not need horses or real animals at all. Early in the film, we see one of their horses replaced by its green screen equivalent, a hobby horse upon which any image of a horse can be digitally projected. To be a spectacle, to be an image is, as Guy Debord argued, to be fundamentally alienated from control over the production of that image, of what the image means, and who it has meaning for. To be a spectacle is to give up control over the meaning of one’s existence, to become an image which is separated from its production, its meaning, and history.
A similar fate befalls their neighbor Rick “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun). He would like to be known as the star of Kid Sheriff; his entire living now, as the owner of a Western-themed amusement park, is predicated on it. However, he is also one of the cast members of a sitcom titled Gordy’s Home, about a family that lives with a chimpanzee. The sitcom was cut short after one season, when one of the chimps playing Gordy went on a rampage, killing and maiming several members of the cast, sparing only Jupe. Jupe, too, is caught between two spectacles, that of the rising kid star and the tragedy that ended his rise. He officially makes a living off of one, donning his cowboy hat to entertain the guests, but behind his office, there is a secret museum to the horrible day of infamy. Jupe would like to be remembered as one, but will always be remembered as the other. As he says to Emerald about the image of violence that ended his career, “It was a spectacle, people were just obsessed.” The second image may be more lucrative, a Dutch couple once paid him fifty thousand dollars to sleep in his museum dedicated to Gordy’s Home, but one gets the sense that it is too painful, too traumatic for him to identify with. When OJ and Emerald ask him about the infamous incident, he does not tell them what happened as he experienced it, but instead recounts a Saturday Night Live skit parodying the tragedy. There is a positive side of alienation, of the fact that one cannot control one’s image, in that it sometimes introduces the necessary distance to live with it. By talking about SNL, Jupe separates himself from his own experience by describing the spectacle left in its wake. Alienation from the image is also a separation from one’s body as lived, from trauma. While OJ and Emerald would like to stay connected to the image of their ancestor, to claim their legacy, which is unfairly forgotten, Jupe would like to maintain his distance from the image that defines him, seeing it as something that was on television rather than something that happened to him.
When the UFO enters the small valley, OJ, Emerald, and Jupe all see this as an opportunity to not only change their fortunes to get rich but to change their relation to the spectacle. Rather than being spectacles that are either remembered, as in the case of Gordy’s Home; forgotten, as in the case of the Haywoods’ jockey ancestor; or barely remembered, like Kid Sheriff, they will be on the other side, seeing the image rather than being an image, changing their fate by capturing the spectacle rather than being captured by it. They go about this in different ways. OJ and Emerald set themselves the task of capturing the UFO on film, capturing what they refer to as an “Oprah shot,” an image that will break through all of the dubious and fake images of UFOs on YouTube, to become an event that they can cash in on. Jupe, on the other hand, makes the “spectacle” part of his amusement park show. Each of these strategies come with their limitations framed in terms of the nature of the “UFO” itself. With respect to the former, the UFO disrupts all electrical devices in its vicinity, making it difficult to photograph. It is a spectacle that can be seen, but not recorded, even in the age of ubiquitous cameras and spectacle. With respect to Jupe’s strategy, a strategy not to capture the creature’s image but to tame it, exchange a horse for an appearance in his Cowboys and Aliens show, and in the biggest twist of the film, it turns out the UFO is not a spacecraft but an alien creature of some sort. There are no “viewers” inside, and what appears to be the metallic structure of a ship is its odd skin. It is not abducting people and horses to probe or study, but to eat them. Jupe’s plan, to trade a horse for the spectacle of the creature’s appearance, falls apart when it decides to just eat the entire audience. The spectacle consumes the audience.
Jupe believes the creature to be a spaceship because it looks like one (having a flat saucer shape), and acts like one (flying through the air disrupting electrical devices in its vicinity). He makes sense of it in the same way the audience does, according to the history of the spectacle, the history of images, but there is another matter, and that is Jupe’s own history with alien minds, with Gordy. We finally see Jupe’s real memory of the Gordy’s Home incident right before the creature devours the crowd. We see the ape go on a rampage, but we all see how Jupe sees the incident, from hiding under a table. After killing and maiming the rest of the cast, Gordy the chimp approaches the young Jupe and offers their trademark fist bump. We also see what Jupe does not see, namely the place from which he watches the scene. He is hidden under a table, his face concealed by the table cloth, and because of this he does not make eye contact with Gordy. This poses a question: does Gordy not attack Jupe because of some bond the two share, or because Jupe does not make eye contact, does not appear as a threat at that crucial moment when Gordy is on a rampage? We know what interpretation Jupe picks—he believes they had an understanding, and he extends this idea of forming a bond and an understanding to the UFO or alien creature, thinking they have an understanding too. He believes that he has tamed it with his offer of horses. He is tragically mistaken, and learns this when the creature decides to skip the horse to eat the entire audience. OJ sees things differently, or more to the point, he understands that animals see things differently. He is the one who figures out that it is not a ship, but a creature, one that is territorial and reacts to threats. OJ knows that the first thing we have to understand about animals is that we do not see or think as they do. One has to grasp that they see from a different place, with a different mind. This is then extended to the creature he names “Jean Jacket.” Ultimately it is OJ who figures out that the creature is more like Gordy, not the Gordy produced for television, the lovable chimp that does fist bumps, but the Gordy that considers eye contact to be a threat.
How do these different threads combine, what does the spectacle, the attempt to capture the spectacle, have to do with animals and aliens? On the immediate level animals stand in for alien minds: if we do not understand the mind of a chimpanzee, how a balloon could turn a trained ape to a rampaging animal, then how can we expect to understand the minds of entirely alien creatures? On one level, Nope suggests that the aliens are already here, in our jungles, zoos, and barns. What does that have to do with the film’s particular social demon, the spectacle? If it is the animal that helps us envision the gulf that separates our understanding from that of an alien, then it is the alien creature that helps us understand the spectacle. The spectacle is not just an image that is alienated and separated from us, but in doing so it takes on a life of its own. Muybridge’s clip lives independently of the jockey that is filmed in it, just as Gordy’s attack lives on even as it is suppressed by the studio. The spectacle ultimately does not just have a life, an existence independent of its creators. It lives by consuming others. As we see with Jupe, OJ, and Emerald, as well as other characters not mentioned, the desire to capture the spectacle and be the spectacle, to get the “Oprah shot,” can become an all-consuming passion. Or, as Antlers Holst puts it to Emerald, “This dream you’re chasing, where you end up at the top of the mountain, all eyes on you. It’s the dream you never wake up from.” The social demon is the spectacle itself, not just the image separated from its conditions, but the desire to possess or be that image. We do not need to wait for an alien to arrive to see what people will do to capture the spectacle. This demon is everywhere, as the unnamed motorcycle rider asks OJ in the film, “Why aren’t you filming this?”
Jason Read
Jason Readis a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author ofThe Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present(SUNY 2003) andThe Politics of Transindividuality(Brill 2015/Haymarket 2016), andThe Production of Subjectivity: Between Marxism and Philosophy(Brill 2022/Haymarket 2023). His blog isunemployednegativity.com.
