**WARNING: Spoilers for Jordan Peele’s Nope ahead**
It means something to be the first.
To be first is to be permanent.
To be remembered or, in some cases, forgotten.
But no matter one’s place in the collective memory of history, they were still first. And no can take that away from them.
Of course, people have tried.
The first set of images put into motion debuted in 1878, courtesy of English photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion is not quite the first film — even that distinction remains a contested topic amongst historians — but it nevertheless laid the groundwork for all the motion pictures to follow in its wake.
Muybridge’s series of cabinet cards depicted a mare named Sallie Gardner galloping along a racetrack, mounted by an unnamed jockey. The series of images proved groundbreaking for a variety of reasons. Equestrians were shocked to find that a horse’s gait was much less graceful than previously thought. Photographers were fascinated by the possibilities associated with this new “chronophotography,” capable of visualizing the passage of time. And inventors were eager to carry the horse’s momentum forward.
An inventor himself, Muybridge developed the zoopraxiscope in 1879. The invention allowed for the display of chronophotographs in a disk-like format. Muybridge used his new machine to project The Horse in Motion for a series of lectures between 1880 and 1885.
Were these projections the first ever films?
Muybridge himself would likely say “no,” having assisted American inventor Thomas Edison just a few years later in developing the Kinetoscope, yet another precursor to the motion picture technology on the horizon.
Of course, “horizon” is a subjective term. In fact, by the time Edison debuted his Kinetoscope in 1891, Frenchman Louis Le Prince had already shot the world’s first true film in 1888. Perhaps more than any other contribution towards the advent of cinema, Le Prince’s Roundhay Garden Scene has been lost in the annals of history. Le Prince isn’t even the most famous Frenchman to shoot a film in the late 1800s, his work eclipsed quite soundly by that of Louis Lumière and his brother Auguste. The Lumière brothers emerged in the mid-1890s as the faces of cinema’s rapid global expansion. The duo’s Cinématographe became a popular form of entertainment in vaudeville houses across Europe and the United States, and served as the primary mode of projection in the nickelodeons that defined American moviegoing until the early 1920s. Their own films became known as “actualities,” depicting everyday life in their hometown of Lyon and beyond (the American film industry was also built upon these actualities, capturing coal miners in western Pennsylvania, in case you were wondering how far American cinema has strayed from its working class roots). It may all sound rather mundane, but for audiences, it was nothing short of spectacular.
The Lumières lost interest in motion pictures as their brainchild took on a life of its own, and actualities were soon replaced by the so-called “cinema of attractions,” thrilling renditions of the magical or the impossible from visionaries like Georges Méliès and Sergei Eisenstein.
So who amongst this crowded cast of characters was the first? Does it matter?
Nope director Jordan Peele seems to think so, paying tribute to a lesser-known character in this story of cinema’s early days. Peele’s interest lies not with all the old European and American men tinkering with nuts and bolts in their attempts to capture what mankind has never captured before. Rather, Peele’s latest film fixates upon the onscreen image itself. Even as Peele sets Nope in contemporary Agua Dulce, several miles north of Los Angeles, its roots extend all the way back to Muybridge’s equine innovation. Who is that unnamed jockey riding the horse named Sallie Gardner? We know the horse; shouldn’t we know the man?
After all, he’s a part of the spectacle.
In truth, we may never know the name of the black jockey lost to history, but we can certainly imagine who he might be. And Peele does exactly that, assigning the simple silhouette an entire lineage of horse wranglers. The Haywoods have been training Hollywood’s horses for over a century by the time we meet them in Nope. Following Otis Sr.’s (Keith David) inexplicable death-by-falling-coin, however, the family business is at a bit of a crossroads. O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) remains committed to his father’s legacy, albeit unenthusiastically. He cares for the horses at the Haywood Ranch, but he is unimpressed by the Hollywood glitz and glam adjacent to his work. On the other hand, his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) sees her family’s history as a clear means to an end. As the thinking goes, all that horse wrangling might just pay off for Emerald, stamping her ticket to Hollywood stardom. Their competing interests aside, the two siblings form a pretty gream team. O.J. understands the horse, and Emerald understands the spectacle.
And isn’t that what Haywood Hollywood Horses is all about? Dating back to O.J. and Emerald’s great, great (and as O.J. points out), great grandfather, the Haywoods have been impressing horse and film enthusiasts alike. Of course, the extent of those impressions has waned across the decades. When O.J. and his horse Lucky (a not-so-coincidental Sallie Gardner lookalike) botch their first Hollywood shoot in the wake of Otis Sr.’s death, one can’t help but rush to the Haywoods’ defense. The cast and crew of the commercial are understandably caught up in the chaos promised by any proper production, but their auto-pilot nature comes at a cost. O.J. calmly warns everyone around him not to stare Lucky in the eyes, as she tends to dislike that kind of eye contact. O.J.’s warning falls on deaf ears, and Lucky nearly kicks the commercial’s star actress right out of the frame.
If Muybridge’s earliest audiences were marveling at what they saw, it seems those in contemporary Hollywood could merely look at the subject in front of them. This flattening of the image is more or less Peele’s primary preoccupation with Nope.
In all those early cinematic offerings of the 1880s and 1890s, the onscreen image was astonishing. Whether it was a depiction of workers leaving a factory or a moon with a face, audiences couldn’t help but stare at the screen with awe. We still achieve this kind of spectacle from time to time. I’m particularly fond of the kinds of high-concept action films that pare spectacle down to its simplest form: films like Speed, Unstoppable, or Crawl. By asking such bold questions as “what if there was a bus that couldn’t stop?”, these films are participating in that same “cinema of attractions” film scholar Tom Gunning recognized all those years ago.
Of course, cinema is always a spectacle. But does that term imply a sort of superficiality that ignores the potential depth of the image at hand? Well, Nope’s Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) might take umbrage with that suggestion. In building his newest carnival attraction around the mysterious UFO spotted in the skies above Agua Dulce, Jupe sees only one thing: “an absolute spectacle.”
The labeling of the UFO is significant. O.J. sees a “bad miracle.” Emerald sees the “impossible.” Famed cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) considers it a “dream,” while only support technician Angel (Brandon Perea) is willing to say what we are all thinking: “aliens.”
But soon, all such labels vanish, and the UFO receives a proper name: Jean Jacket, in honor of the horse a young Emerald never got the opportunity to train. That final distinction may grant the otherworldly visitor the respect it deserves, but Peele is careful not to strip Jean Jacket of what makes it so damn irresistible. Indeed, who could blame Jupe for appropriating the spectacle in the sky in service of his own on the ground? Or Emerald for convincing herself that a single photo of the phenomenon (the “money shot”) could lead to fortune and fame? Peele may resent the increasing superficiality of cinematic spectacle, but he more than understands its allure. Besides, in the case of a former child star like Jupe, spectacle is all he has ever known.
Jupe’s backstory accounts for arguably the most terrifying sequence in Peele’s Nope, which transports us to the soundstage for Gordy’s Home, a 1998 sitcom about a family and their pet chimpanzee. A young Jupe (Jacob Kim) can only watch as the popping of a balloon sets the chimp actor (few can play a monkey like motion-capture legend Terry Notary) on a violent frenzy, brutally attacking Jupe’s three other co-stars. We know at least one of Jupe’s co-stars survives — the horribly disfigured Mary Jo Elliott — but why was Jupe spared entirely? Peele offers a few tantalizing possibilities, but nearly 25 years removed from the incident, Jupe doesn’t seem all too concerned with his improbable fate. In fact, his memory of it might as well be nonexistent. Jupe’s relationship to his own (presumably traumatic) past is instead filtered through an SNL sketch of the event. For Jupe, this recreation, this simulacra, suffices as a stand-in for the incident on the Gordy’s Home soundstage. We as viewers see via flashback just how terrified a young Jupe was during the rampage, but Yeun’s Jupe would have any of his contemporaries believe the ordeal was nothing more than an oddity, realized most fully by an apelike Chris Kattan and the unwitting quartet of Darrell Hammond, Cheri Oteri, Scott Wolf, and Ana Gasteyer. This simplification of the tragedy is made even more apparent by Jupe’s exploitation of it, inviting Gordy’s Home devotees to stay in a private room at his Jupiter’s Claim theme park and live amongst memorabilia from the show. To the average viewer, Jupe appears broken, perhaps even deranged. But again, who are we to judge? After all, we certainly have our own tolerance for exploitation in service of spectacle.
As part of its excellent “Anonymous in Hollywood” series, Vulture recently published a piece with industry-rattling potential, detailing the experiences of a VFX artist for Marvel Studios and drawing attention to the superhero behemoth’s questionable practices. Like any industry giant, Marvel has mandated a kind of “race to the bottom” in which effects houses must engage in a bidding war. The lowest bid wins, and so studios desperate for work will find any and all ways to cut costs on Marvel’s behalf. The result is a project that almost certainly requires ten or more team members, but must instead rely on the work of two or three. Considering the massive scale of Marvel’s budgets, the practice would be laughable if it weren’t so inhumane. VFX artists further describe the process of being “pixel-fucked” by Marvel, referring to the client’s tendency to nitpick every individual pixel. Marvel has been known to nitpick within a month of a film’s release, the likely result of an ever-widening gap between VFX artists and a stable of directors unfamiliar with the VFX process.
Audiences generally remain unaware of or uninterested in pulling back the curtain in this way, but the Vulture piece does seem to be gaining a rare kind of traction amongst Marvel enthusiasts and detractors alike. The anonymous writer draws specific attention to the third act of 2018’s Black Panther, in which the special effects suffered immensely. The dip in quality is attributed to a lack of oversight from a director of photography during postproduction, a bizarre rarity that forces VFX artists to come up with shots of their own, disrupting the visual language of the film. Audiences picked up on this weakness at the time, even as the film met widespread acclaim (it’s telling that the film’s long list of Oscar nominations did not include one for Best Visual Effects, a category Marvel tends to dominate). Calls for union strikes and industry changes have intensified amongst certain pockets of the internet, but these revelations only further speak to Marvel’s stranglehold on the entertainment industry, and our longstanding willingness to sit back and watch as its grip grows tighter and tighter.
And yet there is perhaps no stronger example of an image flattened than a Marvel production. Each entry in the MCU is an obvious example of spectacle, of cinema as an attraction (insert obligatory Scorsese-roller-coaster reference here). But with the VFX artists themselves acknowledging the films’ waning quality, and with the repetitive cycle of colorful-laser-slices-building-in-half becoming more and more transparent, is there really anything for us to see in these images? Like the cast and crew of the commercial in Nope, we can surely look at such images. But in a rather ironic twist, I wonder if we are even marveling at Marvel anymore.
That’s not to say spectacle is dead, of course. Nope itself delivers spectacle in spades, thanks in large part to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, a frequent Christopher Nolan collaborator. Its alien depiction is also a genuinely unprecedented contribution to our collective understanding of extraterrestrial life (Peele plays with viewers’ expectations halfway through the film, teasing us with traditional imagery of bug-eyed and big-headed aliens). But the film also arrives in a year that we might just refer to as the “year of the spectacle,” as several of the year’s biggest hits have employed a kind of maximalist approach to filmmaking that places their status as an “attraction” front and center.
After the unprecedented success of their high-octane film Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, the Daniels drew attention to this very idea, referring to themselves as “maximalist" filmmakers and promoting their ability to “be nuanced with a jackhammer.”
Kwan’s full thread highlights all kinds of reasons why maximalist filmmaking can be effective, and I am hard-pressed to disagree. But there is no denying the emphasis on spectacle that emerges as an inevitable byproduct of such films. And with its tongue-in-cheek awareness of its own status as spectacle, EEAAO recognizes cinema’s broad appeal. The film offers its own history lesson of sorts, paying homage to the wuxia films of China and recreating sequences from the films of John Carpenter and Wong Kar-Wai. Its frenetic pacing and chaotic editing nearly invent a cinematic language of their own, although the film cannot quite outrun a sort of televisual quality. Its closest cousins may not be the poster children of Gunning’s “cinema of attractions” but rather several episodes of Rick and Morty, or the little-known works of executive producers Joe and Anthony Russo.
If it sounds like I’m being critical of one of the year’s most popular films, it is only because I am wrapped up in the very conflict Peele identifies in Nope. I find that I’m particularly sensitive to the kinds of spectacle that the Russos and the rest of the Marvel family have introduced as the new standard. But where the Daniels still succeed (EEAAO is a good film!) is in their unapologetic celebration of what film can do. To present a spectacle, to introduce new imagery to the cinematic canon, is to make yourself vulnerable as a creator. It can be embarrassing, and despite its status as an industry behemoth, Marvel regularly seems embarrassed to be what it is. And quite frankly, Marvel’s attempts at spectacle have grown staler and staler as a result. But the Daniels are unembarrassed by their funhouse of a film. And particularly because the film maps its roadshow of absurdities onto the experiences of a Chinese-American family, EEAAO forces us to not just look at, but see the spectacle in front of us.
The directing duo is joined by some of contemporary cinema’s greatest carnies in 2022. With Elvis, Baz Luhrmann takes the basic biopic format and stitches it together with candy floss and ketamine. With Ambulance, Michael Bay sends his camera flying down the sides of buildings, or weaving through high-speed traffic (it’s made possible by FPV drones, and it’s glorious). Both Luhrmann and Bay direct with an acknowledgment that the film is only one level upon which the relationship between artist and audience is being mediated. When we watch their films, we do so with the understanding that we are watching the work of a madman. Even when they misfire (and trust me, both of these men have misfired aplenty), directors of this ilk leave us no choice but to see what is in front of us.
Other films have celebrated the spectacular in 2022. Tollywood smash hit RRR found unique international success by reminding viewers just how batshit an action epic can be. Jackass Forever marked the franchise’s triumphant return by placing a series of increasingly painful (and expensive) stunts on the big screen, as opposed to our childhood backyard. Even films like Nitram and The Fallout dealt with the kinds of unconscionable tragedies rarely seen onscreen.
Nope evokes all such spectacles in its interrogation of the relationship between spectacle and spectator. And it’s not alone amongst 2022 films in questioning how we engage with the onscreen image. Ti West’s meta-slasher X centered the conversation on the taboo duo of violence and sex, a pairing David Cronenberg has exploited throughout his career, and reflected on quite intensely with his latest film Crimes of the Future. West and Cronenberg wonder aloud as to whether or not we’ve grown desensitized to depictions of violence and sex. And if so, has that desensitization made us complacent to key devolutions in these spaces? The policing of bodies is a prominent theme in Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, and it only took on greater urgency as the film was released amidst the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Some have considered Nope’s own perspective on womanhood, as Jean Jacket’s insides (which already mirror the inside of the motion picture projector that opens Peele’s film) resemble female genitalia. One also can’t help but think about flattened images and images unseen in the context of police brutality, where short online videos often serve a significant political purpose, yet also become perverse spectacles in their own right. It can be difficult for us to see such crises in our modern environment, as they are sooner simulated, repackaged, and exploited.
And as O.J. points out, the spectacle needs to “feed.”
A brutal tragedy is devoured by an SNL skit. Governmental secrets are swallowed whole by a TV series on the History Channel. Painful breakups fall prey to influential Instagram stories and breakout roles on The CW.
So as several of 2022’s most popular films throw everything at the cinema screen and wait to see what sticks, we know Jean Jacket will spit out some debris here and there (a quarter, a key, a bad Nicolas Cage movie). But we also might be able to tame the onscreen image, to wrangle it like the Haywoods and their horses. And in doing so, we may ultimately demand the kinds of spectacle upon which cinema was built.
We may finally achieve the impossible shot.