If you’ve ever re-watched a Jordan Peele film, then you’ll know that the man likes his details. His detail-oriented style—with heavy use of foreshadowing, nods, and callbacks—has in turn encouraged a distinctively forensic viewership. Members of this group (myself included) have a tendency to hunt for hidden plot clues and covert cultural references within Peele’s films. For the most part, neither a director’s eye for detail nor an audience’s investment in such minutiae is a bad thing. But the forensic style of viewership surrounding Peele’s style can also at times drift into a rather flat approach to interpretation where the director is the ultimate authority to which the interpreter turns for approval. (For an example of this, see the 2017 video for Vanity Fair, where Peele discusses various fan theories of Get Out (2017), granting “partial credit” to one viewer’s theory and verifying another fan’s suspicions of an “easter egg” within the film). With a nod to Roland Barthes, we could say that this kind of interpretation inflates the stature of the Author (or, in this case, the Auteur) at the expense of appreciating the fuller dynamics of the text. Interpreting a Peele film becomes a game of guessing the director-as-auteur’s intentions and hoping for his eventual confirmation. By foregrounding Peele as author/auteur, these guessing games seal off the film’s status as a collaborative work (as all films are), as well as foreclosing other textual dynamics and possible readings. At its worst, interpretation of this kind sees the film as a watertight work, as an elaborate puzzle created simply to be solved. In this essay, I want to hold fast to the importance of detailed interpretation — what, following D.A. Miller, I will call “too-close reading” — by looking at a few small features in Peele’s film Nope (2022). However, I do so with the aim of destabilizing the established formula of interpretation that surrounds both the informal and critical reception of Peele. Rather, I will explore a moment that goes beyond the intention of the author/auteur and which places intentionality as such under question. In the process, I hope to reframe the practice of film spectatorship and the interpretation of Peele’s style.
Nope follows the Haywood siblings Emerald (Keke Palmer) and OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) who are trying to survive as Black horse wranglers in white Hollywood, as divided siblings in the wake of their father’s death, and as the human targets of an alien predator which they call Jean Jacket. After a close encounter with Jean Jacket on their family ranch, the pair decide to capture a photograph of the flying alien for fortune and long-overdue recognition. They call this photograph the “impossible shot,” the “money shot,” the “Oprah shot,” or more simply “The Shot.” To get this shot, the Haywoods recreate a Western set on their ranch to direct and misdirect Jean Jacket into the lens of a nearby analog camera. Clearly, the production and consumption of commercial images are especially charged processes for Nope. And, because of the image’s overdetermined status in the film, we are primed to think harder about Nope’s framing and design. We are primed to think carefully about the picture’s details and the elements which tease us by sticking out.
Here is an example in Nope of the kind of hidden detail Peele typically encourages us to look for: when Ricky “Jupe” Park Park (Steven Yeun) encourages Emerald to browse the memorabilia in his office while he trades horses with OJ, Jupe nonchalantly tells her “Su casa es mi casa.” Jupe gets the possessive pronoun in the Spanish phrase wrong (it should be “mi casa es su casa”). What this slip (which goes unnoticed by the three characters) communicates to the discerning viewer is that Jupe’s sole intention is to take from the Haywoods — what’s theirs will be his. This mistake is obviously scripted and functions as a kind of breadcrumb in Peele’s long trail of clues throughout the film. To avoid the viewer confusing Jupe’s blunder for Peele’s, the dynamic the error conveys is reaffirmed a few seconds later when OJ asks to “lay some groundwork to a pathway of buying some of [the Haywood horses] back” from Jupe, to which Jupe awkwardly and unconvincingly agrees. Re-watchers will know that Jupe is lying here; these horses are long gone, fed like pellets to Jean Jacket at a weekly spectacle.
In essence, Jupe’s “Su casa es mi casa” is supposed to be read as a revealing mistake for Peele’s attentive audience. The character’s imprecision thus operates as a testament to Peele’s precision. Indeed, by getting the possessive pronoun wrong, Jupe’s error serves as one more sly detail that underscores the film’s interest in the status of ownership and possession in the culture industry. It is one of many aspects that points to the fungible status of actors, crew, and animals working in entertainment. It further emphasizes the film’s basic thesis, which is helpfully outlined in Jason Read’s analysis: Hollywood — as a stand-in for the society of the spectacle — “eats people [up] and spits them out.” This situation applies to animals as much as people. What’s more, there will be somebody (or something) ready to take your place once you’re gone. Here, the scripted “mistake” simply adds support to the film’s main concern.
According to our current dominant culture of interpretation, this is how the film should be read. However, I want to examine another detail in Nope that will complicate the meticulousness of the director’s picture. In other words, if there are sly details that, when observed, both strengthen the film’s interest and display Peele’s genius, then perhaps reading too-closely can unearth a loose thread or two that will allow for the film’s style and meaning to be, if not totally separated, temporarily parted.
In the first scene after the opening credits, OJ stands uncomfortably on the set of an advert shoot with his horse, Lucky. The pair stand between the set’s camera and a green screen. Emerald arrives late to the job and quickly delivers a safety announcement that’s really a promotional plug for the Haywood family business (furthermore, Emerald’s little-known account of her great-great-great grandfather’s contribution to Hollywood — “the very first stuntman, animal wrangler, and movie star all rolled into one” — helps Nope introduce its interest in the stifled presence of Black people in cinema’s history). The shooting crew is fussy, overwhelmingly white, and ignorant of what having a horse on set requires. At some point, a crew member approaches Lucky and rotates a VFX light meter ball in his face. Lucky sees himself flash on the mirror’s surface (but probably doesn’t understand the image as himself) and kicks out. Lucky’s buck is dangerous and so, in a subsequent shot, OJ is told that he and his sister have lost the gig. While OJ receives this bad news, the viewer sees, in the background, a dummy horse rolled onto the set as Lucky’s technological replacement. The advert will make do with a CGI horse, not a real one — a choice on the grounds of commercial practicality in contrast to Peele’s commercial requirement, elsewhere in the film, to use a CGI chimp instead of a real one.
Obviously, this is an overdetermined scene that, to borrow OJ’s phrasing, lays the groundwork to the film’s numerous thematic pathways. What I want to focus on specifically is the scene’s odd, quick, fixed shot/reverse shot where the VFX ball’s reflective surface flashes in front of Lucky’s eyes. While the film’s plot is foreshadowed by what Lucky sees here, what’s just as important to the film’s style is what is withheld without our noticing: Peele’s camera. Without digital post-production intervention, Peele’s camera should appear in the ball’s reflection — more or less directly in the center of the shot and between Lucky on the right and the crew member on the left. It should also be discernible in the reverse shot, in the dark gleam of Lucky’s eye. But it isn’t. This technical apparatus has been scrubbed from the two shots with (I’m pretty sure!) digital VFX. Before we even know it, then — before we even register the introduction of digital FX as a problem or opportunity that Nope will explore with Lucky’s replacement and the film’s own use of CGI — our understanding of the film’s reality has been smoothed over and constituted by Peele’s subtle use of digital VFX. The camera’s absence leads to an epistemological uncertainty: should we read this moment as another instantiation of Hollywood film’s reality principle, of what Joseph Litvak calls “mass culture as mask culture,” or have we detected Peele hiding and waiting to be found?
Here, I take a page from Miller’s Hidden Hitchcock, where Miller performs a “too-close reading” of Alfred Hitchcock’s “understyle.” Miller’s obsessive practice of reading wrangles over matters of directorial nod and bluff and film continuity and error, ultimately exploring the potential meaning of a film’s mis-take alongside the hidden fault lines within every sense that it does make. For neither the meticulousness of Peele’s style nor the consequent habit among his audience to hunt for clues, planted details, and hidden references are new phenomena. They most evidently repeat the work and reception of the Master of Suspense himself. For example, when Miller re-watches The Wrong Man (1956), he finds himself stuck in a similar situation to our sighting of the invisible Peele. The Wrong Man is supposed to be a film “true to life and hence false to [Hitchcock’s] style,” and yet Miller finds himself lured into the prospect of finding a secret Hitchcock cameo. Like a detective, he hunts for clues of Hitchcock’s presence in one of the few films in the director’s oeuvre “where the camera is made to disappear.” Miller eventually finds his man, but what does this clandestine cameo mean? For Miller, it represents:
A further patch of that defective dot-to-dot puzzle in which the film encourages us to draw doubtful connections between images, connections that, no matter now matter [this typo is Miller’s secret in-joke] how wrong they may prove on being scrutinized, cannot clearly be separated from the right connections we are also invited to make; nor can they be ever cleanly expunged from our experience of a design whose rightness, or indeed, whose very legibility, is thus being increasingly overwhelmed by so many irreconcilable lines.
Returning to this scene in Nope, we can say that the situation is slightly different. We don’t have a hidden cameo that, as in The Wrong Man, is nearly impossible to spot. Rather, we have an unseen absence that, while necessary for the film’s sense, may or may not be a thematic clue. Nonetheless, this non-moment in Nope can’t be “cleanly expunged” from Nope’s design. There might be a sense of connection here. For, when I first detected this hidden detail of Peele hiding, I assumed that the director hadn’t intended the viewer to see it (or, to not notice “it” not there). But maybe I hadn’t just gotten lucky with this discovery. Maybe Peele had intended the viewer to discern his masking after all? For one, the abrupt rhythm of this shot/reverse shot is radically at odds with the rest of the scene’s slow pacing, and the sudden use of extreme close-up — where Peele’s camera’s absence is central — is unlike anything else in the scene as well. The feel of the moment stands out.
We haven’t seen Peele’s tracks so much as observed the immaculate covering of his tracks. But isn’t that curious? As with Miller’s reading of The Wrong Man, doesn’t this observation, upon reflection, resonate with the film’s thematic interests? In fact, this invisible non-detail, afforded by digital manipulation, foreshadows two important, more spectacular elements in the film, lending it a sort of sense in retrospect. First, the concealment of Peele’s camera here — and the seamless disguising of that concealment — echoes the way that Jean Jacket camouflages its presence in an artificial cloud near the Haywood ranch later on. You wouldn’t see it unless you knew what to look for. Something of the dynamics of the lurking, predatory gaze is therefore established by this early, fleeting moment – implicitly aligning Peele with Jean Jacket. (However, if my supposition is wrong and this shot/reverse shot instead uses a practical effect to hide Peele’s camera, then the elision would still have a kind of meaning: Peele’s disguise would then foreshadow and mimic OJ’s later strategic use of fake horses and reflective eyes to ensnare Jean Jacket.) Second, Peele has presented us, technically speaking, with what Emerald will later call an “impossible shot.” His camera shows us a frontal image of a mirror-surface without getting his own apparatus caught in the object’s reflection. It’s no coincidence, I think, that Emerald’s analog “impossible shot[s]” of Jean Jacket in the film’s showdown will also be, technically speaking, digital images too, since Jean Jacket is a product of CGI technology.
Whether this innocuous non-moment toward the film’s start was intended to mean something or not, now that its absence is out in the open, it’s hard to unsee. And once seen, this disguised detail introduces additional levels of complexity to the film’s constant theorization of digital effects, visual decoys and misdirections, and the status of Black representation in cinematic history (after all, Peele absents his camera — as a stand-in for himself — from the two shots). And the detail does all this in a way contrary to the standard scripted slip or hidden clue that’s become standard fare in readings, academic and informal alike, of Peele’s style. It’s more than a subtle nod or an open secret; rather, as a consequence of Nope’s style and thematic concerns, Peele can’t help but disclose Hollywood’s need for secrecy when rendering reality. In other words, because digital technology successfully conceals Peele’s camera in this moment, the film’s realism is preserved. But by that very camouflaged preservation — which both Peele’s style and Nope’s plot trains us to look for — Peele implicates himself as practitioner within the vast predatory machinery of mass masked spectacle. This implication runs far past the point of what the author/auteur ‘intended’ or ‘planted’ for us to see. Sufficiently prepared, we are identifying (but not unveiling) the disguising of a limit of Hollywood realism — a structural and historical limit or law of the form — that Peele must observe one way or the other.
Omid Bagherli is a PhD Candidate at Tufts University, where he works on contemporary literature and critical theory. His research studies the representation of absence and exclusion in texts and films that draw from “the archive.” He likes double negatives and good literary criticism.