‘Nope’, ‘Princess Mononoke’, and monster movies that put us in our place
VERY SPOILERY thoughts on Nope from an environmentalist POV originally published at https://putongwords.substack.com/p/nope-princess-mononoke-and-monster
When you first start watching Jordan Peele’s new film Nope, nothing is certain except that there’s an unidentified flying object (UFO) haunting Agua Dulce Valley. Its disc-shaped silhouette, which eventually emerges from behind an innocuous looking cloud, is unmistakable. Though the entity bears no resemblance to the chimpanzee dressed as a birthday boy on a sitcom set, the two are the same. To the humans they engage with, they are wild creatures to be tamed or be killed.
Many have categorized Nope as a sci-fi Western thriller, drawing on genres that frequently celebrate the tenacity of man, so I will focus more on its environmentalist themes that’s subtler than the human adventure at the forefront.
The vulnerability of humans is established from the very first shot, even without full context of what happened or full view of the carnage, we know multiple people are dead of maimed due to their proximity to a beast. Gordy the chimpanzee, dressed like a boy, calmly surveys his handy work with a bloody face. We are reminded of how weak we are, how easily wild animals can tear us to pieces. We have no claws, no fangs, no venom, our arms aren’t powerful enough to even pull up our bodyweight without vigorous training. We just have our well-developed frontal lobes and opposable thumbs.
But it’s our higher cognitive functions, combined with our killer instinct, that make us the ultimate apex predators.
It is in our nature, and few things prevent us from taking this planet for everything it’s got. For Jupe, played with heart-breaking guilelessness by Steven Yeun, his attempt to train the creature for his Wild West show exemplifies humans that has taken their place in the world for granted, and forgot that a wild animal must be broken thoroughly before you can trust it to do tricks. Yeun’s character never understood that it wasn’t the chimp that spared him from a violent death, but the person who put a bullet in its head.
It’s no accident that OJ (played by Daniel Kaluuya, a powerhouse of brooding), an animal trainer by trade, understood that between man and nature, nothing belongs to humans without a fight, that nature is constantly at our throats when it gets the chance to take back what man has laid claim to. The film is broken up into chapters named after various Haywood horses, a creative decision that didn’t make sense to me until the last chapter “Jean Jacket”, the name OJ gave to the creature, after his first horse. The new Jean Jacket essentially becomes one of OJ’s horses, his to do what he will with in order to get what he want, be it to live, or to thrive (get that Oprah money).
I’ve been referring to the creature as part of nature despite it being established as an extraterrestrial for a reason. For one thing, nothing about its origins are ever explained in the film, it is assumed to be an alien life form simply for matching the flying saucer trope. What’s more, the way it is regarded by the human characters is no different from any other creature viewed as a rare prize, be it rhinos poached on the Serengeti or sperm whale once hunted the North Pacific. Its feeding and hunting behavior, natural to its own existence, are too easily accepted by us as specifically hostile to humans when there really isn’t a single reason for us to expect wild animals to respect human landownership or deservedness not to be eaten.
Because the creature’s post-feeding excrements of keys and coins fell from the sky and killed the Haywood patriarch, because it has an insatiable appetite for flesh, it becomes a murder in our eyes. Its existence is bona fide malignant, and thus it is morally righteous for humans to feel entitled to exploit, and if need be, to hurt and to slay it. There’s no consideration to allow it to have the valley, not when it seems as violently territorial as humans (and there can only be one predator on the scene).
The fear, defiance, and aggression that fuels the humans’ actions against the creature they later named reminds me of director Hayao Miyazaki’s seminal Princess Mononoke, an unflinchingly violent tale of humans and gods of the forest waging war and fighting to the death. In Princess Mononoke, one of warmongers is Lady Eboshi, an arms dealer who employs and shelters lepers and brothel girls, carving out space for the downtrodden in human society at the expense of the forest dwellers on four legs who see no reason to yield to humans without a fight.
In Princess Mononoke, both sides of the conflict gets plenty of screentime, where their motivations are explained and the audiences are encouraged to have complicated sympathies for both intrepid humans and the proud, regal animals defending their home from invaders. Crucially, Princess Mononoke’s heroes are environmentalist/pacifist humans that believe in negotiating a peaceful coexistence between man and nature. In Nope, however, the creature is the ostensible antagonist of the story, and despite its fearsome powers and even more powerful pride and temper, gets goofily named “Jean Jacket” (the sheer disrespect!). What is the name they calls themselves? What kind of life does it live? What exactly does it want? These are not important to a story centered on human survival, and thus like so many other creatures we barely understand, killing it seems par for the course.
Nope actually shows a lot of restraint in depicting the creature’s monstrosity. Peele did not opt for the dark, slimy, gnarled ugliness you’ll find in the likes of the creatures of the Upside Down in Netflix’s Stranger Things. In fact, the monstrosity of the creature and its allegorical counterpart, Gordy the chimp, are all framed by their violence against humanity, which in and of itself is only horrific to us as human viewers. In the grand scheme of things, nature is not inherently benevolent or malignant, those qualities are constructed by human sensibilities.
When you take a moment to stop relating to OJ and company as they try to survive being stalked and hunted, and really look at the creature, there is nothing monstrous about it. I would compare it to the hauntingly beautiful human-faced deer god in Princess Mononoke who can heal wounds with a breath, who trots with flowers blooming and dying at its hooves, who walks on water…It wouldn’t be an overstatement to refer to the creature known as Jean Jacket to its killers as a god of the sky, who can conjure an unmoving cloud, manipulate energy, vacuum up whole creatures, and fly effortlessly like it’s destined never to touch solid ground.
What connects the forest god and the creature even more is perhaps how they die. The former is beheaded because it is rumored to induce immortality (in the real world, rhino horn is prized as a maybe erectile dysfunction cure), and the latter angered and lured out hiding to be captured on camera so that maybe, a bunch of desperate humans can make some easy money by titillating audiences between the latest Kardashian shenanigans and political scandal. Both the forest god and the creature known as Jean Jacket die at their most breathtaking, majestic moment of glory, mid-transformation into their most dazzling form.
It would have been so easy for Peele to lean into mainstream monster design aesthetics in its maximalist, nastiness, to make the creature look dirty, decayed, putrid, dripping in gore and goo, with fans galore. Instead, what we got was a massive, pale, ethereal fairy creature radiantly illuminated by the setting sun, with tentacles devoid of suckers, bellowing like silk ribbons in the wind. Its mouth/orifice, which was more sphincter like in its disc form, now forms a lush green doorway that whips and snaps. What if it is about to complete its metamorphosis and be done with carnage? Again, we have little idea about this creature, and when I watched Emerald (played exuberantly by Kiki Palmer) trick it into killing itself while capturing the moneyshot photo, my heart hurt a little even as I cheered on the Haywood siblings for surviving and succeeding.
As I reflect on Nope, I think it is one of those rare monster movies with an environmentalist bend, that showcases and celebrates human ingenuity without framing it as morally righteous. As much as we talk about inheriting the earth, sometimes we need reminding that it is not inherently ours, but something we have taken for ourselves, viciously, with our faces covered in blood.
