Whatever else you may have heard about Nope, otherwise known as “Not of Planet Earth,” know this: Jordan Peele’s third and most radical movie is his subversive inquiry into Hollywood. On the surface, such a stance is old news. At least as early as Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust, artists who have experienced the Hollywood moviemaking business firsthand have exacted some form of literary or cinematic revenge at the beast that has fed them. The irony is that it can sometimes seem that it’s some of the most successful in the Hollywood galaxy who engage in this project, whether it be Vincente Minnelli with The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Paul Mazursky with Alex in Wonderland (1970), or Robert Altman with The Player (1992).
And Peele is nothing if not successful. His emergence with (2017), with its nightmarish depiction of white privilege run amok, followed by (2019), an ingeniously clever, Rod Serling–influenced tale blending racial horrors and paranoid science fiction, were cultural landmarks, announcing not only a Black filmmaker of far-reaching imagination and brilliance but also one able to dislocate the viewer from genre expectations while exploring disturbing political themes. By the time he announced that he was readying his third project with Universal (historically the friendliest Hollywood home for horror), Peele had reached the industry pantheon occupied by Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese: moviemakers/cinephiles with enough box-office clout to pretty much call their own big-budgeted shots. (So if, say, they want to shoot in IMAX, as Peele insisted on for and Nolan did for [2017] and his upcoming , they get their wish.) The fact that he is the first Black American filmmaker to do so, however, makes Peele more important than any of these others in our current moment, and also means that he still remains an outsider in a profoundly white-dominated industry. No matter the level of business Peele can generate with his films, he will never be an inside player.
