The Western is a chameleonic beast. While the genre started off on the page with penny dreadfuls, it quickly expanded to the silver screen with the John Ford and Sergio Leone classics that have come to define its most popular examples today. Yet the genre has expanded far beyond the confines of deserts, sixguns and cowboys. Take a quick glance at the Wikipedia page for the Western and you’ll find a grand total of 29 sub-genres, including the Greek Western, the Ramen Western, and the Weird Western. The author Will Wright, in Sixguns and Society, summarises these archetypal narratives as ‘a lone stranger who ides into a troubled town and cleans it up, winning the respect of the townsfolk and the love of the schoolmarm’.
Nope, Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated third feature, plays on many of the Western’s archetypal features while keeping the narrative within his own original, eclectic sphere. Brother and sister OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Kete Palmer), two ranch-hands put in charge of their family farm following their father’s mysterious death, try to record proof of an extra-terrestrial being ravaging their society. Peele’s love-letter to film, filmmaking and film viewing becomes immediately apparent during OJ’s failed attempt to keep horse Lucky calm as a barrage of film crew and cast distract and unsettle the animal and ignore OJ’s instructions. A knowing order ‘to keep your phones turned off’ from one character places the audience firmly in the cinematic realm. You’ll want to have your attention focused to fully appreciate every detail laid out on the camera. Get Out and Us have received endless amounts of analysis and theorising, and Nope will no doubt receive a similar treatment. Peele is an expert in ‘less is more’ philosophy; the alien ship is rarely shown in full form until the film’s climactic moments, and, as with his previous two entries, the plot allows the audience to interpret scenes without heavy exposition.
Kaluuya fits the silent hero role of the Western hero admirably, largely expressing thoughts in mumbles and deadpan facial expressions. After listening to the three questionably laid out theories of alien invasion by tech salesman Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), OJ amusingly undercuts his observations with a single grunt. When the chaos goes down (moments of gore are shocking and provocative thanks to Peele’s targeted and limited use of it), OJ carries on through with minimal panic. Satire seeps through the narrative; both the audience and characters participate in the spectacle of filmwatching and making, and the film’s opening quote provides a fairly damning judgement on our modern viewing habits. Steven Yeun’s Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park is given a particularly poignant narrative; it’s safe to say that you won’t be looking at our monkey comrades in the same way for a while. To explain much more would dilute the genius of the film, so walk into that cinema and enjoy that wonderous and dangerous spectacle on the big screen before it rides off into the sunset.