You ever been to a comic book convention? Over the years I’ve been to several and I always find them fun but frustrating. There are always these people there with tables who either never really were celebrities or were celebrities for five minutes 40 years ago.
And some of them, if they were connected to the right film franchise, make a living selling autographs and telling stories about their time on set.
It’s not that I begrudge anyone a living it’s just that I find the whole thing demeaning and depressing.
Also, panels with actual comic book writers and artists who created great things are often ignored while a panel with a guy or girl who played a zombie or a stormtrooper on that thing for half a minute decades ago can fill up a lecture hall.
Jordan Peele’s Nope is a brilliant examination of fame. What some people will do to get it and what they’ll do to keep it and what it can cost you when you won’t let it go.
There were two things in it that connected for me.
At one point the alien is overhead and you can still hear the screams of people who are dying in one of the most horrific things I have ever seen in a movie.
It’s not horrific, so much for what you see, but for what it suggests. It’s the perfect kind of horror shot that forces you to imagine the lingering suffering of other people.
Anyway, as two people hide in a house and hope they won’t be killed I thought of the time I was in a newsroom while a Cat 5 Hurricane banged around outside.
The power had gone out and we were off the air and there were more than a few screaming and upset young people who called their relatives convinced they were going to die.
In order to deal with it I grabbed the only person who still had a cell phone signal and we did a Facebook live with the anchors and weather folks and basically kept working for as long as we could.
If you had asked me why I did that I probably would have given you a lofty answer about journalism. But the real reason was that in my mind as long as we were working I was convinced the Hurricane wouldn’t kill us.
You can’t kill someone when they’re on the job. And if you are working you can’t spend time thinking about the life choices that led you to remain behind instead of getting out of the way and getting your family out of the way of a Cat 5 Hurricane.
There is a character in this movie that gets just the right amount of attention. He is a cinematographer who is the best in the world at what he does and he helps the heroes in their quest to get the perfect shot of the alien.
And everything about him, from the way he spoke, to his final choice to get a great shot is note-perfect.
He reminded me of a guy I heard about from one of my college journalism professors. The professor had been a reporter for the Miami Herald and had been in a photographer’s home and spotted a shot the man had taken in Vietnam of a group of soldiers walking through a minefield.
And it took a moment for my professor to realize that the photographer had walked through the minefield first in order to get a shot that would show the men’s faces.
“What would possibly possess you?” He asked. “To risk your life for that?”
“The truth is worth a man’s life,” the photographer replied.
It’s been 20 years and I’ve never forgotten that.
Oliver Stone made a movie starring James Woods that was loosely based on that photographer. It’s called Salvador. It’s pretty good.
You have never seen it.
Every scene in Nope builds brilliantly on its themes. Every bit of it had me thinking and questioning.
The keystone event in the movie is a chimpanzee ripping people apart on the set of a sitcom. These images of the animal covered in blood are terrifying. But you know what was equally disturbing? One of the stars of that show, 20 years later, her scarred face covered with a veil and accepting the applause of a small crowd when she is introduced.
Along with the veil she is wearing an airbrushed t-shirt that shows what she looked like when she was a child star.
Mr. Peele not only will kill you but he knows exactly where to twist the knife.
Another one of the sitcom’s stars is a young child who we meet as an adult. The adult is trading on his small brush with fame by running a dude ranch near our heroes.
The kid survives his encounter with the dangerous animal unscathed physically but deeply scarred emotionally. And of everyone involved he should have been the one to understand the price of fame and walk away from it. That he doesn’t, and that he pursues it again with a different sort of creature that he doesn’t understand, gives us a classic horror movie trope.
The sinner must be punished.
And then there are the Haywoods. When you hire these Hollywood horse trainers you will get an entertaining story from them about how they are the great, great, great (great another great) grandchildren of the first horse trainer to appear in the first movie ever recorded.
That story is wonderful and wonderfully delivered by Keke Palmer. That it is most likely some bullshit their father made up in order to convince white producers and directors to hire him is another twist of the knife.
The movie doesn’t explicitly say that the story is fake but at one point Palmer and her brother, played to laconic perfection by Daniel Kaluuya, talk about how their father started this.
And I thought, and he came up with a perfect story to tell white producers and white directors that they should hire him.
It wasn’t until after the movie was over that I fully realized that Kaluuya was playing the classic, terse, movie cowboy in this movie.
He’s the guy you call who gets stuff done. The guy who knows how good he is at what he does and doesn’t need to brag about it and when the time comes he will show you just how amazing he can be.
The movie ends with Keke celebrating because in the distance, in the mist her brother is astride his horse, alive and well. It’s a beautiful shot.
But as I left I thought did this movie end the way I thought it ended?
You will recall that in one of the greatest westerns ever made that technically Shane is still alive at the end too.
Dark Highways 