Jordan Peele’s Nope and the Spectacle of Social Media
In her review of Nope, writer Alissa Wilkinson describes Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle as an ‘all-consuming blanket of unreality that attracts our gaze and replaces our reality’. In today’s media landscape quite a few examples jump out as obvious indicators of ‘blankets of unreality that attract our gaze’, such as the constant culture wars brimming amongst British news circles which push away reporting on austerity and the harm from the ongoing cruelty of our government. As consumers of media, we are peddled the idea that these cultural backlashes are more important than children needing to eat daily. When we look at digital media, that unreality becomes even more apparent. Hoaxes go viral on TikTok nearly every day, conspiracy theories run rampant and viral trends where users engage in trauma dumping are pushed in order to capitalise on one's pain. When reviewing the concept of ‘spectacle’ in 1989, Jonathan Crary argued that the spectacle can also be a set of techniques that surveil us and that surveillance and spectacle are not opposed terms but connected to one another in a disciplinary apparatus. Similar to other social media platforms Tiktok is used for surveillance, this has become an unspoken agreement when you opt to use the app, you give up the idea of privacy for a few quick moments of distraction.
I’ll be honest and say I enjoy the distraction, focusing on the impending doom of climate change is anxiety-inducing but it would be amiss to pretend that there isn’t a deeply unhealthy fixation with the app and its content. It seems that it’s easier for a lot of us to pretend that TikTok is more helpful than harmful, over the years I’ve seen a myriad of comments relaying how the app has given people a community and that it makes them feel seen. Speaking up about your trauma on a platform like this is helpful to others who have similar experiences or that posting about conspiracy theories is actually a good thing because people are questioning things even if it most likely radicalises a whole set of teenagers into falling down an Alex Jones or Andrew Tate rabbit hole. It seems that whatever critique can be lauded at the app is immediately dismissed for the positives.
As Debord states, “The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.”
Nope is Jordan Peele’s third feature film and seems to be his most debated. When the film first premiered earlier this summer, Logan Paul, a man famously known for filming a dead body in a forest in Japan chimed in to say he couldn’t grasp the concepts at hand in the movie. This irony is not lost on me.
‘What’s fascinating, is that the obsession with spectacle from Jupe to Hollywood to the TMZ reporter centres around the idea of taming a beast and conquering trauma into a monetisable form’
Looking at Nope there are clear inspirations from real life to how the horror manifests within the movie. Firstly, the film centres around how Hollywood treats its performers (both animal and human), it talks about traumatised individuals and their obsession with overcoming their fear no matter the cost. It is also evident that the 2020 pandemic as well as the spectacle that emerged from the 2020 BLM protests circled around Peele’s mind whilst writing the film.
In his interview with GQ Peele stated the following,
“We were going through so much. So much of what this world was experiencing was this overload of spectacle, and kind of a low point of our addiction to spectacle.”
The spectacle of death, illness, fighting and anger. All of that surrounded 2020 and ended up setting a clear tone for the next two years to follow. The way we now engage with social media has become more damaging after the effects of the lockdown and our hyper-dependence on the internet in our time of need. People were lonely and desperately seeking comfort and the platforms lay there waiting.
Debord further states, “The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds.”
For better or worse cinema has always tried to be on the pulse with cultural shifts and with the advent of social media, we have an influx of films that attempt to tackle the new social relations we engage in. Films such as Not Okay, Spree and Mainstream have attempted to break down our relationships with social media and the spectacle involved. Spree is the most brutal but its director states that it is a non-ideological film which strikes me as absurd given the subject matter and ending of the film which clearly juxtaposes the death of its serial killer turned 4chan icon with the success of his last victim. Nonetheless, the aforementioned films including Spree hone in on the idea that it’s not social media that makes us selfish or vapid but instead that’s merely our base-level experiences. That as humans we are simply just meant to engage in this behaviour. There’s not much analysis of the actual systems behind these apps and how they monetize and optimise our emotions for their own capitalistic gain. The best example of this would still be The Social Network by David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, a realistic yet somewhat removed portrayal of the founding of Facebook and the egos that fuelled the platform.
Nope scarcely mentions social media outside of the moments where Jupe tells Emerald to YouTube an SNL skit of the Gordy attack or the mentions of UFO forums. There isn’t a hamfisted mention of TikTok or Twitter, characters mostly use their phones for phone calls (which becomes a sign of incoming doom), if you placed the film in a decade without social media it would still work. But what’s fascinating is that the obsession with spectacle from Jupe to Hollywood to the TMZ reporter centres around the idea of taming a beast and conquering trauma into a monetisable form. This is what most modern-day social media consists of. Posts about how sad people are and how they’ve forgotten their meds fill up our timelines, and apology storytime videos circulate YouTube with clearly performed sobs and sniffles. Nope holds up a mirror to this behaviour without even trying to actively do so and that is what makes it a much better tool to analyse modern-day spectacle than any films that purposefully go out of their way satirise social media.