Nope should have been called Get Out and Get Out should have been called Nope

I like all three of Jordan Peele's movies to varying degrees -- two of them quite a lot, one not as much -- but I think he might have gotten some of the titles mixed up. Specifically with the two I like quite a lot.

Isn't Get Out more of a Nope and Nope more of a Get Out?

Allow me to explain.

SPOILERS AHEAD, though hopefully you've seen Nope by now. (And if you haven't seen Get Out, I'm not even sure what you're doing here.)

We all instinctively knew what function the title Nope was serving as soon as we heard it. The word has been around for ages -- the internet tells me its first documented usage is 1888 -- but it's one of those words that's developed a specific new use in the past five years or so. 

If you don't know that usage, allow me to belabor its effectiveness by spelling it out for you. It's a way to declaim, in a single word, that a situation is way too fucked up to be involved in. You utter "Nope" when you stumble across something that might immediately turn into a disaster, if it is not already there -- either an actual disaster, like the loss of a life, or a messed up social situation from which no one will emerge unscathed. And while I think we do associate it disproportionately with a Black person confronting a scenario that won't end well for him or her, likely but not necessarily involving a racial element, neither do I think it is a word that belongs specifically to any one culture. Anyone can use it without any accusations of appropriation, at least as far as I'm aware.

And while I immediately grokked what the title was going for and loved its potential usage, I'm not sure how well it works with aliens. 

Sure that's a fucked up situation. Sure you are unlikely to escape without loss of life or limb. You might even be digested in the stomach lining of a creature flying over the California mountains, your screams broadcast for people to hear miles around, your loose change spat back to the earth at dangerous velocities.

But I'm not sure it is a "Nope" situation as we classically define it.

I think the classic "Nope" situation, if broken down to its barest elements, is more like this: A Black man walks unsuspectingly into a room, sees a bunch of men in Ku Klux Klan outfits loading shot guns, and immediately turns on his heel and walks out of the room. "Nope" would perhaps be an understatement in that scenario.

Aliens? "OH SHIT WHAT THE FUCK." Yes definitely that. But that's not quite the same as "Nope." 

"Nope" is best coming from an earthbound situation that could actually happen. No, that man did not expect to walk into that room of Klansmen preparing for a murderous, racially motivated rampage. But neither was it too much for his brain to comprehend. In fact, in a way, it was the purest realization of his deepest and darkest fears, the moment that he always knew, on some level, was bound to happen eventually.

I think it's for this reason that both of the actual "Nope"s as spoken dialogue in Nope didn't work for me. I think there were only two. I really hope Peele was smart enough not to go for three, but he may have.

Both times a character said "Nope" in Nope, I thought that "OH SHIT WHAT THE FUCK" would have been a more appropriate thing to say in that moment. And because it was the title of the film, the moments called attention to themselves and had sort of a thudding execution. (That's how I remembered it, anyway -- Nope is one of the top films I'm looking forward to rewatching once a suitable amount of time has passed since my first viewing, so I'll see how the usage hits me next time.)

You know where "Nope" does work? Get Out.

The first scene that occurred to me was the opening scene, where the great Lakeith Stanfield is kidnapped by what turns out to be the crazy white boy Caleb Landry Jones. (One of our craziest white boys, so it was perfect casting.) When the car Jones is driving slows down to a menacing crawl next to Stanfield, who is lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood that he refers to as a hedge maze, Stanfield picks up pretty quickly on the driver's nefarious intent, and changes direction to get away from the car as quickly as possible. "Not me, not today," he mutters as he tries, in vain, to extricate himself from the situation.

That's "Nope." "Not me, not today" is like 100% exactly the definition of "Nope."

You mightn't base a whole movie title on the vibe of one scene, but of course it's not just one scene. As the movie shifts to the perspective of Daniel Kaluuya's Chris -- Kaluuya being the common element between Get Out and Nope, other than Peele -- he's just met with one "Nope"-worthy scenario after another. Seeing crazy white people put drugs in your tea to hypnotize you with the ultimate goal of inserting the consciousness of an old white person into your body? Sure you should get out, but also, that's a giant steaming pile of "Nope" right there. 

(You could catch me on a technicality here, telling me that this is not the "earthbound situation" that I mentioned earlier as a precondition for "Nope." As far as we know, mind-swapping is not a thing. In fact, aliens are likely more of a thing, given the vastness of our universe. However, of the two, aliens are definitely the more mind-blowing in terms of the "OH SHIT WHAT THE FUCK" factor.)

"Get out" is, in a way, more practical advice to the characters in Nope.

Most of the characters in Get Out only get this advice when it's too late, and just because Chris survives his ordeal doesn't mean that it isn't basically too late when he gets the advice. Everyone else in his position couldn't get out in time.

But if you've got an alien flying over your ranch, a ranch you are thinking of selling anyway? SELL THAT FUCKING RANCH.

O.J. and Em still can get out, and when you are getting rained on by the blood of 30 people who just got sucked up by the alien now swooping over your house, you can just get the fuck out of there and never return.

Us? I guess that title works for that film. 

Which is Witch?

I’m usually pretty good at keeping different movie personalities straight, whether in front of the camera or behind.

But the confluence of three new(ish) young(ish) white men breaking through as horror directors in the past five years has thrown me for a loop a bit.

Those three men are Robert Eggers, Ari Aster and David Robert Mitchell, and the similarity may all be in my head. But bear with me.

The three came into our sphere of awareness in different years, but the fact that they’ve all had their follow-up to their breakout movie in the same year – this year – has kind of cemented their similarity in my head. Even though at least one of their follow-ups is not a horror movie. (Unsure about the third director’s follow-up as I haven’t seen it yet.)

Chronologically, the first to come on the scene was Mitchell, both in terms of his earlier films and also his breakout film. He’s also the oldest (45) and the one whose name I tend to forget because all three of his names are fairly indistinct in terms of the larger continuum of whitebread American names.

Mitchell grabbed our attention in 2014 with It Follows, which was the unlikely follow-up to a movie I still haven’t seen (but probably should), 2010’s The Myth of the American Sleepover. Suffice it to say that that one’s not a horror movie. Despite its flaws, It Follows really whetted our appetite for what Mitchell could do, and would do next.

Well, what he did next undoubtedly demonstrated a command of the language of cinema, but it was not a horror movie. Appropriately, it was also the first of the three follow-ups to come out this year, Under the Silver Lake. I admire that movie but boy is it tedious at times. I’m not sure how possible it is to like it, but it does present us a visual stylist at the top of his craft.

Next up was Eggers in 2015 with The Witch, or The VVitch, or however you want to write it. Although the subject matter is not at all similar to that of It Follows, I began to think of them in the same boat because they both represented new creative voices giving us something clearly outside of the standard way horror movies were being made by studios. And like It Follows, The Witch had significant flaws for a viewer to contend with, which similarly didn’t detract from the sense of being in the hands of a cinematic visionary. Eggers is also middle in age at 36, by the way.

Eggers’ follow-up to The Witch is the last of the three to be released, just this past week, which destroys a little of the nice chronological symmetry we had going. That’s The Lighthouse, the only one of the six films mentioned here that I have yet to see. Though I’m champing at the bit. It looks even weirder (in a good way, of course) than The Witch. I can’t find an Australian release date yet for that.

Then you have the prolific young prodigy, Ari Aster, who is only 33 and yet has now had buzzworthy horror opuses released in back to back years. Given the scope of the films he makes, it seems hard to believe that it was only last year that Hereditary came out. He followed it up this year with Midsommar, beating Eggers to the theater by a couple months. Both of Aster’s films can fairly be described as great, and both also have pronounced flaws. I see a pattern here.

I don’t actually have trouble remembering which guy directed which movie, though I do sometimes need to remind myself that it was Mitchell who started out with The Myth of the American Sleepover and not Eggers. If I’d seen that movie I’d probably recognize it as a lot more similar to the aesthetic of It Follows than The Witch, but I haven’t yet.

The point of this post is not really that I confuse them, but more, that we are living through an exciting period in which new horror names are regular presenting themselves as more than just any other studio hack. They’re coming with enough frequency that the possibility exists to confuse them. If we abandon my premise that I'm confusing them for one another, you could also mention Jennifer Kent, who has a similar career trajectory to date, having knocked our socks off in 2014 with The Babadook and then followed that up this year with The Nightingale – which could be characterized as a similar type of historical horror to the ones Eggers prefers. Then of course you’ve got Jordan Peele, who can’t be confused for the others in terms of his racial identity, but who has also had his sophomore horror film Us come out this year, following on the heels of 2017’s Get Out. He might be most similar in execution and aesthetic to Aster.

It is a rich time for horror indeed.

But it could be another white man who has me most excited, though we’ll have to wait until next year for his next. That’s Osgood Perkins, and a weekend rewatch of The Blackcoat’s Daughter – which has a release year of anywhere from 2015 to 2017 depending on festival/theatrical release – reminded me why I ranked it as my #3 movie of 2017. He’s also a bit different from the others as he had two movies come out practically on top of each other, the other being I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. That one kind of went in one ear and out the other for me, but considering that I saw it before Blackcoat mesmerized me, I should probably watch it again. Perkins has Gretel & Hansel coming out in 2020, and I’m really excited for it.

Who are your favorite horror visionaries to come on the scene in the past five years?

Jordan Peele knows what to do

Not long after Get Out became a certified hit, we started hearing rumors that its director, Jordan Peele, was being tapped to helm a remake of the anime classic Akira.

Boy is it good he didn’t do that.

Very soon after that, the Scarlett Johansson version of Ghost in the Shell came out, and tanked, likely putting the brakes on the project anyway. In fact, in IMDB, it’s currently still listed as “in development” and doesn’t have anyone associated with it publicly – though if you are an IMDB Pro subscriber I guess you can see names attached as rumors and the like. My guess is that it’s DOA, but maybe it’ll still go somewhere.

Whether it was made or not, Peele wouldn’t have had anything to do with that shit. There’s no quicker way to extinguish your heat than to take the money to try to turn some soulless studio remake into something better than it otherwise would have been.

And I’m sure Peele would have made Akira better than it otherwise would have been. But it still likely would have been a forgettable sophomore effort that hurt him more than it helped him.

Besides, Peele knows what he should do, and what he can do quite well: make scary, surrealistic horror movies starring black people, with a hint (or more than a hint) of comedy, and a hint (or more than a hint) of social commentary.

Of course, Peele is such an interesting talent that I suspect he will choose to go in a slightly different direction for his next film, just so he does not appear to pigeonhole himself. Whatever that is, though, I’m sure it will be well worth seeing and well worth talking about. And it won’t be an Akira or its equivalent, in any case.

Just about 11 hours after finishing Us, I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about it yet, to add my half-baked theories to the many that are already out there, that I’ve only just started to read about and listen to. But I do know I was in the presence of a filmmaker on top of and in command of his craft, manipulating us in all the right ways, and making us think, even if we don’t always know what it is we’re supposed to be thinking about. I think of Us in a bit the same way I think about Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, in that it throws a bunch of provocative ideas out there for us to consider, but does not really tell us what to make of them. Or it gives us five different possible interpretations, and we can choose the one we like best – even if none of them are completely internally consistent or can stand up to scrutiny.

All I know is I’ve been thinking about it almost non-stop and have the sinister version of “I’ve Got Five On It” running through my head in a constant loop.

Because Jordan Peele knows what to do, I certainly don’t fault him for his controversial statements this week about not seeing himself casting a white guy as the lead in one of his films. I don’t think I would have faulted him anyway, but having seen Us, I fault him even less. It’s clear that he is filling a niche that is otherwise missing in today’s cinema. “I’ve see that movie” is the reason Peele gave for his No White Guys policy. And truly, we had not seen Get Out or Us before we saw them. Whatever Peele’s third joint is, we won’t have seen that one either.

Jordan Peele knows what to do. I can’t wait to watch him continue to do it.