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.