On the Genre-Blurring Worldbuilding of Nope
One of my favorite things about Jordan Peele’s movies as a whole is that they don’t fit neatly into any genre box. A big reason for this is Peele’s worldbuilding style and prowess. His films take place in worlds that are just slant of reality: normal on the surface, but with one strange, horrifying difference lurking below—quite literally, in the case of Us, and metaphorically in his debut Get Out. It’s a similar thought experiment model that underpins many episodes of Twilight Zone, and it makes sense that Peele is at the helm of that reboot.
(Note: Thar be spoilers past this point. If you haven’t seen Nope and care about such things, probably best to stop reading now.)
And Nope may just be Peele’s most genre-blurring film yet. The major plot movement is horror, sure, but in pacing, tone, and atmosphere it’s more akin to sci-fi films like Arrival. The characters take a scientific, empathetic approach to their alien visitor, which is a source of mystery more than jump scares; the ultimate cause of the death and destruction isn’t some murderous, evil impulse of the creature itself, but rather the pride of human characters, whose misunderstanding and attempted exploitation of the creature lead to their downfall—an early sci-fi theme if I ever heard one. On top of all this is a Lynchian surreality and symbolism rarely found in blockbusters—an art house sensibility layered over a big studio CGI budget.
The most impressive thing about Nope, in my opinion, is how Peele blurred genres and influences to create something unique and new, without muddling the themes or causing confusion that pulls the viewer out of the world. That’s not easy on screen or on page, and any storyteller who likes working in this between space I think can learn a few things from studying how he built this world.
The Background
The world of Nope is, by and large, current reality. A fictionalized version, sure, but even surreal elements like Gordy the chimp’s rampage were likely inspired by true events. Aside from the alien, there is only one noteworthy difference between our reality and Nope’s, and it’s subtle but crucial: In Nope’s world, alien skepticism doesn’t seem to exist. Every character that OJ and Emerald encounter has a seemingly implicit belief that UFOs are real, from the technician who installs their security system to the director they recruit to get the “Oprah shot”—and that’s not even including the alien-themed amusement park run by the grown-up child actor next door.
This seems like a tiny thing, and I suppose it is, in the grand scheme. It’s certainly less exciting to think about than a man-eating space squid. Yet this small detail is absolutely critical to the pacing. Nobody in this world thinks OJ is crazy for believing in aliens, and that eliminates scenes of him convincing non-believers as well as the now-cliché Casandra trope many UFO tales are built on. By fast-forwarding through those expected aspects of a UFO story, Nope has time and space to build to a new gotcha twist that takes the genre in a novel direction.
The lesson here for storytellers: don’t neglect the quiet parts of your world, because they’re the foundation for your big, bold ideas. The worldview, beliefs, and day-to-day existence of your characters directly affects what’s plausible, believable, and logical in their world.
The Monster
Any horror movie needs a good monster, and Nope’s is IMAX-ready. Initially, it takes the form of your average little-gray-men-carrying flying saucer, which is eventually revealed to be just one form of a squid-like air-based predator with sophisticated camoflague abilities and a psychedelic eye-mouth to hoover up potential food and spit out whatever it can’t digest.
The alien is colloquially referred to as Jean Jacket in the film, after a horse from Emerald and OJ’s childhood, but it also has a scientific name, if you’re curious: Occulonimbus edoequus, or “hidden dark cloud stallion-eater.” This name wasn’t coined by Peele but by marine scientist Kelsi Rutledge, who served as a consultant for the film and has some experience coming up with scientific names, having discovered a new species of guitarfish in 2019.
As you might guess from Peele consulting with a marine animal expert, creatures of the open ocean provided much of his inspiration for Jean Jacket. Which makes sense—some of the most bizarre, alien-like creatures on earth are found in the ocean, especially the deep sea, which remains the least-explored area on the planet. Peele was especially inspired by cephalopods like squids and octopi, many of which have pigment-changing cells they can use for camoflage and communication. Cuttlefish, for example, use a kind of hypnosis to attract and catch prey, similar to Jean Jacket’s mezmerizing displays. Even the creature’s square eye, a rarity in nature, has some analog in the square iris of the octopus.
The process of developing Jean Jacket sounds like it was very collaborative in an interview Rutledge did with Nerdist. As she says:
Jordan wanted to make something that was still in the realm of scientific possibility. He had a clear vision for how he wanted the creature to look and then was hoping for certain elements…he’s like “I really want to do a square eyeball, but does that exist anywhere in nature?”
But why consult with a scientist at all if he had this vision in his head already? This relates back to what I said in the beginning about his worlds being, by and large, based in current reality. Because of that, for a creature to feel plausible according to the rules of the on-screen world, it mostly needs to feel plausible according to the actual rules of reality. The less a viewer is asked to suspend their disbelief, the more fully they can get immersed in the story, and modeling his alien off of creatures found in nature helps to do this.
There are other benefits to taking this approach to the design of fantastic creatures:
Realism makes monsters scarier. The more plausible a creature is, the more easily the audience can picture themselves interacting with it. People were afraid to swim in the ocean after Jaws, but nobody avoids a trip to Tokyo because they’re afraid of Godzilla.
A touch of the familiar makes the bizarre more accessible. Occulonimubs edoequus has no true analogs in nature. In fact, while it’s placed in the animal kingdom, Rutledge had to invent a new phylum for it: Nubaria (“of the clouds”), because there are no known extant lifeforms that are solely celestial. But the details that do have real-life analogs give viewers something to grasp onto when they see the creature for the first time.
Familiar details set up expectations you can subvert. A flying silver disc carries certain connotations for a viewer who’s even slightly familiar with UFO and alien lore. Peele didn’t need to set up false herrings to mislead viewers—he presented a familiar image and allowed the audience to mislead themselves.
The Shoe
When I walked out of the theater after seeing Nope, the biggest question nagging at my brain wasn’t about the alien or the characters or the themes—it was why the hell that shoe was standing up all by itself in the flashbacks of Gordy’s attack.
I think I understand its purpose in the narrative. Because Jupe was staring at the shoe, he wasn’t looking at Gordy. This kept him from making eye contact, which means he’s not seen as a threat and survives the attack unscathed. This foreshadows OJ’s later attempts to “break” Jean Jacket. It also adds an extra layer of irony and tragedy to Jupe’s death. He came out of the chimp attack believing he’d survived because of a special connection with Gordy, and thought he could forge the same bond with his alien visitor; his attempt to tame the alien is based on this false premise and predictably fails, a variant on the “death by hubris” trope.
This is all well and good, but also—why the fuck was the shoe standing up in the first place? A scouring of online nerd haunts showed I was far from the only one wondering this. My favorite theories after falling down the speculation rabbit hole:
- The shoe wasn’t standing up at all. Jupe could be an unreliable narrator: The viewer is seeing the event as Jupe remembers it, but that’s not necessarily the way it actually happened. The shoe definitely existed—it’s on display in Jupe’s office—but the only time it’s shown standing upright is in Jupe’s flashback of the experience. Maybe, in reality, it was propped up against something, but in his seven-year-old perception he didn’t see that supporting object and it seemed miraculous.
- The shoe is just a metaphor. In reality, the shoe was oriented more naturally, but it’s shown upright in the flashback scenes to mimic its placement in Jupe’s display cabinet. This represents the way Jupe has “boxed up” this trauamtic event to make it a salable object he can charge people to view, tying in to the way he’s trying to tame Jean Jacket for financial gain.
- Jupe was right in believing he was special, and had some unnamed supernatural ability that first emerged during this childhood trauma. It wasn’t coincidence that the alien creature came to Agua Dulce. Jupe intentionally called the alien to his area, thinking he could control it once it was there, but drastically overestimated his abilities.
- Jean Jacket first arrived during that filming. The horses are shown acting strangely when the alien is nearby; it would likely have the same effect on other animals. This has the chimp on edge already, and the popping balloon is the final straw that sets him off. Taking this theory further, the alien creature is actually a living weapon that an alien race unleashed to consume indigenous predatory species and clear the way for their arrival. Their method of delivering the creature to earth created a brief gravitational disturbance and that’s why the shoe was standing upright.
- It just happened to land that way. OJ talks about “bad miracles” during the movie, and the shoe landing upright and staying that way through all the chaos was just one of those one-in-a-bazillion things, but Jupe reads meaning into it because it happened during such a life-shaping traumatic event.
The last theory is both a) the most likely “real explanation” and b) my least favorite. But which theory is the best really doesn’t matter. Dropping this detail unexplained makes the viewer want to find an explanation for it. It turns a passive viewer into an active participant when they start sleuthing out the answers, and that’s a very effective way to pull someone into a story.
Now, obviously you can’t just drop random unexplained details anywhere you please. Peele does two key things with the shoe in Nope that let it function well as a mystery-builder. First, it’s placed in a setting where the bizarre can be rationalized because it’s framed as a memory. Second, it’s thematically coherent. A shoe standing upright breaks a lot of in-world logic rules, but its potential symbolic interpretation gives it freedom to break these rules.
Ultimately, while the exact meaning of the shoe can be debated, there’s no debate that it does have some intentional meaning, and that justifies its existence. Unexplained doesn’t mean unexplainable. Viewers can accept this seemingly random and illogical detail in Nope because it’s used with authority. It’s clear Peele understands why the shoe is standing, even if he’s careful not to reveal that to the viewer.
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