No: Jordan Peele’s nightmare behind the movie’s scariest scene?

Warning – The article below contains spoilers as it goes back to one of the most important scenes of No. So please go ahead if you haven’t seen it yet, better to keep the surprise intact.

Would Jordan Peele get the look “Make her dreams come true” A bit literal? We can legitimately ask the question when we look at one of Nope’s key scenes, arguably one of the most terrifying scenes seen in cinema in recent years, and this tweet from the director in 2014, in which he described one of his A nightmare.

(“I dreamed that a baby chimpanzee was attacking people and then coming up to me to hug me while I was scared. I woke up with tears streaming down my face”).

It’s hard not to see this tweet as a flashback to the carnage that Ricky ‘Jup’ Park (Steven Yeun) witnessed on the set of the sitcom he starred in. Photographed in public and named “Gordy and Company”The series featured a family and a monkey dressed as a human. And during the filming of the animal’s birthday party, a bursting balloon causes him to lose his pedals and attack the actors and the audience.

A sequence that opens the film (initially with a single voiceover, then a long shot both disturbing and mysterious) and which we then find in its entirety as Jupe tells his story. And we find that the scene is shot from his point of view, while he is hidden under the table and witnesses the carnage of which he does not necessarily see everything. as an audience in the room.

The monkey then approaches the child in fear and shakes his fist to find out what “fist” What they repeated many times on the set, but they can’t do it with his gesture, because they dropped it. No one knows if this is how Jordan Peele’s nightmare ended, but the similarities are uncanny. And when he posts this tweet, he hasn’t yet directed Get Out, which hit theaters in 2017, which means that the story made an impression on him so he decided to direct it, totally in line with Nope’s point. .

Although, at first glance, this sequence is surprising when we have been sold a story of supernatural events related to aliens. But as always with Jordan Peele, gender comes with social commentary. And specifically, here, the place of people of color in the world of entertainment. Before it gets bloody, the scene is otherwise violent, as the filmmaker points the finger at the ethnic quotas that were in place during the series, in the latter half of the 90s, but which were then and still are today.

Like the chimpanzee, the young boy we see in the midst of this white American family appears to have been adopted and serves as a gag machine. Nothing more. So much so that when Emerald (Keke Palmer) discovers Yupe’s past, she refers to him as “Baby Sheriff’s Little Asian”His previous series, Instead of quoting a character. Just as an animal that kills is described only as “One of the monkeys plays Gordy”.

If the monkey doesn’t attack him as much as the other actors and the audience, it’s probably because he felt a similarity in their treatment, as Jordan Peele points out how men and women of color were treated like animals. . In the world, as well as in Hollywood, where they are too often confined to archetypes.

Cultural reappropriation

The fact that Nope’s characters are characters of color allows the director to continue this commentary and change the situation. And this sequence captures the unpredictable side of the story, as well as fitting perfectly into the overall theme and also allowing us to explore the story’s theme of appropriation, or re-appropriation.

For example, the question is how Edward Muybridge, the author of the pictures that appear to us as a precursor to cinema, was preserved, but not the black rider that we see above. Ow Yup says Gordy’s bloody history was the subject of a skit Saturday Night LiveOr a cartoon in a magazine crazywhich lessened its tragic impact.

And, in the same vein, the former child star has also rewritten her own history as she finds herself chosen after escaping the carnage. “Gordy and Company”and imagines that he can manage to tame an alien creature for the purposes of his own show. When we know that Jordan Peele himself was clearly inspired by his experience to tell a part of his new film, the character is all the richer and more fascinating.