ENG 400 Final Exam Thesis: (Creative Exploitations) The exploitations of resources for ours and others entertainment is the centerpiece of NOPE and it allows for blame to be placed on the need to witness a spectacle and how those injustices are played out through nature.

The “gaze” has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that “looks” to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating “awareness” politicizes “looking” relations—one learns to look a certain way in order to resist. (116)
“Before racial integration, black viewers of movies and television experienced visual pleasure in a context where looking was also about contestation and confrontation. Writing about black looking relations” (116)

Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions"

Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess"

Bell Hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze"

Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, "The Culture Industry"

Plato, "Allegory of the Cave"

“Horror is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat the trauma of castration as if to ‘explain,’ by religious master, the originary problem of sexual difference… impossibly hoping to return to an earlier state which is perhaps most fundamentally represented by the body of the mother.” (10-11)

Quote: "It would take time, I suppose, for him to get used to
seeing higher things. In the beginning, he might only
trace the shadows. Then, reflections of people and
other things in the water. Next he would come to see
the things themselves. Then he would behold the
heavenly bodies, and the heaven itself by night, seeing
the light 516b of the stars and the moon with greater
ease than the sun and its light by day" (Plato 5).

Shot From Nope (20:27)

The scene inside of Jean Jacket connects to body genres. It’s a horrific scene showcasing numerous people screaming as they’re claustrophobic inside a monster. The scene is meant to provoke a visceral reaction to the body that is resistant to the idea of being eaten by a flying monster. In addition, the inside can be compared to a womb, possibly meant to represent the body of the mother.

"The drive towards display... and a direct, often marked, address to the spectator at the expense of the creation of a diegetic coherence, are attributes that define attractions, along with its power of 'attraction,' its ability to be attention-grabbing (usually by being exotic, unusual, unexpected, novel)." (Gunning 36)

Connection Between Theory Reading and Nope:
Plato's allegory of the cave encapsulates the idea that when watching something (on the wall of a cave) this is a distorted representation of the real version of what is being watched. This same concept can be seen in Nope, both thematically and as part of the plot. A specific example of this can be seen in the previous shot provided which shows a slipper from a victim of Gordy the chimp. While the slipper is meant to represent a character from the show and its family friendly atmosphere, it takes on a new macabre meaning after the charecter wearing the shoe is attacked by Gordy. So in the same way Platos cave takes a representation of something and gives that representation it own unique meaning is the same way Nope takes this conventional version of Hollywood and gives ot a new (and more dark) meaning.

In the film, Jupe makes a spectacle out of Jean Jacket at his live show at Jupiter's Claim. Jupe wants to amaze the crowd with the UFO, thinking that it will keep his relevancy in the world, because it is something unusual, unique, and unseen before. What this film says about that is, people will only pay attention to things if they are interesting and strange. That is what catches their eye and makes them attracted to what they see. Because Jean Jacket is this otherworldly, bizarre object, Jupe and the audience want to make a show out of it, and in a way, they gain pleasure from its peculiarity.

“Whereas the mechanism of supply and demand is today disintegrating in material production, in the superstructure it acts as a control on behalf of the rulers. The consumers are the works and salaries employees, the farmers and petty bourgeois. Capitalist production hems them in so tightly, in body and soul, that they unresistingly succumb to whatever is proffered to them.” (106)

In the film, June says that he usually pays for access into the back room. He even says that a couple offered him 50k just to sleep there. It’s reminiscent of the culture industry as it discusses how working class individuals will succumb to what is offered to them— such as access to a room of the shows artifacts.

Jordan Peele's Science horror film NOPE is defiantly many things, one of the them being Humanities obsession with taking tragedy and turning the horror of spectacle into something for peoples' enjoyment, but it is also about "gaze". Peele addresses the power of looking and the "right to look" and "who is being looked upon." The right for people to look, especially for people who historically were not allowed to do so. After a general look we see that this is a movie about an alien encounter, further in we see that is the need to turn anything and everything into a spectacle, and even one step further, there is the discovery of the commentary being made on the power of gaze. or better yet, Bell Hooks "The Oppositional Gaze." Which is dangerous, an instrument of resistance, and radical. Nope is commenting of the way the people of color have been constantly looked at and dehumanized by "the white gaze" but they retaliate and reclaimed the right to look for themselves. These characters OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), and Ricky Park "Jupe" (Steven Yuen), both are compared to the animals, which are both being stripped of their humanity. There are of course much to pull from as this movie has this as a consistent commentary but one that I would like to focus on is Jupe's Character. Jupe is notable the only POC on the "Gordy's Home" cast. One could say that the lack of danger that Jupe find himself in after the incident with the "Gordy's Birthday" scene is that Jupe is the only character left physically unharmed, is not a coincidence. They are co-stars, but they are also both being made to be a token prop for the sake of entertainment. Jupe being the token Asian individual and Gordy being the token animal, both are being made special and observed, and presented to be laughed at, by the presumable rich white people who can afford and have the leisure to watch daytime TV. Jupe’s character and function being created by the subject of his surrounding, comes in when upon discovering the alien, he is more than happy to provide a constraining gaze onto the other, much as been continually placed upon him. He assumed the expectation of his white audiences and supplies the spectacle and provides the opportunity to look. Hoping to frame the alien as the show under the gaze to counteract his devastating child acting career. In Nope the alien represents the ability to look, and look upon, that our characters such as Jupe and OJ have been excluded, but if these people where to dare to look back with the same gaze or a portion of it, then the alien will eat them. Which makes this action a literal retaliation, and makes looking "an act of resistance." Both Characters needing to create a filming or documentation of the Alien could also be an attempt at the oppositional gaze