Jordan Peele makes great movies for analyzing. They make for great online lists like “27 Mind-Blowing Details & Easter Eggs From Jordan Peele Movies.” In other words, there are always things that don’t make sense until a second or third watch, and Nope might be his most confounding film yet.

“Day for night” shooting isn’t new to Nope, but the cinematographer for this movie, Hoyte van Hoytema, did come up with a new way to make it look better than ever.

The technique involves using one camera that shoots infrared light and another rolling 70mm film. A careful combination of the two images mimic how our eyes react to dark at night. It also means they don’t have to sacrifice all the prettiness that shooting on 70mm film gives them.

“I was in my phone. Everybody, we were all in our phone watching the most godawful things come through this device that I worship more than anything else in my life. The monetization of that obsession to this bad spectacle — that was what was bubbling inside me that came out in this film.” —Jordan Peele, Hideo Kojima presents Brain Structure      

Peter Minshall is a Trinidadian artist who created these puppets for Carnival. He later adapted the style to inflatable installations at the 1996 Olympics, and they were a hit. 

Doron Gazit and Arieh Leon Dranger were members of Air Dimensional Design (AirDD), the team that brought Minshall’s designs to life. When Minshall went back to Trinidad, AirDD patented the design without Minshall knowing.

What started out as a piece of artwork is now associated with cellphone stores and used car dealerships. Considering Peele’s previous sentiment on monetizing a bad spectacle, and Nope’s theme of Hollywood turning real things into cheap obsessions, it’s fitting that he chose this tube man to feature so prominently in the third act.

Also — and this is pretty off-topic — these tube guys are genuinely used as scarecrows. A farmer named Gary Long who used them on his land reported that bird damage to his crop went from 20,000 pounds a year to nothing. They aren’t used as scarecrows in Nope, but it could be where Peele got the imagery from.

Eadweard Muybridge is the man behind the first motion picture. He also murdered his wife’s lover after suspecting his child might belong to the other man. 

At the trial, Muybridge pleaded insanity. Part of his reasoning (and that of his friends) was that he’d been in a stagecoach accident that had altered something in his brain, causing him to become unreasonably obsessed with photography.

In Nope, Antlers isn’t in a stagecoach accident that we know of. But he does reflect on his obsession with getting the perfect shot. It’s likely not a coincidence that Peele wrote both Muybridge and Antlers into his script.

Notary played the King of the Apes in Kong: Skull Island, as well as Rocket (aka “Bright Eyes”) in the new Planet of the Apes trilogy. He was also the onset Groot for Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame.

The way Ricky talks about the alien, it is the watcher. And there’s evidence to support this, with its massive “eye-hole” seeming to scan the desert landscape. But Ricky is a watcher as well, even back to taking in Gordy’s rampage as a child.

Those who watched the Saturday Night Live skit about that rampage, the people in Ricky’s stands waiting for the alien, OJ, and Emerald — all could be called watchers.

The interesting wrench that Peele throws into all this watching is that the alien can perceive being looked at. OJ discovers that avoiding “eye-contact” with the alien will keep it from killing you, and it’s the people who are hungry for a spectacle that are doomed.

There are the Tethered’s scissors in Ricky’s office, as well as Angel’s license plate (FE1111). Jeremiah 11:11 is the Bible verse that opened Us. 

Is Peele just giving casual callbacks, or are his movies connected?

Toho / youtube.com, Universal / youtube.com

Not only does Jordan Peele reference his own movies, but other films as well. The iconic motorcycle slide from Akira was recreated intentionally, as Peele has shown interest in making an Akira adaptation.

Buck and the Preacher, a Western that was the first movie Sidney Poitier directed, is shown several times in Nope. The Scorpion King is also mentioned as OJ’s first job.

The influence of several other movies can also be felt throughout Nope. Jaws is an obvious one, only because its monster-hunting formula is so tried-and-true. There’s also influence from movies like Creature from the Black Lagoon and Jurassic Park, which are monster movies that make you feel for the “monsters.”

If nothing else, just rewatch Nope to see Keke Palmer at the top of her game. She’s exploding with energy and charisma in every scene, and is offset nicely with Kaluuya’s subdued OJ. 

You quickly get the feeling that OJ can say in one word what Palmer’s Emerald would take a monologue to get across, but she’d be a lot more fun saying it.

A horse-wrangler and his sister try to capture an alien on camera. There’s more that happens in Nope, but that pretty much sums up the plot of this movie. 

Still, it’s over two hours. If you left your first viewing feeling like there wasn’t much in the way of story, try focusing on the inpidual elements rather than the “this happens then this happens” plot of it all—inpidual elements like the tiny details below.

Some symbols in this movie are harder to figure out than others, but that doesn’t mean Peele just wanted to confuse audiences. What might the shoe standing perfectly upright mean? Some people say it’s an allusion to Arrival, but that seems like a stretch to me. 

And then there’s 6:13. Jupe says Gordy went on his rampage six minutes and 13 seconds into the Gordy’s Home! episode, and the alien arrives at Jupe’s ranch at 6:13 every Friday. The movie opens with a Bible passage, and some people have theorized that another passage, Romans 6:13, could be relevant:

“And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.”

There’s also the connection between Mary Jo Elliott (the scarred woman in Nope who survives Gordy’s beating) and Charla Nash. Nash is a real woman who, in 2009, was brutally attacked by a chimpanzee actor.

Then you’ve got the fake-out in the opening credits, when a slow-push on the first ever motion picture (the man on the horse) makes you think you’re looking at the inside of a camera lens. Later, when we finally see the inside of the alien, we realize we were inside it, not a camera.

And why horses? And why the man on the motorcycle? To me, any of Nope’s pisiveness comes from whether you find working out a riddle that has multiple answers fun or frustrating.

Too often characters in horror movies are outrageously dumb. Sure, OJ and Emerald go back to and stay on a ranch that has a hungry alien monster flying around it. But Peele does a good enough job of establishing the importance of the land, the house, and the horses to the brother and sister that I buy it.

And when OJ sees the alien over his truck and we wonder briefly if he might make a run for it, he just locks the door and waits it out as any sane person would.

“Darkness and silence and the fear of the unknown have haunted me. The fear of death is the big one, right? I think comedy and horror are both ways in which we deal with the existential crisis of the knowledge that the pattern of life we’re so used to will one day be broken, and we don’t know what will happen next.” —Jordan Peele, Time

When I say a “1:1 interpretation,” I mean like a key on a map, where each symbol in the movie translates to an exact metaphor for the larger message. Nope doesn’t seem like the kind of movie to “translate,” but more like a painting that might give you different readings based on what you’re bringing to the experience.

For example, you can watch Nope thinking about any of these themes and probably get a different experience each time:

-Americans’ addiction to trauma or how people cope with trauma

-Hollywood monetizing horrific events

-Animal rights or the ethics of taming nature

-Black representation and/or exploitation in film

-Trying to attain the unattainable

-The lengths one will go to to get rich

Will Nope win an Oscar for Best Song with Wincott’s rendition of “The Purple People Eater”? Only time will tell.

I know, I know, “this guy went to film school,” but hear me out. I really do think movies like this suffer from immediately being labeled good or bad upon release. It’s easy to make snap decisions about movies, especially when they refuse to give a clear message like Nope. 

The movie isn’t for everyone, that’s a given. But let’s say you really — I mean really hated Nope. Like, Logan Paul twitter rant levels of hate for this movie. Don’t try to rewatch it with the mindset that the movie has to convince you it’s good, because it probably won’t. 

Nope does things we don’t usually get to see in blockbuster movies, and Jordan Peele did that very intentionally. He said of the movie, “I wrote it in a time when we were a little bit worried about the future of cinema.”

A lot of the criticism about Nope has been about plot and things making sense, but think about that first moving image of the man on his horse. Somewhere between that early footage and Nope, we decided that movies had to have certain things (a clear story, symbols, message). If Jordan Peele is challenging that decision, the audience’s frustrations with Nope might be part of his point. 

All of this is to say that there are movies made to entertain, and there’s the artsy shit. Jordan Peele is trying to do both, and that is, at the absolute bare minimum, worth a second viewing. 

Or don’t, Glass Onion also looks good.