Zoopraxiscope to Nope: A Case for Nonhuman Cinema Historiography
| May 23, 2025 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 34, Number 1, September 2023 |
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Clare Ostroski
Abstract
This article examines the ontologies of blackness, animality, and technology in Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022). It argues that Nope’s CGI alien both engages and resists canonized film histories of material and discursive humanness, demonstrating the medium’s complex relationships between humanness and not. By tracing interlocking logics of racism, spectacular technology, and animal exploitation, the article seeks to undo notions of cinema as inherently “human,” arguing that Nope’s aesthetic and epistemological collapses of body, machine, alien, animal, and human can open more possibilities for cinematic ontology and historiography.
Early in Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion” (1878) is described as “the very first assembly of photographs to create a motion picture.” Simplifying Muybridge’s contribution—one of many prototypic films from the nineteenth century—to the history of American cinema, the line becomes just one of Nope’s many historical citations. The film follows the Haywood family, Hollywood horse ranchers literally descended from the black jockey in Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope. As their animal actors are increasingly supplanted by digitally rendered horses, a UFO starts terrorizing the ranch, evading the family’s attempts to film it.[1] A hybrid between ship and crew, technology and living body, the extraterrestrial named “Jean Jacket” continually disrupts the family’s attempts to cinematically document it by conjuring storms, killing things, or short-circuiting electricity. Not unlike the horses, however, Jean Jacket is only violent when someone looks into its eyes. With Hollywood’s demand for horses in decline, the Haywoods, their animals, and the alien are each objectified and mystified, as the horses are rendered disposable by Hollywood’s use of computer-generated imagery (CGI), and literally disposed of by the digitally composed Jean Jacket. Relentlessly reconfiguring overdetermined histories of capture, evasion, animality, and otherworldliness, Nope approaches canonized ideas of cinematic technologies from perspectives that are anything but canonized.
Just as history has overlooked the blackness of what it often claims to be “the very first” motion picture, black people become downright invisible when animals, spectacle, and CGI are involved. While it is a blockbuster explicitly citing some of the most naturalized ideas about its medium’s history, Nope defies those processes aesthetically, diegetically, and extratextually. In its engagement with and subversion of aesthetic and economic histories, it serves as a clarifying entry point to radically reimagining how cinematic spectacle and technology necessarily involve and can be co-opted by the people and bodies they have most often discarded. Unpacking these ideas in Nope and beyond, I argue that cinema ontologically complicates human and animal categories, but in so doing also crystallizes their material formations.
Fig. 1. Horse “Sallie Gardner” ridden by an uncredited jockey. Screenshot from Muybridge, “The Horse in Motion.”
Muybridge seems to flatten horse and rider, with both playing second fiddle to the main attraction of reproduced motion. Yet this blending of human and animal is further complicated by the rider’s seemingly black flesh, which materializes an otherwise uncredited human star. A simple collapse between human and nonhuman is further problematized by Muybridge’s realization of the film via celluloid, made of gelatin, a product of boiled tendons from real animal bodies. To locate animals and less-than-people in the history of cinema’s spectacular representation of humans is therefore to capaciously understand how nonhumanness has been shaped throughout modern and postmodern histories. In so doing, a historiographic practice materializes that centers animal, laboring, and non-white human subjects in the mechanical representation of images and in the logics by which those images are animated. Cinema also provides a model for understanding how violent histories are formed on a cultural register, as the use of animal death to render the meaning of humanness has changed with the medium’s technological and stylistic developments. People die, too, to reproduce images that denote which bodies have access to the humanness of cinema’s technological and spectacular apparatuses. It is a question of which people die to produce the mediated life of others, however, which fundamentally disrupts the medium’s sense of humanistic technological achievement.
Richard Dyer has shown that cinema has been “fixed and naturalized” around privileging white subjects, from the inability of cameras to reproduce black flesh to the stylistic and cultural norms those cameras established and reified (103). Nope not only excavates those histories but denaturalizes them by showing how cinema, labor exploitation, and racist objectification are all discursively and materially forged through their interactions. While the medium is constantly in flux between light impressions on filmstock and digital imagery, it always sustains an aura of technological human progress. Those technologies and spectacles also reliably stick to the juncture between animal and machine. While their aesthetic representations might be blurred, in other words, animals and people historically rendered less-than-human are still objectified as threatening or industrially futile, while their differentiations are constantly materialized by specific historic conditions.
In direct relation to “The Horse in Motion,” Nope emerges from these material-discursive histories to engage explicitly with the representational ontologies of human and animal. On the Haywoods’ uncannily and quintessentially American ranch, “the other” is not one symbol or body, just as the alien is not clearly a technological device or a creature. Instead, the film’s nucleus is itself a kinship forged between black Hollywood laborers, their horses, and Jean Jacket, all sharing in their “alienation” from society or themselves, yet reproducing the medium’s exploitations along species lines. The only way to synthesize the historiographic complexities in Nope is therefore to follow its lead; Nope’s interjections in the medium’s ongoing history and ontology prove a methodologically salient approach to reorienting our study of cinema toward the bodies and subjects it has historically disregarded. This essay unpacks how discursive and material nonhumanness can be understood in the context of spectacular technology, and how a politically productive definition of nonhumanness is forged from cinema’s racist distinctions between animality and humanness. Inspired by Nope’s explicit engagement with the thrust of cinematic history, this approach is marked by the establishments and ruptures of aesthetic and industrial conventions through proto- and post-cinematic eras. By tracking entanglements of differently nonhuman bodies and categories through the development of moving pictures in Euro-America and globalized re-assemblage of exploitative industries and aesthetics during the rise of digital imagery, I argue the flesh and performativities of non- and less-than-humans are foundational to film’s technological and cultural ontologies.
I use Nope’s contrasts between alienness, blackness, and animality both as research objects and methodological models. Beginning with a citation of the “first” horse and black body in motion, the film is winkingly literal in its complications of technologies and industries of “looking.” Next to the Haywood ranch, for example, an amusement park called Jupiter’s Claim markets Jean Jacket as an all-American attraction, testifying to the exoticism of animality and the greatness of humanity’s domination over primitive violence. This cites a historical link between amusement parks, animal exploitation, and cinematic attraction by comparing the alien and early spectacle of, say, a horse in motion. But the attraction quickly devolves when its spectators gaze too intently at Jean Jacket, who swallows them whole with a mouth resembling a camera’s aperture. Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures, a replica of Jupiter’s Claim was constructed as a permanent attraction in the studio’s eponymous, real-life Hollywood theme park (White). At this attraction, the film’s historical citations conjure spatial tensions between nature and control in the modern otherness of proto-cinematic cities, this time in the overly determined postmodern attraction of real-life movie fantasy.
Fig. 2. The final encounter between O. J. Haywood, his horse, and Jean Jacket. Screenshot from Peele, Nope.
These collapses between the ontologies of blackness, animality, and technology are not flattening but dynamic; as storm clouds brew and clear, blowing dust and blood over the Haywood Ranch, animals and blackness are put in active, discursive negotiation with the natural and economic environments the ranch materially occupies. It is Nope’s depiction of Hollywood that compares black workers to its animal performers, but the Haywoods exploit Jean Jacket like their horses, whom Jean Jacket spectacularly murders. The film exploits its audience, too, with a promotional facsimile of Jupiter’s Claim. By considering these complexities, I engage a canonized history of cinematic spectacle and technology to reinterpret the medium from a nonhuman perspective, applying that model back onto Nope. Specifically using rubrics of blackness and animality to explore the material-discursivity of spectacular technology, I seek to undo historical notions of cinema as fundamentally, ontologically human, reorienting those canonized histories toward bodies and performances of beings that have not been granted equal power to look and labor.
While simultaneously analyzing a text and breaking apart its historicity seems unconventional, this essay attempts to animate a sort of epistemological dereliction offered by Nope’s citational and narrative structures. Both perpetuating and rupturing historical patterns of exploitation in film, Nope visualizes both the conditions that led to its existence and the ways cinema can radically break from its exploitative logics. The medium’s consistent refusal to reproduce the flesh of black and laboring people, whose bodies have been otherwise central to its technological and industrial developments, reifies both the social nonhumanness of certain people and the perceived, essential humanness of film technology. Nope’s extra-human creature, on the other hand, demonstrates a divergent potential embedded in cinema’s aesthetic and economic histories, newly imagining the medium’s social future in an age of digital nonhumanness. This essay follows Nope’s rebellious and constant syntheses of body and medium, cinema and not-human, which parallel the epistemological obstacles to using and historicizing cinema—a medium built for and by colonial-capitalist visions of humanness—for radical aesthetic means. After surveying key ontological categories at play, I maneuver between using Nope and the canon it engages to thread an alternatively nonhuman needle through some particularly well-trodden areas of cinematic history.
Volatile Ontologies of Animality, Race, and Cinema
John Berger succinctly describes the paradigm articulating animals and media: “The first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was animal blood. Prior to that, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was the animal” (7). For Berger, the most salient lens through which to understand these processes is “the look” dominant man gives the marginal animal, thereby performing a human/nonhuman hierarchy (24). Animals are, in other words, culturally and physically marginalized by their mimetic representation and aestheticization as never-human, a discursive necessity for defining, in fact, what a human is. As animal fleshes are used on cinema’s most basically material register, it is important to consider how that “look” intersects with the political and cultural history of its making. Authorized by Nope’s jumps between historical movements and ruptures, I oscillate between the material and discursive, performance and flesh, gazing and reproducing in order to approach cinematic nonhumanness as an ongoing historical condition. Animal bodies, I argue, are used to render their cultural and philosophical selves visible or invisible via their mediation; their visibility or invisibility is an ontological foundation for the way the gazes of cameras and spectators exploit nonhumans.
Cinema’s aesthetic, industrial, and semiotic extraction of what it deems not-quite-human bodies, that is, racialized flesh and raw animal materials, is crucial to understanding any of its other practices. From uncovering animals in the mechanical representation of images to the logics by which those images are animated, cinema also becomes an entry point for disrupting the white humanism embedded in broader materialist histories of embodied race. An ontology of “humanness” as it relates to flesh, race, and animality is baked into both cinematic technology and its cultural history. Dyer explains that the photographic apparatus and the chemistry of camera stocks were developed with only white skin in mind, “so much so that photographing non-white people is typically construed as a problem” (89). Gazing at those reproduced images, in bell hooks’s words, is thus inherently a “site of resistance” where these overdetermined marginalizations must be renegotiated by black spectators (116). The exploitation and death of animals has also remained central to the medium’s mimetic attraction, with its ontological and industrial establishments around black subjects developing dialectically with a similar use of or disregard for the labor and bodies of animals.
My approach to synthesizing these histories specifically takes after Karen Barad’s ontological approach to posthuman performativity, positing that neither physical materiality nor social discursivity be privileged when theorizing how bodies are externally categorized or autonomously performative (823). Applying this model, however, must also look toward the biopolitics of blackness, as its material-discursivity has precluded some bodies from ever being rendered human at all. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, for example, defines antiblackness as precedential to animality, while also complicating the materiality of both. Because racial categorization and the colonial distinction between beasts and civilized humans were mutually and simultaneously constructed, she argues, the “matter” of blackness, that is, both its corporeal materiality and historical discursivity, has been underdetermined. Bénédicte Boisseron, on the other hand, suggests that blackness is not incomparable to animality, but materially and discursively entwined with it (xvii).[2]
If blackness has indeed emerged from industrial colonialism underdetermined, its historiographic rematerialization demands a human ontology that addresses the range of nonhuman interactions from which it arises.[3] In other words, a radical reimagination (or eradication) of humanism demands an explicit and ongoing theory of human and nonhuman bodies and subjects. Jackson’s and Boisseron’s differently calibrated approaches to “the animal question” in material-discursive histories of race suggest a fundamental and dialectical complexity between nonhuman animals and less-than-human people. In this materialist history, otherness, race, and animality are all mutually realized, which produces a sense of violent symmetry and simultaneity in the relation between animals and othered humans.
Bringing this methodology to the hinge point of flesh, Hortense Spillers’s approach to the “symbolic paradigms” of humanness is imperative, braiding together the discursive ephemera of race and gender with the seen and felt materialities of enslavement (66). Of the relationship between humanness and blackness, Spillers accounts for a historical differentiation between “body” and “flesh,” which also affords the differentiation between “captive” and “liberated” subjects. Black flesh thus invariably materializes the discursive illusions of race, snagging the body in its iconographic interpellations (Spillers 67). Jackson cites this idea in her account of animalized blackness, defining the black woman as an icon around which humanness itself is materialized. The human category, discursively formed in contrast to nonhuman counterparts, does not exist without the performativity of blackness embedded in the racist, and seemingly indexical, animality of dark skin (92).[4] Materialism thereby gives a tactile sense of flesh and bone to the subjective formations of race, gender, and animality that, in Spillers’s words, otherwise “adhere to no symbolic integrity” (66).
As Laura McMahon and Michael Lawrence argue, “[T]he ontologies and histories of animal life and the moving image are deeply interlocked” (9). When cameras were invented to be technologically blind to black flesh, that flesh of non-white subjects also became indispensable to the cinematic medium’s economic and aesthetic developments. Likewise, as the titular horse in motion went uncredited by name but became iconographic in canonized film history, the fleshes of all kinds of animals were baked into the medium; at the level of filmstock, bodies become gelatin, and in the cultural reproduction of their images, movies of animals running and dying became crucial to the way proto-cinema was understood. These dynamics are not isolated to the proto-cinematic; instead, they highlight how notions of humanness play into the semiotic and visual representations of animals throughout the medium’s life.
Flesh complexly sutures bodies—human or not—with ideas of “performing” humanness, or not. In cinema, the performativities of flesh are uniquely visualized by its historical intersections of human and nonhuman, death and animation. Its spectacle and reproducibility materialize and dematerialize bodies; just as the dead animals in gelatin are used to represent a horse and jockey, computer animation materializes Nope’s animalistic UFO. Despite its attraction of technological innovation and industrial authority, the medium is thereby always mutually constitutive with the colonial-capitalist hierarchy of humanness. In the post-cinematic context from which Nope emerges, flesh is dangerously abstracted. When the materials of images become ephemeral digital code, we must look toward the political ecology of computer-generated images which involve human death from different industries and historical lineages. Kristen Whissel also argues that CGI figures ontologically and fundamentally involve flesh more literally, composing real-life animals with binary code through the visualization of skin, blood, and bones in a “digital body-building project” (92). As I will discuss in detail, these figures appeal to the medium’s sense of humanness through their perceived ability to kill or die (Whissel). Narratively and aesthetically, Nope tangles all these historical threads in its diegetic and extratextual reliance on nonhuman cinema, and its representation of a deadly, CGI alien.
Slaughterhouses and Celluloid
However influential, “The Horse in Motion” came from an already storied tradition of animals in motion pictures. Over two hundred years prior, Athanasius Kircher’s seventeenth-century magic lanterns helped to establish the parameters of cinematic spectacle by using flies as living puppets. A little later, chicken egg whites were used to adhere photos to projection glass. When filmstock began to appear, its celluloid base was made from the viscous byproduct of discarded meat. At the time of the zoopraxiscope, famed animal arbiter P.T. Barnum was using spectacular experiments to help form the disparate mimetic techniques used in phantasmagorias. Meanwhile, scientific demonstrations placed miniature aquariums of living fish or insects inside lanterns, which would screen the animals as larger-than-life shadows.[5]
Nicole Shukin has flagged these kinds of fetishes across all “modern logics,” using “rendering” to navigate between the way animals are disassembled into resources—“the industrial boiling down and recycling of animal remains”—and reproduced in culture, “interpreting an object in linguistic, painterly, musical, filmic, or other media” (20).[6] Rather than “The Horse in Motion,” this history of movies begins with popular slaughterhouse tours at the turn of the twentieth century, where the moving line of violent sights, sounds, and smells of animal disassembly forged affective and perceptual logics for cinematic spectacle (100).[7] In the momentum of this genealogy, Shukin problematizes theoretical abstraction of the animal outright, contending it risks a collapse of historic, political, and physical differences between animals, humans, and objects.[8] Instead, she argues for a deconstruction of nonhuman fetishization, thereby reinfusing animals with “historical specificity and substance” (38).[9]
These marriages between material and sign, presence and representation, illustrate the centrality of animals across industrial developments, emphasizing the value of more broadly materializing nonhumanness. Shukin names celluloid, film, and electricity itself as technologies for the cultural sanitation of animal death, demonstrating a modern dependence on animal sacrifice (158). Deploying Marx’s “mere jelly of undifferentiated or human labor,” she reads analog cinema as an unavoidably visceral medium for the suture between material and symbolic animal violences (Keenan 168).[10] A nonhuman historiography thereby asserts that celluloid did not naturally develop into CGI, but coexists alongside it in an ongoing condition produced by the material relations of history, technology, and spectacle.
Nope can be used as a contemporary hinge point for these trajectories as it straddles analog and digital technologies and histories. Whenever the Haywoods attempt to document Jean Jacket, electricity on the ranch mysteriously short circuits. When O. J. Haywood’s (Daniel Kaluuya) sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) installs a battery-operated security camera to circumvent the outages, its view is always blocked by a bug on the roof. Seemingly in cahoots with the alien pest, the insect drives the Haywoods to seek out cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) who is skilled at filming wildlife with a hand-crank camera. In the film’s final set piece, O. J. lures Jean Jacket to Holst’s non-electric capture, ending in the demise of the cinematographer and his analog device. To ensure the alien does not get away, Emerald leads it to Jupiter’s Claim’s Old West themed photo-op. As the alien soars overhead, she cranks the still-image camera, whose bright flash seals Jean Jacket’s reproduction in what Emerald calls the “Oprah shot.” Seconds later, the alien chokes on an oversized helium balloon released from the park, disaggregating its body and killing the creature.
Fig. 3. Emerald Haywood’s non-electric “Oprah shot.” Screenshot from Peele, Nope.
These composites of digital cinema in Jean Jacket’s aesthetic rendering and the filmic photography necessary for their capture and commodification are also couched by the film’s compositions of animality and nonhumanness; Jean Jacket liminally and literally floats between animal and human, material and discursive worlds. The theme park where Emerald photographically mummifies the alien has, of course, been secretly capitalizing its existence. When its business and patrons eventually succumb to Jean Jacket, terrified horses and tourists slide through the alien’s insides in a series of shots from inside the alien’s prosthetic organs. An aesthetic, historical, and discursive mishmash of corporeality and technology, the practical, digital, animal, human, and alien bodies in this sequence clearly mark the conditions from and in which Nope emerges and intervenes: viscous modernist cinema and more materially abstracted digital production.
Fig. 4. A tourist being ingested by Jean Jacket. Screenshot from Peele, Nope.
Calling into question the reliance of attraction industries on animal exploitation, the view from inside an alien also illustrates the violent dialectics between animals and their human counterparts. Jean Jacket acts like a horse at times and a monster at others, but Jean Jacket’s effect on electricity, batteries, and industrialized performance also suggests its categorization as technology. This recalls Shukin’s understanding of cameras and electricity as tools for the naturalization of slaughter, solidifying the perceived reproducibility of animal death as crucial for film. Despite an apparent domination of digital aesthetics, the corporeal violence of proto-cinema is also still prevalent in the era of Nope’s production, as Jean Jacket’s insides are rendered practically with rubber tubes that give its body a sense of material fleshiness.[11] Blended with its entirely computer-generated silhouette, Jean Jacket’s multi-materiality brings into relief how cinema’s reliance on death extends far beyond gelatin; electronics manufacturing necessitates inhumane labor conditions at all levels of resource acquisition and assembly, and CGI rendering requires immense physical spaces and underpaid labor to store and manage data, which then expresses some of the highest volumes of fossil fuel use in the world.[12] Just as Jean Jacket swallows people and horses in its spectacle and money-making exploitation, cinema always relies on the performance, exploitation, and/or death of bodies that are not quite classifiable as human.
Industrial Nonhumanness in the Digital Era
As analog photography is joined by digital imagery, the relationship between cinema and the raw materials of nonhuman bodies shifts: celluloid is no longer necessary, and creatures can be brought to life and death from immaterial code. Of course, it is an illusion that immateriality has overtaken the material violences of film, as digitality’s dehumanizing logics and various mechanical exploitations merely continue the historical precedent imperialist humanism. Jean Jacket’s computer-generated slaughter at times likens all people to horses, and at others racialized less-than-humans to all nonhuman animals. When Jean Jacket’s digital body unravels to reveal its proto-cinematic center, Nope serves as a new cornerstone for clarifying these threads of cinematic nonhumanness, especially when considering its context as a blockbuster.
As Sarah Keller has written, theories of digital film have long hinged on historical anxieties about its colder, less-human quality (5). But digitally rendered images can also be analyzed in terms of their life- and death-giving properties. Kristen Whissel has complicated digital sublimity and its immateriality, necessarily locating the representation of material bodies at the center of digital aesthetics. Among her objects are nonhumans, which complicate any discursive categorization: computer-generated creatures she calls “vital figures.” These images ontologically synthesize animals with code in a “digital body-building project” based on maquettes that are scanned into computers, animated, and “made credibly ‘organic’” (91). It is plausible that gelatin is an important component of those maquettes and their animation, as we should also consider the fleshy death involved in the production of computers, outright. But the “dead” components of digital code more abstractly demand what Nicole Shukin describes as the “reinfusion” of material-discursive nonhumanness with historical substance.[13]
Evocative of the use Soviet cinema made of film to perfect the radical potential of organic seeing, vital figures embody both the “optimal functioning of technology” at play in the representation of organic beings, and the lifelike aesthetic realism of those beings (Whissel 93).[14] Part of the double-marginalization of animals suggested by Berger, the believability of these creatures also relies on their potential to die and kill. Exemplified in the sickly dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and in the tragic demise of one of cinema’s most famous monsters in Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), for Whissel biological phenomena like aging, decay, and injury work to visualize their imagined corporealities. However, vital figures also always possess some sort of deadliness to their live-action human counterparts; Jurassic Park’s T. Rex and the titular Kong can easily rip real-life characters to shreds. The separation between life and death in films where vital creatures populate synthetic or fantastical environments is narrow, and their perceived ability to rupture that boundary in order to disrupt the realm of real people is what gives these organisms an “embodied presence” (Whissel 99).
Despite their sense of hybridity, in other words, vital figures still rely on the medium’s nonhuman exploitation. The aesthetic of “vitality” of images already in ontological limbo can be further scrutinized as creatures like Kong continue to straddle monster, human, and animal identities. Seemingly demanding affection through pet-like behavior and its own death through monstrous frenzy, Jean Jacket can certainly be considered one of these beings. It is not unreasonable, then, to connect the composite aesthetics of vital creatures to the inherent racism of cinematic rendering. Hailing from a mystical and violent “tribe,” for example, it is King Kong’s fetishization of a white woman that leads to his terrorization of all industrialized America. Unlike Shukin or Peele, Fatimah Tobing Rony begins film history with Félix-Louis Regnault’s use of cinema as an anthropological tool. Documenting and comparing the motion of West Africans and Malagasy people with that of French soldiers, Regnault’s proto-cinematic projects—often conflated with the animal-centric series by Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey—“sought out the perfect index to measure and classify race” (30), solidifying cinema as a means for colonial industry to fuse science and fantasy in its exploitation of bodies (43). Recalling the suggestion that animals are doubly marginalized by spectacle, Rony reads the double consciousness of race in the “veil” of the movie screen, where racialized people only find images of themselves “reflected in the eyes of others” (4).[15] Regnault’s films, for instance, often render West African participants as shadows, or obfuscated bodies denied the possibility for resistive return gazes toward the camera or spectators (54). Rony reads this practice as a form of taxidermy embedded in the medium, citing the definition of a taxidermic specimen as that which transgresses reality through compositing monstrousness, death, and life (Bann).[16]
While this connection between a colonizer’s gun and camera is obvious in the case of late-nineteenth-century anthropological filmmaking, the taxidermy effect is just as potent in the original version of King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933).[17] Rony describes this practical iteration of Kong as a monster embodying the collapse of the “‘primitive’ into the technological, the Ethnographic into the Historical,” encouraging anxieties about an end to imperialism amidst the acceleration of technological achievement (188). In so doing, the spectacle of a beast standing in for the horrors of non-white flesh exemplifies cinema’s entanglements with the complexities of humanness, animality, and violence. Jackson’s Kong was released seventy-two years after Cooper and Schoedsack’s. As Kristen Whissel has shown, however, it sustains the medium’s long-held fusion of monstrousness and death, albeit in a new aesthetic mode and with a new relation to labor.
Continually churning imperial anxieties through technological spectacle, Jackson’s version is a logical extension of cinema’s racist gazes, fit with an indigenous tribe played by actors in blackface. For each frame of the 2005 monster’s motion, two gigabytes of data were reportedly required to render its fur atop a skeleton, muscles, and skin.[18] Nearly twenty years later, the third installment of a different Kong franchise, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Adam Wingard, 2024), has undoubtedly used even more data, space, labor, and animal motion to render a war fought by two of colonial-capitalism’s most spectacular and canonized monsters. The contrast of Kong’s earthly gorilla with the alien Godzilla perhaps implies a more complicated aesthetic of nonhumanness in the digital era.
Jean Jacket, in its material-discursive threats to blackness, humanness, and industrial attraction, both subverts and self-referentially perpetuates these patterns of animality. Its complexity demonstrates that deadly, aesthetically and discursively hybrid creatures are where notions of nonhuman spectacle erupt in digital cinema. Digital cinema recalls the sanitation of animal violence cast through the lens of industrial achievement, as defined by Shukin. For, as CG lifelikeness necessitates human innovation, the subjects of its deadliness and of cinema’s power to mediate life and death remain liminally between human and not. CGI is unique with regard to the matter that creates its image, which is seemingly void of boiled mammal tendons. However, in addition to the colonial-capitalist exploitation of non-Western electronic producers, its monstrous depictions of nonhuman life are just as successful in their alienation of non-white and nonhuman fleshes through spectacularizing death.
Since Muybridge’s horse, spectacular and radical cinema developed dialectically throughout the twentieth century, in part through their continued indulgence of animals and monsters. Post-cinematic bodies are shaped, in large part, by aesthetic and technological practices of 1970s and 80s Hollywood, when black actors like Bolaji Badejo and Kevin Peter Hall literally became Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and Predator (John McTiernan, 1987) through practical special effects. Focusing on a later moment in cinema history with CGI affords a clearer trajectory of the medium’s material-discursive formations of nonhumanness through its changing use and aestheticization of bodies; a computer’s ability to materialize and disaggregate creatures raises again the question of how an industrially formed medium can radically intervene in our material world. Digital figures, in other words, flag a distinct rupture in the way film as an industry and practice can and does imagine what people are.
Synthesizing Proto- and Post-Cinematic Nonhumanness
These overlaps between proto- and post-cinematic styles and industries accord with Sarah Keller’s “volatile” cinema history and ontology, which describes the medium’s assumed “humanness” as always up for grabs. There is an inherent slipperiness to movies, whose affective and material malleability engender diverse modes of encounter. The cinematic experience began before images could move, and extends beyond their conventional exhibition, with the only ontological commonality among film objects being their “sensuous” appeals (133). This appeal recalls an agential and often resistive relationship between discourse and material, as differently directed agencies and gazes are bound in cinema’s sensorial experience.
Cinematic devices, experiences, and the medium’s resistive and hegemonic participations therefore all interact to produce the medium’s ontology, suggesting ways in which bodily things and processes shape technology and spectacle. Citing André Bazin’s metaphor for photography as a mummification of “flesh and bone,” Keller postulates “the human element” as a nexus for cinema’s tendencies to produce uncanny or astonishing affects (4). The very premise of moving images relies on a binary between a subject’s living, animated body, and cinema’s mimetic reminder of death’s inanimate destiny. Its unseen black skin and forgotten electronic laborers substantiate this, uncovering a complicated differentiation between human (living bodies) and not (dead objects). Despite its attraction as a human technological feat, the moving image is, in Keller’s words, an “ungraspable nonobject that nevertheless derives from real things and generates real experiences” (133).
As celluloid shows, those “real things” can be animal materials, and as Mary Ann Doane has argued, “real experiences” are often produced by spectacular catastrophe, or the represented potential for confrontation with death (276). This necessitates differentiation between deaths and lives that are spectacular or disturbing, flagging notions of animal/human categories. The very idea of “confrontation” is also complicated, considering that when audiences encounter the spectacle of dying they are also confronting the mammal tendons and inhumane labor used to capture it. Identifying bodily peril as a central technology for early film, Jennifer Bean clarifies that, like “the capricious antics of animals,” cameras and projectors were also unpredictable; as “vital figures” would be nearly one hundred years later, early movie stars were rendered realistic through their potential to die, and cinematic realism was produced vis-à-vis the “destructive force emanating from within technology’s steely body” (30). This kinesthetic deadliness extends beyond cinema’s appeal to realism. Early movie stars and vital figures differ in the way their perceived humanness serves as a ballast for cinema’s “steely body” when conceptualizing its produced encounters between people and machines. The material conditions that historically form cinematic objects are perhaps most visible at the film/digital horizon, which Keller explains entirely in human terms: “[T]o describe celluloid as kindly, warm, and human but digital cinema elements as cold and inhuman . . . shapes the way media are received and perceived. . . . Celluloid connects to the shape of the world it films, whereas the digital translates the world into numbers” (5). Despite its invocation of humanness, celluloid’s reproduction of nonhuman marginalization through the material composition of animal bodies might make it more “animal.”
Keller’s attention to humanness in and around cinema points toward the nonhuman hierarchy in technologies of mobile catastrophe. Expanding the idea of bodily violence as crucial to early spectacle, she says the Edison Manufacturing Company’s Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) revealed both the “ontological uncertainty” of cinema and the salience of the depiction of life-and-death throughout its history (45-46). The film shows Topsy the circus elephant succumbing to electric execution, another example of what Shukin sees as the naturalization of animal slaughter and fetishization of technological marvel (161). Its concentrically symbolic and material animal death, where cow tendons are used to reproduce elephant slaughter, means neither the celluloid nor elephant corpse ever completely vanish into spectacular ephemera. For Keller, because the film can be rewound, it also makes Topsy’s death both inevitable and undoable, despite the permanence of her material demise. Like an early film camera, the digitally rendered Jean Jacket is prone to unpredictable “sputters” in its outbursts of violence, cinematic glitches, and unraveling, becoming an animalistic attraction at Jupiter’s Claim through its perceived ability to kill. In its similarity to horses, however, the alien’s defeat can also be compared to Topsy’s, as Jean Jacket’s image is “mummified” by analog photography, and its meaning by the ongoing animation of images and history in Nope.
A key element to the way these historically sensual relationships play out in this film is found in the theme park, which Lauren Rabinovitz defines as historically intertwined with cinema: both are “‘inventions’” of modernism’s “dichotomy of commercialized labor and leisure” (12), where logics of “looking” are dialectically exchanged (37). In the postmodern world from which Nope emerges, she argues, the ontological connection between movies and amusement parks has shifted to the latter, producing a “fantasy of ‘living inside the movies’” (173). In other words, the contemporary theme park on which Jupiter’s Claim is modeled, in its synthetic and larger-than-life environments, is fundamentally about “Control and Nature” (Rabinovitz 173). Jupiter’s Claim takes this literally, not only in harnessing an animalistic alien for spectacular consumption, but in doing so by stealing the Haywoods’ horses as bait, rendering their bodies and the ranchers’ labor as uncompensated elements of the performance. Like its engagement with Muybridge and the literalism of Jean Jacket’s aperture-like mouth, the Haywood Ranch and Jupiter’s Claim become grounds for more reinterpretations of canonized film history in their untangling of minoritarian and animal bodies, cinematic gazing, and industries of attraction.
Jean Jacket’s violent outbursts are also borne from more complicated natures and controls, as tensions between the alien and Haywoods literally change the weather. Just as the alien begins performing “unpredictably” at Jupiter’s Claim, its erratic, aerial movements block out sun and kick up sand in swirling clouds. When O. J. angers it with a look, the alien seems to conjure a rainstorm, floating in the deluge while regurgitating blood and guts onto the Haywoods’ home. While O. J. thinks Jean Jacket does this as part of their pet-like territorial feud, the sudden and visceral expulsion of prosthetic and computer-generated flesh appears to distort the straightforwardness of Nope’s canonized historiography. Jean Jacket does not just disrupt business-as-usual for Jupiter’s Claim and the Haywoods’ strained place in the film industry. By aesthetically synthesizing different historical threads, spitting them back out in narrative re-engagement with the Haywoods’ participation in cinema, the alien challenges a posterity of technological and economic racisms put forth by “The Horse in Motion.” Nope itself extratextually parallels the engagements of and resistances to Hollywood and film history made in Jupiter’s Claim and on the Haywoods’ ranch. While consistent with Rabinovitz’s definition of theme parks’ desire to immerse tourists in “the movies,” when real-life tourists explore the “fantasy” of Jupiter’s Claim in Universal Studios, they are also inadvertently engaging with Nope’s destruction of that fantasy in its constant and simultaneous reverence for and rejection of the most canonized versions of cinematic history. Jean Jacket is not reproduced with any visual tricks or animatronics in Universal Studios, but with glitching TVs, the sudden absence of ambient wind machines, and disembodied gurgling sounds.
Fig. 5. A storm of rain, blood, and flesh on the Haywood Ranch. Screenshot from Peele, Nope.
In the film, Jean Jacket’s aperture terrorizes black life, but its CG tendrils connect the Haywoods to a nonhuman, environmental otherworld, consistently symbolized by clear skies and storm clouds. The alien’s seemingly inevitable death also breaks that link, ironically reinstating the capitalist hierarchy of humanness which otherwise excludes the Haywoods from cinematic participation. When a non-electric camera nearly shatters the alien’s digital composition, history is rendered an impenetrable loop of colonial discursivity and capitalist production. Nope’s tensions between disruption and continuation demonstrate a broader potential for cinema to rupture its own nonhuman history, citing capitalist and radical aesthetics in a fundamentally black movie produced and promoted by a legacy studio. Relentlessly citing Muybridge, the invisibility of Hollywood’s black Westerns, and a historiographic slippage between organic and technological seeing, the film takes an American canon of film history seriously as often as it rips it apart.
If cinema is an ontological non-object, then, perhaps, so is its history. Jean Jacket’s consumption and regurgitation of teleological technology and industry seem to assert just that, while also defining nonhumanness as its own ontological category: in the context of cinema, slippery and potentially radical. Yet, the specifics of the alien’s aesthetic and material negotiations, like the violence at Jupiter’s Claim, are also narratively and affectively introduced by more conditional murkiness. Its animalistic, machine-like, and marginalized body is like a camera—a monster of looking with the potential to kill or economically advance the Haywoods—and also a less explicable historical force.
In the spirit of tensions between nature and control, Jean Jacket’s storm of blood also recalls Christina Sharpe’s definition of American black death as a kind of weather; produced from the tension between colonial-capitalist racism and the insistence of black survival, racism is a historical, affective, and ongoing condition. Borne from friction between racist industries and technologies, oppositional gazes and aesthetics, Nope uses canonized ideas about cinema to ontologically and historically stretch the medium between and across ideas of humanness. The conditionality of these “storms” becomes even more complex considering the specific tensions between Jean Jacket’s rubbery insides, practical vomit, real-life theme park spin-off, and computer-generated silhouette. Not unlike Shukin’s slippery definition of the “rendering” of flesh and images, there is also a tautological connection between the “capture” of images and of animals, and the “storminess” of condition and industry.
Conclusion
Nope is primarily organized around the Haywoods, narratively unfolding chronologically with Jean Jacket’s intrusion. But it is also interrupted by flashbacks to what we learn is the backstory of Jupiter’s Claim’s owner. The film’s very first shot is of a bloodied chimpanzee on a live TV set, what we later learn to be a diegetically infamous event. Like Jackson’s Kong breaking from chains in violent reaction to a camera flash, during taping of a sitcom in 1998, the show’s chimpanzee actor reacted to the sound of popping balloons by murdering his human co-stars. Future theme park arbiter, Jupe (Steven Yeun), was a child actor on Gordy’s Home who was left unharmed by the titular Gordy even after they lock eyes in Nope’s opening sequence. The scene that later interjects the Haywoods’ story is grotesquely violent: Gordy extends a paw dripping in blood to Jupe after his animalistic rage has settled. Seemingly concerned for Jupe’s safety, the entirely computer-generated ape is narratively anthropomorphized in a matter of moments, transforming from monster to person. As the camera embodies Jupe’s gaze at Gordy attempting to make physical contact, Gordy is shot by law enforcement, blood and guts spreading toward the camera.
M. Shadee Malaklou has identified similar relations in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), where she sees an animal gaze as a black gaze in the rhythmic looking toward, away, and between cameras, creatures, and black bodies. By contrasting and intersecting rabbits, deer, slaves, and other structurally erased people, Malaklou argues, these films challenge the onto-episteme described by Spillers, suggesting a kinship between all bodies and subjects objectified as nonhuman. As Joshua Bennett has argued, both black persons and animals are “readily available as fetish, floating signifier, scapegoat, ghost, corpse,” rendered such in part, according to Malaklou, through an objectifying look (Bennett 28).[19] Produced and shaped by a cultural and political moment obsessed with a “decaying Anthropocene”—in Nope’s case, perhaps, also signified by random storms of blood—Malaklou suggests Peele’s filmography theorizes a future blackness specifically in the material-discursive conditions of the 2010s and 2020s (87). Get Out and Us are radical, in other words, not necessarily because of their material resistance to white film labor and representation, but because of how they imagine blackness and animality to emerge from the same history, teaching “even the most human among us how to live in common-unity with nonhuman sentient life, and thus, how to survive the ends of Man” (72).
It might still be true that, in Rony’s terms, film taxidermizes black bodies. Malaklou suggests, however, that it does not have to be a bad thing. Albeit in an opposite political mode, this context of the “decaying Anthropocene” is strangely reminiscent of the historical context of King Kong (1933) as Rony defines it, with its cultural anxieties about the end of white empire. Although complex, Peele’s prior films rather explicitly intersect the deaths and gazes of roadkill and a black character being pulled over by police (Get Out), or rabbits in cages buried alongside black characters who comment, “we’re human too, you know” (Us). Nope reinstates many of its director’s previous looks at and between nonhumans, comparing and muddying distinctions between horses and a black family. Gordy aesthetically and narratively falls in line with these animal kinships, too, but his humanoid movements and narrative anthropomorphism fit more neatly in an ontological genealogy of apes, race, and cinematic aesthetics; he moves and acts like King Kong. In those scenes on the set of Gordy’s Home, rote emotional beats and aesthetics are interpolated within a different ideology, one seemingly at odds with the cinematic medium. While this demonstrates an ideological animation of cinematically taxidermied blackness, as Malaklou says about Peele’s earlier work, Nope fundamentally differs from Us and Get Out in adding the extra-human Jean Jacket. Gordy is exploited on a film set, becomes enraged, and is shot by police, only for his story to be misinterpreted in Jupe’s continuation of exploitation at his theme park. While this thread narratively clarifies some of Nope’s commentary on blackness in American entertainment, paralleling O. J.’s horses’ and Jean Jacket’s own reactions to camera flashes and gazing, Jean Jacket is what elevates the film’s interventions to be both aesthetic and historiographic. In rendering this otherworldly being, Nope stakes a nonhuman history of cinema by suggesting that co-opting the death of black bodies, by gaze or alien consumption, is not unlike co-opting an industrial medium of colonial-capitalist spectacle for radical means.
The alien materially-discursively synthesizes the many ways black people are dehumanized, made other, in film, and suggests how they can use cameras and eyes to undo those things. Its movements are not merely humanistic or animalistic, blending technology and corporeality to concentrically redress relationships between monstrousness, labor, race, and cinema. By bringing together cultural icons of alienness and real-life animals, Jean Jacket is also materialized from another synthesis between abstracted code and material political ecologies. Despite its aesthetic and ontological fantasies, the alien’s death is still easily marketed by the Haywoods in their rightful reclamation of Hollywood’s spectacular looking. Much as many people have refused, resisted, and renegotiated cinematic gaze, Jean Jacket also refuses to become an attraction of motion. It is inevitable, however, that it becomes a spectacle of slaughter; just as “The Horse in Motion” privileges spectacle over its black and animal stars, Nope elegantly privileges the Haywoods over all else, including the awesome imagery of Jean Jacket. When the alien’s digital image and symbol of synthetic nonhumanness is ironically destroyed by the interruption of film history, Emerald and O. J. still disrupt cinematic conventions by capitalizing on their own exclusion and terror.
What remains underdetermined in Nope’s complex and pointed reorientation of film history is the materiality and subjectivity of its horses, whose bodies are seemingly disaggregated by the computerized presence of an extraterrestrial beast. Nope’s materialization of blackness, in other words, still relies on animal exploitation. The material-discursive entanglements of nonhumanness that lead those horses to Jean Jacket are partially and purposefully undone in the alien’s fantastical mummification and death by a resistive cinematic eye. As Peele’s camera, the Haywoods, Jean Jacket, and Nope’s audience intersect gazes and the material conditions that formed them, eyes also turn to the future of cinema, whose intersecting lenses might begin to incinerate the nonhuman exploitations on which the medium has historically depended.
Notes
[1] While apparently black, the jockey in “The Horse in Motion” is uncredited and was only later identified as “jockey Domm” in an 1878 article in The Photographic News and by a student lecture delivered sometime between 1876 and 1882. No other specifics are known about the athlete (“Automatic Electro-Photography” 352; Armitage 176).
[2] Boisseron argues that “The black condition is without analog except for the animal” (xvii), citing Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx” (238).
[3] For more on the necessary interactions between critical animal and race studies, see Malaklou.
[4] This is also in dialogue with Donna Haraway’s investments in “making kin” by the meeting of animal and human fleshes; she argues that the formation of “species” itself is inherently racist and sexist (When Species Meet, 105).
[5] Charles Musser outlines these intersections in the first chapter of nonteleological proto-cinema history, “Toward a History of Screen Practice,” pp. 15-54.
[6] This idea is also, in large part, a response to Akira Mizuta Lippit’s theory that animals are discursively salvaged by technological media after “vanishing” from historical modernity (Shukin 40).
[7] Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky has triangulated histories of labor, animal slaughter, and cinema by defining the cinematic “process genre” as “the sequentially ordered representation of someone making or doing something” (2). These sequences, according to Skvirsky, involve waged and unwaged labor which restore practical activity to an aesthetic dimension and impart a haptic sense of material consciousness to the labor depicted (40).
[8] For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, human and animal categories have been altogether eradicated, as each “deterritorializes” the other amidst postmodernism’s annihilation of form (22). Animals and art, they argue, function to free the human from identity and destroy taxonomies that distinguish between human and not (187). Shukin is also directly engaging with Jacques Derrida’s use of “looking” to philosophize how animal specters relate to humans from their realm of discursive suspension.
[9] Shukin takes up Michel Foucault’s biopolitical critique of the Marxist superstructure to analyze “an economic reality underlying the ideological smokescreen of animal signs,” rather than taking up a strictly essentialist materialism or post-structuralist “economy of signifiers” (26). Combining economic and discursive meanings in this way forges an ontological biopolitics of animals without also eradicating connections between ideology and structure.
[10] Cited by Shukin (75).
[11] In a behind the scenes feature, Jordan Peele shows how the sequence inside Jean Jacket was filmed with a prosthetic “tube” through which real actors were “intimately” filmed (“How Nope’s Scariest Scene Was Made”).
[12] For surveys on the labor and environmental exploitations of the computing industry, see Ceruzzi; Cubitt; and Kara.
[13] For example, microchips and batteries needed to build computers and data centers used to produce CGI require cobalt, mined by child laborers and other modern-day slaves primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kara). The computing industry produces toxic waste dumped across the world, primarily in indigenous communities, where rates of civilian illness and death are high (Cubitt).
[14] Films like Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) aesthetically contrast and discursively blur human exploitation and animal slaughter, comparing, in Mikhail Larionov’s words, the “imperfect apparatus” of human and animal gazes to the more effectively defamiliarizing “eye” of a camera (qtd. in Nesbet 26; 28).
[15] This is a citation of W. E. B. Dubois’s idea of double consciousness, wherein black people are always forced to look at themselves “through the eyes of others” (3).
[16] Originally cited by Rony (101).
[17] Donna Haraway notes that this comparison between cameras and guns occurs throughout “natural history” more explicitly in Primate Visions (42).
[18] In a widely cited, now-defunct online article, Studio Daily apparently reported the digital size of Kong’s fur in 2005. Ian Failes speculates about the probability of the large data usage again in 2020, explaining the cost of network bandwidth to build the fur by frame was likely the cheapest option.
[19] Originally cited by Malaklou (81).
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