Netflix Just Quietly Added The Best Sci-Fi Western Of The Century
Nope owes a debt to a deeply complicated Hollywood obsession.
The ongoing cultural dominance of the superhero film, which has lasted for over two decades now, can really only be likened to one trend in Hollywood history: the prevalence of the Western. A long-lasting genre that occasionally gets a modern-day deconstructionist or revisionist take (like Django Unchained or Logan), it enjoyed its peak from the 1940s through the ‘60s.
The spirit of the American Western is inseparable from the values that drove Manifest Destiny 100 years earlier — that America is a predestined inheritance, and its savage landscape must be tamed into a home. Films like The Searchers, Shane, and The Last Wagon all depict the struggle to lay roots in America while contending with the wilderness, outlaws, and outdated depictions of indigenous tribes as unwelcoming brutes.
The American Western is essentially a collective nationalist narrative, a concerted effort to rewrite the tumultuous history of American settlement into something triumphant and noble. Manifest Destiny represented indigenous genocide, and even the beloved cowboy archetype is a whitewashed transformation of the legacy of Black cowboys, ranch hands who accounted for up to 25% of cattle drive participants. The western is ground zero for a total cultural redefinition of what the settlement of America meant — but four years ago, one of horror’s contemporary wunderkinds delivered a film that rewrote the western as a tool of reclamation, not only of American history but the history of Hollywood as well.
Jordan Peele’s Nope, which just hit Netflix, obviously wears the lineage of the Western on its sleeve, from the Agua Dulce setting to the horse-wrangling lead characters. But it’s also part of another long-standing Hollywood obsession: UFOs and aliens. The comparison to Spielberg has followed Peele his entire career, but nowhere is it more prominent than in Nope, which follows siblings and Hollywood horse handlers Emerald (Keke Palmer) and OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) as they attempt to document photographic evidence of UFO activity in an effort to save their family ranch from going under. Even though the flying saucer in Nope is far more bloodthirsty than the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, they still share a thematic strand — the alien as a window into the unknown, a reminder that there are unforeseen wonders out yonder.
One of the things Peele’s third film understands so well is the history of the western as a site of American exploitation. During the 19th century, the American bison was hunted by settlers to the point of near-extinction; Nope features no bison, but that strand of animal exploitation runs throughout the movie, most notably in the flashback sequences to the TV show Gordy’s Home, a fictional ‘90s sitcom starring a chimpanzee that tragically massacred much of the cast and crew after being set off by birthday balloons. The event traumatizes one of the show’s young child actors, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), who inevitably goes on to replicate that cycle by offering up horses to the UFO in an attempt to tame it. Unbeknownst to him, that UFO is actually a sentient alien creature (affectionately referred to as Jean Jacket) that functions like an animal, and it doesn’t take kindly to attempts to break it in.
Jupe’s attempts to wrangle Jean Jacket can be viewed as an extension of the deeply American desire to tame what it doesn’t fully understand.
The exploitation that Westerns largely ignored wasn’t just reserved for animals — the legacy of the Black cowboy is mired in erasure, and Peele links that to the erasure of Hollywood’s Black laborers and craftsmen. OJ and Em are descendants of the unnamed jockey in the Muybridge clip, a brief video of a man riding a horse that stands as one of the first moving images. The fact that the jockey’s identity has been lost to time is a reflection of countless non-white contributors to Hollywood’s history, which imbues OJ and Em’s quest with a sort of unspoken seismic weight, an undertaking that won’t just save the family ranch but also re-establish Black people as pioneers of the cinema camera, capturing the uncapturable.
A recurring idea in Nope is the desire to capture the “impossible shot,” something so unbelievable that it feels unreal. Within the movie, that goal is inextricably linked to the lineage of the American Western. Stripped from the political and historical context that defines the genre, the western is fundamentally about the search for a home, a place to call your own.
To Em and OJ, capturing Jean Jacket on film would mean saving Haywood Horses, their father’s life's work and their closest link to him after his untimely passing. Despite being a rather potent combination of genres — sci-fi, horror, western — the heart of Nope is reconciling the history of the Western as a genre that sanitizes some of the darkest aspects of American history, while also speaking to the deeply human desire to find a place to belong.
