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Episode 200 - Nope on Nope? (w/ Leslie Lee III & Trevor Beaulieu) (Patreon)

Published:
2022-08-11 00:54:57
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2026-06
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Content

Subscribe to Bad Faith on Patreon to instantly unlock our full premium episode library: http://patreon.com/badfaithpodcast

We take a break from politics this week to talk about Jordan Peele's latest film with two of our favorite cultural critics, Leslie Lee III & Trevor Beaulieu. Is Nope a yes?

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Comments

Kamili Feelings

Peele is my age; it’s like killing John Amos and having his picture on some mantle piece for an entire film. That level of sacrilege. ;)

Laurel

Great episode

Anonymous

people didn't like Us? it's my favorite horror movie at this point. I loved this discourse on Nope. It scratched an itch I didn't know I had when it comes to this movie lol. Also happy 200!

Anonymous

I ❤ movie/TV episodes! Politics and the shit-news depression can be overwhelming. This sort of scenic rest stop is great, cuz it can be about how much pure entertainment there is in a movie and/or is there a message? Plus, Leslie & Trevor were a fantabulous addition! MORE PLEEZE!

Michael Martin
>>89399330

My lady & I both hated Us, and I was pretty embarrassed after how much I had talked up "Get Out" (which she hadn't seen). Sounds like "Nope" has the same problem according to the podcast, too much effort spent on themes & hidden meanings, not enough time spent on making a good film

Anonymous
>>89399330

i do think Nope was good movie, i really did enjoy it. but definitely agree that you have to land your themes/motifs for the audience otherwise a good film won't have people leaving the theater satisfied and willing to recommend the film, which is the whole point i think. idk i thought Us did at least a better job of that! the reason i liked it so much was the suspense. Nope's suspense was pretty much gone after you first saw the alien thing.

Andrew

I feel like you guys missed an important point -- Steven Yeun calls the alien "The Viewers", and I think it's meant to represent the audience/humanity. Humanity actually is really beastly (see American criminal justice system / sickening inequality / genocide, etc) and when you show us our reflection clearly in art, we go apeshit. If Jordan Peele made a movie about how we actually suck, no one would see/fund it, or most of the public would hate him for it. Instead you have to give us something partially fake, though not so fake (like the plastic horse) that we spit it out. You have to show us who we are, but through an obscuring screen (like young Steven Yeun sees the chimp through the tablecloth). You can't look humanity directly in the eye, even if your overriding goal as an artist is to depict it.

Yup

Jordan Peele's best work is his Gremlins 2 sketch

Anonymous

I can't stop recommending Saul Williams' Neptune Frost to people since I saw it. Absolutely the best film I've seen this year. I was expecting at least one of the panelists on this episode to've seen it, considering their areas of focus. In any case, I'd love to see Williams come on the show to talk about it. I'm sure his world view and energy would be a treat for Brie and her listeners.

Andrew R Gross

I had two issues with statements early in the ep: 1) I think the complaints about electoralism seem to ignore what appears to be serious shifts in city and county races (at least in California) and (2) how can no one talk about a movie like "Everything Everywhere All at Once"?!? This was the best movie I've seen in like five years, and you guys just shrugged and said, 'nothing's good'. WHAT?! Go see this film!!

Anonymous

And Neptune Frost, too!

Liska Ostojic

30 min in and agreeing with the general “trying too many things at once / too focused on themes yet themes are simultaneously incoherent” discussion. Re: Steven Yeun’s character psychology — fwiw, his character is one of the pieces that really worked and made sense to me. The key is the scene about SNL, where he’s remembering the horror of the attack and what he lived through in flashbacks, while outwardly he’s describing a “classic” SNL skit about the incident and laughing. He has somehow sublimated his trauma by burying himself in the kitsch, exploitation, and clout-chasing of hollywood. Like the chimp, he was exploited, then pushed to the side, to the fringes of the entertainment industry, a kind of freak show/cultural obsession, but instead of rejecting it, or even seeing it for what it is (like the chimp arguably did - lol) he wants it all the more, and survives off of it like a leech (his back-room museum). Or maybe a better word than sublimated is detached. He has detached himself from the trauma, by burying himself in a Hollywoodized simulacrum of reality. (Even his wild west-themed park is obviously a happy/fake/empty representation of a genocidal colonialist project. It’s beyond mythologized, it’s reduced to chibi renderings of iconography and platitudes *of Hollywood westerns and books,* which are themselves a mythologized version of reality.) And it’s not unheard of for traumatized people to cling even harder to the thing/person that traumatized them — whether because recognizing it would reveal their own (perceived) complicity/weakness/failure, or would render the entire experience meaningless, or… some other psychological mechanisms idk about. And of course he’s completely hollowed out and detached from his humanity by this, so he continues chasing his pre-attack glory/fame, even RELEVANCE — a moment when his life had meaning, when it mattered whether he was alive or dead — when he attempts to “tame,” or master, or use, a wild, dangerous thing. Like a priest leading his congregation to the alter, he promises them a *life-changing* experience, and (like Siegfried and Roy) it ends horribly. He can’t see the creature for what it really is because he’s projecting his fake reality into it, where OJ, who understands and RESPECTS animals/nature, and sees them as they are, can. So Yeun’s character is kind of a fulcrum of a lot of the main themes — man’s hubris in the face of nature, Hollywood exploitation of tragedy, life, even reality, and how, in the absence of anything meaningful or real in our lives, we drown ourselves in these fake reflections of reality to fill the void. Maybe that’s too many themes… on the face of it, abstractly, it feels like all those ideas *could* coexist and meaningfully enrich each other, but somehow (again imho), in Peele’s ambitious execution, feel… incoherent is too strong a word… maybe like incomplete thoughts. If it weren’t for Yeun’s character, I’m not sure I would have been able to glean anything from it. There’s also the whole digital vs analogue film thing going on (is one more real than another?? Not sure what the point there is) and, always central to any Peele project, recentering Blackness or the Black experience in what is considered a “white” world — westerns, horses, hollywood. Or reclaiming those “white” spaces for Black people, both making us aware there is an exclusion, and that the exclusion is false (ie there have been Black cowboys, Black performers/writers/directors/crew, etc). But it all gets confused when, as Brie points out, the third act turns into a kind of Kaiju monster movie — are we supposed to celebrate the thing’s death or no? Is the thing a camera or a symbol of the “real” that everyone wants to exploit? Is exploitation bad if the literal climax/triumph of the movie is when a main characters FINALLY manages to get her “Oprah” shot? A coin (money) literally kills their father but coins/money also saves them when Keke takes the photo that’s going to make them rich and famous. Cartoonish, plastic representations of settler colonialism are indicators of the emptiness and fakeness of modern life (literally full of hot air!) but also what saves them. The TMZ photographer is a slick, greedy, exploitative fool who dies miserably for chasing the story, but the celebrated DP who dies chasing the hero shot “we don’t deserve” gets a hero’s death? It’s not at all that I need things to be simple, or black and white. Ambiguity and duality (that something is both good and bad, that someone is both victim and victimizer) can be mind-blowingly powerful and moving. Some of the greatest films “make no sense” in a cognitive/rational way, but watching them feels like enlightenment (Nostalghia, Uncle Bonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Last Year at Marienbad… Mulholland Drive!!!!) … so why does this one feel confused? Less like Peele is exploring rich complexity and more like he can’t make up his mind? Or as I said before, like (exciting, interesting, ambitious, but) incomplete thoughts. I genuinely don’t know?? Fwiw the cinematography is imho mind blowing, the design of the creature took my breath away, the acting is *phenomenal* from everyone. Shit, I guess I had a lot to say — sorry! Now for another hour of listening 😂 I’m sure I won’t be compelled to comment again.

Liska Ostojic
>>90077460

Oh wait! The chimp is an excellent example of something with duality working beautifully in the movie! It’s both a vicious, violent instrument of death, and a captive victim *turned into* a monster by being put into an environment where it doesn’t belong, and used for entertainment no less (shades of King Kong). It’s very much a mindless ANIMAL, utterly incomprehensible to us, and a moment later, when he reaches out to the boy, a feeling, empathetic being, lost and alone and reaching out to someone for connection — man’s closest relative, in fact — and I feel like crying when it’s killed. That hand moment, and witnessing the chimp’s death, and not just the rampage, are (imho) really important to Jupe’s psychology and behavior later.

Eric

I love when you do film and tv stuff! I waited to listen to this until I saw the movie and it was great to process

Eric
>>89480235

I love this take - when I was watching that scene, I assumed they had him looking at the monkey through the tablecloth so they could spend less money on making the CGI look realistic 😂