As Buck and the Preacher (1972) begins, we see Sidney Poiter riding the range, in an indefinite place, from site to site.
he is patrolling against the bounty hunters from Louisiana who want to capture back into slavery or kill the parties of exodusters that have headed out into the West. The wiki says the exodusters stopped off for some time in Kansas, before heading out West. This movie seems to catch them in the near West as they seek out a Hidden Valley they have heard about past the Indian lands, out in Colorado. These bounty hunters are soulless killers, determined to not let one Negro pass
they will not only burn you out.
but kill all your livestock, making it impossible to continue.
the best thing about the early going in the movie is that Poitier has a good feel for the eschatia, the outlying places at the margins of a known settled place, at the fringes of which the parties of Blacks travelling through camp out and try to remain below radar. We see him move cautiously at rivers edge.
and in the trees, always in the trees, often obscured.
when the party that he is particularly attached to, because he is married to Ruby Dee, is set upon, he is hiding behind a barrier, gesturing them, telling them how to stay alive.
Poitier as director also understood the Nature Morte visual trope, putting an obstruction in the center of the shot, which makes the goings on around it seems more spurious and suspect, or, from the other POV, desperate and maddening.
and then, having helped one group, he is off again, to help another. This shot made me pause.
it sure does look like the valley that Otis Sr bought up for his family in Nope.
it is not, the movie was filmed in Mexico and Kenya, but it certainly does bespeak the overall nature of the land of the West, making shots of OJ on his horse riding fast from this or that aspect of the UFO, seem to be set in a world known to viewers.
At one point, dropping out of his ride into the edges, he catches Harry Bellefonte preoccupied bathing in a river so he steals his things, to keep on going (his horse is out of energy),
this trope, the riverside theft, also played in Barry Lyndon (1976)
he is trying to keep all the camps aware of where the Nightriders are, the damage they are doing, and to protect them, a map comes out, and like a magic map, and there is one in Nope, a map becomes important when it is a matter of life or death, as this is
some of the camps have become more permanent because local white farmers have hired the exodusters to pick their crops, meaning that they stayed put under protection for a year, but now even these are threatened by the scorched earth Nightriders
These exodusters are from Mississippi
but, here again, sneaking around the sides, houses hidden in the brush
and preacher or is it Buck riding back of a screen of trees, this is hard core eschatia, the lands at the edge of the country land.
the classic western towns of the imaginary West only come into it when Buck and the preacher realize that with the posse out of town searching for them, they can sneak back into town and take out the Nightriders, the core of whom, including Mitchell, are in a whorehouse, so Bellafonte distracts and Buck guns them down.
then there are three more of them upstairs with women, and they are taken out too, to the tune of nice French academic erotic painting, signifying the coil of a need that kills.
Lots of good pictures in this one
curious scenes from a magazine, perhaps of assignations, brothel art, unclear, but in the shot above to the left a flower painting meaning a place of depletion and death, and a Women at the Fount image signifying that dangerous females are about.
and this one
a beautiful picture, possibly of the Primrose Path, but maybe, indeed, of the Hidden Valley, the goal they all have, going West.
and the contrast, phallus in the lady gets you a rifle in your face.
then the climax is that they do business with the local Native American tribe to buy protection from them, and a few supplies, and they get it, and Ruby Dee is now riding with them, even as she gave a speech that womenfolk often did in old male macho movies that she was fed up of this land and wanted to go to Canada or something,
The final shootout, which they win, seems lifted from Butch Cassidy
with Poiter and Bellafonte both taking a bullet, then doing a Butch and Sundance routine leaned up against the rocks, always the rock formations fought in in old westerns..
and then the promised land
and I would also spin this image further back to the same image more or less at the beginning of There Will be Blood (2007), the image of the two mountains of creation, the Hidden Valley, where men meet the gods
So, it is a passing reference, but important ballast as it were in the honeycomb way back behind the picture, left to emanate up from it a deeper theme and gravity which grounds the ranch in Agua Dulca as indeed the Hidden Valley of Otis Sr., which now must be protected, even against aliens, representing the Blank Slate view of the West, at all cost.
Holst then surprises me by reciting the purple people eater song, which unbeknownst perhaps to him means that he is not yet entirely free of restraint, and is old, bespeaking the fact that his mind is currently feeling the turbulence build in it, that is, he is possessed by the purple one-eyed demon Savoy, as I call it.
The song is a novelty song from the 50s, I have no memory of it, but the video by Sheb Wooley almost feels like a prototype to the script for Nope, “I saw a thing coming out of the sky (this is a modern youtube version, not from the 50s)
one big eye
one horned
purple people eater
this is the part Anders quotes, I heard him say, and there is that “vagina” it could also be, the deeper throat with uvula.
It could be said, then, that this song, which wiki tells me it was NUMBER ONE from June 8 to July 14, 1959, which is six weeks! echoes in the movie. These weird novelty songs I did not know much of, but we had in my day Leader of the Pack, and others, but I do remember Alvin and the Chipmunks The voice of the purple people eater is a sped-up recording, giving it a voice similar to, but not quite as high-pitched or as fast, as Mike Sammes‘s 1957 “Pinky and Perky“, or Ross Bagdasarian’s “Witch Doctor“, another hit from earlier in 1958; and “The Chipmunk Song” which was released late in 1958. (Alvin and the Chipmunks themselves eventually covered “Purple People Eater” for their 1998 album The A-Files: Alien Songs.) The sound of a toy saxophone was produced in a similar fashion as the saxophone was originally recorded at a reduced speed.[4]
Wooley also had a career in the perimeters of Westerns, in the old Hollywood that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) tells the story of the end of. his scream in an obscure Western became a stock scream use in movies. This lore of the primal scream is important too, though, it is telling, not from OJ or Em, if I recall, of a less elevated lineage. There is also in that linkage from an early unknown Western a connection to Star Wars, also a Frankenstein connection, as a friend on fb noticed the other day, apparently watching Curse of Frankenstein (1958) for the first time in his life, both of which used the scream. This song also has lineage giving birth to Alvin and the Chipmunks. the noise in this song is truly weird, and may inform some of the sonic elements here, which are complex and hard to make out, less so on a laptop screen. The voice was even on Ed Sullivan, 1959
Then, Judy Garland got involved, her version starts with flying saucers
And in one of those odd ununtangleable knots of popular culture 60 years ago here we have Judy Garland mockingly referring to Earth versus Flying Saucers (1956) and this past season we have the same shots speaking to the booty call nature of JFKs erection and coming in the mouth of Marilyn Monroe in Dominik’s Blonde (2022), and yet the moralistic critics of the liberal self-defense of their values league see it as a legitimate degradation of the memory of Marilyn (the scenario in the movie is entirely falsified nonsense)! Garland recites all these titles, delirious!
the sky turns red
and then it turns green
She sings “I saw a thing coming out of the sky
it had one long horn and one big eye….”
Characteristic of the map too is that they make use of an old 45 rpm to symbolize the beast, which means, symbolically, as black vinyl does, that they are in an engagement that is life and death, and dwell in the valley of the shadow of death. This also bespeaks that this encounter with the demon might end some of them up in Dark Wax, and not White Album, that is, extinguishing their quest for a dream.
Then, Em strikes her “game on” pose, in the bloody house
They turn up the sky dancers, bait. Holst has an electricity-free camera
a TMZ reporters shows up, he is sacrificed, but the vehicle he brings in ends up being helpful
They also play black vinyl on the day, to attract th UFO.The song being played is about a man who thinks himself a demon, exuma, an obeah man, so there is some realization on their part that all of this is a kind of voodoo. I do not know the reference, McKay aka Exuma was part of the village folk scene in the late 60s, well known to all the greats, but did not crossover, how do I know this? because it was into folk music, and played folk music, and played Dylan, and played Baez, and played Richie Havens, and did not know this song until right this minute, have to tell the truth, fascinating story
the album cover, will listen to, but later, in any case, this is the music that they make use of to attract the UFO to attack, which gives them the opportunity to attack back.
This whole sequence maps out according to the pursiuit-aversive vector, with some variatoins. That means that it is a trap set up to lure a monster in, then to undo him.
the second nightmare was when Jupe attempted to make contact with it, him then being an emissary of the demon TIND-TIRH, and hoping for White Album, but OJ goes on his search for his lucky talisman, Lucky, to save him from sacrifice; in the state of syngogy, we move from Jupe and the catastrophe to OJ coming after and seeing it all for himself.
then the seeing of the monsters, the jump to epigogy, and Em especially feeling put out onto the place of sacrifice, under the rain of blood, over the “cenote” (though there is only the Hidden Valley here)
then, as I conceded in Hereditary (2018), and in Midsommar (2019), there CAN be a fourth element, though it is rare, and that is what I call the daimonion, and I as I work it out here it is that the person under attack HAS a sort of ophthchthony (“seeing truth through the darkness”) moment, but in a sense plays dead, a response to aggression I have not placed on a vector; but the pursuit-averruncate vector is turned to ON, in an outward way, as a trap, with all the attack postures turned into bait.
This place, we go to in the final section of this essay.
Jupe has begun, then, to stage shows in which the star of the show is the alien. There are concessions.
There is a mysterious guest, a burn victim, likely a survivor of the carnage in his youth, and a friend of Jupe still.
But this will not go well. And it will not go well because it has never gone well whenever it has been tried in movies (I thought of Revenge of the Creature (1955))
but also because at just this point Peele backs off to the far off full valley shot, as if the birds eye view, not unlike in the Birds (1963) of the gasoline fire
a surprise, a suggestion of gazing down
as with many other examples, and this bespeaks the fact that the viewers (the aliens) are watching, and zeroing in.
He is all got up in his outfit, in his weird alter ego, or blocked ego reality
and he has a magic act, just like on stage
But the weird part, and fateful part, bespeaking his loss of values as a result of his trauma, his “trick” is actually feeding a horse (Lucky) to the UFO
The contrast between his rhetoric and the concessions, for dolls, etc, are droll, but then he is surprised because its seems that this Friday, he has done this every Friday for the last six months, the alien must be hungry early because he is making an early appearance. And then it attacks.
At this point, we see the insides of the animal alien from outer space. It is abstract, and double-mountain formed, with a crotch of light, and then an intense wobble-wobble as if in material form, feeding screaming women like kids at a ball pit amusement struggling to get out of a tunnel leading in and out of it. This is amusing because on the one hand it looks utterly “foo”, that is, not a rational explanation for its innards. On the other hand, it seems rubbery and in this reminded me of a concession that I went through in 2015, when at Rocca Farm Halloween outing, me and my nephew went through an odd, haunted room which consisted of two large inflated black balloons, and you had to squeeze through to get out. It is called, generically, a squeeze room.
This makes me a-tingle because my book, The Horror of….Rococo (2016, unpub) was derived from an intense popular culture question that I had wobbling in behind my nephew, why would rococo genre paintings circa 1900 be thought scary and appropriate to go into a haunted house in 2015 AD, from which I discerned the descent of the rococo into a haunted style in horror and erotic movies since. And now, here, another ping, of a reference long silent, from that place, and outing.
people as if fed down it, screaming
And, it’s a thing, the squeeze room (with squeeze image first)
and we all know that Peele likes the comfy pop culture derivation of scares that descend from amusement park horrors, as in Us (2019), (playing tonight at the National Gallery, Washington, as part of their show The Double).
Generally, I place all elements of dreaming figured out in the real world in the form of the devisements of amusement park attractions to be crossover machines, moving over the in-between, what I call the Luor, between waking and dreaming. The Dunk Tank is my favorite one of these, with its troubled racial past, but others no doubt apply. Thus, it could be that Peele visualizes the border between the mere ambient and the sentient as another turbulent in between, I call it the Fluxsin, and his UFO animal is as if a scavenger being on that limit.
Thus in an object of uncertain nature with unclear form and material, out of the blue, people are eaten. The cannibal theme pings. That is, people who indulge in idle amusement with the real world, will get theirs. Life will eat them up. The irony is built in, seeing that the insides of the thing reminded me of another amusement concession at Halloween time of the year. It is also fatefully ironic, meaning that he lived under the thumb of a tyche curse, a triggering trauma that did not go away, that Jupe cannot get to the promised land and ended up dying with his boys by contradictorily abusing an animal by using Lucky as bait to attract the bigger beast who would now repeat history for him by breaking out and causing a profounder chaos in his life on a stage while making some amusement. He somehow ended up setting himself up for the trauma of animal rage to finally get him in the end.
This ended up as a post like this
A couple of months ago I traced the graph for the mindset of a world put under the thumb of a Tyche alien power, a tyrant. The world is cast into a sort of mad bipolar ping pong, spinning in a figure eight from one taunt to another, back and forth, endlessly. I came to identify the figure eight formation as a brain formation, likely cingulate spinning to cerebellum, which causes stress, and as it is an eschelture, a formation, and it is now going to go haywire, or oltre, beyond, it is the source of helter skelter, in the mind of man, in the form of the world he builds out of that mind on earth. It shocks me, with a jolt of real intense “synchroetherrhoe”, my word for everything all at once flowing together, that Peele is thinking along similiar lines, and I think he shows the digestion system of the thing as if the nexus of that figure eight, now and then lighting up to a ray that expands out to the Black Sun, and for this the UFO here is an embodiment of a mental figure eight as it approaches sentience and being unrepresentable for that.
Peele ever letting the forms he introduces degenerate down the slide of trouble, OJ is now worried where Lucky is, so goes to the town to find him. He is surprised and alarmed to see the town littered with debris, and empty, that is, funnily, a ghost town
as compared to a normal day, alarm
and he then spins around into the theater he sees Lucky
but he also sees that all the people have been taken up, and then, time for the big reveal, a UFO disc comes zooming in at him, almost as if to crash to catch him. It comes up to him as if to eat him, but he and Lucky get away. Having in effect declared game on, we now have the movie’s best scene, really, in terms of the horror of contact of a UFO and what it might really entail, when the thing comes in over their house,to try to eat them.
Em is left in the house to fend for herself, against a power that comes against them. It comes as rain and comes as debris falling on the house. The portrait of her mother flashes at her, as if to give her strength. Then, the blood and guts pour down the window, terrifying. And now we realize that it is raining blood. Raining blood.
The rain of blood has been emblematic of low sky paranoid horror since the 1600s in Germany. The science is that it is merely caused by a fungus coloration of this or that. But the figurative explanation is that it is a judgment on man by a god who bleeds for them, it is the kreuzregen, and in its 1561 manifestation as seen by Glaser over Nuremberg the rain is part of a larger UFO sighting
As a cannibal creature the UFO monster sucks people up into its digestive tract, and then expels waste in that funnel cloud. Thus, some of the harder things like a hail in that rain are body parts, and the rain itself is the blood of its victims, being poured out, dumped back to earth. This again is classic Fortrean phenomenon.
The form hovers heavy and all-encompassing above the house. It unleashes as if a false sky, that is, a rain that doubles up on the rain, a true supernatural torrent. Then it all runs with blood painting the house with blood, the front steps with blood, great shots. In the dark
(and note the “sky” is LITERALLY the figure eight, if in the UFO form, and a blue streak of sky. And then, in the flash of lightning, even more horrible, recollecting as well that in this state lighting penetrates the space to electrify all, it literally fuses the horror to the subjects
Likely my favorite shot in any movie in 2022, it is in the popular culture as consumed or maybe the word more appropriate for all the reviews and all the explanations coming out in a single rush in the three days after the cannibalization of the art. As to the theme of the lightning too, when OJ asked is there a word for a “bad miracle?”, my thought was a keraunton, a person, that is, struck by lightning, but, for that, if perhaps disabled by it, somehow become gifted with a crazy skill, paranormal. In relation to seasonal ritual movies, Halloween 3 has become the signal Halloween movie of my current culture, based on an essay I wrote last December after finding out that it was Nigel Kneale’s attempt to Englishify the storyline as if almost to link it up to the Stone Tape (1972). But then rereading this sequel cause me to hear a closing line in Halloween (1978) itself, that I guess I had not heard before, just before Loomis says death has come to your little town, making of MM the angel of death, he says that his black eyes consisted of looking through you, and through the walls, and he was looking here, to come back here, death has come to your little town. It is that looking through that grounds his evil in some prototypical source, which would link up to the goddess as discussed in Halloween 2 and 3. So, a keraunton, is a lighting/trauma stuck person, cast into an eschatia to live forever after.
And this production shot, because, as I explained in my essay on the Psycho house on the roof of the Met a few years back, by Cornelia Parker, pomos locked in rationality think the crawlspace between stage and backstage, and movie and shots of the set, is the only crawlspace, and the behind the scenes explain how it it done shot, the directors comments, etc, all the auteur divining, is the reality, the reality of the mechanical age of the world
And this resulted in the house being stained in blood, Em transformed from her having been stripped bare of her defense the night before
The whole house, under the overcast of the UFO, covered in blood, in the rain of blood, maybe the best shot of the movie, mythos wise. Why is their house subject to rain of blood? In thinking of why someone would believe in hollow earth theory, it struck me as a defense mechanism in an extreme form to block all paranoia resulting from feeling like a nothing in the vast world science has opened up for us. I figured that some people, to control their fear, need to think of themselves as if still safely enfolded within a womb, and that to block out all the dissociating depletions of modern scientific living, which can empty you out. In a some less extreme form to see the cloud as a body and it both evacuating waste and raining blood, as if vomiting the leftovers from its meal, this sees the sky as a body, and oneself as if in truth cowering under the cover of that body, still, that is, in a sort of womb formation. If one feels like one is being driven crazy by the spinning of a figure eight, for it to evacuate body part debris and blood onto one, this scene is seen as a blood sacrifice to placate. One is reduced to proskynesis, prostrate before it. under it. It is precisely this embodied delirium of himself over the skies of Paris that caused Nerval to think the sky over Paris was also raining blood. So, the first thing it does is create The Blue Streak, the false alien sky of a foreign element, with a rain way worse than a normal rain. All of it cast on the house.
this is then experienced, in full horror, cowering, as a nightmare, where one bounces out to the place of sacrifice, the Tarpeiian rock, and you feel the whole world come to tear you to pieces and eat you. You are the sacrifice on the sacrificial spot to this monster. The house is located remotely because it is the holding pen at the edge of society, where sacrifice takes place. By their misfortunate and the limits placed upon them by race in a bigoted time, they are as if the pharmakon of the country, taking its sins on to them. This position, in a mind sent spinning, then, as if causes one to cast up one’s sense of one’s body so that the monster itself becomes you, and thus it attacks you in the form of, not eating you direct, as in the Lair of the White Worm (1988), but in an ambient global way as a rain of guts and most of all a rain of blood. so, this the best rain of blood sequence I have seen in movies. The body in the place of sacrifice casts her body up over the figure eight
it then attacks in the mode of guts and blood
And as this plays out by devouring you, or fulfilling your case of voraphilia, that is, a desire to be devoured, to be made safe, to hit rock bottom, to have nowhere else to fall to, if you cower, and if you say NOPE, and NOT engage, then you might, in that pursuit-aversion vector, survive (dumb white: people by contrast will say yep, bravely, foolishly, taking on this affront to their prepossession of a sense of power in life, and get eaten up, happens every time).
you basically by ego imagine the thing comes only for you, to make of it a projection of your own body expelling its suffering, a weird formation (this I picked up from the fact that Em is watching a tape on the farm history on tv, just before the attack, so she is trying to make up for not being there, holding down the fort; and then by her being absolutely emotionally crushed down aka stripped bare of her defenses, by this attack).
Haywood house and the rain of blood, Nope, 10 29 2022.
But, of course, from inside the house out, in a “mondo”, or a fireball, created by the thing, what Keke sees, and feels, is intense oppression, the weighing down of this many-layered horror over the house and her, and this is one of Palmer’s best shots, capturing the absolute oppressive suffocating nature of a total attack by a sentient being.
Mondo Em laid out by the hovering, Nope, 10 29 22
But really, in the deep psychology of it, Em, all over the place in terms of emotion in the movie, and, for that, having adopted a cool nonchalant manner in deflecting all her pain, something of which anyone who seeks life in he “side sit” knows well, she is in fact feeling her worst truth rain her own blood onto her.
Em Bleeds of Herself in Nope, 10 30 22
But she, like OJ, in a second very nice variation of the scene, that is, out on the road, hiding out in his car, he gazes out at it, she is like nope, not going to mess with that, going to wait it out, see how that works. This terrific shot of appraisal echoes the shot of the internal throat of the UFO monster eating. His looking out of the windshield shot is the Raven’s Gate trope, indicating that everything out there is seen now as a place of death, best to hide out. At one point this little hope is interrupted, but by a horror that seems monstrous at first, a whole horse being dropped out of the sky, the ultimate Fortean experience, crashing through the windshield; except that it is one of the plastic ones, offering a hint to survival. It is during the escape, using Angel’s van, that we see the thing from below for the first time, a flying saucer but with a dark center that appears to be both a mouth and a garbage disposal, that is an anus mouth, a scouring up machine, like a leech or other feeder, the derivation this particular beast I have not yet worked out.
One other point, old school. However, it IS, in fact, a demon, of the mind, that is, a psychodynamic thing. And what it most resembles in its being having an orifice that takes up dust then excretes blood is, of course, the god of carnage, whom I call Psallictus, he who by a tornado of dust and blood during battles in, I read of it once, the days of the Black Hawk war would communicate to Native warriors, the turning point has been passed, victory is won, any killing from here on out is ignoble and shameful. It does bespeak this extreme sentient fatefulness, a real appearance of the god of carnage, a mythos of the Crow people, but Castor and Pollux are variants too, on screen in America in 2022.
God of Carnage appearing over a Crow battle field, Nope, 10 30 22
I believe that the horror movie aspect of the movie ends when they escape the horror of that nighttime attack. It has rattled them all. If this was only a horror movie, and one of the most fateful sort, where there is no happy ending, the movie likely would have been content with having laid out a sequential version of the three-nightmare eldritch formation and ended things there. But nope, Nope goes on.
They escape then from that horror
then a classic hanging out at diner scene
But as Sobchek notes, sci fi movies tend to be more optimistic. And so this movie, like Hereditary (2018), though that one went bad, has a fourth sequence of action, a formation I call the damonion. This occurs when in the last reel the movie decides to rise up to the fata morgana to bring about a positive ending of the problem. When they convene on the parking lot of the fast-food joint in town, whatever town it is, Lancaster? OJ rightly says, animals got rules, they are territorial, we use that against it, that is, he is speaking of Umwelt, and it has just happened that his ranch has turned out to be taken over by the thing as its Umwelt, its territory, but they can then exploit that.
Now, to my joy, a map shows up, and they map out on the map where each of them have to be in formation, to catch it on film.
and the map is transferred over onto the Hidden Valley, to make of it a trap
A plan of action is laid down, the movie goes Western. There is a poster for Poitier and Bellafonte in a Western, Buck and the Preacher (1972), this the movie behind OJ when he talks it out
here it is
I did not see this movie in real time, that is, 1972. Indeed, when Poitier died a few years ago, it surprised me, except for the explicit civil rights sort of movies that got him legendary attention, he made his actual career making movies of a B-movie quality or release, and of a very grown-up nature, of which I saw none. But this one has a legacy to it, it is about post civil war Kansas and the exodusters
This migration took place at the end of the 19th century, and pivoted from the deep south to Kansas and west of there
this was a millenarial movement too
My guess as to why this is the only readable poster in the movie is that it is a trope==and I found it in Blonde (2000), for example==everyone in California, especially if of the working-class level, came from somewhere else, it is axiomatic of California. And to accommodate that every movie set in California has a quick way of summing it all up, we came out here from Kansas, as the Monroes did, and then moved up the line out in the promised land. At one point in Blonde, Marilyn herself I think refers to her roots as an Oakey, and that would refer to the one migration I did know about, due to the Dust Bowl migrations out of Oklahoma in the 30s (Grapes of Wrath). The number of Californians who came out from Chicago also subscribes to my theory of the occult Midwest brain drain. All this then means to supply a hint at a deeper history explaining how Otis Sr., nicely played in virtually a cameo, but one that then, unusually, hangs over the whole movie, by veteran Black actor Keith David, an impressive moment. David is one of those amazing character actors that are in basically every movie ever made for a whole period of time, and he had a full career, born in the early 1950s, came of age in the 70s, where that sort of thing was at last possible.
And so all that is being hinted at is that he comes from Exodusters, who moved from the deep south to Kansas or Oklahoma Indian territory in 1879; and then when things did not work out there he or his father kept coming out further, to California. Thus, this one poster deepens the mythology by which this family lives. It is, as OJ says, something he built, a real thing, a thing worth defending.
Buck and the Preacher (1972), directed by Poitier, is a good movie. A few elements of it are germane. For one thing, early on all we see in Poitier riding from place to place apparently on the margins of mainstream Wild West life. He is looking out for parties of exodusters passing through the land, to make sure they get to the other side. This task is made deadly because Cameron Mitchell is at the head of a group of vigilante representatives from Lousiana trying to steal slaves back into slavery, or kill them if they resist. They also seem to have taken up a contract or two for local populous who want the Blacks out. We see them brutally attack one party, with a clear intent of extermination, even shooting all their livestock to force them to turn back.
Here is my post
Much more fun, when a director arrives at the full brain state, he or she has a deep honeycomb of references that, while almost unspoken of in the text, rumbling around in the subtext, and echoing through the movie, explaining the cinematography. In one scene OJ is seen sitting in his chair, in which he says something about why he wants to keep this ranch, because Otis Sr really did something. On the wall behind is a poster for Buck and the Preacher (1972) with Sidney Poitier (as director) and Harry Bellefonte. The movie happens to be on Tubitv, it is very good, makes me sad that Poitier did not get more chance to be a Clint Eastwood kind of director, he has excellent sense of space, especially having to skirt around the margins outsmarting ‘The man” it’s about the exodusters, who are blacks who left Louisiana in the 1870s, giving up on change there, and headed to Kansas and points West. We catch up with Poitier guarding small groups and camps hiding out in the woods down by the rivers, as they are being chased by bounty hunters from Louisiana determined to force them to come back to slavery, or be killed. Then it is fascinating watching Poitier negotiate with the particular Native American tribe involved, to get safe passage for his people. The exodus-ters, that’s an egg cup expression meaning for them this was exodus, wiki tells me they were millenarian, looking for the promised land, and at the end of it is the trope of the Hidden Valley, that perfect place beyond all the crap where you can be happy, they find it at the end, last shot of the movie, the movie ends with the obeah man, having kept spirits up by telling them were gonna find it, glorying in the green pasture in Colorado. The Hidden Valley trope applies in Nope, it is all staged that way, that’s what that is, a perfect place of peace that they have found, now being upset by the neurosis of Hollywood (the next door neighbor) and the attraction of UFOs to neurosis.
The trope of the Hidden Valley has a rich history, both in society and in movies. (Of the places in movies that I was wowed by as a kid it was mostly manifest in fantasy. There was the valley of the cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and then the valley of the giant sculptures of the gods in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), then the valley shut off from modern life in the Valley of the Gwangi (1969), in Mexico, connected to the world by a single cave). The Hidden Valley is more like a paradise at the end of a struggle, and it represents, then, a kind of rising up to a positive level. Since this Valley takes on theological and eschatological qualities in the context of being cast into the bottomless pit by the tyche powers that be in the world, it is perhaps pointed the way to by the Angel of Milkandhoney; but it strikes me as lifted to a fata morgana place from that, a rare positive place in sentience. It is clear that in his generation Otis Sr. made this something for his son against great odds, and against much prejudice. It seems likely that in his history he found this wiggle room up in an unpopulated overlooked valley north of LA and finding a way of buying it he slipped in under the racial territorial censors of his time and managed to put down a root in the promised land indeed. This single poster reminds us that the movie Buck and the Preacher is all about this deeper theme. A few words about the movie.
Nope (2022), Jordan Peele’s latest, and his best movie, is not only terrific in itself, but it has a lot of zeitgeist with particular attention to “synchroetherrhoe” in these pages. Since September 2021, my mind and eye, seeking out something new to see, pivoted to the whole world of UFOs, and have been busily parsing out various movies and books for visual “foo” (named after the foo fighters which American pilots over the Rhine saw in 1944 returning from bombing runs to their base outside of Strasbourg). This graduated to an interest in cosmic rays, and then the extent to which cosmogony, or consciousness in the sentient zone fixated on cosmological dimensions for validating and justifying acts on earth, possibly the motive of Putin in his war on Ukraine. Soon after, a nagging thought that I had in 2019 reading Ed Sander’s The Family (1970), finally came home to roost, it was time to figure out if there was something to the dreamscaping of LA as a place of helter skelter which is the secret formula that Vincent Bugliosi conceded was that missing element in explaining how Charles Manson created the Family. Along the way this study then turned into a whole examination of the representation of the psychogeography of LA as a character of hope or menace in a number of movies, including Harper (1966) and Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1970), which situates the menace in the highway system that the modern city overcovered itself with. Finally, such a psychogeography featured the creation of a Tyche (fate) figure of domination over others in a figure eight spin in the mind which in the case of LA not only helter skelters from the city below to the hills above, but from the city as a whole to Death Valley or to atomic-testing Nevada beyond, by which point we get to the question of how Michael Heizer’s City, completed this past September, relates to possibly complete an age of the blank slate testing ground helter skelter West (1940-20??) and all it means.
And all of these themes, it turns out, somehow, are in Nope (2022). Right from the get go Peele also gets it that this exploration is carried on in this world by way of media. After we see the name of his film company, Monkeypaw on the screen, we are dropped into a confusing scene where a monkey, or chimpanzee, has turned over a lampshade, universal sign of chaos, and brought chaos to what appears to be a scene on the set of a tv show being filmed in a studio with an audience.
One is not sure if this is yet another of those too elaborate logo stamps that independent movie companies are posting at the beginning of multiply-financed movies in these days, which are annoying, and this is Peele’s effort to create the “Citizen Kane”, that is, best trope example, of such a logo indulgence; or if we are in the movie already. It is unclear, and, it being unclear, poises us on the blade edge between being in the movie and gazing at the movie from a meta POV. As it turns out, the scene is the first push in creating a spin that keeps the movie going until the end.
We are then transported to an odd place, a ranch outside of LA, north. A place called Algua Dulce, which is a real place, a valley between two ranges of mountain, outside of Santa Clarita
and, in fact, yet inside the mountain range that forms as it were the north wall of the LA world
and, indeed, not that far from two other ranches which spun about in the far orbits of the Hollywood dream machine, the Spahn movie ranch which burned to the ground in 1970 after being the hang out of The Family, and then, upper right on the map, the Barker Ranch in Death Valley. And both were part of a whole system of ranches orbiting LA serving as locations for the original Western movies that Hollywood specialized in in the early going, pre 1930s. (These ranches even have their own wiki page, and spread out around LA in all directions. Thomas Ince, mysteriously killed on Wiliam Randolph Hearst’s yacht (see Bogdanovich’s The Cat’s Meow (2001), was a major pioneer, creating a number of ranch sets nearer Malibu)
A point is made that the city of Los Angeles might well be said to have been settled by movie dreams first, and then a real-life city began to rhizomatically spread out to close the gaps from there. This would make of LA a place not of agency but of reverse agency derived from the dream of a counter reality. It means as well that, unless there is a secret primal history, this helter skelter spin is the creation of tyche figures, like Daniel Plainview, in There will Be Bloow exploiters, visionaries, under whose curse we live. That is, the West happened first, but it was made into an image and icon by Hollywood in a kind of backwash development of life into art that has been going on since Buffalo Bill. Hollywood was founded, from this POV, on the Western. In terms of dreams, the pivot from a studio to a ranch would appear to make of a location a reality, but in fact sets set in the eschatia (borderlands) of the studio world would make them periacqueductally cardboard, a world of houses of cards, at the edge of the filmed universe. Which would, of course, explain why a valley like that in which the Haywood ranch is located could be construed as a place of uncertain reality where anything might happen, including opening up to supernatural agency.
This means that, relatively speaking, though the ranch is, as the electronics delivery man said, “this far out,” it is yet within the overall purview of the ambient circle of supporting businesses in and around LA. In the big picture, with Bakersfield usually taken, in movies like Play It As It Lays, as the outermost limit, it is relatively far south, and inside the circle, and, in fact, the valley beyond “the valley” in LA, the San Fernando Valley, the staging area, as it were, of city growth, what I call the Yellow Submarine.
And it turns out that they are not a “real” ranch in the sense of raising animals for agricultural purposes, but a ranch made to supply Hollywood movies with horses. From the very first shot we are told that life with horses, real horses, not pony ride horses, is a constant spin, we see some horses on a strange technical machine, “a walker,” walking in circles, and then we see another group let loose in a corral running in circles. We will also see later that the ranch is big enough to give horses range to run out their anxieties if they happen to all of a sudden bolt and run off (and they have cameras to keep track of them to the edge of the property too). But, in the bigger scheme of things, the solar system as it were of the Hollywood location system, then, their ranch, Haywood Hollywood Horses, is once more removed from the set and the movie than the movie ranches, no movies are filmed there, they just supply the horses for those movies. No surprise then that they are in the business of bringing horses in to be made use of in shoots, and this is where we see them do their business.
The precipitating incident, if you will, is when OJ Sr is hit by shrapnel spat out of the UFO, and killed
So right away OJ has to deal with the fact that everyone thinks horsies are tame little things, when real horses are temperamental and high energy. He has to give a safety spiel (this also remarkably zeitgeisty since a recent Western Rust had an on location accident with a loaded gun, killing a crew member; a scene strangely anticipated in Play It As It Lays as Maria firing a gun on set is the last straw for her husband, the director, who orders her off set, as they never allow live firearms on set), This is also where we see for the first time (and it is funny that Osgood Perkins plays the director), Keke Palmer take over the movie
with her frantic joyful energy also creating a kind of whirlwind on screen
Then, then they are rejected because the horse is too temperamental, she says “I’m going up with you”, meaning that, this commute, from the city to the perimeter
is as if the DNA of their lives, in and out of it, in a spin. It is in this sequence that we see, once again, another LA movie, another highway, and then another shot of the two mountains (of creation).
And then it turns out that within their little magic valley they now have company, a sort of wild west amusement park concession has opened up
and not only does this newcomer line the road with what later are called, and will become instrumental, sky dancers, which have also become a Halloween decoration, but they have also made use of training horses, models which rear up to attract horses in some way unspecified in training. It is unclear at first if this concession exists on a further out orbit, or nearer, we shall see, but they are not alone anymore in the valley.
But, then, they do have business there. To recap, in the first scene OJs father, the original Otis, the father who built all this, was hit by some what they think is debris from a passing plane and a metal shard or coin goes through his skull, killing him. As a result, OJ is in this painful transition, he has sold ten of his horses to Jupe, the man who runs this concession, and Jupe even wants to buy the ranch. They have to go to see him, and so walk through the Wild West amusement park to his office. It is quaint and entirely fake. That is, it is not like a set in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), though it is amusing that another movie bounces off that trope, and it is unclear to me if the site was a place where an original historical town once existed which then became a ghost town which then became a concession, this looks built from scratch ersatz and in its fakeness is amusing, more so as a Black woman walks through it, not too often seen at high noon in the original cinematic version of the Wild West.
All of the auteur film critics, educated in the arthouse aesthetic of the 70s, latched onto the fact that the Haywood ranch derives from the fact that Haywood made a point that his great great grandfather was the Negro jockey seen in Edward Muybridge’s stop action motion picture one hundred fifty years ago. Thus, this is a rationale for a Black business owner claiming prototypical grounding in the business and on the land. This, saith the color fanfarists, reclaims for African Americans the truth of the American West. Maybe so. But, in fact, it is much more likely that this sort of appeal to primeval LA and its early days as a site of the movie industry is more a legend than a fact and plays a part here only in serving as a dream machine, that is, a plausibility enhancing device, giving credence in this world to a fantasy that might only exist in their father’s mind. If the father believed in all this as true, and the pictures inside the Haywood house indicate maybe so, then that means that as to LA spiritualism he lived in a state of magnetic sleep, an awake mind hypnotized by the wonder of the place and therefore requiring a myth to solidify his claim on it. Whether or not this is any more real than the highly problematic derivation of Jupe’s decision to put down roots here is played with, never answered. But it may be that as with Jupe, his occupation grounding by a trauma, their claim might contribute to an original sin that made this valley a strange place that might attract UFOs (if you venture into the UFO world, there is Skinwalker Ranch, and other occult or UFO-attractive places, like the San Luis valley south and east of Denver, CO, that is somehow believed to innately by the very nature of the land, the lay of the land, attract UFOs. These myths then put down the tap roots.
But there is another DNA in that story, and how it wound its way into the minds of its children. If their claim is based on an invention of movies and of photography, that would seem to bind them to photography as much as to horses. And it is likely that in their mind they shuttle from one to the other to make a living. OJ has stayed behind to tend to the ranch and horses, Em (Emerald) has gone to LA to lead “the life”, trying to be an everything related to the film industry.
Peele is impeccable in his staging, and after he signals to her “c’mon” after she is cruising the old west town they have an encounter on the steps, he telling her not to bring all her side shit into it, and she is like, “first of all (the eternal cry of the struggling fillintheblank!) this is my side shit, to that”, very funny, and nicely staged on the steps on the side of a building.
But before this, a tie-in to photography. It could be argued that Muybridge lead to movies, but it is also true Muybridge set up some very strange stagings to as if make photography work on a machine level. And Thom Andersen argues in Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975) that Muybridge’s advances ended up as a cul de sac that did not, in fact, lead to cinema, that happened when film was invented.
That is, he created a Strange Camera, a type of strange picture room. I am currently running through the stages of imagination at play in spirit photography, as it skirts mesmerism, then moved out into its own, between 1840 and 1930, so this too hits the spot. And the thing is, where some of Muybridge migrated was in the making of odd in-between dohickey cameras, that is, dream machines, which, while not catching on as standard tech, became as if devices by which dreams were made real. And it is in fair grounds and side shows that a number of channels of strange photography developed, all the way down to the photobooth. The old town here has a doozy. It is that age old trope of horror, a deep well, and it is made to be an amusement by having a whole circumference of the base of the well lined with cameras, to, for a nickel, flash a picture of the guest peering in over the well, as people always did in old Westerns (and many horrors movies from Annabelle Creation (2017) back to Lust for a Vampire (1971)). And Em peers right in, she is fascinated, her mind is spinning, it says something to her, that well, the spin in it. Another choice moment.
Jupe it turns out is a former child star who was “the Asian kid” in a 90s sitcom that Em watched when she was a kid. She is amazed to meet him in person. He has memorabilia all over his walls, the walls of his office, meaning he loves to talk about it, even as OJ wants to get down to business. They are wrestling between OJ thinking he can buy the horses back, and Jupe just wanting to buy out his ranch (since as I imagine it they exist in a solitary push-pull in this valley I actually had a toad road formation form in the Land of Nod in my head this morning, figuring it out how the transition could be made good for both, Jupe telling OJ you keep the house and a perimeter, I will run the farm from a house I build way over here on this end, you get status quo, I get the trouble of owning). So, a figure eight forms.
Then things escalate as Em sees a Mad magazine cover about a crazy chimp, and is amazed, you’re that?
Not only is he that, he is the Asian kid we saw hide under the table while the Chimp went crazy on set, killing his costars. Jupe now exposes his near madness on this issue, though he never explains why he made this career decamp, by letting them in to see a secret room, which is like a little museum commemorating the thing that traumatized in his youth. By art and commemoration, perhaps, a trigger can be undone? It in any case is a classic example of a Basement Lab, or Man Cave, expressive of the intensity of his reactive-avoidant ego, suggesting by trope going way back that he is somewhat crazy. The museum has some bad sculpture, a white plaster figure with a Hawaiian shirt on, some movie stills and, then, you did not see this at the beginning, in the prologue, but it was there, a shoe standing on its back heel, upright, as if by magic, this become then the talisman of him having survived, a miracle thing he saw in the middle of the trauma which he latched on to, and which he now keeps in his heart as his primary talisman of personal luck and survival (his responsion).
He mentions that the Chris Kattan monkey scenes in SNL in the 90s were based on this monkey, and it seems that he personally appreciated the over-the-topness of Kattan’s performance as a sort of purging for him of the trauma. It’s real, whether or not it sets into fiction this way is a moot point, (alas, I do remember these, and my kids liked Kattan and Ferrel in Night at the Roxbury (1998) too).
so, fun, but worrying.
One writer found Jupe’s way of dealing to be disturbing, in a way, making, in fact, a museum to it. In fact he was deeply traumatized, under that table
He watched, as we come back to this scene, several of his cast mates murdered by the berserk chimp
But in the middle of it all there was a miracle form, a shoe somehow torn off his friend, who might be the burned woman who appears at his shows, balanced on its end, a miracle. Later, OJ asks Em “what is a bad miracle?” nemesis? a curse? I toyed with the word spiracle, or a Kakoreka (Mad eureka), that is, something magic that happens during a crisis that you latch onto to concentrate on it for you to keep your wits about you as you are in terror, and this shoe is it, this shoe, even more so, might be the origin of the UFO
And, then, sure enough, he is like Lorena Bobbitt, in the 90s, others, celebrities for a horror only, who somehow make a living from it, and enshrine themselves, bronze themselves forever on the place of sacrifice, scapegoat of the world, with a serious case of survivor syndrome. So, the shoe ends up in the museum to his tragedy, for him to tell the story again by, with spotlights, crazy
And, then, to create as if an alibi formation around it, to disguise his madness from the world, he becomes in his post-acting career, like de Niro as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), who ended up reciting poems in nightclubs, the maestro of an old west town (and while most audiences still today, even now, when the Westerns history of Hollywood is getting a going over, might be surprised by an Asian being interested in the Wild West, well, as at least spaghetti Westerns knew, and know, the Chinese were imported as laborers very early in the history), And it is named Jupiter’s Claim in the style of self-starters in the Old West, hell, even Charles Manson exploited the aura of old mining towns to convince the Family that the city of gold at the bottom of the bottomless pit below Death Valley was real, classic Dream Machines of mining ruins, and it was a claim, your right, your claim, that was enough
And, of course, in standard pomo style, the site has been set back up with empty frameworks on the left of the movie studio
But the Out Yonder means that beyond that gate, in the original design and intent of the set up is the UFO. That is, Jupe knew about the UFO, somehow, before OJ, and acted on it, indeed, OJ has become aware of his strange neighbor putting on very strange, and loud, lots of echoing in this valley, UFO shows at night
And though he is slick enough with OJ and Em it is also clear that if his wife has to use pressure points on him to snap him out of lapsing into a sort of fugue hypnotic state, perhaps magnetic sleep for real, he is clearly deeply traumatized and it is his trauma that has brought the problem to paradise, and attracted, theoretically, the UFO
That night, we get down to business at the ranch. And the business is that OJ does not quite believe that it was a passing plane that shed debris on his dad, killing him. He hears sounds, is wary, then Ghost, his white horse, runs off, there ARE noises. The worst of the noise, counteracted by Em dancing, is the shrieking that he hears in the sky, Then the electricity waffles for a bit, she gets frightened, and next day, they are at a massive electronics store in a mall not far off, and as a place of nowhereness not that different from the parking lot under the Big T in Play It as It Lays (1970), to get a full security system. By this point Em is full of excitement, as she now has a new get rich quick plan, get “the Oprah shot”, that is, she believes that there is a UFO about, and if they get the shot that will make them famous. Which means that the mythos of the original photo jockey is ingrained as if into the DNA of their mindset, salvation by photography. And so they have no problem shopping for a major security system with all sorts of cameras. The attendant, Angel, who will become a character, because he is into UFOs, has a funny line, when OJ asks him is the installation difficult, he is like, “for me, no, you are not going to know how to do it”. Funny. The purpose of the set up is to show us in full daylight the full domain of their ranch world. They basically exist inside a circle of mountains in a shallow valley. It is ambient
I return to a familiar place, almost. This is not, however, a valkyrem, a special event place saturated with death. But it is a sort of enclosed, tropaic space, a Hidden Valley, where magic can happen, and which for some reason attracts UFOs to earth. When all the menace of the craft or being bears down on Em in the house later, I call this space the Tarpeiion. By putting it under surveillance from one end to another, they have as it were translated the Well Camera in the Jupe’s Claim over their whole domain. It is now a photographic set up, just like those strange setups Muybridge made.
That night the drama continues. OJ is haunted by three little aliens which turns out to be the kids from Jupiters concession, messing with him. But take it as Peele’s special will that he makes a scary scene of this false positive jump scare. Not only does it serve to again map out another space spinning round him, the stables, it is quite good, but serves to lay the groundwork for a real haunting.
On edge, OJ now sees things for real. There is a column of dust that shoots down from a cloud. He sees that a cloud is stationary, but also that there is something in it
While Em is on the roof trying to get a praying mantis off the camera so they can see, this first night of trying to get the money shot, he is in the barn, he hears a whistling, a galloping, the camera spins gazing up from behind the chinks in a barn wall. This is not only a venetian blind effect bespeaking the gray area uncertainty of what is being seen, but it relates as well to Eli’s spare church in There Will be Blood, which he made use of to express his will to exorcise a demon. Here the camera spins around through a venetian blind effect and it is up above on the left that OJ sees for the first time a flitting form passing between the clouds above. He now knows that they are under attack. As to the aesthetics, this sort of one two three removes from a full sighting, to break the ice of the nightmaring, making of this night the first nightmare, follows pretty closely Lovecraft’s sense of the visuality of the unseen. It is very well done, but likely to pass by without notice in a movie so full of such scenes.
But, then, I almost fell out of my chair. Last week, intrigued by the degree to which spirit photography influenced the film making of James Whale, from the Black Country, UK, I watched Hell’s Angels (1930), and not only marveled at the odd dreaminess of a movie straddling the silent and talkie eras, but the zeppelin scene, showing a craft coming in and out of the clouds, and in blue tint, magically, separated from the rest of the movie.
And then being an influencing machine (Tausk), that is, a machine expressive of the paranoiac schizophrenia of the POV, it features a mad scenario where men commit suicide to lighten the load, dropping through a great vagina
And, to my shock, not only does the first sighting of this alien borrow heavily from that Hells Angels sequence, but the insides of the “animal” in the sky also corresponds to the strange vagina as bottomless pit in that craft as well.
The fact that this scene of discovery, the first real scare, mimics in its look the zeppelin scene in Hell’s Angels could be just a coincidence, brought to you by the limits of the human imagination, which sooner or later repeats things others did. But then, consider this, in addition to the zeppelin scene, which was filmed over Ross Field, in Arcadia, CA, which Is over east of Pasadena
heading out to the San Bernardino valley into the desert, which is, if I recall, the route that Maria in Play It as It Lays took to head out of town in the final spin in that novel. Thus, on that same latitude, so to speak, heading out of town, as Spahn Ranch
Ross field was created southwest of Arcadia to house troops prepping to ship out in World War 1, 1918
wiki acknowledges that after the war the camp faded in use, used only for balloons, and that the hanger sequence in Hells Angels was filmed there, and here is a map, not unlike the map that Em will present to all later in this movie
and some weird ballooning shit did go down at this latitude out from the center
there was even a balloon school, times past, dream machines
another airplane crash scene was shot at Iverson Ranch, which is almost next door to the later Spahn Ranch up in the Santa Susanna Pass, long since the Reagen highway
which is right up there on the way to the next valley out, where Agua Dulce is, upper right
But the real psychogeographical pull of the movie is from the Santa Paula canyon, which is, again, right up in the same latitude
But, now, gather all this up, to create as it were a profile of a legend, and the legend is, cursed movies that killed people in the making, and almost killed the maker in the making, a lore which goes way, way back in Hollywood, and which Peele is clearly buying into, as especially Jupe is the unwanted neighbor who brings this bad ju ju their way; and one final detail, one of the pilots that was killed in the movie was a simply killed by accident delivering a plane for the Oakland shoot, to a base in….Hayward, California, it’s a real place
and Hayward and Haywood sure sound like they want to echo in the same echo chamber of evil Hollywood Hollywood Babylon lore. So, I think there IS a known conscious connection between the first scary scene of seeing the UFO dart in and out of the clouds, and the phenomenally otherworldly paranoid vision of the zeppelin sequence in Hell’s Angels (1930), which I would not even have seen previously if not for my interest in spirit photography zigzagging from the Crewe Circle to Old Dark House (1932), to then consider James Whale’s other work, including his contract startup work on this film (But he did the talkie sequences, not the zepelins). Still, deep story for the lore of the haunted movie production, and the lore in general of accidents taking place filming movies. It is part of the honeycomb of offscreen interests boiling under the surface of the movie.
Hell’s Angels (1930) was most notably a hit because of the dogfight scenes at the end, which were filmed over Santa Paula Canyon. The sequence here bespeaks, with cameras all about now, that they, in their DNA, as it were, live inside the gaze of the camera, and with a sort of inherited paranoia think that they are being watched by what Jupe will call the Viewers (not the watchers). To see their paranoia made real of course shocks them into action. This is as if, from the ur story of Muybridge, through the well camera, and other strange cameras, to the quest for the Oprah Shot, now for it to be real, it is as if they are living out the haunting of their genetic lineage on the site, also now haunted.
And, indeed, the next thing they do is call up the director of the commercial, Anders Holst, whom they come to call Antlers, or Ant, and we find in him all but the opposite end of the spectrum Man in Black, and that is that he is has a soul split between doing work to make money, and then doing what he wants to do, a diehard hippie and documentary filmmaker, and we find him in his houseplant jungle, bespeaking intense paranoia, spending all his days compulsively watching old time nature films of large animals devouring each other. This situates his eye in a valkyrem, that is, a landscape saturated in death; but it also makes of him a connoisseur of the science film always shown in a sci fi movie, to give reality to an occult occurrence; and it suggests, like Mary’s mother in Lair of the White Worm (1988), transfixed as if by a snake charmer to a TV scene of a belly dancer, he is obsessed with some otherworldly need. He may be a parody of Werner Herzog, hard to say, but he turns out to be an interesting character, forever searching for the impossible shot. Once again, still, fourth time, they are taking action entirely inside the lane of photography, they have called him hoping he would have the skill and a camera to get the shot, the Oprah shot.
At this point, their team forms as Angel shows up, he had been looking at their footage, and confirms for himself that it is true, that the cloud at the far right edge of the valley has not moved in all the time it has been filmed. It must be that an alien hides in the cloud. This repeats a trope I like a lot, from The Trollenberg Terror (1958), and others, Strange Invaders (1983), about the midwestern town where a sort of buslike mothership hides in the cloud; but, again, the motif struck me this time though as most closely related to Hells Angels
This I mentioned in a post today
Well, still working on getting my phone back. This I know, since the last time this happened to me I have basically transferred my whole brain to my phone, I do everything on it, so I am going to have to reprioritize like under-30s in horror movies which equate phone loss with certain death. Anyways, been wading through the deep, deep honeycomb that supports like an aquifer of all horror Jordan Peele’s excellent Nope (2022). First thing, the mainstream critics still believe that creativity has to be “original,” not in the world of genre. No one seemed to comment on the origin of the UFO, as a movie trope. I got lucky by pure chance watching Howard Hughes Hells Angels (1930). only last week and was stunned to see that the excellent reveal sequence seems to bounce off of the surreal zeppelin sequence in HA. Even more to the point, that sequence was filmed in Arcadia, CA, which is in the perimeter of sites that early Hollywood made use as on location sites, and not only is the Haywood Ranch in Nope part of that world, but its right over the mountains. Second source, one of my favorites, yep, there is a stationary cloud in The Trollenberg Terror (1959), which I actually wrote up last January because Janet Munro is clairvoyant in it. Then, too, the UFO mothership concept in Strange Invaders (1983), shows the same element, hiding in the clouds, also wrote that one up this year. For all this, the art is in WHAT YOU DO WITH IT, and Peele did much. (pics Nope, Hell’s Angels, two from The Trollenberg Terror, and Strange Invaders. it’s a trope).
We have therefore set the stage, in several steps, creating their habitus (complex mindset), a beset family, in mourning, uncertain if they will be able to hang onto their father’s legacy; ingrained into a photography prototype space and grounding, then thinking only of photographic ways to solve their dilemma, based on the fact that a UFO shot would be worth something.
But now we need to spin the figure eight again, and that is back to Jupe. My argument is that a counter space is created by turning one’s back on the culture you were being groomed in, but then to only create a ghostly or hollow form of that in depletion or dream in counteragency. That is because if you think you turn away, the fact is the turn away is likely motivated by a trauma which limits the degree to which one can really transform things. We now find out that Jupe’s space is a neurosis space, not much better than Spahn Ranch, if in a more benign form. We return for the full carnage of the scene when the chimp tore up the stage and killed the cast. He is sitting under the table watching it all. He is afraid lest he be seen by the chimp, who would kill him. But he sees it all, in all its horror, from an under the table place behind the couches of the set shot. We now see the Chimp come toward him, he is terrified.
But at this moment, the chimp reaches out his bloody hand to do a fist pump with him, and, no foolin’, Peele gives us a very twistedly tight trope of the creation, but as if between two subalterns even suggesting with a hint of ET benevolence that the chimp acted on behalf of Jupe, a minority in the cast made stereotypical. It is in a complex combining identifying as the sole eyewitness of that scene, so making fragile peace with it, and being entirely traumatized from it, so not wanting to be part of the industry, but unable to break entirely away, meaning that he ends up realizing his limits in not quite making an entirely going concern of his museum to the trauma as expressed in a wild west amusement concession. And now it is time for the show. (The chimp is shot dead in front of him too, so another layer.)
The show is sad and strange, but quaint and cool too. But he has sinned against nature too, in his reaction formation against that trauma, making the same mistake as the handlers of King Kong (1976) and others did
He has also been seeing the UFO and while OJ is in a wait and see mode Jupe jumps in for full exploitation and whatever they did before that in a Wild West show has been scrapped for a very strange amusement indeed. He has made a stage of the valley and the stationary cloud over it. He has set up the bleechers to look out over the terrain. He has set up on the stage a strange form, curtained. It turns out it is glass box in which Lucky, the horse, is located, for him I think to be fed to the beast.
This reminds me of the horror of the large game animals being fed to the monster in Jurassic Park (2001)
(this specific shot bespeaks earlier shots where we find Antlers Holst spending his time ar a desk watching old movies of animals devouring each other, meaning that he is in a cannibal state, and may be even has caught the Erisichthyon contagion. That is, he has despaired, he is now eating up others’ lives, and now he is to eat up his own. Since houseplants per se represent fear of others intruding, and that something bad this way comes, the fact that he is in his viewing sort of bunkered inside of a blind of houseplants bespeaks his advanced state of paranoia, the white malady.
and though I tend to think Holst is a parody of Werner Herzog, one writer mentioned Herzog with regard to the model for the type of character that he is interested in, like dIeter dengler (this is from the ringer)
so Holst and Jupe sort of bookend the madness of the movie, either side of OJ and Em, always on the look out for the strange, and, indeed, the few people who have showed up may think they are in for a wild west show of some sort, but it has, by Jupe’s psychosis, degenerated into something nearer to feeding time at an aquarium
which their whole valley has become, and that theme of exploitation for amusement purposes is therefore brought up. Jupe has taken a very dangerous step, but it is uncanny in its strange opportunism, that he would be alright with this. And what he has done is invite a smattering of enthusiastic no doubt UFO fans to sit and watch the UFO in that cloud come in over the ranch to then suck up the horse, let out of his mousetrap for audience entertainment.
rmarts 