Every year or so an article comes out like 2021’s “Astronomer Avi Loeb Says Aliens Have Visited, and He’s Not Kidding” from Scientific American, in which Loeb explains that Oumuamua, an interstellar object that passed Earth, “had been nothing less than humanity’s first contact with an artifact of extraterrestrial intelligence” of a kind that we can neither explain nor even begin to understand how to communicate with. Common sarcastic reactions to posts like this on Twitter welcome the alien apocalypse because things are so dire here or assume that these extraterrestrials will pretty quickly see what a mess humans have made and turn right around. Whereas a decade or two ago, popular culture consumed UFO/alien fiction and nonfiction1 in part due to a kind of fascination with its conspiratorial implications in works like The X-Files and as demonstrated by the swift invasion of the History Channel through shows like UFO Hunters and Ancient Aliens, the institutional distrust behind the gravitation toward these fringe topics has become mainstream in not just media but often the people running said institutions. A typical X-Files mythology episode might end with Mulder trying to convince Scully that the higher ups in the FBI are . . . lying about something. A musical sting would lead into a commercial break and viewers would sit in suspense and shock. News as a concept now has absorbed a level of spectacle and distrust where it’s unclear that media coverage of an ongoing alien invasion would or could convince a significant portion of the population that A) anything is actually happening or B) that it is something to worry about.
One of my first radio gigs was hosting a paranormal talk show basically doing an Art Bell imitation because I had a suspicion that, as a total newbie to the media world, all of the usual talking heads on the History Channel during their paranormal peak would be pretty easy guests to book. I was right. I interviewed most of the cast2 of Ancient Aliens,3 UFO Hunters, the titular prophets of a program called Prophets of Doom, many ghost hunters, and even a few 2012 doomsday preppers. While hearing claims like “Ghosts just don’t like when cameras are on—that’s why it’s hard to get footage of them” was always difficult to take with a straight face, I tried to keep an open mind. This was shortly after the financial crash, and, even though there was ostensibly plenty of change to believe in, I felt that these people were on the pulse of something, even though I didn’t initially understand what. It didn’t take long for me to realize that what they had figured out was not the secret history of the planet or the path to the hollow earth but how to manipulate media without either knowing much or believing in anything they made a living off of espousing. As I made my way through the relatively small community of alt-history and alt-news commentators, they began to assume that I was in-the-know and the conversations that happened off-mic often shifted from performance to truth. The entire operation had essentially nothing to do with good faith questioning of obfuscatory institutions, reporting news, or finding Mulder’s truth out there; it was about harnessing spectacle.
Media representation of extraterrestrial life has come a long way, something Stephen J. Dick describes in “Other Worlds: The Cultural Significance of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate” as starting from a place in the late nineteenth century where
Even while invading spaceships were the occasional subject of the developing science fiction of the time, no one seriously suggested that they were really in the skies of planet Earth. Only in the post-World War II era of nuclear uncertainty, beginning in 1947, did UFOs catch on.
And from there the depictions progressed “from the unsophisticated aliens of early 1950s films to the mature and mysterious aliens in Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.” The insidious, fantastical aliens of H. G. Wells were gradually replaced with something more mystical and utopic, perhaps the key to humanity’s transcendence that needed to come from without rather than within. By the late 1960s, Dick notes, “the primary mission of the starship Enterprise in the popular TV show Star Trek was to seek out new civilizations” and 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind redefined the accepted look and transportation of the still vaguely humanoid greys who fly around in UFOs, abducting and watching as they please.
Just as any author will inevitably imbue themself into a created work, depictions of extraterrestrial life serve as a mirror. Just how alien the aliens are and can be is the subject of Carl D. Malmgren’s “Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters,” in which he differentiates “encounters involving anthropocentric aliens and speculative encounters involving unknowable aliens,” with the anthropocentric alien serving as an overt reflection of humanity and the speculative as less obviously so, though
the relationship between figure and ground upon which perception is based abrogates the possibility of absolute otherness; one needs a background to distinguish the salient features of the foreground. Built into the concept of otherness is the idea of relationship, the question other than what? In terms of the alien encounter that what is necessarily defined in human terms.
So whether it’s a Star Trek interplanetary species visibly made up of humans with weird plastic foreheads or whether it’s Annihilation’s terraforming bear absorbing the skulls and screams of its victims, to answer the question of what an alien is in any fiction, let me quote Jordan Peele’s 2019 movie: “It’s us.”
Peele’s 2022 opus Nope is an epic horror/comedy building upon the thrills and commentary of his previous films this time on a huge canvas: a budget three times the combined cost of his previous films, majestic vistas captured largely on IMAX, and an interplanetary4 threat that both draws from your cultural expectations and uses what you’re conditioned to bring to it as a basis for its biggest reveal in another direction. As with Us in particular, it’s a lot. At face value, it’s a UFO movie. It’s also, as anointed by Richard Brody, “one of the great movies about moviemaking” and, as Saffron Maeve puts it, “American mythmaking” about the “lineage and recognition” of “an overlooked Black filmmaking family at the forefront of a work which specifically threatens their livelihood,” and a critique of “spectacle culture,” as Alyssa Wilkinson explains. Wilkinson points out that the inescapable reference point here in a film where the word spectacle is in the first title card and repeated in dialogue throughout is Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.
Debord diagnoses a world completely and irretrievably consumed with representations, which Wilkinson summarizes as an “all-consuming blanket of unreality that attracts our gaze and replaces our reality.” In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord argues that the world around him has been conquered by an “empire of modern passivity” where
the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings–figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior. Since the spectacle’s job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special preeminence once occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalized abstraction of present-day society.
Consumption and creation of images reign supreme, where we have endless content at our disposal and the difference between the real and the seen is increasingly murky—and it’s not clear that people on average prefer the real to the representation. Peele namedrops Debord’s book in an interview about Nope with Today:
Look, this is a society of the spectacle. And I think that the idea of spectacle harms us in many ways–whether it’s something we are so obsessed [with] that we give it too much power because it has a spectacular nature to it or it’s because we use the spectacle to distract ourselves from the truth, we have this very dark relationship with it.
This contradiction with spectacle is at the heart of Nope’s plot as well as its place in contemporary film as one of the few auteur-driven original projects to get studio support at a blockbuster level. If cinema, which Peele refers to as “the industry of the spectacle,” is capable of fighting off the streaming revolution and existing as a theatrical attraction beyond superhero tentpoles, then it needs the spectacle of movies like Nope to deliver big returns.
Peele explains to Today that
All the themes and characters in this movie interact or represent the media in some way . . . and obviously the nucleus of the sort of media I’m examining here is Hollywood and the selling of dreams, the selling of nightmares, the selling of illusions.
Its central character, O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya), is the most divorced from spectacle culture—a man who uses a flip phone in 2022 and spends most of his time taking care of the animals at Haywood Hollywood Horses, his family’s fledgling business renting trained animals to big productions still willing to work practically. An early scene shows that, without the working man’s credibility and entertainer’s charm of his deceased father (Keith David), productions would rather roll in a CGI horse prop than give O.J. a chance to wrangle the family animals. He has the workman’s ethic and his sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer), has the charm—but they’re struggling to find a groove that sells the goods like their dad could. Emerald has less of an antiquated sensibility toward society, often watching her smartphone like anyone else and using her energy to hustle rather than do the hard work of running a horse ranch. Instead of selling the ranch and adapt, O.J. and Emerald feel compelled to honor their family’s legacy as descendants of Alistair Haywood, the jockey riding a horse from 1878 in the real Sallie Gardner at a Gallop by Eadweard Muybridge, which “many believe is the earliest known motion picture exhibition.” Alistair Haywood is an invention, created by Peele to populate his setting, which is a launchpad for spectacular American mythmaking: the West.5
Despite the Haywood ties to the creation of the industry of the spectacle, their ranch is in serious trouble and their best non-sentimental way forward is to take their neighbor Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) up on his offer to buy the place. Park was once a tokenized Asian child star in movies like Kid Sheriff and most notably in a short-lived multi-camera sitcom called Gordy’s Home, in which a family has a pet chimp. One day on set, the chimp snaps due to a series of popping balloons6 and begins a violent, face-eating rampage before emerging from his rage, unsure what has happened. Gordy seeks comfort in a fist bump from the terrified young Ricky before animal control shoots him in the face. Park has capitalized on this childhood trauma, turning it into a career, keeping a shrine to Gordy in his office, and putting himself in the same precarious, fate-tempting circumstance for a living when he buys a bankrupt western theme park, remodels it with an extraterrestrial flavor, and performs a series of live shows feeding horses to a UFO. When O.J. and Emerald discover this same UFO eating one of their horses, they too seek to exploit the real and embrace the society of the spectacle by getting rich off of selling the impossible shot. The UFO, which they name Jean Jacket, is actually a flying organism that sucks its victims into a tight chamber slowly until they reach its center: a black screen. By enlisting the tech nerd Angel (Brandon Perea) and the seasoned cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), the crew embarks on what Peele, in Today, calls spectacalization: profiting “off of the human need to see something crazy,” to which he adds “I’m a guilty party.” Nope’s subject, target, and classification all align in this sense—a spectacle that is also a satire of spectacle culture and a condemnation of spectacalization by spectacalizing. But what movie doesn’t?
David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus on the spectacle, from which I pretentiously took the name for this newsletter, is Infinite Jest, a book about a movie so addicting that, as Wallace describes in a Wisconsin Public Radio interview, it’s
lethally entertaining, meaning watching it is so much more fun than doing anything else. Once somebody’s watched it once, they’re pretty much have the spiritual energies of a moth and want to do nothing more than watch it again and again and again until they die of, probably dehydration.
Wallace questions and satirizes whether humanity has the ability “to keep from sort of dying on couches.” He could acknowledge that “the standard agenda of any piece of entertainment is to be as entertaining as possible” and his concept of The Entertainment takes this to an extreme: the complete rejection of reality in favor of pure spectacalized pleasure, a dramatization of Neil Postman’s notion in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business that populations will relinquish their freedom much more easily through bountiful options of passive pleasure than can ever be done through a totalitarian regime inflicting fear and pain. Postman writes primarily on the concept of television as the signifier for spectacle or entertainment, though nearly all of his insights can be directly applied to internet/smartphone culture and all of which are “transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business . . . a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible.”
Park, when showing O.J. and Emerald his room of Gordy memorabilia (which he usually charges entry for), evades his trauma when asked what the chimp attack was like by instead explaining the Saturday Night Live sketch representing it. Angel, when first talking in explicit terms with O.J. about their UFO problem, interprets what he sees through lines he knows from Ancient Aliens. Holst processes their enemy through a recitation of Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater.” And audiences come to a movie like Nope with immediate (and often intentional) recall of their own cultural reference points such as Peele’s previous films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, Tremors, etc. Everything is filtered through entertainment, the real becoming a representation of a representation ad infinitum, a phenomenon Postman sees as taking command of our lives just as Debord describes in his notion of an empire of passivity. It is in this framework of overwhelming entertainment damnation that Peele fascinatingly posits that creating another spectacle is the unlikely path to salvation. For O.J. and Emerald, it’s making a consumable product good enough to be featured on Oprah, harnessing the spectacle of the real by turning it into a representation. O.J. and Emarald cannot transcend spectacalization but they can own a piece of it just like their family legacy is a motion picture from the birth of the medium that now overwhelms everything.
Chris Hedges, in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, equates the dynamic of spectacalization to the allegory of the cave:
Plato said that the enlightened or elite had a duty to educate those bewitched by the shadows on the cave wall, a position that led Socrates to quip: ‘As for the man who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow lay their hands on him and kill him, they would do so.’ We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves . . . Those who manipulate the shadows that dominate our lives are the agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers, and television news personalities who create the vast stage for illusion. They are the puppet masters.
Peele does not position himself as uniquely enlightened or elite, despite the strong commentary that grounds each of his films. His position is perhaps as paradoxical as the warning he offers through a big budget film; Nope manipulates the shadows with a glee at the possibility of illusion while attempting to communicate truth. Thematically, then, it’s not surprising that the opening credits are both the image of Alistair Haywood (the original spectacle) and the center of Jean Jacket (the personified object of our spectacle-addicted minds: an all-consuming monster that demands your attention until it kills you). Jean Jacket’s core is a screen and the central conflict for survival in every scene is the need to reject every impulse to look right at it, a struggle that many viewers likely had every time they felt a notification while watching Nope.7 Jean Jacket is David Foster Wallace’s titular movie but reimagined as a monster, though, where Wallace struggled to conceive of beating the addiction, Peele presents a possibility of taming our personified addiction, joining it through an act of simultaneous creation and destruction. The key to creation, as O.J. realizes, is to stop looking at the infinite jest, which, in Nope’s climax, means destroying it in the act of making a new spectacle. And Peele succeeds in making it thrilling to watch unfold on the big screen that we’re addicted to.
Nope works as an allegory in a broader cultural sense for the decisions an entertainment-addicted society makes. I don’t know that Peele is in an old man phase of simply yelling at kids on their phones all the time—but Nope’s repeated depiction of the struggle to not look at something awful should be familiar to anyone dread-scrolling Twitter over the past several years, anyone watching a rally full of hateful promises, and anyone seeing culture war noise drown out the destruction of a livable planet. It’s not clear that everyone has the ability, like O.J. or Emerald, to destroy the spectacle that keeps people from doing something meaningful. It’s more likely that we get sucked up into it like Park or Holst. Hedges writes that celebrities (such as filmmakers)
create our public mythology. Acting, politics, and sports have become, as they were in Nero’s reign, interchangeable. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion
Peele, like his protagonists, felt pressure after Us to create a spectacle and to add to the spectacalization of our culture through his continued filmography of a new American mythology—in part because of the state of cinema. He tells Fandango:
I wrote it in a time when we were a little bit worried about the future of cinema. So the first thing I knew is I wanted to create a spectacle. I wanted to create something that the audience would have to come see . . . So I set my sights on the great American UFO story, and the movie itself deals with spectacle, and the good and bad that come from this idea of attention.
Like with O.J. and Emerald, the allure of spectacle became the motivation for creation and the subject of scrutiny. Peele’s approach is an embrace and an expression of guilt at his own love of these types of films, of the addiction to screens he has made a career from. Just as David Foster Wallace lamented that he’d much rather watch a Die Hard marathon than read Wittgenstein, there are limits to what we can do even when we understand the problem. Nope is wish fulfillment, like any big movie.
At the end of the day, even if we can intellectually agree that our addiction to spectacle leads to disaster on a personal and global scale, any plea for humanity to rewire our brains is going to be about as successful as John Cusack’s character Craig at the end of Being John Malkovich,8 trapped inside a young girl’s consciousness with no autonomy other than a passive eternity of watching, begging, “Look away, look away, look away.”
A generous way of putting it, sure.
They classify themselves as experts.
In appearance, anyway. Peele doesn’t explore what exactly the creature is from a logistical perspective.
Or, as Michael Chau tweets, “American culture is all myth, might as well add one that includes people that have been there all along.”
A blatant, hollow spectacle used in a crucial moment as well to destroy Jean Jacket.
A mature viewer ignores the little screen because the big screen deserves your true attention. If Nope was made in the 90s it likely would inspire a series of cheap sequels like Tremors where a bunch of little screen monsters would be the villains.
Peele, a self-admitted fan of Being John Malkovich, has jokingly agreed with an internet theory that Get Out is a sequel to it, where Maxine (Catherine Keener) has created a new life for herself and taken the Malkovich method of mind control in a much more sinister direction.