Nope - Hypotheses Non Fingo

[Prefatory Remark: the following is not meant to be an exhaustive review. It constitutes my raw, initial reflections and impression of the film as I experienced it last week. I may compose a more detailed analytical review, but the film is, I believe, of such rare artistic quality that my intuitive reactions are as important to capture as it is important to produce a more considered and reflective second pass. For those readers who have not yet seen the film, I would recommend postponing your reading of this post until you see it, for I am bound to spoil some of the magic of the film itself. You are warned.]

Famously, Newton refused to offer an hypothesis about what ‘gravity’—the new theoretical entity introduced within his theory—really was. “I feign no hypothesis,” he declared, claiming only to be proposing in his new theory the mathematical form of the observed behavior of gravitating objects. Whatever else gravity “is”, here is how things act gravitationally … here is the law of the (observed) phenomena. It was almost naïve. It was brilliant.

But do we feign hypotheses for UFOs—perhaps unconsciously? This is the deeper question of Nope. And like Newton, it asks us not to … to suspend our categories for a moment, and perhaps also to laugh at ourselves in our obsessions with capturing “it” (whatever “it” is). Eluding the capture, Nope asks us to consider maybe the evasion is part of what “it” is—but no less “real” for that.

In our drive to produce the evidence for the UFO, the puzzling but elusive aerial phenomena that have recaptured the public imagination after some decades of hiatus, and which is now square on the agenda of the government and many newly formed research coalitions, have we forgotten that nature herself is the very first enigma? Have we forgotten that nature will not be long contained by our designs? That a chaos swirls in the heart of she who has for long been our object of wonder, but also of exploitation? Have we exhausted ourselves in our attempt to frame, to capture—the image, the “evidence”? Will nature always remain a kind of excessive “other”, not quite fitting into the camera’s lens—the “lens” of culture? What if the UAP is nature herself? Not an interplanetary phenomenon representing the pinnacle of some distant civilization’s long reach into the empty cosmos for the loving hand of wonder, but the spectacle of nature so intimate with us that we miss it—melted into the very clouds above our heads? Part of our environs, and so close as to be a particle of our own world—as close as the self-same electrons dancing forth at the reaches of the earliest universe, as dazzling images reflected to us recently by Webb disclose?

The point of Nope is not to demonstrate a definite thesis and so collapse the divisions between the skeptic and the believer, but to raise out of this mire a suspended third option—eliding the conventional thought-lines drawn by the scientific materialists (or skeptical “rationalists”) and the enthusiastic spiritualists who would design for us a newfangled religion out of an enigma (and perhaps this is the wellspring of true religion: an attempt to contain, to harbor, to exploit the architecture of an enigma which, in truth, only calls for the spirit of inquiry: of going inside, to connect, to know, and finally just to be with whatever is in the patient hope of one day mastering that which presents to us as first enigmatic. We may say in this regard that science is merely obverse to religion.). In other words: Nope. We’re not gonna do that. We have to say outside looking in, but to what we do not know, even as we are consumed by it—and as we attempt to consume it.

The Object in Nope refuses to be contained or reproduced as a purely technological object—a saucer. It is a very contemporary “UFO” film, in that it reverses the persistent technofantasy which is perhaps the foundational intellectual inhibition preventing true (scientific) progress on the phenomenon. Indeed, the Object in the film is a reversal—a deconstruction of the “object” in UFO: nope, it is a pure phenomenon, about which we have no understanding. It’s camouflage. The Object itself hides itself in your expectations, in your world, in your objects. In this way, Nope attains to the level of a profound philosophical and deconstructive meditation on the very concept of the UFO qua object—a supposed technology that we are forced to concede is more an ambiguous phenomenon. Hence, “UFO” reverts to the more primal “UAP”: unidentifiable aerial phenomenon.

Continuing in this direction of deconstructive reversion to the primal level, the phenomenon presents us with a kind of animality. Indeed, Nope begins with an act of pure animality, that chaos of nature herself we learn to dialectically appropriate through the convenient fictions of culture. Nature, instinct: we find the chimp on the Hollywood set as a pathetically, stupidly (mercilessly?) entrapped wild animal used as a cheap prop, awkwardly and ultimately futilely forced into the trappings (the gaudy 90s clothes) of human culture. The chimp is close enough to us, right? With the sudden and frightful bursting of (the hot air in) the balloons, we soon find a chimp touched off in a wild, murderously violent tantrum of destruction. The chimp tears up the set. Nature red in tooth and claw, as Darwin had reminded his readers: nature will not be contained by your fantasies, or your dreamworks.

But we find no better a circumstance down on the Ranch, where horses (horsing around) are trained for spectacular Hollywood exploitation. It is not cattle that this UAP is attracted by. It is horses. The events of the film are touched off by a sudden UAP encounter: the loss of a horse, leading to an earthly tremor and the raining down of all manner of metallic objects in a deadly torrent—the excessive remainder to exploitative human culture. What kills the ranch-owner by cutting into his skull but a simple, silvery disc, a coin—money, the very thing, of course, the Ranch is after with its horse-training.

It was last Sunday afternoon—another virtually cloudless, hot, dry afternoon with that infinite Southern California sun overhead. I drove out to downtown LA to see my great friend (a Greek who happens to also own an apartment just near the Acropolis in Athens). We were headed to see Nope—he for the second time, me for the first. On the drive out to see my friend for our film engagement, I somehow noticed something as new which I should have taken to be boringly familiar: a big sign atop a strangely institutional-looking building between Hollywood where I live and downtown LA where lives my friend: “The Dream Factory”. It’s a route I’ve driven many times on the frequently congested 101. I would realize later what a moment of strange synchronicity this would prove to be, as Nope turned out to be a “UFO” film that somehow also was a powerful (comedic) critique of Hollywood, the Dreamworks. The Dream Factory. The most obvious and the most familiar of scenes on that marvelous far-away Ranch was missed as where the phenomenon would end up hiding in plain sight—the cloud. Looking into the cloud (into one’s dreams), this one cloud was, per impossible, immovable, static. You’ve got your head-in-the-clouds but … that’s where your “saucer” lives. In plain sight. A frozen, immovable dream.

The object-phenomenon in Nope presented itself as a silvery disc. But was it such? Early in the film it was only glanced fleetingly, slipping into and out of the clouds, and sometimes violently rushing forth from them and down toward the ground. Frequently it is disturbingly silent. Shadow-like. At night, sometimes luminous. Plotinus—that fascinating ancient mage of a thinker—writes that the essence of a thing is disclosed in its movement, the grace of its characteristic motions. “Observe the meanderings of each thing,” da Vinci writes centuries later, perhaps himself suffused with luxurious Plotinian mysticism, now deftly converted by him to pragmatic Renaissance intellectual craftwork. “If, in other words, you want to know a thing well and depict it well, observe the type of grace that is peculiar to it”.

At one point, as the phenomenon-object tilts and rotates, we see that it is as if it’s covered by cloth, billowing slightly in the windswept California mountain plains, suggesting there’s something behind the curtain… It’s an organism (is it?), like living, cloaked origami, a hungry beast, searching. Consuming. It “processes” humanity as nature does, but spits back out from its interiors an excessive remainder—humanity’s extras, its manufactured products: jewelry, watches, coins. The origami phenomenon is nature taking back into herself  only what is part of herself, leaving the rest as useless empty symbol of what amounts to a deadly evanescence (culture, canceled by the sheer impenetrability of the phenomenon as enigma).

The object-phenomenon is like an anti-organic other (almost a direct opposite to the reactionary Romanticism of the Naturphilosophie), uncategorizable. It is at the same time very anti-sexual: the aperture or opening into which it brings humans and other animals of the earth is the antipode of the sexual encounter which (biologically speaking) leads to the production of human beings. Rather than being born out into the world (out onto the Earth through the birthing canal of the mother), this object draws you inside and up through a passage in which you are consumed and removed from the world—taken from the Earth while simultaneously becoming part of the object itself, which then leaves all your belongings behind, spitting them violently back to Earth, where they are capable now of fatally injuring the living.

This phenomenon will not be captured on camera. It’s not that kind of thing. Stop trying to frame it, contain it, and exploit it, the film seems to suggest. Whatever “it” is, it exceeds technological enframing, it exceeds the conveniences of culture, including language, and frustratingly evades therefore human appropriation. Nope: can’t film it. Nope: no “evidence”. What exactly are we to see in the wishing-well snapshot taken towards the very end of the film—but yet another ambiguous photo, endlessly debatable. There is no “money shot” which is what the main characters are all, in classic Hollywood fashion, after. And yet the film reverses the typical logic the skeptical seek to demonstrate: the characters are not out to make money from a hoax. No(pe), they intend to make it from the real McCoy. A persistent fallacy of the skeptic is that some UAP footage is fake because it was a hoax for fame or money; but what if (in a playful Hegelian inversion) it’s the very opposite? What if the real is the “hoax” itself—and this be the true money shot? It is significant therefore that in order to truly capture the “raw” of this real world—of nature as it is—the film forces Hollywood to revert to its primitive technological origins (unpowered hand-cranked cameras) in an effort to try and capture the real of what is always beyond the Hollywood fake: nature. Thus arrives onto the scene, after some coaxing, the eccentric rogue Hollywood camera wonder-worker Antlers Holst with his hand-cranked filming camera, ready to capture the raw of nature, enframing and thus rendering exploitable the unidentifiable—the impossible which he is supposedly known for being able to capture on film.

Here we must shift registers, for Nope is not strictly a UFO film. The UFO/UAP acts as a cypher, a dual commentary both on the obsession with images, evidence and the technological enframing of what may very well perpetually elude such easy and familiar conceptual schema, and a reflexive commentary on Hollywood and the cinema itself in its obsession with the exploitable spectacle. The object-phenomenon is another cinematic eye, an aperture (indeed, its “mouth” is just that: a puzzling but mesmerizing aperture that from an ovular slit opens into a perfectly square exploding palm of an orifice—a graceful paradox). But the eye is totally other. Something which cannot be captured, which refuses capture. It doesn’t see you so much as it acts to consume you. That is, it does to you physically what Hollywood does to nature ideationally and imaginatively. The object-phenomenon is itself like a Hollywood prop, concealing itself, but in its concealment discloses what it really is: a real fake, as opposed to Hollywood’s (vulgar) faked real—which of course (from a psychoanalytical register) leads to Hollywood’s obsessions with filming, framing, capturing, “documenting” nature or the Real in reverse: reproducing and consuming the Real and spitting back out the unreal. The object-phenomenon central to the film reverses this logic entirely: it takes in the unreal and leaves behind the excessive remainder of real human life: the “real” of human culture. A reverse birth: consumed to death.

Of course, the film should not be read as a new explanation for the UAP phenomenon but rather as a reminder that, as we don’t understand “it”, we should be wary of easy categorization or unwittingly limiting the phenomena by an uncritical technological enframing. But strictly speaking, from what evidence there is, the manner in which UAP present themselves to us is highly varied, showing great morphological variation between incidences. Thus, we should never seek one grand explanation for all UAP. Hence the film’s critique (such as it is) is adequate only as far as it goes. In some cases, a technological presentation is apparent (but we should always wonder, as the film prompts us: but is it?), and thus a reasonable first pass. But we should take the spirit if not the letter of the critique presented by the film very seriously: we must ask what ‘technology’ is. What are we doing to the phenomena when we insist on using ‘technology’ as a framing concept? What might be lost of the phenomena when we do this? What will we fail to see? It is a hard question.

The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game

The object disclosed within the cinematic bounds of the film itself suggests a kind of inversion or hyper-realized (hyperbolic) version of Naturphilosophie, the “organicist” movement that flourished in German philosophy in the wake of Kant’s brilliant critique of science and philosophy. Its main proponents were philosophers like Hegel and Schelling. It was a product of the “Romantic” reaction to Enlightenment “Rationalism” (although this characterization is doubtless unsubtle to the scholar of philosophy). It really amounted to an attempted new philosophy of matter, or rather, a critique of the debasement of matter by strict scientific rationalism which seems to banish “spirit” or mind from nature, leaving only “dead” matter-in-random-motion as the basic structural component of all things, both living and non (suggesting of course that all things whether alive or not reduce to the same things: what is essentially a dead thing, unintelligent, nonliving matter itself). So, the object-phenomenon in the film is an opening for a profound question: what is matter? And hence the object is effectively a (meta) commentary on our own perhaps rather impoverished conception of matter—something we too quickly make conform to purely technological conceptions (matter, that is, is rendered suitable to mechanism, leading to the view that mechanism is the required philosophy for matter). Or it is a commentary on our unjustified implicit assumption that technology is distinct or distanced from nature and the organic? Perhaps the technological/natural divide is not so much an essential difference as it is a superficial difference of style—not necessary but rather quite contingent. We for peculiar reasons have (unconsciously?) constructed the technological to be (seemingly, awkwardly, destructively) opposed to the natural, but it needn’t be so (need it?). We might imagine here the science fictional worlds of Octavia Butler, or perhaps even Paul Shephard with his bio/organic technologies. (The mostly unread cultural critic and historian Morris Berman writes at length on the question of searching for this contingent alternative in a series of probing works—products of their time, but still invaluable as exercises in the mechanics of alternative thought-scapes.). But are we not headed into this direction already—albeit a nightmarish form of it? Is this biotechno merger not already our dream, but one twisted to suit our ‘machinist’ techno-fantasies? To suture the machine to the man, as it were? The cyborg: biology becoming ‘machinic’, machines becoming biological. Working the wire directly into the human, closing the gap between technology and nature within human nature itself. Is this Musk’s fantasy—which will undemocratically be enforced as the will-to-power of future biotech firms pushing their wares on the unwary? (History, I must admit, is anything but democratic.) The evolution of the techno-natural divide can go in any number of ways…

What a beautifully anticlimactic ending does Nope present us with: after the phenomenon consumes the bloated fake human, the silly cowboy float (filled with nothing but gas), sent into the air in a desperate attempt to arrest the chaotic rampage of this object-phenomenon, the object—by now all blowing sheets, like an elegant wind sail (La Pinta on the clouds)—explodes into … well, nothing but torn curtains drifting back down to the Earth. There is nothing behind the curtain: the curtain hiding something “real”, which we all want so badly to see (to have “disclosed” to us) … the curtain-hiding-something is the real itself. The UFO phenomenon is said to be an enigma wrapped inside a mystery… swaddled by a puzzle, packaged inside of a myth. But in the center, like with a Kinder chocolate, what we desire is the treasure, the secret, the Socratic ‘agalma’ that seems to be waiting hidden inside. But what if the hiding is all there is? Or is all that will be given to us? Or all that we are able to experience? What if the hiding just reflects our peculiar obsession with disclosures, revelations, dramatic truth-bombs that show all? Thus, beautiful crass Emerald Haywood, sister to the somewhat hapless but sincere rancher, tempts the cinematographer Antlers Holst: this is real, man, come and get it. If anyone can capture the impossible, he can, Emerald hopes, confident. Yet when he finally arrives, what do we find? The cinematographer with his hand-cranked machine is pulled up and into the object of his filmic fascination, brought into the reverse birthing canal to himself be consumed to death for the life of this object, his camera spit back haplessly to the Earth, crushed, red (baptized) with his blood.