Three newsletter posts in a single week? What’s the world coming to? Well, this one’s going to be a short one - I promise.
I watched Jordan Peele’s NOPE last night and loved it. I am pleased as punch with the fact Jordan Peele gets to make large-scale, weird-as-shit films that are just crammed full of the things that fascinate him, big and small. NOPE is stuffed full of small emotional tangents that aren’t necessarily germane to the specific plot of the film but are essential towards understanding the themes he’s working with. And these aren’t just quick scenes. Nope, NOPE really relishes in these asides - handling them with as much care and consideration as Peele handles the big horror set pieces. NOPE, like Peele’s earlier films GET OUT and US, feels like something that could have only come from a singular imagination. There’s too much personal obsession in NOPE for it to be anything but the work of a real creative voice.
I’m not going to spoil too much about NOPE but it’s impossible to talk about what I want to talk about without giving away some of the film’s secrets so please, for the love of cinema, don’t read any further until after you’ve seen NOPE.
Still with me? OK, good because I really want to recommend a few books and then I’ll be on my way.
Watching NOPE, I was struck by how tonally similar the movie is with the writing of another stone-cold killer of a creative voice - John Langan. In THE FISHERMAN (2016), John Langan explores grief and the journey to overcome it while painting a gorgeously detailed celebration of storytelling. The multilayered narrative deals with a widower who retreats into a new hobby - fishing. When he learns of a fishing spot in which one might reel back a lost loved one, the widower comes face to face with an incomprehensibly big and unknowable terror, the Leviathan. Langan’s novel features a story nestled within a story but his beautiful prose gives the entire package a sweet rhythm. The book often feels like an ode to the art of yarn spinning, just as Peele’s NOPE is a celebration of the mechanics that go into making a movie. That juxtaposition of incredibly detailed storytelling with creatures that melt away the very ability to use your words to describe it runs through both Langan’s novel and Peele’s movie.
While THE FISHERMAN is a great, great novel, the specific story by Langan that reminded me the most of NOPE, though, is “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky,” found in the short story collection THE WIDE, CARNIVOROUS SKY AND OTHER MONSTROUS GEOGRAPHIES. In this story, readers are introduced to a giant vampire bat-like creature that preys upon soldiers in Iraq. Like the creature in NOPE, Langan’s monster emerges from the sunlit sky with no origin, no explanation - only death and destruction. It’s a terror that comes from that place we so rarely look - upwards. It takes without warning and leaves only questions behind. “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky” is one of the best monster stories I’ve ever read and I would recommend it to anybody and everybody, but especially folks who saw and enjoyed NOPE.
If you haven’t read anything by John Langan yet, get on that! Langan’s writing is beautifully constructed prose that creates and celebrates pure, uncut nightmare fuel. Fans of NOPE are going to really dig what Langan’s is laying down.