horror or comedy? Nope.
It’s a scene that is characteristic of Peele’s films, which reject hard distinctions between comedy and horror. As in this scene, the difference between the two is often one of magnitude rather than substance. When he punches the lock, everyone in the theater laughs. When the windshield breaks, people jump. The mismatch between the situation and the solution is funny at first—until the situation violently reestablishes itself.
Comedy turns to horror, and vice versa, on a sliding scale of peril; what often differentiates them is the stakes of any given imbalance: between reality and a character’s response, between danger and attempts to quell it. For instance, the oft-quoted Crocodile Dundee (1986) line “That’s not a knife… That’s a knife” is comedy. The famous Jaws (1975) quip—“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”—is horror. In the former, it’s revealed that they were never really in danger. In the latter, it’s revealed just how much trouble they’re in. Comedy trivializes danger; horror insists on it. In combining and conflating the two, Peele’s films expose core horrors in things we find silly and silliness in things we find scary. A more representative line for Peele’s work would be “Here’s Johnny!” from The Shining (1980), where resituating pop culture turns our familiarity against us, into fear.
In Get Out (2017), “I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could” at first plays for laughs; but, as the film progresses, becomes ghastly self-justification. By ratcheting the racist chitchat of white liberals up to body horror, Get Out suggests that there is a relationship between what we merely cringe at and what we should recoil from in horror. This is Get Out’s central conceit: taking casual racism ad absurdum, in order to better illustrate its rotten nature.
In Us (2019), the bodysnatching project of Get Out becomes a larger reckoning with the American underclass. Us is a more interesting film—and, I think, a scarier one—because its universality prohibits caricatures and easy punchlines. It also implicates its viewers more than Get Out (or, rather, implicates more of its viewers). But in both, there is a central sickness: the complacency of the privileged about the suffering that such privilege depends upon. The final scene in Us, a brutal restaging of the Reagan-era charity spectacular, Hands Across America, is a brilliant Peelean flourish. In turning upside-down a corny and well-intentioned fundraiser for starving Africans, Peele casts doubt on the event, while also delighting in its absurdity. It’s as if the truth about a thing is stuck somewhere between its potential for amusement and its potential for dread. As Peele himself once said, “when you have something idyllic and beautiful and sort of perfect, that's where true horror lies.”
Us is strewn with references to Jeremiah 11:11, which functions as a kind of cipher for the film. 11:11 resembles the paper chain dolls, the four members of the family, and the mirrored lives of the Tethered. The actual verse—“Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them”—distills the Us v. Them themes of the film. Nearly exactly alike, the thing that separates the them from the us is that the us does not heed—or even know of—the plight of them.
Nope turns its satirical focus to the entertainment industry (including the racism therein), but eschews twists and neat conceits, instead offering parallelisms and parables, along with plenty of gags and easter eggs. It’s exciting, memorable, and original. The struggle to “explain” aspects of it or litigate whether it is horror or comedy misses the point.
Nope begins with a Bible verse from another Old Testament prophet, Nahum: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” Whereas the Bible verse in Us provides a cryptic motif and a moralistic clue, in Nope, it’s basically a joke. The literal casting of filth that follows is both funny and frightening. As any Peelean spectacle—winking, bloodsoaked, deft and daft—always is.
ben tapeworm