Plankton In A Drop Of Water
For all that the landscape is made to seem eternal, a backdrop on a stage, the charm of it comes in how it is implicitly in motion. Every piece of it comes from somewhere else and is on its way to somewhere else: the trees dropping their dry organs, cheap brick cracking up underfoot, signs from the last election skating along the ground. In each such case, the pieces of the landscape drift out of their fated purposes and go to ground, deserters from an army.
The basic notion of objects having agency, and thus being worthy of human respect, seems (appropriately enough) more lively in retrospect than the specific arguments of any of its recent promoters. What tended to be the most underplayed part of the idea was exactly the most powerful one: while it is worse that arguable that a stone feels, thinks, or intends, it does indeed seem eminently sane for a person to treat it as though it did. A person doing so would be respectful, in their own way, of the forces they share the world with; maybe most importantly, they would never be alone. They could always look forward to an encounter with something with a history, not a dead sign forever speaking the same word.
There is some way out there of making a landscape that is not about installing hard forms, hard forms that look as though they should be moving. Such a landscape would be a crossroads, the kind you see in one of Manny Farber’s paintings – where a new tumbleweed is always bouncing across.
To imagine this as architecture – Constant’s, Cedric Price’s, or whoever else’s – destroys the idea before it starts. The question, then: what means would you use to try to make this landscape happen? Would it be, at bottom, a technique of selective gravity, to pull in some things and repel others? In the same way, you might put a treated mesh around a cubic foot of ocean, one that could attract certain creatures in and screen others out; that could make an altered sample of the water around it.
Such an altered sample would at once have its own charm, and be a means with which to read the more prototypical swath of reality. It would not be a depiction of that larger set of life; it would move in an analogous way, just as the motions of any one creature, watched in sufficient detail, help to explain the motions of any other creature.
Since I saw it, I haven’t gone a day without thinking about Nope. Among many other things, it is a great landscape movie; it makes a clear distinction between the hard fact of land underneath and the moveable things placed on it, from the corrals holding in horses, to the grid of tube men that Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer lay out in their valley. The monster sucks in audiences; it leaves the seats beneath them empty, untouched.
Jordan Peele’s monster is a crossroads of signification; it does not map on to any one force in an allegorical way. It acts according to laws, in this case stupid, absurd laws about who gets to look. The sane response is to refuse to look at it at all; the risky response is to find a way to look at it without being seen. This basic axiom having been generated, we can carry it around to compare it with the world that we know; it acts as a sort of accelerating enzyme, lighting up an odd set of commonplaces with power while leaving others untouched. Film, fame, domestic animals.
Or: a tube man picks up connotations of race and class, for all that it is only an innocent means to catch the eye. Being that it is a child of the 1990s, and not the 1930s; and that it gets parked outside payday lenders and head shops, and not outside barbers and ice cream shops; knowing this from everyday experience, anyone is likely to read a tube man in the same fashion, as having a stigma assigned to it. That stigma contaminates the tube man’s dance, and makes him altogether harder to look at. (It’s a hard thing that so many things tell you to look and not to look at the same time.)
Peele takes this commonplace, closes off some paths through it, and opens up others. The final result is not the film’s climactic showdown, but the viewer’s new encounters with tube men outside in the landscape after seeing the movie; experienced differently now than they could have been before. What is the inherent power of these objects? Not only to draw wrath from above; but, in the end, to match any which way with its viewers’ own powers of attention.
