I returned home from work leaving a pile of project papers and funding applications, to meet a pile of films, plays and exhibition concepts that are yet to be born. This is the life of a producer, writer and curator and I wouldn’t have it any other way. To be an artist is to constantly question your own humanity. The joys and terrors of life. As I settled down for another day, I scroll through social media. It is Oscars season. The film industry is aflame with who got nominated. What films made the cut to get their labour gilded in gold? And who, despite going through the same artistic processes, didn’t?
NOPE, unfortunately, got no nominations. The discourse was often filled with love and appreciation for Jordan Peele’s third instalment in a career, which I can only understate, is going really fucking well. There was one element of the discourse that troubled me somewhat though. This is based entirely on my own opinions of the validity of awards, their function and their relationship in the heavily commercialised art world, but these thoughts have been brewing so heavily, I had to get them out.
From a commercial perspective, you can absolutely say NOPE was erased in the Oscars, the most prestigious award in the film industry. Nonetheless, I wholeheartedly disagree that this mainstream erasure will have a lasting impact on the film’s legacy or has indeed removed arteries from the heart of the film.
Jordan Peele’s NOPE is a commentary on the very industry that has tried to diminish it. It managed to searingly critique the mechanics of fame, the process of human life becoming a commodity and the psychological tendrils that attach to that to such a point, people would endanger themselves to catch it.
The very intention of framing the culmination of the goal in the film in a single shot or video clip is a
cleverly underrated detail. To know the carnage and destruction of the beast, and still walk into its mouth with everything you hold dear; in this case, Daniel Kaluuya rides a horse, the family’s livelihood, after having a fair few of them devoured, with Keke Palmer filming the celestial but terrifyingly tunnel-visioned creature, encapsulates the industry to a T.
Smiling at a society that would rather we didn’t exist because we know, we are a benchmark in history of the time we were alive.
For that is the life of an artist. You have to fall in love with your art and the process of making it. The intricacies and the replotting. The characters who speak to you in the dead of night remind you that the work never leaves you. If you should facilitate an environment where your soul’s inner workings are put into our 3rd dimension, the vulnerability of visibility and your art being viewed is both exhilarating and incredibly scary.
But it comes down to this. Art much like a soul is difficult to categorise and unequivocally commodify. As the buzz wears off after the Oscars, films and art carry on. Until next year. We work and work and work, year in and year out. We have all the time in the world. The Oscars but one night. We are mightier than the sums of the academy.
And our work lives on, long after awards cease to exist. As will NOPE and every film ignored by the academy. What matters far more than the establishment of industry professionals that make up the academy, is the people that watched that film and every other horror film awestruck in cinemas all around the world.
It’s not wasted on me that the statue which makes the much-coveted Oscar is based on a Knight. Designed by MGM’s art director at the time, Cedric Gibbons, it was attempting to make a statement as a badge of honour. It would say plainly, you were a crusader in the industry. Horror then fits the bill time and time again. A genre often misunderstood. Still as impactful as the day Mellies arguably made the first horrific impact on moving image with The House of the Devil in 1898. A genre so resilient it took on the state in the video nasties era and prevailed. With the memories of the most iconic representations on screen ringing in my head, you can say from a commercial standpoint, NOPE’s snub at the Oscars is indeed mainstream erasure. Still, Robert Englund, Shelley Duval, Lupita Nyong’o, Duane Jones, and Bolaji Badeyo, reach their hands into the brain and heart, begging the question, why should we care? We’ve survived and we will continue to.
As a unit or a family, horror creators have indeed survived some of the worst censorships and pressures on the art form from conventional society since its inception. Infinitely though, we rise to the occasion, making scorch marks on the underbelly of life. Saying things society is too afraid to say. Facing fears society is too terrified to address. Bearing the questions of the human condition. Crafting a home for those societies have cast out. Yet we are still ignored but never erased by the establishment.
However, we continue to work, as we always have, leaving screams everywhere we go. Smiling at a society that would rather we didn’t exist because we know, we are a benchmark in history of the time we were alive.
We know the secret that future generations will look at our work to answer questions of societal fears and the temperature of the period we lived in. So to continue to work is to continue to rebel and NOPE is exactly where it should be.
