Wen 丨 Aver Arsenic
Jordan Peele's third film, No, is the real Don't Look Up. Just like after watching "Escape from Death Town", they are no longer willing to stare at the spoon stirred by the coffee cup, and when the audience watches this film and looks at the strange clouds overhead, it will definitely make different waves.
"No"
At a time when the horror film market is very mature, it is not easy to avoid clichés and rhyme.
"No" is a film that oscillates between genres such as Westerns and thrillers, and it is difficult to classify and define. This is jordan peeler's proper meaning, and this time, he tries to explore something deeper and broader, such as the cinematography itself, the camera's gaze, and the power of the image.
To this end, he reproduced the spectacle of a hand-cranked camera, reproducing the earliest moving image in human history in 1878, the galloping horse.
Jordan Peel devotes a lot of time to screenwriting and pre-production, burying details that can produce topical mysteries, weaving metaphors for social issues, and providing audiences with after-reading talk. He never rejects over-reading his films, even enjoying them.
Peele said that audiences who love me will use metaphors to explain all the irrational plots for me.
This film is similar to Jordan Peele's two previous works" "Escape from Desperate Town" and "Us", first letting the protagonist fall into a black hole-like mystery, the film is halfway through, and then peeling back the truth layer by layer, the horror-stimulating exploration process is the motivation for the film to attract the audience to follow up continuously.
Like the two previous works, the innuendo is buried under the story, the protagonist is not the microphone for the director to expound the theme, and the hidden polysemy of the film needs to be carefully excavated by the audience, which is also a place worth recalling in the film.
The main line of the film is the male protagonist OJ and his sister's maneuvering with an unknown creature cruising in the air.
However, in addition to the male protagonist OJ, the purpose of several people in the film is worth mentioning. They are not trying to communicate with the creatures in the air, or to prevent a catastrophe, nor to defeat the behemoth, but simply to photograph it and visualize the unknown creatures in order to rely on the information gap to gain a head start, control and operate this spectacle, and thus exchange traffic and profits.
The younger sister wants to gain attention and enter the Oprah show, the electrical store clerk wants to satisfy the curiosity of conspiracy theories, and Ricky, played by Stephen Yen, is driven by the spectacle complex and desperately tries to domesticate the flying saucer. Everyone asks for wonders.
They unknowingly try to exercise the power of the image. Visualization is a prerequisite for control and slavery, and it is also the most convenient way to implement power structures in the era of mechanical reproduction. In the end, the younger sister used the retro silver halide image to photograph the true appearance of the alien through the theme park's entertainment project "Photo Well".
The photo well is photographed while the visitor is staring at the bottom of the well, which is a kind of reverse gaze. When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes at you.
This plot is an excellent meta-film reference, as a theme park amusement ride as a by-product of the film, completing a shooting that professional photographers cannot complete. Image power was successfully reproduced through imitation.
To add to that, the theme park has almost become Jordan Peel's label magic box, the theme park of "Us" hides the entrance to the underground world, and the deep well of the park in "No" achieves the ultimate blow to the control of the subject by the image. It is said that his next film will be based on theme parks. We'll see.
When the photo was successful, the sister breathed a sigh of relief, at this time the unknown creature had not yet been detonated, but for her, it was over.
At the moment of filming, the huge unknown creature was locked in the frame, and it had fallen into amber like a worm. The mystery is also the time when the suspense tension disappears. Once an unnamed thing has an image, it means that it can be measured, calculated, and compared.
In this way, it is not the inexhaustible beast Cthulhu of the human mind, nor the indescribable thing in the flood universe that makes people infinitely small. It is no longer an unknown creature.
Lovecraft, the creator of Cthulhu, once said that there is no mercy in the world than the inability of the human mind to integrate its entire contents. But today, ubiquitous images allow everyone to peek into the skins of every corner of the world.
In this era, Cthulhu could not exist.
In the film, the unknown creature does not eat the innocent irrationally, but on the contrary, it almost stubbornly follows a principle: it only attacks those who stare at itself, in other words, it only resists being stared at.
The father was struck in the eye by a coin falling from the sky while gazing at the vision of the sky, the people gazing at the unidentified creatures in the theme park were all sucked away and turned into a rain of blood, and the eyes of wild animals gazed at by the camera were constantly played on the screen.
In flashback, the little boy escapes the fate because the tablecloth obscures the view and does not make the out-of-control chimpanzee feel the pressure of staring. Movies warn us all the time, the terrible power of staring.
Watching and gazing are the basis of the suspense construction of this film. All along, Jordan Peel's suspense structure has been based on the premise of duality, the suspense of "Escape from The Town of Death" is the fear of exploitation by the exploited, "We" is the fear of the unbreakable class being revealed and broken, and this film is the fear of the photographer's uncontrollable picture when the gazer tries to break through the power of the image.
Gaze is a timeless topic in film theory, a way of viewing that carries power or desire, giving the viewer the power to possess and control from a voyeuristic perspective.
The viewer is given the privilege of "seeing", and while the viewer is reduced to the object of "seeing", he feels the power pressure brought by the viewer's vision, and self-objectifies by internalizing the viewer's value judgment.
In bentham's "Circular Prison", each person, under the pressure of the gaze, will gradually and consciously become his own watchdog, so that he can achieve self-imprisonment.
panopticon
The wrath of circus orangutans and alien creatures is resisting their objectification.
Every bloodshed in the film is caused by the oppression of the gazers, most of which come from camera footage.
"No"
So, is the purpose of the image or the film a spectacle or movement, the discipline represented by the gaze, or is it just a record? Is it to consolidate power relations, or to make the passage of passage eternal and free time from decay by reproducing, as Bazin said?
Images cannot stop decay. Unidentified creatures have been destroyed and cannot be monetized. The Oprah show that my sister was obsessed with, and the following year, she also announced that it would be suspended. After all, she could not rely on this to make a name for herself. What is eternal is only a record of the present moment, and the present becomes the past in every moment.
This is the question that Jordan Peel asked with the help of the film, which he did not answer, and the film, like its title, NOPE, no, rejects the one-dimensional gaze, rejects the single answer. Jordan Peel knew that topicality was the key to victory. It's much more important to throw up a topic than to give an answer.
This iceberg film, like Jordan Peel's predecessor, opens up multi-dimensional interpretation space, and at the same time, Jordan Peel, who has always been good at carrying bootlegs, unsurprisingly buries a huge amount of interesting details outside the main line.
In this film, Jordan Peel weakens his obsession with racial discrimination, but still does not forget the occasional gag about black and white confrontation. For example, the opening chapter deliberately uses OJ's name to trigger the association of Simpson's wife murder case, and in the middle of the line, Jordan Peel is still not addicted, and asks his sister to shout out the well-known "Run!" in OJ Simpson's advertisement. OJ，Run!」 The classic lines make people laugh in addition to nervousness.
Peel continued his consistent allegorical creation. His debut novel, Escape from Desperate Town, uses deer that have been killed and made into specimens as a metaphor for oppressed black groups, and We use the food rabbits of the underground people as a metaphor for race, hierarchy, and the bloody history of being hidden. To "No", the horse metaphor is used to be gazed at and disciplined by the wider group.
Peel, as always, pays tribute to the ancestors in film history with the path of the shadow. If you have the heart to look for it, fans can find a lot of fun in this movie.
In the film, he recreated the first moving image in the history of Maibridge's film in 1878, "The Running Horse", with a hand-cranked camera. The motorcycle drift at the climax of the film pays homage to Katsuyo Otomo's Akira, and the unknown Cthulhu-like creature borrows from the apostle in EVA, the enemy of mankind, a giant living creature.
In addition, the unidentified creature swallows the balloon and explodes, which is similar to the ending of the explosion of the oxygen tank swallowed in Jaws. If you have the impression, Jaws also appeared in his last film, "Us", and the little boy Jason wore a "Jaws" T-shirt on the beach to help create an ominous atmosphere.
It is no exaggeration to say that the grandeur of the climax of this film is definitely not inferior to that of Jaws and "Contact of the Third Kind", in order to maximize the presentation of the impossible image and its psychological oppression, Jordan Peel hired Nolan's royal photographer Hotma as the director of photography. In the film, alien objects are suspended on the roof, spurting blood from the dark opening of the hole, and the whole house is suddenly flowing in a scarlet, which is definitely the best horror scene in recent times.
But the fear caused by the image can not transcend the fear of the unknown.
Peele once said that Rosemary's Baby was his favorite movie. The baby at the center of the film never appears in the film, so that the audience's fear of the unknown extends beyond the film. Similarly, the best part of No is the first half of the object of fear that has not yet been revealed. Jordan Peel tries to delay the display of the true face of the unknown creature in order to continue the suspense. Inevitably, however, when unknown creatures reveal their true faces, it is a moment of disenchantment. This also makes the second third of "No" appear weak.
However, a personal work like Rosemary's Baby is difficult to appear again today. In the age of information overload, capital and audiences probably don't have the patience to make and watch a Cthulhu movie that is delayed for two hours but doesn't show Cthulhu's true face.
On this level, these filmmakers who risk their lives in "No" to gaze at alien objects are not the objects of staring and discipline while trying to discipline unknown creatures.
Not to mention those of us who gaze at this spectacle of capital. This is probably everyone's sadness.