#but i'm not fighing Jean Jacket sorry bro nope nope nope fuck that

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My (very late) take on Ricky “Jupe” Park from Nope.

So, when I was a small child, my sister and I were taken to a local museum by my father and it was a wholesome and fun day out for all the family EXEPT FOR THE BADLY TAXIDERMIED WHALE SHARK HANGING FROM THE CEALLING MY GOD WHAT WAS THAT THING?! It was huge, it looked and smelt terrible, the room was poorly lit and crowded and decorated to look like the bottom of the sea and you had this thing with it’s huge open maw hanging right over you all the time. I distinctly remember that I couldn’t look. I could not look. Between the, the ocean episode of walking with dinosaurs, the underwater segment of myst, and fucking books like this that were everywhere in the 90’s!

Fuck you Nigel Marven and Jasper James, Fuck you.

…both me and my sister developed a lifelong fear of being eaten alive by giant, aquatic-type monsters. And because it was advertised and a film about a brother and sister fighting off little green men, and not advertised as a film where 40 people get fucking vored by a flying Portuguese man of war, me and my sister saw Nope together in the cinema and ohhh boy 1, did I catch shit from her about it, to this day, and 2, while I love that film, it scared the shit out of me. It scared me so badly I tried not to think about it until I plucked up the courage to re-watch it this weekend.  So I’m a little late to the party, but speaking on behalf of people terrified of being gobbled up by ever-present sky-sharks (you know they’re there prove me wrong!), I’d like to talk about Jupe.

How was this not a best Supporting Actor win? Give him all the awards!

I’ve seen a surprising amount of commentary say that he’s an idiot for endangering and getting all those people killed, and that he deserves his fate, and while there is a little element of truth to the first part, I can’t fathom the second. One, no, no one deserves that and two… Do, do you guys know how story strucure works? Jupe is a foil for OJ. His life and arc mirrors OJ to a surprising degree: they’re both people of colour working in a white-dominated Hollywood system who have been held back by, or are stereotyped because of, their race. They both witness “a bad Miracle” that’s starts with a strange popping/crunching noise (the balloon for Jupe, Jean Jacket regurgitating indigestible items above them for OJ), that results in death, where a seemingly imposable thing happens (a coin falls from an empty sky, a shoe balances perfectly on one end) and where they are spared death because they don’t look the danger in the eye (Jupe has the table cloth between him and the chimp, OJ looks around whereas Ottis senior looks up and so is hit in his unprotected eye), and are traumatized. Both deal with the trauma badly, and surround themselves with constant reminders of it (Jupe’s Gordy shrine, OJ’s horses and ranch. I mean he keeps the fucking coin!). Both try to commodify and sell their trauma for fame and fortune (the paid tours of the Gordy shrine, getting that “Oprah shot”). Both also want to use Jean Jacket to reclaim the heritage that the film and TV industry has taken from them (OJ wants to save the ranch and memorialize his family’s role in the invention of film, Jupe wants to be remembered for the Starlight Lasso and not just as that Asian kid who survived a chimp attack, for taming the beast, not just surviving it). Both unwittingly train JJ to attack humans (Jupe by teaching it to associate people and music with food, OJ by putting it off horsemeat by feeding it a decoy). Both are a bit greedy, and kind of disrespectful to the dead, and nether Get Out (couldn’t resist sorry) when they should. Both put their family, friends and strangers in danger to get their payday, and both get at least one person killed doing it.

So why does the film kill Jupe and his family in such a hilariously awful way, but spare OJ and Em (and Angel: we love you Angel)? What’s Jupes fatal flaw, that greek tragic hubris that dooms him and that separates him from OJ? Why is he the one who gets vored by an angry stetson? Is it a eat the rich narrative? A critique of the idea of Asian Americans as the “Ideal minority?”. Is it killing off the comic relif, or just done for shock value? No, I don’t think Jordan Peele would be that heavy handed or un-imaginative. I think it’s something far more clever.

It’s this: from an early age, Jupe was trained to perform, whereas OJ was trained to handle performing horses. OJ thinks about how to safely provide the spectacle, whereas Jupe was trained to be the spectacle. OJ communicates with Angel in clicks and gestures without realising: OJ’s internalised how to talk to horses, how to use body-language. But Jupe...His plan, upon finding out that there’s a UAP flying around his home is to build and stage and make it into a rodeo attraction. That’s not a sane person’s reaction, that’s how Homer Simpson would try and Monetize first contact with alien life. That’s how Peter Griffin or BoJack Horseman would treat ET…. That how a 90’s sitcom character, who never got over that one role, would treat the situation.

Every time a name is mentioned in the chapter titles of Nope, the living being it refers to dies… except the title card “Lucky.” The horse (so long as the final shot is real and not Em hallucinating) lives. It (and OJ) makes it out. But then again….

Jupe probably thought of himself as Lucky, after the Gordy incident. He was probably told time and time again that he was Lucky, until he internalized it. He learnt the wrong lessons from the experience, he learnt that he not only needed to perform, but that he was special. “You’re’ chosen.” He learnt that he needed to perform, to be a spectacle, to survive a horrible industry that swallows people whole and chews them up and spits them out and occasionally has animal control shoot its stars dead if they go of script. He was conditioned, and trained, from an early age to treat everything that ever happened to him as part of a performance, until he can only talk about his own trauma in terms of how good the SNL take on it was.

And like every other trained living being taken from their natural habitat and forced out on stage as spectacle in this film, his training fails him at the worst possible time.

He’s “Lucky”, and he’s tragic, and he’s just another victim of spectacle, and that’s the scariest part of the film. ...Other than the FUCKING MURDER PANCAKE IN THE SKY OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT!?