Considering the volume of support groups available in Los Angeles, it’s interesting what topics you can’t find support groups around, or at least you can’t yet. If you’re still grieving your Goldendoodle a year after its death by misadventure, you’ve got many no-doubt welcoming and nurturing groups to choose from. If you’re a man who’s in a relationship and being abused by a woman, you’re on your own. Similarly, if your life has become unmanageable thanks to your addiction to attaining or maintaining viral fame, there don’t appear to be any organized support groups available for you as of this writing. But, as a man with an entirely manageable gambling addiction, I’d wager there will be soon.

Nope, the new horror-comedy auteur-de-force from Jordan Peele, is a sprawling, complex film about a lot of different things. It’s full of deeply embedded riddles and references that will delight hardcore film buffs for many repeated viewings to come. It’s a righteously funny film with a few star-making performances, some truly gut-churning imagery, and a gruesome view of the baseline nature and probable future of humanity. It’s informed by everything from the history of Black marginalization in Hollywood through the social commentary of Guy Debord and George WS Trow. And it’s a grim satire of the lust for going viral and the hungry ghosts who thirst for digital infamy the hardest.

Nope is, among other things, a center-and-eccentrics comedy focused on OJ, a bedraggled but stoic legacy Hollywood horse trainer who refuses to own a smartphone, annoyed by his try-hard sister Emerald (Keke Palmer), engaged in a dubious business relationship with traumatized former child star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), and collaborating with alien-obsessed electronics-store employee Angel (Brandon Perea) to document some strange comings and goings on his ranch 40 miles north of LA. 

Much of its conflict revolves around the eeriness of perpetually watching and being watched, the mutually harmful relationship between The Spectacle (which is related to, if not the same thing as, The Abyss) and all who look on it, and the zero-sum nature of gleaning meaning from the sense of being seen, which may be the major pathology of our age. Even OJ, who is depicted as a “Black cowboy” archetype and mostly wants to survive and be left alone, finds that the watchers enjoy his vulnerability the most, and not in a wholesome way.

Peele’s movies deep-fry his crack sketch-comic sensibilities in blast-furnace anger, and Nope is his angriest and funniest. The pain is real, which makes the comic conflict electric. 

As much as they want to see and be seen, his characters are all hiding from something. Emerald’s disorienting high-speed patter and innumerable side hustles fail to offset her creeping sense of disempowerment and exhaustion. Angel’s fixation on aliens distracts him from his less hopeful obsession with an ex. Jupe can only access his traumatic memories through an erotically charged fascination with the comedy stylings of “Chris fucking Kattan,” and his quest to maintain his E-list level of fame drives him to Uncut Gems depths of humiliation. When the characters find their lottery ticket, they have to hide it from all the other addicts who show up to swipe it. The Men In Black are goons from TMZ.

Nope is a pessimistic film, and it’s a warning. It suggests that, although it’s not unhealthy that we want to convince ourselves we matter, our sense of being seen and taken seriously will not be fulfilled if we keep bowing to systems designed to prey on us, which are working as designed – at least, not without killing us in the process, if it hasn’t already. My hope for Nope is that a few of the self-destructive viral-fame addicts on my turf will see themselves in it, start support groups, and find community with each other that “the viewers” can’t and won’t provide for them.

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