Chimpanzee attack video8/5/2023 That the Gordy attack happens on a television set is pointed. “They nailed it better than I ever could,” he says, before launching into some unsettlingly funny praise-a brilliantly written and performed monologue that feeds into Nope’s larger ideas about America’s habit of abstracting trauma and horror into spectacle. In fact, Jupe’s dissociation from the event is so extreme that he discusses it only through the lens of a Saturday Night Live sketch about it. Like Dieter Dengler, the former Navy pilot and POW escapee at the center of two Werner Herzog movies, he’s divorced himself almost entirely from the defining trauma of his life, converting it into a rehearsed anecdote. As Peele introduces him, Jupe is a celebrity has-been who’s been dining out on this one horrible thing that happened to him, cashing in on his memories and feeding a ghoulish public obsession with them via a shrine to his time on Gordy’s Home (including that lost shoe, now encased behind glass). Nearly as disturbing as the actual flashback is the way the adult Jupe talks about it earlier in the movie-a scene that darkens significantly in retrospect. While its inclusion in Nope might at first seem extraneous, the stand-alone exercise in grisly suspense ties into the whole intellectual architecture of the movie. The scene is more than an inspired detour, though. They still see a sitcom character, even as he bashes them into pulp. It’s notable that both of the actors who we see him savage try to plead with him by his fictional name. Gordy, all dressed up with his little birthday hat, strikes a nightmarishly absurd figure-the very picture of failed domestication. There’s some pitch-black comedy to these stunning few minutes, all of it related to the folly of confusing a chimp for an actor who can be controlled or reasoned with. Peele zeroes in on the kind of absurd details that would surely linger forever in Jupe’s mind the actual opening shot, before Gordy stumbles into frame, is of a single abandoned shoe, impossibly balanced upright on the mostly empty soundstage, decorated with a lone drop of blood. If anything, the version implanted in our heads through implication and cruelly evocative sound design might be even worse. ![]() That we don’t actually see him bash in and then devour a preteen girl’s face-an act of unspeakable violence that Peele strategically obscures through blocking-doesn’t make it any less horrifying. Like the boy, all we can do is bear stunned, frozen witness as Gordy (played through motion-capture by Terry Notary, to avoid the kind of on-set incident that’s being dramatized) brutalizes his castmates. Most of the scene unfolds from Jupe’s limited perspective, with Peele locking the camera tight and low to enhance the sense of helplessness. It’s around the midway mark of Nope that Peele finally grants a sustained flashback to the attack, a master class miniature horror movie within the movie. Jordan Peele on How to Turn a Concept Into an Enduring Image How Keke Palmer Earned Hollywood’s Trust ‘Nope’ Isn’t Easily Digested. ![]() (Building the incident up in our minds before showing it to us is one of several choices that recalls the ingenious suspense of Jaws.) This flash of implied violence lends the film an immediate jolt of danger, and Peele keeps teasing the full scene with shots of the young Jupe (Jacob Kim) cowering under a table as Gordy stalks the set. He actually opens Nope with a quick glimpse of the carnage-a shot of Gordy wandering the television set he’s trashed, covered in blood. Either way, the writer-director grasps the car-crash fascination of these kinds of public tragedies, built on a refusal to acknowledge the potential consequences of working with wild animals. Peele may have drawn inspiration for this subplot from a real-life incident that made international headlines: the horrific mauling of a woman in 2009 by a chimpanzee with a résumé of TV gigs. Jupe is best remembered for his stint on a popular, short-lived ’90s sitcom called Gordy’s Home! that was promptly canceled after its simian star snapped and wreaked what Jupe describes, with an eerie detachment, as “six and a half minutes of havoc.” ![]() We learn about it from one of the survivors, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star who as an adult runs a kitschy Old West theme park town called Jupiter’s Claim. In the world of Nope, Gordy’s bloody rampage is the stuff of showbiz legend. We’re talking, of course, about Gordy the chimp. In a movie about a carnivorous amoeba of the sky, the scene that will truly leave audiences petrified and shaken is the one featuring a much more ordinary monster. It takes a grand imagination to think up a movie monster that’s never been seen before-and an even grander one to score your biggest scares without it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |