The Impossible Shot: Race, Genre, and Spectacle in Jordan Peele’s Nope

Contributions by Eric Gary Anderson, Hatice Bay, Thomas Britt, Robert Burgoyne, Emily Diane Burkett, Jack Finucane, Adam Hebert, Noemí Fernández Labarga, Russell Meeuf, Wade Newhouse, Isaiah Frost Rivera, Nancy McGuire Roche, Laurent Shervington, Amira Shokr, James Steck, Christy Tidwell, and Lauren Tocci

After the commercial and critical success of 2017’s Get Out, Jordan Peele quickly established himself as an exciting and innovative auteur with a knack for reinventing Hollywood’s genres through the lens of contemporary race relations. With a focus on horror, his films invert the racial preoccupations of an industry that, especially since the mid-2000s, has been fixated on white fears and anxieties. A highly anticipated cinematic event, the release of Nope (2022), Peele’s newest meditation on race, filmmaking, and media spectacle, did not disappoint.

The Impossible Shot: Race, Genre, and Spectacle in Jordan Peele’s “Nope” explores the director's latest film from a variety of perspectives and situates Nope within his larger work, alongside the growing body of scholarship on Peele and the political turn in post-Trump US horror. His third film offered a sprawling, epic, sci-fi, Western, family melodrama focused on those at the margins of Hollywood image making. This collection offers groups of essays organized around three interconnected themes: Nope’s interrogation of media spectacle and the politics of gazing in the social media era; its expansive intertextuality and layers of pop culture referents; and its investment in positioning animals and ecology into a narrative about media and consumption. By teasing out the nuances and complexity of Peele’s work, this volume will appeal to film and media scholars; teachers and students exploring issues of race, media, genre, or Peele as a director; and fans of horror in general.