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Jordan Peele / North Mankato, Minnesota : Capstone Press, a Capstone imprint
Comedian Jordan Peele won an Oscar for his movie Get Out. Read more about how he became the first African American screenwriter to win this award!
Book
Capitalizing on Animality: Monstrosity and Multispecies Relations in Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022)
One amongst many of the defining characteristics of so-called ‘late stage’ capitalism are human-animal relationships that have become acrimonious, hostile, or even monstrous in nature. A foundational premise of monster theory, and one that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s seminal 1996 edited collection of the same name suggests, is that the construction of the monster in popular culture is fraught with the boundaries that constitute the society that has spawned them; the monstrous body “exists only to be read” (p. 4). Bringing together the theoretical insights of the Marxist theory of reification, critical animal studies, and monster theory, this article examines the ways in which cinematic depictions of gigantic monstrosity can inform our theorizing of multispecies relationships under capitalism. Specifically, I explore how the tensions between capital and human-animal relationships serve to construct and constitute the multiform monster, Jean Jacket, in Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope. Through an examination of the multispecies relationalities that the film portrays, I argue that the figure of Jean Jacket is a monstrous culmination of the reified and therefore, necessarily deferred nature of human-animal relationships under capital. However, Nope’s conclusion alerts us to the radical dereifying potential of multispecies bonds of care and embodied knowledge; systems of resistance that can be forged even within our current capitalist ruins.
Journal Article
Peele’s Black, Extraterrestrial, Naturalistic Critique of Religion
While Jordan Peele's films have always held their mysteries close to the chest, they eventually granted their viewers some climactic clarity. Get Out (2017) used an 1980s style orientation video to clear up its neuroscientific twist, while Us (2019) had Lupita Nyongo's underworld twin narratively spell out the details of the plot. Yet Nope (2022) refuses to show its hand even after the game is over, never illuminating the connection between its opening scene and the broader film, nor a myriad of other questions. As such, critics complained that it stitched together two seemingly incongruent plots without explanation; one where a chimp attacks the crew of a successful Hollywood show, the other where an alien organism haunts a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. In this paper, I will argue that a theological interpretation of Nope helps explain some of these mysteries at its center, while revealing Peele's underlying religious critique and its place within his broader oeuvre.
Journal Article
“How Dey Goin’ to Kill Othello?!” Key & Peele and Shakespearean Universality
Claims for Shakespearean universality often position Shakespeare’s works as resonating with all people across all time. But how far can one take such a claim? A 2013 sketch on Comedy Central’s Key & Peele, entitled “Othello Tis My Shite!”, uses satire precisely in order to challenge assertions of Shakespearean universality. I argue that the sketch – which follows two Renaissance Moors, Lashawnio and Martinzion, who attend Shakespeare’s Othello – suggests that Shakespeare may find the limits of speaking for “all people” when depicting black masculinity. Yet the sketch’s twist ending helpfully proposes the transformative potential in Shakespeare for more effective, authentic representation.
Journal Article
The Bizarre New World Of Political AI Videos, in Economist Video
A fresh wave of AI-generated content has transformed political communication. From a video advertising a Trumpian beach resort in Gaza to Donald Trump sucking Elon Musk’s toes, the videos are garish and gleefully offensive. Our media editor, Tom Wainwright, examines the new era of the deep troll.
Streaming Video
Get In and IGet Out/I: White Racial Transformation and the US Gothic Imagination
This article examines the Gothic trope of White racial transformation in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). These seemingly disparate texts both feature White men who turn Black via supernatural body hopping or experimental surgery. In these texts, Blackness acts as an emotional and material resource for White characters that perversely bolsters Whiteness by escaping it. Little-known outside of antebellum specialisms, Sheppard Lee enhances our understanding of race in the Gothic by considering why Whiteness may be rejected in the early nation. Written in the context of blackface minstrelsy, the novel transforms downwardly mobile Sheppard into an enslaved man as a respite from the pressures of economic success. Get Out builds on its nineteenth-century precursors by showing the Black body as a desired and necessary vessel for the “post-racial” White American self, who swaps their physical Whiteness for Blackness to extend or enhance their own life, turning Black men into extensions and enforcers of White middle-class culture. In uniting these texts through the lens of critical Whiteness studies, this article argues that White racial transformation is a long-held tradition in the US Gothic that not only expresses White desires and anxieties, but itself transforms in each specific historical racial context.
Journal Article
Peele's Black, Extraterrestrial, Naturalistic Critique of Religion
Specifically, Peele critiques the transcendent spectacle of wrathful, cloud-dwelling deities who demand sacrifice and cause 'us and them' division and dominance, pointing us instead to an immanent and naturalistic world of human relationships, equality, and flourishing. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. In the director's commentary, Peele reveals that the Armitage family are descendants of the Knights Templar, and they use this medical procedure as a technological equivalent to their religious search for the Holy Grail and immortality: \"I've got a whole mythology and lore about how they are descended from the original Knights Templar... this whole operation that they've perfected is a way of channeling the original Holy Grail's immortality.\" [...]in order for the Merlin (a Christian, Arthurian figure) theme house to later be built, it must replace the Shaman house that Red originally stumbled upon in the film's opening, representing the colonial takeover of native Shaman religion, culture, and land by Euro-Christian colonizers.9 This motif is clearly intentional, for Peele also makes another reference to Native displacement and fetishization when Dahlia (Elizabeth Moss) comments on how \"beautiful\" a Native headdress looks, while herself wearing and sitting on stylized fabric clearly appropriated from non-Westem cultures. [...]taking this oppressive zero-sum narrative and turning it back on the oppressors, the underworld inhabitants in Us seek to rise up, kill, and replace their overlords, as well as appropriate their lives and homes.
Journal Article
Horrifying Whiteness and Jordan Peele's Get Out
Horrifying whiteness is a lens by which to read the paradox of white supremacists rendering Blackness as monstrous even as they terrorize Black people by executing physical and institutional attacks against them. As its name suggests, horrifying whiteness evokes the complex relationship between white supremacy and the horror genre calling attention to the violent white supremacist performances that are enacted on and off the big screen. In this article, I introduce my concept of horrifying whiteness which draws from previous Black scholarship on the gaze such as Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and bell hooks's Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) but distinguishes itself by rendering white supremacy and the gaze as horrific via the horror genre. As a case in point, Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) epitomizes horrifying whiteness through its depiction of the Armitages and their clients who mask themselves as good innocent white people while they privately abduct and sell/purchase Black bodies and exploit them. By reading Peele's Get Out through the lens of horrifying whiteness, I consider how horror frameworks not only challenge white denial and white innocence, but provide a lens through which Black vulnerability can perhaps be most clearly seen.
Journal Article
Horror and Loss in Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor and Jordan Peele's Get Out
Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963) and Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) were both created during dreadful points in America's history. But Fuller hopes his film will be seen as science fiction as opposed to real life as he states in his autobiography of 2002. Peele attests wisely that Fuller's hope will never be fulfilled. Both works, though filmed in different times, show a troublesome world. They both depict a fragile America. Both protagonists had a sharper eye or were better witnesses to their worlds. A sharper vision is to be valued. Johnny of Shock Corridor is a journalist delving into the dangers of a mental institution. Chris, a photo fan, in the end comes to his close vision that he does not belong in the world of the film Get Out . The fear of loss exists in both Fuller and Peele. This article explores how these two films reveal the fragility of America.
Journal Article
Black Identity and Resistance Revisited through Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us
This article focuses on Black male and Black female ways of seeing and being seen in Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us . Drawing on the theoretical ideas of cinema and Black representation introduced by Manthia Diawara and bell hooks nearly three decades ago, Get Out and Us stage Black male and female orientations challenging established scholarship on Black representation in contemporary movies. Diawara and hooks discuss how Black identity is formed by White Hollywood and Black American Auteurs. Their analysis focuses on who gets to look and who gets looked at from Black male (Chris in Get Out ) and Black female (Adelaide/Red in Us ) perspectives. The article concludes that Jordan Peele contributes to established discussion on Black identity in American film while providing important new critical insights into contemporary Black experiences and legacies of white supremacy in American culture.
Journal Article