Nope

Domare lo sguardo

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to discuss some issues related to the gaze and animality in Peele’s Nope. This film suggests that the spectre of absolute visibility and the elision of the animal enigma lies precisely in the regime of visibility that has made the im- age indistinguishable from the world itself – cultivating the illusion that there is now no difference between things and images, preventing us from inhabiting the distance between the world and the image. For it is precisely when everything seems to be visible that we realise that something can only continue to elude us. And continue to be as enigmatically animal as the image itself.