Jordan Peele Finally Reveals What 'Nope' Was Really About In New Documentary

Peele's revelation is included in his upcoming documentary "High Horse: The Black Cowboy."

(MonkeyPaw Productions/Universal Studios)

Spoiler alert: This article reveals details about a three-year-old film that my editor insists some people haven’t seen yet.

I called it.

Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope opens with a Black cowboy being killed when a UFO pierces his skull with a coin. After the children of the deceased horse rancher tell the story of the unnamed jockey in the first moving picture, they realize the ranch they inherited is under alien attack. Played by Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya, the siblings must defeat a horse-eating alien while also fighting to save their family ranch from being absorbed by an amusement park, Jupiter’s Claim. Ultimately, they devise a plan to capture the UFO on film, sell the video and save their family land.

How can y’all not see this?

Think about it: A Black family is under attack by an alien who literally used money to kill their ancestor. The extraterrestrial colonizer only devours humanity because its only purpose is to “settle on the new land” and “claim its own territory.” Jupiter’s Claim—owned by Jupe Park, the predatory capitalist who wants to gentrify the family’s ancestral land—is named after the mythological Roman god used to justify Rome’s supremacy. As both antagonists used their power to erase the Black characters’ history, the Haywoods realized there was one way to defeat their opps:

Tell their story.

As a celebrated filmmaker behind numerous Instagram dog videos, as well as the 1993 cult classic, The Dollarback (Like Peele, my student film about a talented Black football player who was forced to play four positions after enrolling in an all-white school was snubbed by the Academy Awards voters), I always suspected that this was the message my colleague was attempting to convey. Then again, I’m often accused of making everything about race.

Others, however, have speculated that the Western-themed sci-fi feature was about … well, everything.

The brilliant critics at Time theorized that the feature film was either a summer monster movie about nothing or a critique of capitalism and the surveillance state. According to Screenrant, “the story is about the obsession with spectacle and the need for society to seek it without care for the consequences.” I don’t quite know what that means, but it sounds like something a smart white person would take away from a piece of Black art. Those people aren’t necessarily wrong. All art is open to individual interpretation, and great art has multiple meanings.

But in his new documentary, which makes the story of the American cowboy about race, Peele confirmed my suspicions were correct.

Executive produced by Peele and his Monkeypaw Productions, High Horse: The Black Cowboy dismantles the popular narrative and explores the true history of the cowboy. Not only does the Oscar-winning screenwriter center Black people in the true story of this uniquely American icon, but in the series, debuting on Thursday, Peele also reveals that the villain of the movie was not the interstellar immigrant or the colonizing carnival.

It was the erasure.

“The first movie star was a Black man, and we don’t know his name,” Peele explained in “F*ck Westerns,” the aptly titled first episode of Peacock’s three-part series (I served as a consultant on the documentary). “That, to me, was the horror story of Nope. Nope is about the illusion of the Western ... the Hollywood take on what the past of this country looks like, and the fact that that illusion is what we’ve been fed. It’s about erasure.”

Aside from Peele expounding on the racist legacies of beloved film industry icons, from John Wayne to Mel Gibson, the doc features some incredible stories. Legendary actress Pam Grier recounts how she secured funding for a movie about “Stagecoach Mary,” the formerly enslaved woman who went from a nun to a career as a gun-slinging mail carrier. Historians and scholars show how the characters behind the greatest Western of all time and the “classic American hero” were actually Black Americans.

“I’ve always imagined the story of the Black cowboy as a true crime story,” Peele noted. “It’s a heist. As soon as being a cowboy became a cool thing, that’s exactly when they took that from us.”

The first episode of High Horse: The Black Cowboy streams on Thursday, Nov. 20, on Peacock.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you.