Metaphors of Extractive Capitalism and Fabulation in Nope

This essay argues that Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) offers metaphor and fabulation as a critique of extractive capitalism and its detrimental consequences on sentient life. Peele visualizes the outcomes of capitalist extraction and accumulation as exemplified in racialized labor exploitation and anthropogenic catastrophe. I examine how the film mobilizes fabulation to explore cinema’s erasure of Blackness from its history as an example of racial extraction. My analysis of extraction extends to the shapeshifting sentient “alien,” nicknamed Jean Jacket, who I contend embodies extractive capitalism via its consumption and expulsion of carbon-based life and indigestible objects. I maintain that Peele uses the trope of the alien-monster as a metaphor to comment on the threat of ecological collapse. I then proceed to study how Nope makes a pointed critique of human misuse of media technologies due to an insatiable avarice for notoriety. Finally, I conclude with a reading of how extractive capitalism forecloses the possibility for humans to establish multispecies empathy and cohabitation.