Nope: Why Gordy The Chimp's Scenes Are So Important To Jordan Peele

Perhaps the most confusing part of Jordan Peele's mind-boggling sci-fi horror film "Nope" is the film's opening, which brings the audience behind-the-scenes of a fictional children's program called "Gordy's Home!" The show centered around a suburban family who has adopted a chimpanzee named Gordy, and it ended in disaster when the chimpanzee actor for Gordy went on a bloody rampage and attacked the cast.

We learn as much in the film's opening moments, in which we see a young Ricky "Jupe" Park (Jacob Kim) cowering beneath a table on the set of "Gordy's Home!" listening to the chimp maul his co-stars. The stark contrast between this sequence and the alien abduction storyline that dominates the rest of the film may have led some viewers to question why Gordy the Chimp was ever a part of the movie at all. However, Jordan Peele himself claims that Gordy's scenes are an essential part of the movie and help to illustrate the film's central theme.

"It's about exploitation," said Peele during an interview with Empire. "It's about feelings of rage. At the industry. We fear Gordy, but we don't hate Gordy." Motion capture star Terry Notary (who plays Gordy the chimp in the film) explained that he also felt a deep connection to the chimpanzee, saying it reminded him of how people take advantage of animals and others for their own personal gain.

Gordy's scenes represent a distinct rage against the exploitation of people and animals for spectacle, something which is a core theme throughout the rest of "Nope." The film emphasizes this in the opening moments of Gordy's rampage, adding a title card with the bible verse Nahum 3:6, "I will cast abominable filth at you. Make you Vile. And make you a spectacle."

Gordy's story of being made into a spectacle is connected to the film's main story through Ricky "Jupe" Park (played by Steven Yeun as an adult), who appears later in the film as the owner of a Wild West theme park called "Jupiter's Claim." Jupe is shown to have idolized and embraced his traumatic experience on "Gordy's Home!," dedicating an entire shrine to the disaster in his office, and profiting from the fame that he earned as a survivor of the incident. Jupe becomes no better than the people who had used Gordy for spectacle in the first place, and in the modern day he's one-upped that mistake by exploiting the nearby UFO as an attraction for Jupiter's Claim.

In an expanded interview for Empire Magazine's August 2022 issue, Jordan Peele claimed that the film itself is about the "nature of spectacle, our addiction to spectacle, and the insidious nature of attention," all of which are symbolized by the story of Gordy and Jupe. Although this chimpanzee rampage might have seemed a bit out of place, it's clear that Gordy the Chimp is an essential component of the message that "Nope" is trying to send.