everyone has been so smart and eloquent about Nope, about the spectacle and the horror & thrill of being "seen", about the "bad miracle" and all its moral implications, and I wanna faff about it too, but what I'm mostly thinking about is how we are both the animal and the technology.
that first "moving picture" of the black man on the horse, the precursor - the "ancestor" - is not just about film and art and entertainment and exploitation and anonymity, but also about the way we are both the jockey and its visual representation, because we inhabit both modes of being: we are riders and hunters, but we also project ourselves into the beyond, into art, film, pictures, technology, artificial intelligence, residing somewhere between the animal and technological. The siblings don't manage to defeat the beast by becoming it or taming it, or by outsmarting it with technology. It's a mixture of both and neither, it's something in between, it's Emerald on a bike and OJ on a horse and the tandem of nature and machine, biology and construct - just like jean jacket.
in that sense, the classical question of "who is the real alien" becomes redundant in this movie. We, all of us, are "not of planet earth", we are literally "out of this world", both inside it and beyond it, we are as strange and maddening as the creature in the sky, devouring everything in our path. our bowels are the camera obscura, and we're constantly feeding, processing, producing content, part sitcom, part horror show, we are the shoe standing up, we too are a bad miracle