Auteur (noun): a filmmaker whose individual style and complete control over all elements of production give a film its personal and unique stamp.
Metteur en scene (noun): a director who has technical competence when it comes to film directing, but does not add personal style to the aesthetic of the film.
Watching Jordan Peele’s new release Nope recently, I found myself wanting to revisit the director’s sophomore effort, Us (2019) a film I had only seen once when it was first released in cinemas. Checking my Letterboxd account, I found that I had rated Us at 4.5 stars and I remembered being enticed by its creepy atmosphere and chilling central performance(s) from Lupita Nyong’o. Rewatching the film, I found myself less enthusiastic about its overall storytelling, the machinations of which ask us to suspend our disbelief to such an illogical degree that any questioning of its central conceit and how precisely the world of the ‘tethered’ works results in the whole piece becoming, itself, untethered.
What did remain clear is that Peele is a filmmaker whose talent for visual storytelling and composition positions him far above many of his contemporaries. Many, including Peele himself, have highlighted how his filmmaking has been influenced by the late Stanley Kubrick, whose The Shining (1980) is referenced at various points throughout Peele’s Get Out, Us and Nope. Like Kubrick before him, one can’t help but scrutinise every detail and element of Peele’s mise-en-scène – every choice of prop, colour, and composition – for clues and insight into the allegorical or thematic concerns of his storytelling. ‘Everything in this movie was deliberate’, Peele has said, ‘that is one thing I can guarantee you’.
A shot like this (below) – an overhead long-shot that tracks the Wilson family arriving at Santa Cruz beach – beautifully encapsulates this aptitude for symbolic composition.
Seen from the slightly unusual ‘eye-of-god’ or bird’s-eye-view angle, the stretching shadows cast onto the sand divide the Wilson family into two separate entities. Foreshadowing the arrival of the Wilsons’ ‘tethered’ selves, Jordan’s allegorical composition effortlessly injects the mundane with a more sinister subtext. It’s a powerful image that visually hints toward the film’s doppelganger antagonists. And this isn’t the only example of the director’s visual play: note the clearly deliberate connections drawn between, amongst other things, the toy ambulance that Jason uses to prop open the door to the closet in which he hides and the actual ambulance that will serve as the family’s get-away vehicle, or the visual parallel between the family car’s stick-on avatars and the appearance of the Wilsons’ tethered selves holding hands on the driveway in the darkness.
Yet, whilst these shots initially appear to evidence the director’s visual ingenuity, they also perhaps speak to what I’m beginning to recognise as a kind of superficial auteurism (or perhaps on auteurism of superficiality?) in Peele’s filmography. The visual rendering of the Wilson family’s/America’s subterranean id in an image like the beach shot is captivating for a viewer seemingly tasked with drawing connections between and interpreting such visual cues, and yes, can be explained as a general allusion to the film’s overarching theme of doubles and duality, as I have echoed myself, above. But in the grand scheme of the film, what do these connections and parallels actually amount to other than so many empty signifiers? Other than a very literal example of foreshadowing in its visual doubling, for example, what allegorical/thematic meaning does the particular choice of vehicle, an ambulance, actually yield within the film’s narrative? Why not a police car, or a fire truck? Surely tandem bikes would be more appropriate?
We perceive these choices of mise-en-scène as deliberate, but only in so much as their use is often doubled or mirrored elsewhere – a self-affirming loop of self-reference. The thematic reasoning behind such doubling is often less clear, and is perhaps why the allegorical or thematic conceit of the ‘tethered’ and the film as a whole is so frustratingly difficult to pin down. I note that on the film’s Wikipedia page under ‘Themes and Interpretations’ that a variety of ‘meanings’ concerning the film are cited, ranging from classism to xenophobia, ‘othering’, religious belief or fanaticism, and the idea of American exceptionalism. Whilst critical response to the film was on the whole very positive – and let me say now that I don’t think Us is a bad film – I share the view of Time Magazine critic Stephanie Zacharek, who rightly asks: whilst ‘Us is dazzling to look at […] what is it trying to say?’ The indeterminacy of the film’s central meaning or message, a consequence of the film’s piling on of reference, homage and vague visual poetics, speaks of a filmmaker more interested in how a film looks rather than in what it all means.
An apparent need on the part of the viewer to evaluate and interpret every element of what they see on screen because, as Peele reminds us, ‘everything [is] deliberate’, muddies the waters of audience comprehension, and arguably leads to overreading, confusion and misrecognition/misinterpretation. Look no further than the director’s debut feature, the phenomenal (but again, in my opinion, imperfect) Get Out (2017).
One sequence features the maniacal Rose eating Fruit Loops, but keeping, as one Reddit user describes it, ‘her white milk separate from her colored cereal’, a reading that ingeniously ties into the racist, white-supremacist world-view of Rose and her family. The fact that Peele has admitted that this reading has no basis in his conscious intention for the scene is apparently neither here nor there, but an example of how the director, in the space of three short films, has achieved the status (rightly or wrongly) of maestro of mise-en-scène and visual symbolism. Yes author intent should never by the sole criteria by which we understand a film, and in post-structuralist thinking meaning is only every produced by the reader/viewer. But by frontloading his films as puzzles to be pieced together, each minute detail of the image becoming something to recognise, analyse and debate, Peele seems to have positioned himself as an illusionist capitalising upon distraction and misdirection rather than a storyteller.
Another symptom of this issue can be found in Peele’s decision to pay homage to other films through his mise-en-scène. Nope tells the story of siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em Haywood (Keke Palmer) as they strive to survive (and potentially exploit for financial gain) an alien visitation. The film features multiple allusions to films and media, some of which feel thematically complimentary (Close Encounters of the Third Kind is brilliantly referenced in one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment), others less so.
Does, for example, the third act homage to Akira (1988) have some specific textual significance, or is it simply quoted because it’s a ‘cool shot’? What of the film’s repeated allusions to members of the Haywood family working on The Scorpion King (2002)?
Similarly, Us pays homage to The Shining, and we can see this indebtedness in the film’s replication of that earlier film’s most iconic images. In foregrounding such references these films suggest that such elements are thematically important, part of the narrative puzzle that we are being asked to decipher, when in actuality they may be little more than a reference for reference’s sake. Of course, this kind of post-modern intertextuality is nothing new, but the (emerging) primacy of this in Peele’s work puts me in mind of the endless empty homages to other films seen in Tarantino’s filmography, films like Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood (2019) or the Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2 (2003, 2004) which end up being a collage of intertextual surfaces and look-how-clever-I-am references rather than something artistically original or sincere.
All three of Peele’s films contain strands of storytelling, characterisation and social commentary that prove he is better than that sort of ‘metatextual’ gesturing, but my fear is that such aspects will become lost in the mix as yet another Youtube video renders Nope as nothing more than a ‘spot the clue’ exercise, deciphering the ’25 things you missed!’ rather than discuss and debate its intellectual concern with our culture’s obsessive need for gratuitous and exploitative media spectacle.
If an ‘auteur’ is defined as a filmmaker whose signature style, artistic originality and thematic concerns can be tracked across their filmography as a whole, then a ‘Metteur en scène’ (‘scene-setter’) as disparagingly coined by French film critic André Bazin, is a director whose work amounts to visual window-dressing rather than something of artistic depth. The ‘Metteur en scène’ is the auteur’s inferior counterpart, their lowly opposite, their ‘tethered’. Even after three films – three films that I have, I’ll repeat, thoroughly enjoyed – I still think Peele is treading the line between the two.
Notes from the Multiplex 