#also the director for whatever they're shooting is antlers holst

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

I kind of love this scene at the beginning of Nope where OJ and Lucky (the horse) are on set because it foreshadows the rest of the movie so well: OJ and Emerald explain to the actors and crew how to interact with Lucky — how a horse, even one trained for TV, responds to the world around them according to their instincts — and the crew ignore him. One of them says to "tell the horse we're ready to do one," like he's a human actor who speaks another language and OJ is the translator.

And it keeps happening all through the film. In the narrative of the Gordy's Home, Gordy is treated as essentially another human member of the family, albeit one who can't tell time or speak English (and I've seen some excellent commentary on how Ricky, an Asian child actor, is commodified and exoticized in the same way). But the chimp who plays Gordy is not a person; he, like Lucky, is an animal being exploited by a production company uninterested in and unwilling to accommodate his needs, and so he reacts on instinct — to the sound of balloons popping, to eye contact, to the people around him screaming.

Maybe Ricky survives because the tablecloth kept them from making eye contact, or maybe the chimp would have killed him, too, if he hadn't been shot at that moment. But Ricky doesn't process what happened as an animal reacting on instinct, at least not that final moment. He still anthropomorphizes this chimp as Gordy, his friend from his TV family with whom he has a special connection. And so years later, he assumes Jean Jacket is a ship piloted by sentient aliens. He assumes they trust him, when really all he's done is teach an ambush predator to expect a regular food source —  it's the equivalent of drawing bears to a camp ground because you forgot to put away the cooler.