Netflix Just Quietly Added The Best Sci-Fi Western Of The Century

Superhero films have maintained cultural dominance for over two decades, resembling the Western’s long-lasting presence in Hollywood. The American Western is tied to Manifest Destiny values, presenting America as predestined and its wilderness as something to be tamed into a home. Classic Westerns depict settlement as a struggle against outlaws and the environment, while often portraying Indigenous people as unwelcoming brutes. The genre functions as a collective nationalist narrative that rewrites settlement history into something triumphant and noble, including whitewashing legacies such as Black cowboys. A modern reclamation appears in Nope, which draws on Western imagery while also engaging UFO and alien obsession, following siblings who work as horse handlers and attempt to document what they encounter.

"The spirit of the American Western is inseparable from the values that drove Manifest Destiny 100 years earlier - that America is a predestined inheritance, and its savage landscape must be tamed into a home. Films like The Searchers, Shane, and The Last Wagon all depict the struggle to lay roots in America while contending with the wilderness, outlaws, and outdated depictions of indigenous tribes as unwelcoming brutes."

"The American Western is essentially a collective nationalist narrative, a concerted effort to rewrite the tumultuous history of American settlement into something triumphant and noble. Manifest Destiny represented indigenous genocide, and even the beloved cowboy archetype is a whitewashed transformation of the legacy of Black cowboys, ranch hands who accounted for up to 25% of cattle drive participants."

"The western is ground zero for a total cultural redefinition of what the settlement of America meant - but four years ago, one of horror's contemporary wunderkinds delivered a film that rewrote the western as a tool of reclamation, not only of American history but the history of Hollywood as well."

"Jordan Peele's Nope, which just hit Netflix, obviously wears the lineage of the Western on its sleeve, from the Agua Dulce setting to the horse-wrangling lead characters. But it's also part of another long-standing Hollywood obsession: UFOs and aliens. The comparison to Spielberg has followed Peele his entire career, but nowhere is it more prominent than in Nope, which follows siblings and Hollywood horse handlers Emerald (Keke Palmer) and OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) as they attempt to document ph"

Read at Inverse