Headscratchers / Nope

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The UFO/Jean Jacket

• How is it that no one else noticed the UFO? Ricky at the least was aware of it for six months. Did no one attend prior to the Star Lasso Experience incident?
  • It was hiding in the clouds for the six months and only coming out to feed when no one was looking. Given the report of missing hikers it's likely anyone who did see it (besides Ricky) got eaten.
  • On the other hand, given that this is Southern California we're talking about, there would certainly have been quite a few days over those six months when the sky would be completely cloudless apart from that one perched over the mountain. That would seem likely to draw more attention to it on those clear days. Of course, Peele didn't show any clear days in the movie.
    • A single cloud on an otherwise clear day is unusual, but nothing extraordinary. It only becomes obvious that something is wrong when one looks at it long enough (or on time-lapsed footage) to see that it doesn't move. Then again, there seems enough people living or working in that valley to notice that there's one cloud that hardly ever moves, and doesn't California have meteorologists?
    • Jean Jacket resides in what seems to be a sparsely populated desert town near a horse ranch with plenty of land and very few visitors. It's highly unlikely that anyone besides the Haywoods would care much about an unassuming cloud above the hill near such a boring place. OJ and his father seemed to never notice Jean Jacket because it simply never really interacted with them in any way. Meteorologists also probably wouldn't care too much to investigate, as a single, white fluffy cloud won't really affect the weather very drastically, especially on an otherwise sunny day, and Jean Jacket also affects electronic devices that get near it anyways.
• On the subject, does JJ have the power to create clouds, or can it just commandeer a cloud to hide in when feeding or to use as its "den"?
  • Or, like an octopus that can change its skin color and texture to look like anything from sand to coral, does JJ actually reconfigure its surface to become cloud-like, so that instead of hiding in a cloud, it actually is the cloud?
  • JJ is shown using a sort of EMP field to destroy electronics- maybe it’s using static electricity to draw water vapor around itself?
  • According to the scientist who helped design Jean Jacket for the movie, it exhales the vapor that it uses to camouflage as a cloud.
• Jupe's been feeding Jean Jacket for six months. How'd he manage to not get eaten for that amount of time, given how he clearly doesn't know about Jean Jacket's aversion to being looked at?
  • It's likely that Jean Jacket was a lot calmer when he was being fed regularly. It's only when Jean Jacket was fed the fake horse that he started to become agitated. It's similar to how Gordy was set off by balloons. Additionally, we only have Ricky's word that he's known about JJ for 6 months. It could only be part of the show to make it seem safer than it really is.
  • Much like the overconfident producers from the show before, Jupe may have assumed that conditions in a more controlled environment where Jean Jacket left immediately after feeding on the horse would translate exactly to how it would act in front of a crowd full of people. Presumably Jupe has been feeding this creature at night when its quiet and cool, alone in a field where no one else was around, and when he had the time to get a safe distance away when it was feeding. Compare that to the conditions the day of the show, in the middle of broad daylight with the desert sun beating down on it with dozens of loud, noisy people all gawking up at it and Jupe's voice blaring over loudspeakers. Add to that the previous point about how consuming the plastic horse may have agitated Jean Jacket, and Jupe has set the scene for one extremely pissed off creature.
  • It's also likely that Jupe genuinely had no idea Jean Jacket wasn't actually a spacecraft; his mutter of "You're chosen," to himself just before beginning his spiel to the audience may well have been his sincere belief that an alien star-travelling species had chosen him as Earth's first-contact emissary, based on his "gifts" of horses which (for all he knew) were simply being taken as scientific samples, the same way Darwin and other explorer-naturalists took samples of native fauna from new territories. Many cultures on Earth first began interacting with just such "blind gift" exchanges.
  • Alternatively, and the most straightforward answer: Jupe is always seen with his cowboy hat, which is worn to block sunlight from the eyes. It's possible that JJ didn't see his eyes because it blocked his face. Notably, during the Star Lasso Experience, his hat blows away and gives JJ full view of his eyes as he stares up at it. Jupe may have unknowingly saved himself probably countless times by not taking it off.
• If Jean Jacket is truly an extraterrestrial and its sensory organ doesn't resemble a human eye, how does it sense when it's being "looked at"? The "eye" of Jean Jacket looks similar to the compound eye of an insect, arranged in a square that's usually hidden inside the creature's body while it hunts. The Haywoods were able to trick Jean Jacket into attacking air dancers with simple faces, reflectors sewn onto the back of OJ's hoodie to resemble eyes, and eventually with the giant helium balloon caricature of a winking Jupe. OJ was able to protect his horse in part with a fly mask that prevented Jean Jacket from perceiving the horse's stare. So how did an alien come to associate the shape and pattern of large terrestrial mammalian eyes (since it's only shown to attack and eat horses and humans) with a threat and/ or a meal?
  • Sonar. Like a submarine. The sound it makes might serve as a way of getting a precise image of its surroundings (even if it is just afterimages in black and white) and it knows the shape of an eye from this sense alone. (It might also be what shuts down electronics whenever JJ gets near.)
  • Sonar doesn't transmit any information about color or pattern, only the distance and density/ material of scanned surroundings. With incredibly precise narrow-beam sonar, Jean Jacket might have been able to sense the vague shape and layout of a human face and discern that there are two squishy orbs set in an uneven bone lattice, and that its prey becomes agitated when those two squishy orbs are facing Jean Jacket. That doesn't account for how it mistook the eyes printed on the surface of the air dancers and the giant balloon for a living creature. And acoustical waves cannot directly interact with electromagnetic waves, so the sonar wouldn't necessarily be the cause of the electrical disruptions.
  • The alternative might be that the Jean Jacket-species does not recognize "faces" as much as it recognizes "eyes" which is a shape it would know all too well if looking at it from below. That is basically one huge eye which also happens to be a mouth at the same time. It recognizes the shape of the black circle.
    • The idea that the "dark circle" is a threat signal makes additional sense when one considers that as an aggressive territorial predator, Jean Jacket is most likely solitary as well, like tigers or sharks on Earth, and would fight any of its own kind that it encountered. And what is the most obvious signal of danger from a creature of JJ's species? Having the dark circle on its underside turned towards you and expanding (i.e., getting closer). Perhaps Jean Jacket's reacting not to what it sees as being "looked at" but as what it sees as warning of a feeding attempt from a competitor.
    • We don't fully know that Jean Jacket is extraterrestrial in origin. It may be some extremely bizarre earth creature that is very hard to find due to rarity. But that aside, going by the above point, Jean Jacket's species may have actually evolved to recognize the pattern of eyes in order to recognize prey. Which would actually be pretty clever of it in a way. If something initially appears smooth, but then two eyes appear, it means that thing moved and is likely alive, and thus edible. While the exact sensory organs it uses to recognize this are unclear, this basic pattern recognition as a hunting tactic seems like it would be useful to a fairly simple creature like Jean Jacket. Granted this is not 100% accurate all the time, because this pattern can also lead to it sucking up inedible things like the plastic horse or the balloon from Jupiter's Claim. But this sort of error due to misplaced pattern recognition happens all the time in the animal kingdom — a shark may attack a human due to their silhouette in the water resembling a seal, or a sea turtle might accidentally swallow a plastic bag because it mistook its amorphous shape for that of a jellyfish.
• Jean Jacket can shut down nearby cameras, and judging from what the TMZ reporter says about Google Maps in the valley, Jean Jacket is showing up on satellite footage, but only as slight anomalies in a barren Southern California valley i.e. nothing immediately worth investigating. But what about radar from flying planes or Los Angeles Air Force Base? Why wouldn't Jean Jacket show up on those?
  • Between JJ's normal shape (a flat dishlike form without corners), the lack of reflective metal in its organic outer layers, a likely radar-absorbing effect from the same electromagnetism-manipulating cells that shut down nearby electronics, and the fact that it doesn't ever seem to hover more than a few hundred feet above ground at the highest, it has probably just never given off enough radar return on a regular basis to catch any operator's attention. The location of the Haywood Ranch was probably selected to be off any major air traffic routes as well, in order to minimize noise disruption to the horses.
    • You're right, I didn't consider JJ's normal shape (and color) resembles that of a stealth plane or how few planes would be flying in the area, but the idea that its cells can absorb radar seems speculation at best, and, counting the mountains it normally hovers over, it seems several hundred, closer to a thousand feet in the air most of the time; would that really not be high enough to register on radar?
    • It is speculation, but we already know from the film JJ can do things to electromagnetic waves that no human technology currently can (e.g. "slowing down" how electronic devices output sound from received radio waves before silencing them completely; human-generated EM pulses would simply shut down devices immediately). It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to imagine it can do similar outlandish things with other frequencies of EM radiation, like radar. As for altitude, most commercial radar systems designed to look for planes don't try to monitor craft flying below cruising altitude, which is generally not less than 10,000 feet for smaller inter-city planes; ground clutter is too disruptive when you get much below that.
    • after the "balloongate" incident culminating in using an F22 Raptor callsign FRANK 1 to shootdown a chinese spy balloon in 2023, NORAD mentioned that they previously configured their radars to filter out slow moving objects as clutter and after reconfiguring their radars they dispatched more fighters to shootdown a number of other UA Ps over the united states (and the canadians shot one down in Canada)
• Assuming Jean Jacket is an extraterrestrial, how did it get here? It is comfortable breathing and flying in an earth-like atmosphere, to the point that it uses clouds as camouflage. How can a life-form with a carnivorous diet that hunts at sea level survive the vacuum of space for the length of time required for it to travel from extrasolar space to Earth?
  • The two most direct explanations are: 1) it was brought here by an actual spacecraft from whatever world it did evolve on (perhaps deliberately as a bioweapon, perhaps as an accidental escapee from an ark-type vessel), or 2) it has an "egg" or "spore" stage in its lifecycle in which it can survive both interstellar space and atmospheric re-entry, allowing it to propagate between planets (much like the Long One in Slither).
  • Alternatively, if Jean Jacket is a native terrestrial cryptid, its lack of discovery until the events of the film may also indicate a dormancy stage in its lifecycle that allows it to hibernate for extended periods (maybe even centuries or millennia, if the implication that JJ's "real" form has inspired Biblical-era conceptions of angels is true).

Screaming victims

• Rule of Horror, obviously, but why are Jean Jacket's consumed victims still screaming in its belly for days? Wouldn't they have suffocated within minutes or drowned in the stomach juices long before?
  • Considering Jean Jacket appears to inhale a lot of oxygen as a matter of inhaling its food, there may be enough breathable air in its digestive system for a living thing to be able to breathe for that long. The human stomach isn't filled to the brim with digestive acids all the time, oftentimes acid is produced in response to food being introduced to the system. In fact, many non mammals will take a long time to digest their food. For a reptile like a snake, it can take up to a week to fully digest a mouse.
  • Alternatively, we don't know that it really takes Jean Jacket days to digest a whole meal. The biggest indicator of this is that we hear on a radio that hikers went missing in the area two days prior to OJ and Em's father dying, but it's entirely possible this is a different set of people altogether that father and son hear digesting before being silenced. Even after the mass consumption in Jupiter's Claim, Jean Jacket could only have had its latest meal sloshing around in its innards for several hours before it finally liquefied them over the house.
  • Additionally, it's noted that the fake horse made Jean Jacket have indigestion issues. The blood-rain of the Star Lasso Experience victims over the Haywood house isn't normally part of the digestive routine, it's Jean Jacket throwing up. Note that afterwards it seems perfectly fine to eat the TMZ reporter and Holst in quick succession without there being any blood or non-digest organic bits left over when it explodes a few minutes later, which means that it can probably eat a few animals/unfortunate hikers and digest them pretty quickly, only stopping to discard indigestibles (keys, coins, etc.) whenever is convenient.

Gordy's Rampage

• How was Gordy able to go on a rampage long enough to kill at least two people, horribly maim a third, regain his composure, and then reach out to Ricky before getting shot by security? Don't animal actors always have handlers onset for this exact situation?
  • Given that any handler worth their salt would have pointed out all of the disasters waiting to go wrong, it's likely that corners were cut by overconfident producers.
  • Show business unfortunately has a LONG history of ignoring safety precautions. OJ tells the crew how to behave around Lucky the horse for safety, but they don't listen to him. When Lucky spooks at his own reflection and almost kicks someone, they fire OJ and use a fake horse instead.
  • Also, while this is something that's cropped up in the modern day, there isn't any real one-size-fits-all protocol for dealing with chimpanzees. They are notoriously violent and territorial animals to the point that the standard protocol for a chimp escaping its enclosure at a zoo or animal reserve is to be shot on sight, purely due to the harm only one can cause. If there were any professional animal trainers on the set, they probably would have dissuaded the staff from having the chimps in the first place. Considering that the set is FULL of people all clapping and smiling, balloons that make loud noise when they pop, and that Gordy is dressed like a human in a way that's likely uncomfortable for him, there are a number of things that were bound to set Gordy off that they would disapprove of. The studio probably fired them to avoid accommodating for the animal and because Gordy hadn't caused any problems up to that point.
  • Don't forget that there wasn't only one "Gordy." Jupe mentions how they had a rotating cast of chimps to play the role, and OJ comments how the incident is part of the reason chimpanzees are now banned from being used in live filming involving humans. They likely had a really good run of calmer animals before finally getting to one that was more anxious which finally sent the message "Oh yeah, these things will rip your face off."

Gordy's fist bump

• What was the intention of Gordy's fist bump toward young Jupe, especially odd that he's suddenly acting friendly after mutilating the rest of the cast? Was it a challenge with aggressive intent to Jupe? Was it some sort of primitive primate sense of remorse? Was Gordy just confused and afraid not understanding what he'd done and reaching out for something familiar and comforting?
  • It's possibly some mix of the latter two. Gordy's reaction of his rampage was largely one born from fear and misplaced aggression in a high stress environment. By the time Gordy finally came across the young Jupe, everyone else besides the victims had already cleared out, leaving the studio much quieter and some of the major sources of his stressors gone. Also, Jupe was behind the tablecloth, so even though Gordy likely knew he was there, there was no eye contact that could rile him back up again. Animals and people will often fall back on one of two things when all is said and done: instinct and training. While Gordy might not wholly understand what he had done, he at the very least would have had to practice that exploding fistbumb with Jupe dozens and dozens of times. So with nothing else to focus on in the aftermath of the rampage, Gordy simply did what he remembered he could do. Offer his co-star a much practiced fist.
  • It could be also be that out of the entire cast and crew of that show, it was only Jupe who treated Gordy well, and the chimp returned the feeling.
  • Also, simply put, animals are fickle. Gordy was lashing out one moment because he was stressed, but once his stress was over he saw no reason to lash out. It also helps that Jupe was dead silent and not showing signs of aggression like his co-stars. Mary Jo simply got caught in the line of fire, it's implied that Phyllis Mayberry was killed, Tom Bogan handled the chimp in the worst possible way by yelling at it, making direct eye contact, and then trying to outrun him (which would only encourage Gordy to chase him). By contrast, Jupe was showing no signs of intimidation.

What happened to Phyllis Mayberry?

• AKA the mom actress on Gordy’s home, we see Mary Jo Elliot and Tom Bogan get attacked and the latter presumably killed by Gordy, and we obviously know Jupe was under the table the whole time, but Phyllis never appears. Does the bloody handprint belong to her? Or did she just escape with everyone else on set?
  • The woman lying on the floor in the scene; whose shoe stands on end and whom Gordy beats repeatedly until she stops moving or making noise, is Phyllis Mayberry, not Mary Jo. We can tell because that woman wears the same pink outfit Phyllis was shown in during the TV show footage, whereas Mary Jo was wearing a rainbow shirt. Gordy presumably killed Phyllis, or else she would have been brought up later, as Mary Jo was.
  • The girl on the floor is definitely Mary Jo, she's wearing the same white pants and you can see just a bit of the striped shirt peeking out, Phyllis is wearing a skirt.
    • Watched it again, you're right.
  • Word of Saint Paul is that Phyllis did survive, but lost a hand in the process.

Jean Jacket's nature

• Everyone else noticed that the idea that this was an alien was just...assumed by everybody, right? There’s absolutely no proof that Jean Jacket wasn’t a very rare and very bizarre terrestrial species.
  • The idea that such a strange being is Not Of Planet Earth might be easier to swallow than the idea that Jean Jacket is a natural part of Earth's Ecosystem. Consider how often a new deep-sea animal is discovered, and people compare it to an alien or refer to it as "otherworldly".
  • At the same time, however, deep sea animals die horrific deaths when brought up to the surface, or at least undergo serious damage due to decompression from the decrease in pressure. A good example is the Blobfish, whose iconic tubby shape is induced by the latter and is very different from its actual appearance. Following this logic, Jean Jacket can't be a deep sea animal because it would have died horribly trying to get out. However, when one considers cryptozoology, an alternate explanation for Jean Jacket besides being an alien is it being an atmosphere-dwelling creature, also known as an atmospheric beast.
  • Well, the most likely explanation is that it's because Jean Jacket looks exactly like how alien spaceships have been depicted in most Western media since the 1940s. It took a while for anybody to question the assumption that Jean Jacket is sapient, let alone an alien, presumably because the main characters were too busy grappling with the realization that flying saucers exist to consider whether or not every urban legend about flying saucers is accurate.
  • It's practically another level of ironic meta-commentary, one of the central lessons of the movie is "you shouldn't rely on assumptions to fill gaps in your knowledge when dealing with something unfamiliar" and the reveal that it's an animal is played as a twist. In spite of this most people still seem to be assuming it's an alien when the reality is that we have no way of knowing what it is or where it came from, making the exact same mistake the characters did when thinking it was a ship.

The Star Lasso Experience

• What exactly was the Experience previous to the tragedy version and how was it possible? How was Ricky able to ensure that Jean Jacket wouldn't just eat everyone in attendance or, rather, why didn't he just eat everyone in attendance each time? I would've theorised that after JJ ate the hikers, he developed a taste for people as well as animals, but there is at least one successful show after the hikers are eaten. Ricky also says that the "spectacle" happens the same time each night, but we see from far off one show taking place when it's been dark for quite a long time, whereas in the tragic show it is still very light and the show is only supposed to last an hour.
  • OP here, I found out through another summary of the movie that this was supposed to be the first Experience, and the previous one we saw at night was a rehearsal. This makes sense since Ricky still seems to be practicing his lines on the day of the massacre, but I think because of the reference to previous horses and the amount of time the actual attraction had been there I misunderstood that the Experience had been going on a while.

Fynn Bachmann's laugh

• Fynn Bachmann gives a surprised and appreciative little guffaw after Emerald gives her sales pitch about the Haywoods always having "skin in the game." He laughs like he's hearing it for the first time, but shouldn't he have already heard this pitch before? He remembers working with Otis Sr. pretty clearly, enough to be disappointed that Senior didn't return for this job, and Senior narrates the sales pitch on the family's promotional cassette tapes, so it's clearly something he said before every job, just like his kids.
  • Maybe the fact he’s heard this sales pitch before is why he’s laughing. Sort of a “You’re just like your old man” kind of reaction. Or maybe he was reacting to Emerald flubbing the pitch by only saying two “greats” when there should have been three and saved his reaction for the end.
  • It's also possible that the "skin in the game" remark was something new, ad-libbed by Emerald herself as a deliberate riff on her father's standard opening spiel. We only hear the beginning of Otis Sr.'s version on Emerald's old videotape copy, and given that Otis Sr. seems to be a lot more like OJ than Emerald from what we see of him, it seems perfectly plausible that he wouldn't have gone for such an on-the-nose joke.
  • Conversely, it may have been a genuine piece of Corpsing: Keke Palmer did over a dozen takes of that opening monologue, each apparently improvised in wildly different ways, so she may well have surprised a genuine laugh out of Oz Perkins on one of them.

Antlers Holst's death

• What was Antlers Holst trying to accomplish by intentionally getting himself eaten by Jean Jacket while still filming? Since electronics don't work around Jean Jacket and the camera was entirely mechanical, his shot would have been useless because once swallowed, he would be unable to transmit it back to OJ, Em, and Angel (Angel previously states he couldn't link the mechanical camera to the video network, and that's before the camera got physically removed from them). While Holst has been established as insane and obsessed by "the perfect shot", this doesn't make sense because this Senseless Sacrifice results in a shot he wouldn't be able to share (even posthumously).
  • It might be that he doesn't care about the rest of the world seeing the perfect shot; to him, it's about the hunt for the perfect shot rather than the result itself. It's established that he only takes on larger projects so he can pursue his passion projects.
    • It isn't dwelt on much, but all the films Holst's watching at his home are of predators attacking prey. The implication seems to be that his idea of the unattainable "perfect shot" is "the last thing that a prey animal sees as it's devoured," which is the sort of footage where all he can do is get the camera in position and hope someone else can recover it later on his behalf.
  • It's also possible he expects Jean Jacket to regurgitate his camera and for the others to be able to salvage the footage from it.
  • It is relevant that during the climax Holst is seeing taking some sort of medication. Nothing is elaborated on that, but it could be that the guy was suffering from something terminal and just had a death wish, or that he had an existing mental health condition which was finally triggered to the point of self-destructiveness.
  • Jean Jacket can affect electronic and digital frequencies, but the camera Holst is using is an old-fashioned film camera not connected to anything else; it's not plugged into anything and it's not broadcasting, so there's nothing to interfere with. Holst's footage could very well have survived, especially since Jean Jacket likely couldn't digest the camera (although it's arguable whether Holst was thinking ahead that clearly at that point).

Horse bait

• Why would Jupe spend thousands of dollars on highly trained Hollywood stunt horses just to use as UFO bait, when he could buy horses headed to slaughter for a fraction of the price?
  • He either feels sorry for OJ or is not a great businessman (or both).
  • Jupe may have been paying OJ for the horses in cash, so as not to leave a bank trail, or to have people question exactly why he had to continuously purchase more and more horses for a little fake rodeo in the desert. Ongoing purchases from a larger place, rather than a small struggling ranch, would probably require payments either by check or card rather than paper money. Additionally, purchasing the horses from the Haywoods means he only has to transport them the relatively short distance from the ranch to his place, letting him save the costs accrued by transporting several large, heavy mammals by road into town — which again incurs the risk of people questioning why he needs all these horses and what he's doing with them all.
  • Jupe is a showman, not an animal handler. He probably didn't dig deeper into the logistics of acquiring horses. "I need horses. There's a ranch next door that has horses. How convenient is that?" This could tie into him thinking he has a full understanding of how things work while still missing the obvious. Also, with his background in Hollywood and intending to use the horses as characters and/or props in the experience, it probably made sense to him that he'd need "horse actors" rather than just "horses."
• For that matter, why did OJ not get curious about what exactly Ricky was doing with the horses that he (and his father before him) had sold to Jupiter's Claim? He was intending to buy them back at a later date; did he never go to check up on them or ask how they were doing, or start to wonder why he never saw them around the attraction?
  • OJ does not seem to be the kind of person who willingly seeks out places like Ricky's attraction, based on his lack of social skills when dealing with other people.

Returning to the park

• Why did Jean Jacket return for the horse after gulping down what had to be a couple dozen people? Surely it wasn’t still hungry?
  • Considering how petty/compulsive Jean Jacket is sometimes, it might be a combination of You Will Not Evade Me, Lucky's survival as an insult/challenge which needed to be corrected, and a desire to spice the meal up with some horse-meat on top of it. Maybe.
  • At the time when Jean Jacket came back for Lucky, it still had the plastic horse jammed in its system (which we know because it didn't manage to dislodge it until later at the Haywood House when it upchucked it through OJ's windshield). Perhaps it was still irritated and tried to seek relief from it by seeking out more food since its primary resolution tactic is consumption, or the obstruction didn't let the food properly reach its digestive system, making it still feel hungry enough to want the horse. And after the second failed attempt it gave up and returned to its other usual feeding ground (the Haywood property).

Haywoods off the hook

• The Star Lasso attack draws the attention of a news agency to Jupiter’s Claim. Just a few miles away is a bloodstained house covered with detritus that can be traced to the missing people. So why did none of the reporters or police attempt to contact the Haywoods? The leading theory appeared to be a flash flood, not murder, but it would still be helpful to seek out possible witnesses to whatever happened nearby.
  • The Haywood property and Jupiter's Claim seem to be relatively obscure places despite their star studded nature. Jupiter's Claim is a place you go when you're local or you're specifically looking to go there for the nostalgic theme park, and with the Haywood ranch on the decline not many people may give the place a second thought under normal circumstances. Also note that when they enact their plan to get a picture of Jean Jacket, it's maybe a day or two after all the people went missing, and the fact that the TMZ reporter showed up at the Haywood property shows by that point at least one or two people may be considering the place for information searching. It's why their mission to get a photo of Jean Jacket was so time sensitive by the end, too. If they waited any longer, the theme park as well as the ranch would've probably been swarming with reporters. Meaning they would both lose their chance to get the Oprah Shot, and all the people who come to gawk at Jean Jacket would become a giant buffet.
  • Also, while the ranch is technically the closest thing to the theme park, it's not walking distance and I don't recall any shots that show that the theme park is clearly visible from their property. Given that the Haywoods presumably have no violent criminal history and how difficult it would be for two people to kill a group so much larger than them and hide the bodies without somebody calling 911 while things were going down, I can see why the police didn't think it pertinent to question them immediately. And once the film's events are done, the gang has more than enough evidence to prove that Jean Jacket was the only killer.
    • OJ can just barely see and hear Jupe's dress rehearsal in the distance the night before from what might have been near the edge of the ranch. They're also close enough that Jupe's children can travel there on their own to play a prank, presumably by foot or bike. That's still a significant distance apart, though.

What Jupe knew

• Did Jupe know Jean Jacket was an animal or did he actually believe it to be a flying saucer? On one hand, he tells the audience at the Star Lasso Experience that he believes Jean Jacket is a craft, and his marketing clearly is invoking traditional imagery of The Greys. It also would make sense for him to assume that as that is what most people who saw Jean Jacket would assume at first. However, on the other hand, Jupe also has been leaving horses out as bait for Jean Jacket for quite some time, which seems like he knows that Jean Jacket isn't just abducting the horses (hell, it's not totally clear how he would have figured Jean Jacket would want horses). There's also the layer that assuming he has tamed Jean Jacket fits more closely with his belief about what happened with Gordy than him assuming a UFO had decided to make first contact with him — but still it's not totally clear. Thoughts?
  • It's probably up for interpretation, with either option giving a different reading for Jupe's character. If Jupe was aware that JJ was an animal, then this means that he learned nothing from the Gordy's Home Incident and was so confident that he could control the situation that he was willing to bet his family's, his staff's and his audience's lives on it, making his death a case of Hoist by His Own Petard (albeit, a tragic one, as he clearly wasn't an evil guy, just ignorant). If Jupe genuinely believed that JJ was a spaceship full of sentient aliens, then he was probably giving "them" horses because The Greys are stereotyped for abducting cattle. This reading is also even more tragic than the first one, as it depicts Jupe as a guy who, rather than knowing the risks and still going through with the Experience, genuinely misunderstood the situation he was in, but was so confident in his survival of the Gordy's rampage that he was certain that he would survive this too, only to be proven horribly wrong. In either case, both scenarios make it clear that Jupe's Fatal Flaw was his confidence in controlling something he clearly didn't understand very well.
  • Jupe does note in his opening audience spiel that he saw JJ take a horse on the first encounter, most likely one of the Jupiter's Claim horses (which would also explain why the Haywoods never saw JJ take one of their horses until much later, when JJ was established enough to start ranging more widely). It also reinforces OJ's role as protagonist to presume that he is the very first person to realize what Jean Jacket truly is, after observing it at the Star Lasso amphitheatre; for all that Jupe may think of himself as having had a "connection" with Gordy, there's no evidence in the film that he later acquired anything like OJ's experience with animals in general, or had the imagination to consider he was seeing anything other than what it superficially appeared to be (i.e. a classic flying-saucer alien abduction event).