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A standing shoe

In the movie Nope, a standing shoe is shown during the scene where actors are viciously attacked by a monkey.

A surprisingly long shot is given to this standing shoe, but I do not get how it is related to the movie's plot.

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Commentators have said there is no official answer. E.g.:

Don't expect any official answers though from Peele or those involved in Nope, at least not yet anyway.

Moving on to educated guesses. These are not my guesses, but guesses made and published by others. One guess is that the shoe is intended to indicate the moment that Ricky makes his realization (ref):

The perfectly balanced shoe helps snap Ricky [Jupe] into place as someone who believes he witnessed something special — a “bad miracle,” as the script puts it.

Another guess is that Jupe's attention being drawn to the shoe is explainable in the context of trauma and is also what saved him, by avoiding eye contact with the chimpanzee (ref):

Jupe’s eyeline was instead focused on the shoe of a massacred TV family member, which had fallen off and was inexplicably standing on its toe. It’s often said that people facing traumatic situations will fixate on one small element during the event, and because he stared at that rare, inexplicable happening (perhaps a bad miracle itself? an impossible shot?), he dodged eye contact. That’s ultimately why the shoe has such a place of honor in the Gordy museum, positioned in the same way he had fixated on it.

Another commentator has the same speculation, as well as additional meaning in the low probability that a shoe would end up in that position (ref):

You could make the case that the Gordy's Home! scene had not one, but two bad miracles: Jupe's survival of an event that altered tons of lives, possibly due to hiding in the one spot on the set where he could avoid eye contact, and the shoe standing upright. Mary Jo getting ravaged led to another 1 in a million outcome: that shoe standing on its own. It's a miracle, but not through the circumstances that anyone ever wanted to see.

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  • but when Jupe fist bumps with this chimpanzee, they do make eye contact; why is he not attacked? Perhaps because this chimpanzee has come out of his rage and stopped attacking others.
    – Yu Zhang
    Aug 19, 2022 at 11:27
  • I don't know! Mysteries all around. That could be another question though!
    – user96544
    Aug 19, 2022 at 11:28
  • Also Jupe and the chimp are kind of in similar situations. The chimp can't consent to a career in entertainment because he's an animal; as Jupe is a young child, he can't really either. They're both being controlled by others to produce entertainment. Chimp's probably like I got you bro, they aren't messing with us any more huh. Aug 19, 2022 at 11:34

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