Don't Tie Me Down, Don't Fence Me In

 “Nomadland,” the film, directed by Chloe Zhao, 2021

Based on the book of the same name written by Jessica Bruder (reviewed below) Nomadland tries to present a picture of proletarian reality.  These are the modern railroad tramps and hoboes of the U.S. 1930s, but now converted to living in vans, RVs and tents.  It is about workers who live by temporary jobs and small social security checks, no longer able to afford a fixed abode. suffering divorce and job losses.  They are mostly light-skinned people, “the unbearable whiteness of vanning,” many of whom play themselves in the film.  It functions like a slow-moving documentary. This film is unable to hide class issues … but it tries mightily.

The lead character Fern, played by Frances McDormand (who also initiated and produced the film), loses her job in a gypsum plant in Nevada.  She retrofits a beat-up old white van and travels across the country to work at an Amazon warehouse as a Xmas Workamper; a store selling rocks in Quartzite Arizona; a Park District RV lot in the Badlands; a kitchen at Wall Drug and a sugar beet harvest in Nebraska - really on the Red River in North Dakota or Minnesota.  The story never reaches any analysis of capitalism or the class-struggle level of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” because it also dwells on the romance of ‘the road.’   Only once does the cantankerous Fern get into an argument with a relative and his friend in real estate, who claim housing prices 'only go up.'  The book Nomadland was written in 2017, long after the 2008 housing crash, giving the lie to that. 

Instead it is a very slow paen to wanderlust and an elegy to nature.  Burbling books, fallen redwoods, nesting swallows, mountains, desert, roaring surf, buffalo and the dramatic rocky Badlands punctuate. “Don’t fence me in” might as well be the slogan.  Gentrification can even arrive even on this road.  The commodification of the 'lifestyle' approaches in $100K RVs, shown once during the film to the incredulous workampers.  The film will also encourage the attack of the tricked-out camper vans.  Glamping!  Conde Nast called it "a love letter to America's wide-open spaces."  Nothing about losing your housing there.  Just something about the new 'cowboys.'

Fern, the lead character, is a loner who mourns her dead husband for the whole film, no doubt suffering from depression.  It touches on some of the problems of van life – flat tires, repair costs, stealth parking, shitting in buckets and the cold - but not more serious ones like health issues, food quality, ability to vote, getting mail, severe weather, crime, poverty, rising gas prices and insurance, internet, cops and isolation from family and others. You certainly can't bring kids on this 'adventure' for long. Some eventually leave the road if they can.  Can you imagine camping for years on end? 

Its main focus is on the collective and positive lifestyle of elderly folks who have ‘rejected the system’ and not just been thrown out of it.  Even the word ‘nomad’ leans to the romantic, sort of the new gypsies.  There is hardly anyone who has not yearned to travel the byways of the U.S. and discover the country.  In a way the film transforms van life into a new and 'natural' capitalist adventure. It is a weird sequel to Kerouac's "On the Road."  It is the new 'counter-culture' or not. Yet the jobs the nomads have to do are low-paying, hard or monotonous - a profitable adventure for those businesses who use them. 

Unlike the book (reviewed below) Fern is a made-up character, filling in for the younger journalist who wrote the much more interesting book, as well as one of the older women in the film.  We meet the real Bob Wells, leader of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous and founder of CheapRVLiving, who teaches people how to survive on the road.  He is a good and kind example of mutual aid.  Unlike the book, Fern has a half-interest in a fellow nomad Dave.  He tries to get her to settle down with him after a classic Thanksgiving scene but she can’t.  For the most part the film has no narrative drive.  Fern repeats the cycle of jobs and ends up where she began, in the abandoned town of Empire, walking through the dusty remains of the USG gypsum plant and her own former house.  The ghost of dead capital inhabits them still.

This film is a mostly emotional version of the book and suffers from avoiding the elephant in the room. Its avoidance of a bigger picture assumes the viewer will fill in the blanks.  They will not always.  Poverty porn?  Perhaps, to some.  It is mostly humanitarian, showing the reality of working people handling whatever darkness capital throws at them with grace and strength, which at this point is a necessary cliche.  Whether 'endurance' is enough in this situation is a question the filmmakers fail to answer.

P.S. - For those irritated by this review:  The director has said that the film was about "compassion, memory and loss," which is even more distant than portraying it as a 'lifestyle' choice.  In a way, she chooses a humanitarian approach instead of focusing on why we have the quite modern phenomenon of mobile mass penury. She has pointed out politically that being forced to live in a van is unacceptable, but that was not the thrust of her film.  The Huffington Post says the film portrays van-life in "rich magic-hour hues."  That was the real thrust, which Hollywood loved, as the film disemboweled the book and the situation.  In a way, McDormand was slumming.

P.P.S. - In These Times chimes in with a similar criticism of the film: https://inthesetimes.com/article/nomadland-chloe-zhao-oscars-film-culture-amazon-workers

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Nomadland,” “On the Clock,” “The Precariat,” “Love Your Job?” “Minneapolis 2040,” “Postcards From the End of America,” “Sutree,” “Tales of Two Cities.”

The Cultural Marxist

February 19, 2021