It was said in an Ozu movie that staying in one place too long can make you mean. “Mean” perhaps intending bitter. Wondering about all the things you might have done if you had ever left. Or, worse, resigning yourself to not thinking about that alternate reality at all. For Fern (Frances McDormand), the death of her husband, Bo, has made her understand that she still has so much left to see and do after decades spent in the same depressing one-horse town of Empire (though, with its apocalyptic aesthetic, it should probably be called Post-Empire).
Based on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book of the same name, Nomadland also features some of the real van-dwellers mentioned in it: Linda May, Charlene Swankie and Bob Wells. All of them are part of a large group of boomer generation Americans who have opted to chuck the capitalist lifestyle of staying in one place in favor of finding seasonal work that allows them to travel around freely (in many ways, it’s merely a repeat of the transient hippie lifestyle boomers were already perfecting in the 60s and 70s). Feeling the continued ripple effect of 2008 (a.k.a. the Great Recession), these are the Americans the media and the government don’t want you to hear about in their bid to keep the ghost of capitalism alive. To “assure” the population that the system is still perfectly viable. People like Bob Wells know otherwise.
That’s why he’s fashioned an entire “nomad boot camp” for those who want to take a gamble on the lifestyle that they know will probably pay off more than what they’re wasting their time and effort on in the present. Wells declares at the meeting point in Quartzsite, Arizona (the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, if you will), “We not only accept the tyranny of the dollar, we gladly embrace it. We gladly throw the yoke of the tyranny of the dollar on and live by it our whole lives. I think of it as an analogy of the workhorse. The workhorse that is willing to work itself to death and then be put out to pasture. And that’s what happens to so many of us. If society was throwing us away and sending us, the workhorse, out to the pasture, we workhorses had to gather together and take care of each other.” Fern is definitely vibing with his message as she sits next to Linda May in the crowd. Bob continues, “The way I see it is that the Titanic is sinking and economic times are changing.” And yet, they haven’t changed enough to prevent Fern from taking her usual seasonal job at an Amazon warehouse.
On their lunch break, a fellow Amazon worker showing off her Smiths/Morrissey lyrics tattoos (proving The Simpsons still can’t kill him) recites, “Home, is it just a word? Or is it something you carry within you?” The lines come from Morrissey’s 2017 track, “Home Is A Question Mark.” For Fern, it has been ever since her husband passed away. After all, we’re so often told that home is not a place, but a person. So what happens when you lose that person? Well, eventually you have to find that home is within yourself.
Fern seems to be doing just that as she gets her nomadic life off the ground. Running into some old acquaintances at the store, only the teen girl of the mother who tiptoes around the subject is wont to ask directly, “My mom says you’re homeless, is that true?” She replies, “No, I’m not homeless. I’m just houseless.” Yes, there is a difference, as most New Yorkers will try to tell you. To that point, what Nomadland does best is prove that people’s attachment to a place as part of their identity is ultimately just another way to limit oneself in what they will allow themselves to experience in life. Unfortunately, many trapped in New York still seem to think this is the city with “everything” life has to offer. Tellingly, there’s a moment in the movie where Fern is specifically told not to go to the East Coast. There’s not enough room there. Not like the wide, sweeping expanses showcased throughout the film that exhibit the U.S. as it really is: for the most part, a barren yet beautiful wasteland.
The girl Fern runs into at the store quotes back one of the classic speeches from Macbeth to show Fern she still remembers something from their tutoring time together: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/To the last syllable of recorded time;/And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death./Out, out, brief candle!” She doesn’t bother to finish with the coup de grâce part of it: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more./It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.”
To most, however poverty-stricken, life still signifies work—particularly in America. “I need work. I like work,” Fern says in earnest to a hiring authority. This latter line Frances McDormand incorporated into her Oscar acceptance speech. Indeed, Nomadland’s major wins this year seems to prove that it’s all just a little a bit of history repeating in terms of recession and poverty resonance. Or perhaps we must acknowledge that the poverty from that recession in 2008 (and the many that came before it) never really went away. We are living in a time of increasing paucity in every way—including a paucity of meaning. In the past, it looked easier to create it even when there still was none. Now, as MARINA said, “Nothing’s hidden anymore/Capitalism made us poor.”
The Academy’s bid for more “inclusivity” vaguely shined through in Chloé Zhao’s win. After Kathryn Bigelow, Zhao has become the second woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, and the first woman of color to do so. Obviously, however, China isn’t celebrating. She’s way too Western and pro-democracy for their taste, which is why news of her triumph has been tellingly omitted from state media. None of the nomads there will ever know.
As Swankie helps Fern with her blown-out tire at one point, they get to talking afterward back in her van. Swankie soon confesses she’s dying of brain cancer but, not to worry, she has Final Exit by “Dr. Kevorkian” (she means Derek Humphry) if she has to end her life sooner than the cancer does. She feels no remorse over the life she’s led. Quite fond of an existence that has allowed her to see so many things that she otherwise would not have been able to had she been tied to a desk for work. She has no regrets precisely for this reason. Linda May doesn’t appear to either as she notes of the old car they’re fixing up, “When you get old, you get personality.” A.k.a. cantankerousness—a defunct need to apologize for who you are. It has a double application, of course, as she refers to herself and the other olds she congregates with. In so many ways, the fact that it is the boomers who are the main demographic proves that American society really does try to put its elderly out to pasture—regardless of whether they still have so much life left in them.
Shit, there’s even still that potential for falling in love, as Fern’s attraction to fellow nomad Dave (David Strathairn, you know the nice man in A League of Their Own) increases every time they see one another. Yet she also knows instinctively that to allow herself to fall in love again would be to get tied down to one place yet again. The trap of domesticity. In this sense, nomads are aware that people can be just as much of a burden as they are a help.
Another job, another person explaining their tattoos as Fern works at a different industrial-level enterprise to keep herself financially sustained. Scenes of her loneliness and isolation amid decaying emblems of Americana don’t exactly paint the warmest portrait of nomadic life. And most would far rather be holed up alone in a permanent abode than in some empty restaurant or in front of a deserted movie theater. But you have to possess a true American spirit of adventurousness rather than complacency (the new American spirit) in order to do it. The book itself is tellingly called Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. That emphasis on the word “surviving” should not be overlooked. For that is what the majority of us are doing as we try simply to “get by” in this overpriced hellhole that frequently doesn’t seem to be worth the cost that the rich are demanding from the rest of us.
Through it all, Fern comes to terms with her grief and loss. Something that Bob says most of the nomads he encounters are trying to do even if they never succeed. “What’s remembered, lives,” Fern recites—an adage her father came up with that stuck with her. And incited her to stay in Empire way too long after her husband died. But she’s free now…aware that you can remember those who have departed anywhere.
The film concludes with the title card: “Dedicated to the ones who had to depart. See you down the road.” It’s a lovely sentiment that speaks to something Bob said earlier about why he loves “the lifestyle.” You never really say goodbye to a nomad. You’re always sure to see them sometime in the future again…somewhere down the road.
