That Horrible Pen

Before revisiting Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), I had two distinct left-over impressions from my first viewing years ago: One was a memory of the scene where the protagonist, Fern, with a grumbling stomach hurries to grossly use her bucket toilet inside the van where she lives. As someone with both a sensitive stomach and sensitive skin, I found the… hygienic implications of this nomad lifestyle to be a low-frequency background source of agitation while watching the movie. But I mention it because I think it serves as a pathos-shaped hook for more than just me—that the people who watched this movie overwhelmingly did so from inside an air-conditioned, insulated building with running water (running through conventional toilets). While the bathroom situation is explicitly dealt with, I also spent a lot of time watching Fern’s close-shorn hair, trying to decide if it looked like it had been washed recently or not. These more minor concerns still reinforce the bleakness of the situation a...