Re-Nomadland Film Feelings

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 and serve the film and are thus worth mentioning.

The other impression was how the movie seems to go easy on Amazon, the company. Nomadland is ostensibly (initially) “about” the fallout of the Great Recession—specifically how some nice white folks were forced into the lifestyle of migrant laborers, chasing seasonal work in a bad employment market while living affordable, ascetic lives in their vehicles—and it even invokes at one point the concept of “the tyranny of the dollar,” and Fern has some words at another point about the financial dangers of real estate, but this does not end up being a critique of the capitalism at the root of the ills, which would include the notoriously dystopian Amazon. If anything, the Amazon of the film seems like a utopia in contrast to the trials Fern undergoes elsewhere, based on the suggestive associations of the movie. Amazon is like a true-north for Fern: It anchors her ultimately cyclical story with its looming but solid façade and with its promise of a busy but organized environment. When Fern has expensive vehicle problems that push her to borrow money from her sister, she invokes the prospect of her next round with Amazon as the presumed way she’ll be able to pay back the money. And contrast the certainty of Amazon with Fern’s Odysseyian wanderings in the wilderness, and with cleaning human excrement from a toilet seat, hauling fat loads of vegetables, managing hippies that want to sell their wares at her place of employment, and working with a man that’s trying to push her into a relationship with him. In the arena of comparison, Amazon looks saintly in victory.

One reason why potential critiques by Nomadland are hard to pin down is due to a documentarianistic streak in its presentation: The camera “floats” as much as it “frames” (casual-feeling), and the dialogue is often ramble-y, silly, and realistic. There is a sense of presenting the material rather than editorializing, which is reinforced further through the deployment of some characters as themselves—or, the people playing the part of themselves. Bob Wells is like Bob Wells; Charlene Swankie is sort of Swankie. There is a sense of just capturing life as it is, regardless of what it is. So Bob Wells mentioning the dollar and its tyranny is just something he says, like other people say other things, and is not to be taken as an endorsement, necessarily. Of course, the film does have points to make, and the meandering-coded stylization is just superficial. There is still plenty of intent evident in its construction, of course! For example, there is an on-the-nose song about love in the scene where Dave gets Fern to dance with him, and there’s a cut that I find particularly charming where we go from the live barnyard fowl of Dave’s family to a shot of a cooked bird in crispy repose on their dinner table. Intentionally evasive or not, the presentation of the film lets it punt on the issue of evil economics.

Nomadland also avoids systemic critique by curving hard into the personal: It stops being a movie about the Great Recession and becomes a story about Fern and her character, as a person. This makes sense from a mechanics approach to storytelling—It’s easier to tell a compelling story about an individual’s journey than one about a whole country in a movie’s time frame, and Fern also works well as an audience surrogate by being a newcomer to the nomad community (we understand her like we might not understand them, so it makes sense by extension to make this about her, in the end). It is still a disappointment, though, how Nomadland stops being about economics and becomes about Fern’s eccentricity and unresolved grief. The pivot for me occurs when Fern visits her sister, which seems to be a requirement if she wants the repair money. Although things are a little tense between the two, Dolly is very clear that Fern has a place in her house if she wants it. Similarly, later, Fern meets up with Dave and his settled family, and Dave is very clear that Fern has a place there if she wants it (if she wants Dave, we can assume, which is in question).

The problem with these later parts of the movie, re. theme and narrative, is that they take away the tension of Fern’s situation and of the nomad lifestyle she’s representing for us. She has a way out but chooses not to take it; however, maybe one day she will. She could take it as soon as we stop watching! It is an unwelcome relief to know that she could go home to Dolly at any time, which makes the movie a less compelling presentation of the America of cascading crises which repeatedly breaks its promises of prosperity. (Something similar happens with Linda May and Dave settling down too, with little on-screen effort, further suggesting this is a movement of choice rather than one of desperate necessity like the initial set-up indicates.) Instead, we discover partway-through that we are on a spiritual, hippie journey to resolve Fern’s grief. She was not tragically failed by her country, in the film’s thematic emphasis, and is instead a wild woman with a mental block who refuses to accept the help offered her. America is still beautiful, and the west is still wild and free. Nonetheless, there is a wintery disposition here thanks to the sometimes bleak imagery, the coldness of the seemingly-hands-off camera and editing, the melancholy music, and at least the initial premise of an older woman forced to take to the road looking for inconsistent employment. But maybe it’s the winter of one person’s grief rather than of an Amazon-and-co.-ravaged wasteland, which displeases me personally.