After watching Nomadland on Saturday night, my husband and I complained extensively. We'd heard a lot about the film, had our suspicions about it, and were upset to find our suspicions confirmed. I found myself Googling "nomadland amazon" feeling I'd either lost touch with reality, or director Chloé Zhao had. I read some articles, then figured I should move on with my evening. Even after meditating and writing, however the movie was still on my mind, and I sat down at around midnight to stay up far past my bedtime to write notes on what I thought was wrong with the movie. As soon as I got up in the morning, Tim and I were back to complaining about it.
The tl;dr is that this movie really rubbed me the wrong way. I want to talk about why.
A note before we start: It's been a long time since I've written anything even vaguely essay-ish, so bear with my rust. This was also written while I was in pain, and inevitably edited while I was in pain. Hopefully, my muddling will still make clear why I think Nomadland has an empty heart, only serving as a status quo balm for systemically-inflicted wounds.
Yep, the Amazon Thing
When I was Googling the film's relationship with Amazon, conspiracy theories along the lines of "Amazon gave Zhao money like the army does for Marvel," churned through my head. Instead, I found this article which revealed what should've been obvious from the start: why would Amazon pay for propaganda when someone is willing to do it for them for free? According to Frances McDormand, all they had to do was call and ask.
This article also includes the apparently typoed quote from Zhao: "I don’t make films about politics. I like to to [sic] present you the reality of the lives people live, and I like for you to take away your own interpretations."
I laughed out loud when I read this. Zhao's portrayal of Amazon was so conciliatory I wanted to puke: a manager starts the day off with safety tips; Fern awkwardly fills and tapes up a box, taking her time; Fern walks at a leisurely pace past her friend, Linda May, at her work station and jokes with her.
According to this Vulture article, this is a far cry from how Amazon was covered in the book on which this film was based. The book depicted extensive criticism of Amazon by some of the same people who appeared in the movie. I still feel like my brain is melting when I return to the article and double check that, yes, the Linda May who cheerily works with Fern in the movie is the same Linda May who "experienced dizziness during her shifts at the Amazon warehouse that landed her in the emergency room and got a repetitive motion injury from using her scanner gun." Like, really? This same woman who went on record calling Amazon "probably the biggest slave owner in the world," was portrayed in this film as having been saved from suicide by van life?
We've all heard the horror stories coming out of Amazon warehouses. This is the reality, not the sanitized version that Zhao presents, either willingly, or as the result of manipulation by Amazon. The moment Zhao portrayed this cozy picture of life as a gig worker at Amazon -- a gig worker who doesn't get benefits, mind you -- she departed drastically from reality, and undermined her every assertion that she's trying to let you make your own conclusions.
This depiction reinforces the status quo. According to this depiction, Amazon is fine; actually, it's a good resource for the houseless retirees. Fern says it's "Great money," even though this film is set in 2011, before Amazon established a $15 minimum wage (which is still not enough, but that's beside the point). If Amazon is perfectly fine and not held to account, then why would we expect that of any of the other forces at work in the van dwellers' lives? These scenes, which take place early in the movie, set the tone for the rest of the film: a background stream of false working class solidarity that fails to hold systemic problems and capitalistic powers to account.
Positioning by Omission
If this film isn't depicting reality, then what is it depicting? According to Zhao, "If you look deeply, the issue of elder care as a casualty of capitalism is on every frame. It’s just, yes, there’s the beautiful sunset behind it." So actually, scratch what she said in the other article; we are to believe Nomadland is deeply critical of capitalism, specifically of its treatment of elders.
However, the film has already failed to live up to this assertion by failing to depict Amazon's abuse of elders. Such omissions permeate the film, letting the capitalistic factors that led to these peoples' daily reality off the hook.
The story we are given is this: Fern, who is in her 60s (and based off McDormand's romantic dream of what she wanted to be at age 65), lost her husband, then her town. The latter, which is a true story, was the result of the closing of the United States Gypsum Corporation plant there due to lack of demand. Thus we find Fern living in a van, doing gig work, such as for Amazon, but also for a rock shop, a camp, a restaurant for tourists, and a beet farm. She encounters other van dwellers who talk about their backstories. She encounters various struggles. A loose plot is constructed out of her relationship with a man named Dave, who is obviously sweet on her and who tries to convince her to stay with his family. The settled life doesn't suit her, however -- for reasons elaborated better in other reviews of this movie, living "nomadically" suits her lasting grief over her husband's death. She returns to her van and drives off into the beautiful American landscape.
I'll address my criticisms of Zhao's omissions and how they position the viewer in roughly chronological order.
First, the abandonment of Empire, Nevada. The situation is explained in a series of of titlecards at the beginning of the film, which harshly present the dissolution of the town, but also give the USG Corporation a justification in explaining the lack of demand. Especially with the context of the later Amazon scenes, it reads to me like an "oh well," of capitalism, just one of those things that happens in the background of someone's life and there's no need to be mad about it. The USG Corporation is never mentioned again, and we find out later in the film that Fern and her husband, Beau, actually loved living in the company town.
While I don't know about the specifics of life in Empire, company towns historically have a horrible track record -- but the film doesn't address that. Either Empire wasn't like other company towns, or Fern liked it there despite that -- but all we hear about is the nice view from her house. Is the USG Corporation not to blame for monopolizing workers' labor opportunities in the middle of nowhere, and then abandoning them without any lasting aide? Surely it is, but the movie is about interested in that as it is in the horrifying working conditions in Amazon warehouses in real life; namely, not at all.
Moving on to the van-dwellers' backstories. Linda Mays talks about how she retired and found that her social security savings amounted to a pittance which couldn't sustain her. She wanted to kill herself, but couldn't do it because of her dogs, and so joined the van movement. The question of how social security failed her is ignored and quickly forgotten. It isn't presented as a failure of elder care in America because, according to everything the movie shows us, Linda May is happy now, and living in a van saved her from suicide. Again, the injuries and injustices suffered by the real life people shown in this movie are ignored, despite appearing in the Nomadland book.
The other backstories we hear hint at similar systemic failings -- a veteran with PTSD (just one though!), a husband who dies before getting to experience his retirement, a diagnosis of brain cancer the victim may have been unable to pay to get treated, and so on.
All these tragedies are outweighed by a lot of talk about how van life is liberating, you get to go see the beautiful US of A, etc. Why, you'd think that, despite the hardships of van life (there's shots of seminars where van dwellers laugh about bucket toilets and "that knock on the door" that precedes the enforcement of anti-homeless laws), capitalism's failure to care for its elders resulted in a good thing actually, thank you so much for the opportunity!
This is backed up by the arc between Fern and Dave. As it turns out, Dave can go to the hospital without the bills ever becoming relevant, the reason being that actually, he had a place to all along, a family to go live with. He just didn't want to because of his strained relationship with his son. When Fern tries out sedentary life, she doesn't like it, and returns to her van. In both cases, the choice to live in a van is just that: a choice.
I suppose the people turning up at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous are likely to be the sort of people enjoying the lifestyle, and not necessarily the people living in parking lots in Colorado Springs living off food from Dollar Tree. Still, this narrow view of the supposed quintessence of van life, and the handwaving of malignant capitalistic forces in peoples' pasts would make you think that most people live the van life voluntarily, or at least love living it involuntarily.
And why wouldn't they love living it? So far as we see, it's actually not that bad for 60-80 year olds to be working in the gig economy. Unlike real life, no one gets injured. Fern has a "knee issue" but this comes up when she has to sit on the ground for a chat, not when she's shoveling beets or treading the concrete floors of the Amazon warehouse. As a disabled person, I watched the whole movie with a hovering anxiety for the characters' well-being in these harsh work conditions, but that never came to fruition.
The Risks of Romanticization
One review I read said in the byline that Nomadland "risks romanticizing a harsh life in the gig economy," but otherwise praised the film. No, I'd say Nomadland outright romanticizes that harsh life because it barely portrays the harshness of that life. Another review ends with the line "Maybe we should hit the road," -- a lesson I don't think we'd get from a film that didn't gloss over the gnarlier details of capitalistic exploitation of van-dwelling workers.
Okay, it's just a movie, and, as Youtuber Shonalika put it, no movie can say everything that needs to be said. Van life obviously works for some people, and there's nothing wrong with that. But, romanticizing van life in such a one-sided way is a dangerous way to address those vague gestures towards "elder care as a casualty of capitalism." It might sound to some like a decent reason not to worry too much about the failure of elder care because, check it, these elders are fine! Yet there's a reason the people in this movie are majority white and comparatively able-bodied -- van life is not a reasonable proposition for whole subsets of the population.
This is a dangerous mentality of individual solutions to systemic problems. This mentality seeps into other parts of Nomadland. For example, when Fern is at a get together with her sister's friends (?), she criticizes them for being real estate agents, holding them individually accountable for what she feels are problems with their trade. The emphasis, as I heard it, was on what they, these two men do, and they should stop doing it. (Also, according to Fern, the big problem with real estate is that people are duped into buying houses they can't afford, which I suppose is a problem, though no mention of things like racist practices or the unaffordability of housing to begin with, but whatever).
Not every story has to deal with systemic solutions, but if you're going to depict a systemically oppressed group, maybe don't romanticize the individual solutions so hard.
G*psies and Pioneers
There's a bit of tone-deaf language in this film that I'd like to bring up.
First is the use of a the word "g*psy" in a song during which Fern and Dave dance. According to another review I generally agree with, Bob Wells, the organizer of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, is all too willing to use that word on his website to describe van life. The use of that slur during a song no doubt is meant to draw the comparison to the life led by van-dwellers, but, as this article helpfully states, "In depicting 'Gypsy' ways as a lifestyle choice for carefree travelers and adventurers, the real system of oppression is also erased."
I'm not qualified to speak more on that particular subject. I will now indulge in a brief moment of speculation. I've been vigorously avoiding the word "nomad" through this entire post because, since watching the movie, I've been wondering at its political implications. Nomadism describes a way of life for some cultures, cultures which, by my understanding, are generally oppressed by sedentary societies. Is it indelicate to use this term to describe the lifestyle, voluntary or not, of a predominately white subculture? I have no idea, but I have my misgivings, and would love to learn more.
The other bit of language I want to complain about is the quote which was used in trailers for the film -- Dolly, Fern's sister, defending Fern's choices by saying, "What the nomads are doing is not that different than what the pioneers did." This pronouncement is so unspecific as to be totally baffling to me. I suppose it's about the legend of pioneers as explorers, or something, though that's an odd assertion when, according to the film, van dwellers spend a lot of time at campgrounds set aside for that purpose.
Given that this line as obviously scripted, it absolutely baffles me how it passed through so many hands without any noticing its egregious failing which is that...we all know what the pioneers did, right? I guess we're just gonna forget about the genocide of native peoples for the sake of this comparison, which is weirdly favorable? It's a line that buys wholesale into a white myth of America, the idea that what the pioneers did was explore an empty land, rather than ravaging a populated one.
Conclusion
I tried to see what people would like about this movie; I swear, I did. Frances McDormand is a good actress. There's some moments of real humor in the movie. There's also some moments of real "oh shit" tragedy, even if that tragedy is barely explored. The landscapes are pretty, sure, though I think they do most of the heavy lifting where cinematography feels lacking to me, an unprofessional observer. (Even so, my impression of them after the fact is mostly of hills and stones rendered in mostly gray. If the USA has so many beautiful landscapes to offer, why not make them, you know, colorful?) I have no issues with a movie that doesn't have much of a plot or conventional structure (I liked the third season of Twin Peaks after all). None of that is my real beef with Nomadland.
I am sick of films that present themselves as some sort of realistic neutral when they're actually implicitly propping up a dangerous status quo. There's just enough lip service paid to social issues and working class sympathy for it to seem revolutionary -- enough, apparently, for one reviewer to insist that "Zhao’s film is one of the most fervently anti-capitalist films to break into the American mainstream in a long, long time." (That made me laugh, for obvious reasons, but also, I guess Sorry to Bother You and Parasite didn't count?) This bare minimum of lip service, however, gives way to a focus on the general theme of grief and a comforting sadness, a feeling that everything will be fine, these people are fine, it's all fine.
All that space given to aimless depression and shots of the landscape could've been used to say something. But there's a reason the Nomadland is currently a frontrunner in the Oscars, and it isn't because it had lots to say.
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