'No, I'm Mad' Land
How the movie missed the story
Things are beginning to feel a little more normal. On Friday, a bit later than elsewhere, the thaw reached Faversham’s local cinema. The Royal is a small indie with one screen, which tends to show one obvious, mainstream film at a time, augmented by three yearly 8-week ‘seasons’ of Monday evenings run by the Faversham Film Society: tonight it’s the new Almodovar.
But I couldn’t wait for that. No amount of Netflix, even on a real live TV, is going to be the same as going to the cinema. The Royal pretty much kept me going those first months I found myself here, at a fiver a ticket. And I have an interest in the current, unlikely, obvious Oscar-winner. So, on the bank holiday Saturday when spring itself finally seemed to begin to be recovering from its long Covid, I left the sunshine outside and went to see Nomadland.
Everyone, by now, knows that this is Frances McDormand’s portrayal of a woman living in her van after losing everything, and travelling the country as an itinerant worker. It’s based on the book of the same title by Jessica Bruder. The book itself began with Bruder’s article The End of Retirement: When You Can’t Afford to Stop Working, which ran in Harper’s magazine in 2014.
McDormand plays a woman called Fern, whose story loosely coincides with that of Linda May, one of the people in the book — who also appears in the film as herself. Most of the other people in it besides McDormand are not actors — they are itinerant van-dwellers, rubber-tramps, nomads, people who appear in the book, and who tell their own stories in the film.
So, I’ve been thinking all day about how to get at what I think. The top impressions are clear enough: it’s very moving, because the people are moving, and the soundtrack is great. It looks very beautiful, with its backdrop of the Great American Landscape, lots of scenic weather and light, and its theme of ‘reconnecting with Nature’. McDormand obviously is an actor who can wring emotion from a stone — maybe even especially from a stone (although her untalkative stoicism, and many of Fern’s expressive tics, both seem to come straight from Fargo’s Sheriff Marge Gunderson). It seems educational in intent — ‘here is how people are living’ — and I’m sure many people whose lives have been more straightforward are learning something from it, even if a quick trawl through Rotten Tomatoes might seem like no, they’re really not.
I was so euphoric at the sunny day, and just being in a cinema, and meeting a friend for a drink in a pub afterwards, that I couldn’t access all my impressions at once. But when I left the cinema I ran into a young guy I know sitting outside a pub with some friends, and he asked about the film. I said I thought it was too photogenic, sentimental, and a few other things like that, and his friend — who’d only half-heard me — said, ‘Oh yeah, “make it look really grim for the voyeurs”, eh?’
At once I realised that, while on the contrary I felt it had been ‘nice-ified’ (as my friend Elaine put it), my discomfort was precisely that I felt co-opted as a voyeur.
Of course, it is grim. I think a pampered middle-class audience (we are all pampered) might find van conditions a bit grim. There’s a scene where Fern shits into her bucket, for example; that gets made a lot of on Rotten Tomatoes. (The bucket has a lid. She’s not an animal.) There’s a scene where she eats pot noodle in her front seat, listening to the radio, wearing a ‘Happy New Year’ hairband, and once or twice someone knocks on the door of the van and she’s scared. But the emphasis of the film lies elsewhere.
The book tells about workplace accidents, some involving people in their late 70s (or even older) doing heavy manual labour 10-12 hours a day for around $10 an hour. It describes the conditions in the trailer parks where workers park up to live in their vans while they work these shifts: they can be anywhere up to 35 miles from the site. Parts of the movie appear to have been filmed in an actual Amazon warehouse; you wonder what the producers had to sign — or pay — to get that access. The book is much bolder on this front, and the article I’ve linked above is stark on the subject of the workplaces and conditions and pay (or even the lack of it).
In the film several of the workers say complimentary things about the big employers. In the book (and the article linked above) there’s a story about a woman who had a head injury while rushing through the building. She took one day (unpaid) off work to recover, apologised for running up the stairs, and was grateful that they hadn’t sacked her. This tells you not how nice the employers are, but about the brutality of the employment conditions in an economy that seems even now, in several nuanced way, to consider people expendable.
The book deals with the lack of medical insurance, or access to routine health or dental care. It talks about the US government’s systematic efforts to hobble travellers — comparable to how Romani and Irish travellers are increasingly being criminalised by the UK’s current far-right government. The film only skims the surfaces of these things, like a stone skimming the water of a deep lake.
And the movie is full of deep lakes — and redwoods, and deserts, and shots of people sitting in nature, or going for drinks together, having a laugh while working, always happy, singing their hobo songs, as if it were a travelogue, a brochure.
The storyline — fictional — focuses on Fern’s grieving for her husband, after the company town where they lived shut down with the closure of its only employer. She’s bought a van and kitted it out to live in, and off she goes. She’s tough as nails already at the beginning of the film, and this grim determination sees her through. But in real life, surely, and this comes over in some of the travellers’ interviews, people begin as they were, and toughen up as they go. It’s hard: they have to learn to be that tough, and they change because it is tough. The van-dwelling ‘lifestyle’ (God I hate that word) is more and more shown to be a choice fuelled by desire for freedom, adventures, ‘real community’. In one scene, Fern’s sister says to her (I paraphrase) ‘You’ve been running away your whole life’. So it’s not capitalism: it’s just her personality. It’s not the closure of the factory and the loss of her home that’s driving her, it’s her grief for her husband. But the husband had already been dead for some time. So it’s her wandering nature.
The memory of the Dust Bowl still lives in the USA: the national dream. The hobo, the tramp, the wanderer, the guy who just can’t cope with the everyday world, the lost dreamer, the pioneer. The guy who chucks it all in. But the pioneers after the Gold Rush were stooges of business interests — incentivised by railroad companies and the like — and the hobos of the thirties were looking for work. Fern is shown looking for work and being told there isn’t a normal job for her. Homelessness seems less shocking if you call its participants ‘nomads’. (There’s a scene where Fern famously says, ‘I’m not homeless, I’m just houseless’. Then she says, a little too brightly: ‘Not the same thing, right?’ That’s a question.) Technically the van-dwellers are nomads. And their vans are their homes, and as people say, the road can be your home too. They are also, many of them, elderly itinerant workers with no protection or workers’ rights, living in vehicles, harassed by the police and prey to crime. Put that way, it sounds a little less romantic. But hey, ‘nomads’. Let’s go look at them.
Many of them, the rubber tramps, van-dwellers, nomads who appear in the film tell their own stories on camera, in scenes half-scripted and half improvised. (In interviews they have all stressed how they were really just being themselves.) Some are talking directly to ‘Fern’ and a few are sitting round a campfire reminiscing about how they got into it. They sound hopeful, positive, they talk about getting in touch with nature and not wasting their lives. They have tremendous dignity. But ‘dignity’ is a word we use about people whose dignity might be called into question, isn’t it. They’ve been afforded this particular dignity by being allowed by a movie director to share their own stories. A movie director who seems very keen to keep reminding us that they’re ‘real people’, even as she fictionalises them.
I’m remembering these shots as if they were in soft focus, though I knew they weren’t. But actually, maybe some of them were. The film felt a bit pleased with itself for showing us these ‘real people’, who are presented as that kind of ‘real’ that’s code for ‘not like us’. I may be doing the filmmakers a disservice here, but there were a few too many lingering closeups of people’s tattoos, with an implied suggestion that ‘for these people they have meaning’. It is orientalising. There’s even, if I recall it correctly, a close-up of a pretty young woman’s bare feet with a leather ankle bracelet. Hell, for years I used to have one of those.
There’s a scene that made me die inside, where a young guy called Derek is telling Fern (because she’s pumping him about why does he live this way and doesn’t he have a girlfriend somewhere) about this girl he writes to, but he thinks he can’t write avbot anything that would interest her, and she begins to recite to him ‘a poem I read on my wedding day’. It’s ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day’, and it becomes a voiceover. By the time she’s half done, he’s walking down the path with his giant rucksack, maybe back to his girl (or maybe not); by the last line she’s in her van, looking at a photo of her husband. Whoever he is, Derek is real, you know? And his presence in the film is lovely. He is genuinely moving. But who is he?
There is only one black face in the film. The book discusses this whiteness, and how it might not, for instance, be safe for a black man to be caught parking overnight in a van in a place where you’re not really supposed to park. So even clawing back a bit of counter-culture control over your destiny is a white people’s game. This goes unexamined in the movie, which depoliticises this van-living almost completely, except for the most broad, glowy sense that they’re all just breaking away from restricting old rooms and the same view every day. It’s the old hippie dream come round again.
Even Fern’s backstory is confused: her husband has died. She discusses this with several people in the film, and her grief is seen as a reason why she can’t settle anywhere. The closure of the factory and subsequent death of her town has been announced in the first frame, so we know about this brutality, but it’s only really mentioned when her sister asks why she didn’t ‘come home’ after her husband died. She just stayed put in her little house, like people do generally tend to do. But the actual, physical, financial loss of the house (which was a company house, so let’s look at that) is glossed over almost completely. Her grief seems to grow, not fade, as the film goes on. And in a film full of real people, it’s hard not to keep remembering that hers is fictional.
In the course of the film, two people invite her to live with them. One is her sister, and the other is in a Waltons-like setup, a fictitious and almost pornographic enactment of the American dream of ‘family’, in a lovely, big old house somewhere in the middle of Scenery, with millions of sheep and chickens and a piano they know how to play. As Fern, trying to decide, stands facing the family dining table where they had their Thanksgiving dinner the day before, the table somehow becomes the table from Norman Rockwell’s famous Thanksgiving scene — in the painting called ‘Freedom from Want’.
Of course she refuses, and is right to, because neither of these offered lives is her life. But the story has created a false dichotomy. Because the real choice isn’t between living on your own steam in a van or being in someone else’s house — it’s between living on your own steam in your van or in your own place. That’s the choice. ‘Your own terms’ should mean real terms you set, not just how you cope with being spat out by society.
And that is the thing that’s fudged by the film. Remember, that the Crash of 2008 was all about dodgy capitalism, it was about people losing their homes. Since then, as the global plutocracy has really taken off, the rich have got exponentially richer and the wealth gap has left the rest of us with less than ever.
Bob Wells, the man who pulled van-dwelling together as a movement after the Crash with his website cheaprvliving.com, features heavily in the film. He talks a lot about the grief and loss that most of these older van-dwellers are carrying around with them. (He feels that the increasing numbers of younger people now taking up this way of life are doing so to inoculate themselves against future grief.) In an interview with Vulture, he says:
The movie is set so much in nomadic living, but it’s really the age-old story: the hero’s journey through grief and loss. It’s really the story of Fern’s grief and many other people’s. Swankie talks about her grief, her losing her life. [N.b., in real life Swankie is still very much alive. How weird is this.] And at one point, Linda May talks about being prepared to take her own life. I mean, that’s kind of the ultimate in grief. I was ready to take my own life at one point. A friend of ours, who was in the military, talked about his just briefly around the fire — about the grief of battle and war and post-traumatic stress. It’s a movie about grief, and so it’s dark and moving, but it’s very, very true to nomadic living. I think that’s why a lot of us are out here. We’re recovering through a life of grief and loss.
His website goes further and rhapsodises about how it’s going to be ‘the best time of your life’. It really sells the ‘lifestyle’. He makes the work you’re going to be doing sound fun and easy, and easy to get (he says he himself lives off his pension), and his budgets for getting by seem a little optimistic. He does stress that you need to save, ruthlessly, to have enough in the bank for disasters, like van trouble. Yet in the interview above, he ignores the fact that Linda May was suicidal because of the harshness of the life, and the oppressive working conditions she was suffering.
This refusal to look at real causes turns out to be written into the DNA of (not the book, but) the film. The director, Chloé Zhao, is quoted in Indiewire:
The larger community of contemporary nomads, as captured in the film, are largely white older Americans. While most of the film is set in more conservative parts of the country, Zhao tried to depoliticize the story. “I tried to focus on the human experience and things that I feel go beyond political statements to be more universal—the loss of a loved one, searching for home,”
she said, and blurred the ‘politics’ of growing homelessness with the party politics of Capitol Hill. The article clarifies further:
McDormand has long admired the liberation of the nomadic life, and optioned the book with producing partner Peter Spears. (Her fictional character’s name, Fern, may as well be McDormand’s road name.)
Of course, we all crave this — it’s atavistic. One of my favourite books as a teenager was a memoir by a man who had literally run off with the Gypsies, and was adopted by the Romani. And hard as that summer was, after I lost my flat three years ago, there were some senses in which it wasn’t all bad being peripatetic. I needed experiences. And I got pretty fit. But God knows, I envied people with cars. You wouldn’t have to lug all your stuff everywhere, you could just keep it in the car. And you’d have a place to sleep, no matter what happened. Imagine having a van! Even now I envy people with vans: an insurance policy if everything goes tits-up again.
But, as McDormand is quoted as saying in the LA Times,
“It’s not for the faint of heart. It is not a romantic idea. You have to plan and you have to be very confident that you can be alone. Like Swankie says to Fern, ‘You can die out there.’ I love to camp and I’ve been on the road many times since we made the movie. But I’m definitely a dabbler.”
When she, or Zhao, or Jessica Bruder spends time on the road ‘living in a van’, they have their home to go back to any time they want.
Later that year, in a temporary house, I read Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guide to Getting Lost. There’s a paragraph in there that encapsulates much of what I was thinking about then, when I had no idea what was going to happen next, and I guess that this movie has stirred up in me:
Sometimes I thought of my apartment in San Francisco as only a winter camp and home as the whole circuit around the West I travel a few times a year and myself as something of a nomad (nomads, contrary to current popular imagination, have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places; they are far from being the drifters and dharma bums that the word nomad often connotes nowadays). This meant that it was all home, and certainly the intense emotion that, for example, the sequence of mesas alongside the highway for perhaps fifty miles west of Gallup, N.M., and a hundred miles east has the power even as I write to move me deeply, as do dozens of other places, and I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness and profoundly alienated.
The key, I think, is that she has her flat, and her living as a writer, and her sense of herself untrammelled. And I’m now really noticing that word, ‘alienated’. It’s hard not to feel that this movie is a game the filmmakers are playing. The real people are happy to go along with it, because of course they do — it’s their big chance. To break out, to be seen and heard, to put their side. Of course they gloss it and emphasise the good things, and talk about community, and revel in the control they’ve taken over their lives. Anyone would.
… The 38-year-old Zhao, who wrote the screenplay, made the story her own: She has crafted a mesmerizing immersion into the American West, populating the canvas with its real inhabitants and capturing the ecosystem so well that McDormand’s own star power melts into her surroundings. “We put our heads together in this little bubble and didn’t really think about the outside world,” Zhao said.
I guess that’s why they’ve given Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, a free pass for the way Amazon uses these people, each of whom has a back story that doesn’t appear in the film (some were very middle class, just like you, before something broke — in one case, in the book, it was someone’s investments going pop). Meanwhile, Bezos has more than doubled his wealth during the pandemic. He’s rich enough to pension off every one of these people and give them a little house and still be rich.
Homelessness, or at any rate ‘houselessness’, is growing exponentially, in the US and in the UK. Social security is not enough to live on, unless you already have your house all paid for and you’re one of those last people who will get a final salary pension (there’s a gender angle here, too, not addressed in the film at all; my dad retired on twice what my mother was earning at the time, into her seventies) — and even then, hardly anyone now stays in one job till we retire. We work in the gig economy, everything’s a hustle, we’ll never be able to stop. In the UK, the housing crisis has been exacerbated by middle class people buying a second home to fund their retirement, and renting it out. The film about this crisis — which is reality, and which is where Nomadland started — is still needed. It’s a shame they couldn’t have made a documentary, without the soap on the lens.