The film was directed by Chloà � Zhao, Chinese, born in Beijing in 1982. This is her third feature film, after critical successes with Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017), films about cowboys and Indians, dominators and the repressed, so she's got the American pulse alright. Throw in ancient rumors that the "Indians" are actually Chinese ancestors who crossed the Bering Strait, and maybe Zhao's got a secret agenda. Maybe the Academy has a political agenda, pushing a newbie with so little film experience. But, in any case, she's living the American Dream now: high school in LA, undergraduate student at Mt. Holyoke, film studies at NYU, Sundance Festival, Voila: You like me! You like me!
Oh, and one last thing, I read at IMDB that "Amazon Studios greenlit Zhao's upcoming untitled Bass Reeves biopic, a historical Western about the first black U.S. Deputy Marshal." So, given that her cowboy film features a tragically horse-thrown paraplegic -- perhaps a metaphor for American empire -- she's definitely PC the way the Academy likes 'em. The MSM may no longer be adversarial (were they ever?), but the Academy is not afraid to step up to the plate and call, "Meat!" where it sees it. (Gotta watch your criticism, you might get Conigliaroed by some spitballer.) Still, Zhao's contract with Amazon makes this a political movie after all; and helps explain the fairly benign portrayal of the online retailer. ("Great Money!") Uh-hunh.
Many viewers will be unfamiliar with Zhao's work. IMDB helpfully includes a short video titled, "A Guide to the Films of Chloà � Zhao," which tells us to look for key stylistic traits, including: social realism, reflective leads, twilight landscapes, sibling relationships, framed-from-behind angles, night fires. They're all here. Shhh.
Nomadland is about stuff we acquire, procure, receive, buy -- and store. Like old folders and files on our hard drives that we rarely ever get around to 'spring cleaning', things add up, until we're stuffed. In the opening scene of the film, Fern is rummaging through old stored materials in her self-storage unit (all the nomads seem to have one) and "she pulls out a man's blue work coat that's too big for her. She holds it to her face like an old friend and breathes it in. Holding back tears." [screenplay, p. 2] Later, she shows to Linda May, her work acquaintance and an Amazon Ambassador, stuff her father gave her, a bizarre heirloom of sorts: "I got my nice dishes that my Dad gave me. He collected these from yard sales and when I graduated from high school he gave me the whole set." Say what?
Throughout the film, many of the characters give away material goods, from the purely surplus (tables, folding chairs, lamps, etc.) to long-held bits and pieces, or items of significant sentimentality (with "this belonged my mother" or "my grandmother knit this"). In some ways, the film is about the commodification of our spirit, of our human values being replaced by materialism (the belief in material or things as signifiers of our status or credos. A Che tee means to tell others that we care, but not deeply, and when the tee in the wash caring is out of sight and out of mind. It's kind of like that as these nomads pick through stuff they have in self-storage units. They hand these things off to other nomads, with a little story, and sometimes a little hug, and the stuff replaces what the others have just thrown out. It's almost funny, like Fern's daddy-dish collection.
That's the old stuff. The Amazon Fulfillment Center is there to help people procure new stuff. The pickers-packers who work at the FC are fulfilling orders (i used to be called filling orders, but no one seems to notice that). Just as social media get rich feeding off our algorithms (and what they say about our desires), Amazon, and its main competitor, eBay, do their best to get things to us ASAP, the quick turnaround from hitting the Buy button to receiving it at the door is the the fulfillment, the delivery of the promised goods. Das Kapital working hand-in-glove with bank credit cards and their diabolical line-of-credit that eventually punish us for our neediness for things. Indeed, when we eventually become debt slaves, paying off the minimum balance of one card with another in a slow, inevitable spinout and credit rating crash, becoming the "deadbeats" that creditors love, well, it gets old.
So, one of the clearer points that the film makes is that these nomads hit the road voluntarily. They want out of the rat race of too little money, too little freedom as a result, and way too little personal satisfaction about their lives. The nomads we see aren't particularly unhappy; they're just somewhat burned out by a system that doesn't respect their humanity first and foremost. (See the quip above from real employees griping about not being robots.) Robots don't feel, and yet many Amazon employees complain that the pace they must work is set by machines. The company ignores their suffering, folks are routinely sacked if they can't keep up -- as if they don't deserve that "great money", that minimum wage the rest of the nation is fighting to obtain. Linda May tells Fern, when they are together after work at a nomad camp, that she's got some serious health issues from using the scanner gun, as well as worsening tendonitis from hauling boxes that she fears complaining about. But there is no elaboration, no politics emerges. They suffer silently for the most part.
And this raises one of the most serious flaws of Nomadland. For all the freedom touted in the film, being on the road, finding safety in the numbers of other nomads with tales to tell, the story is dystopian. There is no satisfaction in the movie. We are dealing with survivors, not folks driven by the corny idealism of patriotism or economic justice. These are Depression-era people, updated for the 21st century. These people go from Amazon to picking beets to canneries and the service sector -- itinerant casual or part-time labor at the whimsical disposal of employers who can fire at will and offer no health benefits. But Zhao's portrait presses resilience and strength, but always under gray skies and bleak open landscapes. Some have a strange acceptance of their fate -- Linda May, for instance, is rapt about four acres of desert she purchased on Craigslist; the pictures looked nice and she can't wait to get there. It's sad, as our former president used to say.
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