While that is seemingly an obvious and also simple question, it set me thinking—so what really is nomadland about? The story itself is simple, of a woman, named Fern, who was travelling across America in search of work but that is of course not what makes this a great film. What is characteristic of the best films, is how they have the capability to speak to each of us in our own individual condition, in different ways. For adults who have had some experience in life, they will see themselves in her situation, perhaps only in some narrow aspect, but yet they will be able to sympathise or at least understand, to empathise with her situation in its manifold of details, from the pain of separation, from having to power through a grinding day at work, from the suffering of the cold, to her hunger, her anguish but also her joy.
I am making this video for those who have already seen the film and who has come to hear another’s reflections. For those who have yet to see it, there might be small spoilers so it is better that you first see the film and then return here.
So what is nomadland about? It is about love and then having to let go. After investing her entire life in her relationship with her boyfriend and then husband, she moved to a small isolated town, so that he could work in a mining firm which seems to be the main reason for the town’s existence. But as life turns out, the company had to close, probably it went bust in the financial crisis in 2008, and her husband got ill and died shortly after. Even the town of Empire went to pieces—the start of the film tells us about how it even lost its own postal code. She has spent a good part of her life here, and now is no longer young, but yet she has somehow to find a way to make a new life. However, the film suggests, even if it doesn’t explicitly say it, how she has sunk probably a lot of her savings into her home, which because of the decline of the town is now worth little to nothing.
On a sidenote: this is one of the power of the medium of film, which can make suggestions and not spell out everything explicitly. However, an attentive watcher of Nomadland can certainly catch the hints. This is an important rule of any story-telling, which is, “show, don’t tell.” Instead of the director and writer telling us what they want to say, which will then come across preachy, they instead show us, through the eyes and lives of the characters.
Some might think of Nomadland as an indictment of capitalism, of how, even when you did everything right, things can go tragically wrong. She worked in human resources, she even taught at the local school for 5 years. She narrates poems off the top of her head; this is not a woman who was completely irresponsible and had drug, alcohol or gambling problems that caused her to now be in a bad shape. That is the kind of narrative that is fed to us, that if we make bad choices, then we can’t complain if things go badly. This is a woman who followed her man, worked hard and yet seem not to be able to make ends meet, with the movie suggesting that it is mostly not her fault.
So it is a movie about tragic failure and loss. Tragic in the sense that even after doing your best, things work out badly. But what then does one do? The people she meets along the way on her journey across America, who are in a similar situation to her, these nomads, struggle to keep going on. Several spoke of suicide, but somehow something held them back. For one of her friends in the film, it was her dogs, she couldn’t bear leaving them behind. The movie has its ups and downs, there are moments when you can almost feel the cold as she shivers under the sheets on her mattress in her van. You can imagine how she had hardly slept; have you ever had to sleep in really cold conditions, when it is so cold that you keep waking up, you can hardly sleep, you are tossing and turning, trying to eradicate any cold spots on the bed, between your sheets, and just when you nod off, the alarm rings?
Yet the next day, she has to head to work, and her work is mostly the grinding labourious kind, from manual labour, to packing parcels, from cleaning, to cooking at a diner. But she has to work to survive. And her work is the seasonal kind, which lasts only a short while which explains why she has to keep being on the road, to find her next job. This isn’t a lifestyle, the travel is driven by necessity.
Another sidenote: One of the benefits of movies and books is how you almost feel you have lived multiple lifetimes just over a short period of time, but that is reductionistic. Of course we cannot really feel her pain. A long shift, the long night struggling with the cold, is reduced to brief minutes of screentime. If it even stretched just a bit more, we would have found it too tiresome to watch. But of course we can imagine, or empathise, since we might have perhaps some tangentially similar experiences.
So she has to cope with this tedious kind of work, but she is carrying on stoically. Has she any choice really? Living needs money, even to find work needs money, since she needs gas money to make the drive across the country to hunt for her next job. Just putting one foot in front of another, just to keep moving, sometimes that is all we can do. But the movie also has its moments of relief, of alleviation, when she comes across a community of nomads, where they support one another in simple ways, with small acts of generosity when it seems they are unable to afford it but yet they give, kindnesses they encounter and kindnesses they dole out.
What is nomadland about? It is about choices. She and some of her co-travellers have concerned families and friends, who extend their hand, who offer to give them shelter, something more permanent. And perhaps they come to visit for awhile, but after that seek to leave, because they want to what? It is hard to understand sometimes why they go, why they reject what seems to be their lifeline. Perhaps they want to live life on their own terms, perhaps they don’t want to live in the shadow of someone’s charity, perhaps they don’t want to burden others, perhaps they feel undeserving.
Soon, winter is again on Fern. Once again the Christmas carols suggest that time of the year. So a year has passed, she is now back where she started, at the Amazon warehouse. But even as she walked in through the doors of the warehouse, she is already a different person, not the same person who came in through those same doors a year before. Some who didn’t experience life in her shoes would see stagnation; her life seems to be an endless cycle of repetition, with her work driven by the seasons. But she has in that year grown; the lives she has met, the love and friendship she has felt, the knowledge of how her strength and weakness, of how she has overcome, the letting go she has to do so she can move on. There is no happily ever after, though at some point in the film, the writer kind of wanted to suggest that she could choose that if she wanted. She didn’t. Why? It is left to your imagination why. Or better, take it just to be a kind of metaphor, a kind of allegory—her journey is her own, your journey is your own. I hope you have enjoyed my ruminations, thank you.
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