Nomadland: The endless history of our lives adrift.
In The Historic Novel, Gyorgy Lukacs, discussing Walter Scott’s novels, makes the observation that the early novel is a product of emerging bourgeoise ideology. It is the art form of a dominant new class, and it reflects their view of how society is, was, and should be ordered. The hero of many of these novels is, Lukacs notes, an outsider: a figure on the margins, a rebel against the crown, a religious zealot. This outsider is pushed by the flow of history but makes their mark upon it. They are brought into the ruling class that they stood against and in the process change society. They are rarely changed. It is more their characteristics that resolve themselves, impress themselves upon the society around them.
The outsider comes inside, and the inside is forever changed. History is the imposition of individuals on the past to bring it to the present: a perfect present. This is a high point of bourgeoise thought. The first end of history. A romantic utopian idea of the individual at the center of the world. That an individual can not merely ride the wave of history but shape it. This idea allows the bourgeoise to justify its place in the world, atop an ordered reasoned world where the individual is raised by their merit to dominance and prominence.
We still see this in fiction today, on television, in film. It is a strong ideological current that, even as we twist against it, undermine it (as much of modern fiction has tried) persists.
Nomadland, is an inversion of this ideology, but cannot quite escape it. The journey in the film is a constant one, with no end. The insider, Fern( Frances McDormand) has been pushed to the margins by history (Neo liberal capitalism and the atomization and alienation it brings). She once had a home, a husband, a town. She had the trappings of the American Dream. These were taken from her and she, and many others are forced into the gig economy. Forced into a life of travel, searching, looking for community, for some semblance of order in the disorder.
She cannot change history; she is changed by it. She cannot affect history so she must escape it. There is, however, nowhere to go. We see this in the cyclical nature of her journey. She begins in the appropriately tilted Empire, an ex-industrial town now abandoned, much like (to read too much here) the decline of the American Empire’s ideological sway. She ends in Empire too. She returns at the end of the film, to say goodbye to Empire and to leave it behind. But as the camera lifts up into the air (a drone shot surely) we see her tiny van lost in the expanse of snow. She is a piece of dust, an atom. She may have left behind Empire, but she is still in it. In fact, she is a dot in its terrifying nothing.
The film allows us to see the totality of one individual in this vast marginal world of van dwellers, 70 something fry cooks and temp Amazon warehousers. In this it rejects the idea of being able to see the totality of a society in motion, with its ordered and finalized form. The world is through the lens of one woman blown apart and trying to piece herself together. In this it is the opposite of the historical fiction of the early novel. It is in the tradition of the later, more modernist, art that wrestles with the psychological impact of Capitalism on the individual. The landscapes and places of Nomadland are are as much a reflection of Fern’s psychological state, as they are representations of the reality of American in the 21st century.
There is the claustrophobia of the van itself: a cocoon, a hovel, and a lifeboat. Fern’s psyche is linked to the van. Her past is in it, all the things, the objects she has imbued with meaning. The de-humanization and depersonalization of the Amazon warehouse shot wide or in fragmented close ups contrasts with the medium close ups and handheld tracking of the moments of social solidarity with her fellow van dwellers.
We see this framing of the Amazon warehouse, even its drained colors, later in the large bourgeoise house of Dave (David Strathairn),another van dweller now gone back to the safety of his bourgeoise family life.
This return of Dave back to the inside is a temptation for Fern: one she ultimately rejects, in a scene where she literally runs from the house back to her van. It is as if there is no return for her, for the others like her. They must either accept the compromises of middle class life in a time of climate catastrophe, and social dislocation or be pushed to the margins.
There is, in Nomadland, no other way. In this it is not a complete rejection of the ideology of the romantic novelists but merely an inversion. The insider pushed out. The interior world still impresses on the landscape, on society but now it cannot change it. We are trapped, there is no way to drop out, to escape. History is still over, and we are living in the ruins.
It makes perfect sense that Nomadland would be chosen as the best film of the year by the Academy of Motion pictures. It is a beautifully shot, visually impressive film, that has terrific performances by its lead actors and by its supporting cast of non-professionals. The soundtrack creates a mood of the lonely, individual adrift on the flow of time, without being manipulative of clawing. Above this artistry however is an ideology that is comforting to the predominantly upper class voters of the Oscars. It is a sentimental film, in the sense of one that allows us to sympathize with the pain of the poor but do nothing about it. It does not posit a world where change is possible other than through individual acceptance, or adaptation to the continual brutality of Capital. It is a paean to the human capacity for creating social bonds, acts of love, and solidarity. However, it is not a vision where class plays a central role in this, or where change can come through it. It is eulogy to this hope for a better world, a stable world. Death is everywhere in the film. Death full of meaning and at the same time completely meaningless. It is a liberal vision of the individual surviving, not thriving, nor challenging collectively our brutalizing, alienating world.
