Grief, Hospitality, and the Frontier in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020)

Abstract

Chloé Zhao’s award-winning film Nomadland (2020) is partially based on journalist Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017), an investigative account on the precarious yet resilient lives of US senior citizens who have made their homes in adapted vehicles. The half-fictional, half-documentary film features Francis McDormand as Fern, a woman in her sixties mourning the recent loss of her husband Beau, suddenly made redundant upon the closing down of United States Gypsum and evicted from her home at the company-owned town of Empire. Produced by McDormand, who commissioned Zhao to ground the script on Bruder’s work, the film builds upon real events to place her character’s grief, displacement, and van-dwelling itinerance within the economic predicament of impoverished middle-class seniors. The film’s success brought about multiple reviews and opinion pieces underlining the discrepancies between the journalist’s and the young film maker’s respective stories. Commentators argued that Nomadland had disregarded the socio-political dimension of the journalist’s account and its denunciation on the precarious labor conditions of aging nomadic van-dwellers. A recent critique of the politics of Zhao’s film has engaged its distribution through the increasingly globalized commercial channels of the independent film industry, whose marketing strategies cater to progressive audiences and their fantasies of transgression, liberation, and revolution. From this perspective, Nomadland partakes of a postmodern culture where individualism prevails over social commitment, and where an ambiguous reflection of the material and emotional harm of social exclusion is superseded by an emphasis on personal choice (López Delacruz and Martinez Núñez 2021, 313). Legitimate as are the claims of critics moved by Bruder’s denunciation of the excruciating labor conditions imposed on senior citizens, viewing the film in the light of this aspect of the journalist’s reporting does little justice to the politics and poetics of Zhao’s story in its own terms. This discussion proposes a reading that brings to the foreground the protagonist’s grief and the forms of hospitality she encounters along the road. By delving into Fern’s journey as a search for a home that is inextricably tied to her own self, her previous life, and her multiple losses, it will reveal the film’s emphasis on non-dominating self-other relations and its implicit denunciation of the capitalist individualism inherent in the myth of the American frontier.

Old beat-up high-top van,

Like livin’ in a large tin can.

No rent, no rules, no man,

I ain’t tied to no plot of land.

—Silvianne Delmar’s “Vandweller Anthem,”quoted in Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland (2017)

And we have no pavilion,

No bathhouse, no central stage

But we do have a fire pit where friendships are made

We’re all made out of ticky tacky

And none think all the same

—“Rubbertramper’s song” (in Bruder 2017)

To Carsten