The Wokeness of Nomadland

Autofiction has now moved from literature to the movies. Nomadland, featuring the indubitable Frances McDormand (who redeemed herself in my eyes after the horrendous “Three Billboards Outside Ebbings, Missouri”), mixes up real life people with actors who drive around the west in their RVs and vans and school buses as nomadic refugees from capitalism. The movie doesn’t play up the class issue but it’s why they’re on the road “houseless” as Fern (Frances) calls it, looking for community.

Fern’s husband worked at the sheetrock plant in Empire, Nevada, where they lived for decades. After he dies and the plant closes in 2011, she’s kicked out of the company house and on the road in her outfitted van she names “Vanguard.” She works temp jobs at Amazon in Nevada, a campground in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, a sugar beet farm in Nebraska, and a restaurant cook, also in South Dakota. But the best parts of the movie are when she migrates to the Arizona encampment run by Bob, a real life nomad, where others come together to share information, food, and friendship with the likes of Linda May and Swankie, also real life nomads.

I was completely engaged throughout the movie where not much happens. It won awards at the Toronto and Venice film festivals and got glowing reviews from the LA Times and the New York Times. But then came the complaints. Now we’re all entitled to our opinions, of course, and Richard Brody in The New Yorker let it be known that he didn’t think the juxtaposition of real life/fiction worked and complained that the documentary part was hackneyed and in the fictional part characters weren’t fully developed, nobody got to talk enough, all the usual complaints about movies that don’t follow the accepted narrative of plot and character development. Talking to my friend Terri about his review she exclaimed: “Swankie is the classic old lesbian hippie. I’d know her anywhere. And Fern doesn’t need to talk. She listens.”

But then came the other complaints that painfully reveal how cancel culture and identity politics have diminished critical thinking about content and aesthetics (you’re so right, Jakob). First came the class issues: how could this movie portray oppressed people having a good time doing their own thing, finding spiritual support at the Arizona encampment, and actually wanting to be a nomad? What a betrayal of class politics.

Then came the complaint that while the movie shows Fern and Linda May working at dead end Amazon warehouses it doesn’t talk about the movement to organize a union that’s now playing out at Amazon in Alabama. Fern and Linda May are in the warehouse in Nevada. They’re trying to make enough money so they can buy gas and groceries to get to Arizona. They don’t know anything about union organizing, but failing to mention it is somehow class betrayal.

Next came the race card. Here we finally have a story centered on working class women, who yes, are white, but the movie is based on a book by journalist Jessica Bruder who wrote about the actual plant that closed in Empire, Nevada, that mostly employed white people because that’s the demographic of Empire, Nevada. So when Fern goes to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota to work as a campground host a Native American academic posts on Facebook that she immediately quit watching the movie that she “initially liked” because there weren’t any Indians in it. This is Indian Country and how can the director not make sure that Indians are part of the conversation? It reminded me of the same kind of criticism leveled at Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester By the Sea” that there weren’t any black people in it. The movie takes place in a working class town in upstate Massachusetts where the demographic is white. I thought the critique was a joke, but it wasn’t.

Scrolling through Rotten Tomatoes “Top Critics” reviews it looks like The New Yorker is the single negative mainstream review. The rest come in from the woke world out there, immersed in their bubbles of correctness.