Abstract
‘What’s remembered lives’
In Holzwege (wooden-paths), Heidegger (2002) proposes a metaphor between walking aimlessly through nature and the act of thinking by wandering, taking paths which lead nowhere. What matters for thinking is the continuous misdirection, the irreducible wandering through off-beat tracks, unhindered by pre-set destinations. Only in this way can new possibilities of thinking (and life) be engendered.
Nomadland, directed by Chloé Zhao, starring Frances McDormand (who is also a producer on the film), David Strathairn and a number of non-professional actors, is essentially about wandering, the challenges of losing oneself in one’s own potential of being-other.
In 2011, Fern (McDormand) loses her job after the plant where she was employed in Empire, Nevada, shuts down, just a few years after her husband’s death. Fern decides to sell most of her belongings and purchases an old van to travel through the US western states searching for seasonal work – at an Amazon fulfilment centre, at a restaurant, as a cleaning lady etc. On the road, Fern encounters like-minded humans, and shares with them part of her journey. Linda, one of her friends, convinces Fern to visit an Arizona nomad gathering to practice conviviality whilst learning survival and self-sufficiency skills. After her time in Arizona, struggling with money to fix her van, Fern goes back to her sister’s house looking for financial support. Here she finds ‘static life’ unbearable and decides to leave. After a further bout of roaming and seasonal work Fern joins Dave (Strathairn), another friend met on the road, and his children at their rural residence. Despite the good time there, Fern decides to go back to her van. She returns to the abandoned town of Empire visiting her former house and the plant, before returning to the road, again.
Nomadland is largely a character-centred (and a character is also made of the US western landscapes) cinematographic piece. Despite some marginal resonance, it is more meditative than most Hollywood movies on survival-in-nature. The visual language is characterised by continuous contrasts between trivial details and grand landscapes, primal natural beauties and derivative human deeds. Werner Herzog’s documentary style is an acknowledged reference, with its often empathic and embodied portrayal of forgotten humanity. Here, social-economic critique is subtle and nuanced, and the focus is on affiliation/disaffiliation rather than poverty/employment. Although the subject could feature in a movie from Ken Loach or the Dardenne brothers, Nomadland is alien to any portrayal of capitalism’s humiliating cruelty, producing a more evocative and disorienting picture. Ludovico Einaudi’s soundtrack complements the film’s visual language, with its minimalist sound, the alternance between majors and minors, fast and slow movements, reflecting the alternance between the multiple faces of wandering.
The movie is narrated as a visual chronicle of rather daily episodes of people who have survived the end of their world – disease, beloved ones’ loss, economic recession. The atmosphere is subtly post-apocalyptic, with those humans in search of a new life after a social-economic collapse, wandering through a world afflicted by bleak structural challenges, yet full of beauty. The typical post-apocalyptic violence (nuclear disaster, oppressive governments, etc.), though, is diluted in a few bureaucrats and estate agents’ words and deeds, as well as in the shut-down of Empire.
This narration seems geared towards evoking a coherent emotional spectrum, marked by a nostalgia for what it was in tension with the discovery of a new joy of being. There is no space for irony or despair; this is a world of hope and kindness, here and now. Memories keep lived life alive, they do not us drag down, under the weight of missed opportunities and wrong paths. Human relationships are marked by a sense of stillness, of solitary and meditative stasis that invites wandering. Social bonds are solitude’s indispensable counterpart: withdrawal from sedentary life and relentless wandering are a social practice, as individual journeys coalesce, constituting a mobile community without belonging (Agamben, 1993: 85).
These modern wanderers are constantly engaged in building a form of (nomad) life based on self-sufficiency and symbiosis with the surrounding nature. Zhao engages in a ‘nomadology’ which elevates individual lines of flight from a crumbling socio-economic and human order to acts of defiance against the capitalist war-machine (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003: 351). The figure of the nomad stands for the power of the virtual, a tendency towards deterritorialization, an endless movement which fulfils itself transforming this tendency in a way-of-life.
In this way, nomads enact a form of insubordination to the simile-biological vocation which dictates sedentary capitalist life, reminding us that nothing is assigned by necessity, and that instead, no matter how customary, life always retains the character of possibility. This is what the new nomads put at stake in their living. They testify to the fact that happiness is always at stake in our daily choices, and that the choice to leave is not escapism but flight with an immediate political potential: defiance by disentangling from the customary capitalist (produce-consume-die) life. From this angle, it is also possible to appreciate Nomadland’s essential paradox: it proposes the deactivation of capitalist compulsory relentlessness, instantiated in a static life, by a nomad life, a life-on-the-move, of staying-in-the-leaving, which is permeated by stillness and contemplation of one’s own potential of being as much as of not being. The nomad life is a multiplex life, an inexhausted life rich with both endless possibilities and challenges.
A crucial aspect of this way-of-life is the nomads’ symbiosis with nature, their becoming-nature. Contemplating the immobile western landscapes, with their red rocky mountains and flat deserted horizons, means enmeshing with the forces which shape those landscapes, finding in their stillness the complement of the nomads’ wandering. There is also another symbiosis which marks the nomads’ life – that with their vans. These are not simply means (of transportation) to an end (achieving some supposed freedom). They are that freedom and its constitutive challenges, in this means the end is necessarily inscribed and strategically aligned.
In Nomadland, the choice of staying-by-leaving/staying-in-leaving, the freedom of deciding one’s destiny, is what matters. Perhaps for this reason the movie is dedicated to those who instead ‘had to depart’, who did not have a choice. Perhaps this is also why Nomadland is not an illustration of the end of the American dream, of the idea of unhindered freedom and upward social mobility. Instead, it is a critical reformulation of that ethos, hinting at other possibilities of freedoms which emphasise the co-dependency between individual freedom and social bonds, movement and community.
Although Zhao and McDormand have described the movie as a neutral account of an unheard/unseen world, leaving the viewer with the onus of judging how this form-of-(nomad)life is, the movie has a distinctive yet subtle normative identity. It proposes different ways of overcoming internal grief and enacting resistance against external collapses, of bridging ethical choices and political struggles, human deeds and natural forces, by disentangling rather than resisting.
Deleuze (2017), drawing on Paul Klee, argued that arts are about capturing forces, ‘Not render the visible but render visible’ (p. 41) those forces which traverse bodies and yet are not apparent. To some extent this is what Zhao and McDormand have achieved – making visible invisible people, their wandering, the forces which constitute their lives and their subtle political potential. Overall, Nomadland’s empathically portrayed aimless wandering is a contribution towards engendering forms-of-life which have a less-than-obvious potential to weaken the capitalist war machine. An hymn to different possibilities of a ‘wanderous’ life beyond the sedentary and oppressively reassuring common sense.