You know, when Chris Farley talked about living in a van down by the river, he wasn’t exactly advertising a new, hip lifestyle trend.
My colleague at The Pacer, Will Spencer, recently wrote a review of the Oscar-nominated film Nomadland which you can read here. In his review, he touches on what makes the movie a great piece of cinema. But, me having the Viewpoints desk, I couldn’t help but poison it with my cynicism. To make a long point short, while Nomadland may be a fine piece of cinema, it draws out dark realities within the contemporary American economy.
The film is based on a book of the same name by journalist Jessica Bruder. In it, Bruder details the lives of older Americans that took to the open road, generally because of financial desperation due to divorce, being widowed or increasing rents and mortgages. The film’s Fern, who is a widow, decides to become a modern nomad after losing her job at a gypsum factory, in a pattern that mirrors most of the nomads featured in Bruder’s book.
As romantic and quintessentially American as traveling the open road and working gig jobs to keep moving may seem, it belies the fact that something has gone wrong in America when increasing numbers of (usually) older people decide to go Kerouac. While wandering across the high plains might seem great, don’t forget that the hobo lifestyle encapsulated by figures like Woodie Guthrie and Steinbeck’s fictional Tom Joad and company was brought on by extreme poverty and desperation.
It is true that, in some parts of the world, being a nomad is a deeply ingrained part of the local culture, like the Sami people of the European Arctic, many of which still practice a semi-nomadic way of life tied to reindeer herding. Nevertheless, among industrialized populations like those in the United States and much of the rest of the world, nomadism is almost always associated with severe poverty. Migrant agriculture workers the world over are a prime example, but in recent years, with civil wars and other sectarian conflict embroiling nations in Africa and the Middle East, refugees are increasingly finding themselves sold into literal slavery in the markets of Libya or by way of the Kafala system in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States.
In the U.S., the persistent expectation of capital for (at least) the past twenty years is that workers will be obedient, transient, highly mobile nomads that will restructure their entire lives around work, hop any plane, take any phone call and answer any email at any time. A natural outgrowth of this has been the gig economy, a way in which Uber-wealthy tech executives can reap all the rewards of having a popular and successful company while owing nothing, sans a paycheck, to the people that make them wealthy. The gigification of the U.S. economy and Nomadland go hand-in-hand, and it isn’t even just gig-workers. A startling number of entry-level employees at major tech firms like Google live in their vehicles.
It’s all well and good to talk about the romantic aspects of nomadic life, but let’s be frank: you can’t raise a family or have any of the serious creatures comforts that hardworking Americans deserve, like, I don’t know a permanent place to live, if economic incentives are increasingly pushing people to slot themselves in wherever tech oligarchs decide their widget-like bodies are optimally necessary. We should make demands and push back against the liquefaction and transience of the American economy before living in a house comes to be seen as a status symbol of the uber-rich. In short, we should beware the specter of Nomadland.
Photo Credit / Vanity Fair
