Okay so the thing that has to be said first, before any of the cultural analysis, is that Nomadland-the-book and Nomadland-the-film are different objects, and treating them as continuous is the first mistake nearly everyone makes when talking about this. Jessica Bruder wrote a 2017 work of immersive labor journalism — she drove a van she named Van Halen, worked Amazon CamperForce in Fernley Nevada, worked the sugar beet harvest in North Dakota for a few days before she physically couldn't anymore (she was in her thirties; her coworkers were in their seventies), and the book's spine is a political argument about what happens to a cohort of Americans whose retirement got vaporized by the 2008 housing crash and who now subsidize late-capitalist logistics by sleeping in parking lots. It is a book about Amazon. Chloé Zhao's 2020 film is a meditative character study starring Frances McDormand, dedicated more or less to the proposition that the American West is still sublime if you squint. These are different genres. The confusion — and the Oscar — comes from the film being extremely beautiful and extremely quiet about what the book is loud about.
The book opens on a specific piece of machinery nobody outside labor journalism had really registered: CamperForce. Amazon, starting around 2008, began actively recruiting retirees-in-vans for the pre-Christmas warehouse crunch. The pitch was the pitch — come work seasonally, we'll pay your campsite fees, see the country — and the reality was ten-to-twelve hour shifts of concrete-floor picking and packing performed by people with arthritis and plantar fasciitis who had to wear company-issued painkillers in belt-clipped dispensers. Bruder names the dispensers. That's the kind of reporter she is. She gives you the brand name of the painkiller vending machine. And the reason this matters — the reason CamperForce is the skeleton key to the entire book — is that it represents something genuinely new in the American labor market, which is: a firm discovering that a specific demographic disaster has produced a specific kind of worker who will do specific things nobody else will, and building a whole HR pipeline around it. The elderly nomad, beyond a sad accident of the economy, is a labor input. Amazon has a staffing coordinator whose job is recruiting them.
Bruder's angle — and this is what gets lost in the film — is that she is writing in direct lineage from a specific American journalism tradition. Studs Terkel, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Ted Conover's Rolling Nowhere about riding freight trains with hobos in the eighties. She is doing participant-observer labor ethnography, and the genre has a politics: you go do the work, you report the conditions, you implicate the reader in the supply chain. When you order something from Amazon and it arrives in two days, someone in a van in Fernley, seventy-two years old, is having a very specific kind of week.
Now — Zhao takes this book and does something really interesting and, depending on how you feel about political art, either beautiful or slightly obscene. She keeps Linda May. She keeps Swankie. She keeps Bob Wells (the guy who runs the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous outside Quartzsite Arizona, who in the book is partly a guru and partly a savvy YouTube operator monetizing his own community). She has them play fictionalized versions of themselves in a scripted movie built around Frances McDormand playing a composite character named Fern, whose backstory is — and this is the tell — the closure of the US Gypsum plant in Empire Nevada in January 2011. Empire was a company town. Gypsum was a wallboard material. Demand collapsed after the housing crash because nobody was building houses, the plant closed, the zip code got discontinued six months later. Zhao opens the film on this, which is genuinely a -grade detail — a zip code dissolving because a commodity market moved — and then proceeds to spend the next hour and fifty minutes largely not being about that.
What the film is about, instead, is Fern's grief. Her husband died. The town died. She is processing both by driving a van through some of the most cinematographically legible landscapes in the Mountain West. Joshua James Richards shoots it like a nature documentary. Ludovico Einaudi scores it with the kind of piano that plays over shots of clouds moving across buttes. And the effect — this is the thing Zhao does that is genuinely her own — is that the film takes a book about how American capitalism has reorganized the relationship between aging, housing, and seasonal labor, and converts it into a film about the dignity of choosing mobility. Fern is offered a house, in the film. Twice. Dave (David Strathairn) offers her a place in his son's family. Her sister offers her a room. She says no both times. She prefers the road.
Bruder's subjects don't really prefer the road. Some of them have made peace with it, and some of them have built real community around Quartzsite and the Rendezvous, and some of them have genuine wanderlust, but the structuring condition is that going back isn't really an option because going back requires money they don't have. The film softens this into a spiritual choice. Which — I want to be careful here — is not wrong exactly, because some of the real nomads in the film, playing themselves, clearly do experience it that way, and Bob Wells in particular has built a coherent philosophy around it that isn't just cope. But the aggregate move, film vs. book, is to convert a structural condition into an existential one, and once you notice that you can't really unnotice it.
A further dimension is how this particular conversion worked for the Academy. Nomadland won Best Picture in April 2021, during a pandemic Oscars that was itself the weirdest Oscars in modern memory, held partly at Union Station in LA, with limited audience. The film won at a moment when the American professional class was burned out, isolated, and — critically — newly familiar with the phrase "essential worker," which had entered the vocabulary in March 2020 and which named, for the first time in a while, the category of people whose physical labor was keeping the logistics of middle-class life running. Nomadland is essentially a film that lets you feel that you have understood something about essential workers without having to think about Amazon. Which is a remarkable trick, given that Amazon is in the book's first chapter. The film has one Amazon scene. It is brief and the warehouse looks almost pleasant. McDormand scans products contentedly.
There's a specific analytical frame that helps here, which is: the film is operating in the genre of the contemporary American road movie, which has a weirdly consistent political unconscious going back through Into the Wild and Wild and the Kristen Stewart parts of On the Road — the idea that leaving is the authentic American response to a system that has failed you, that the open road is a space of moral recovery, and that community is something you find contingently among fellow travelers, in place of something you build through institutional or political engagement. This is an extremely old American idea. It predates the recession, predates the automobile, goes back to Thoreau and earlier — the notion that the right response to a corrupted polity is to light out for the territories. What Zhao does with uncommon skill is dress a 2010s economic catastrophe in this older mythological clothing, and the clothing fits so well that you almost don't see the wearing of it happening.
Meanwhile the real nomads playing themselves in the film are doing something sociologically fascinating which is — they are simultaneously subjects of a Bruder-style labor ethnography AND actors in a Zhao-style art film, and they are getting paid for the latter in a way they don't get paid for the former. Linda May in particular is a wonderful screen presence. She is also, per the book, a woman who worked at Home Depot and as a cocktail waitress and as a general contractor and who dreams of building an Earthship out of tires and bottles on a piece of land she might one day afford, and the film gestures at this but doesn't really sit with it, because sitting with it would require the film to be about housing policy, which isn't the film Zhao made.
A further difficulty about Nomadland — both versions — is that I don't actually think Zhao's film is wrong to exist. The real nomads consented. They like the film. Bob Wells has said so. And the film has probably sent more people to Bruder's book than any other single event, which means the labor ethnography has been amplified by the art film that partially launders it. But the gap between the two objects — one arguing that Amazon has engineered a labor pipeline out of retirees whose 401(k)s got eaten by the mortgage crisis, the other arguing that Fern is sad about her husband and there is a light on the horizon — is the specific cultural gap between what we can stand to know and what we can stand to watch. The book is a hard thing to finish. The film is a beautiful thing to finish. The country has a known preference.
And the further thread, the one the piece keeps circling toward, is that the gypsum plant in Empire Nevada, the one that closes in the opening title card, closed because of "reduced demand for sheetrock." Sheetrock demand fell because housing construction fell. Housing construction fell because the 2008 crash. Which is the same crash that wiped out the retirement savings of the people who then became nomads. The film's opening fact and its closing population are the same event viewed from different ends of the supply chain. A company town dissolves because houses aren't being built. The people displaced from that town and from other towns like it drive vans to warehouses run by the company that is, right now, building the warehouses instead. There's a geographic logic to the whole thing that looks like randomness until you squint. The country built itself on houses, ran out of houses, and pivoted to shipping.
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