Nomadland, directed by Zhao Ting (Chloé Zhao), was the biggest winner at Academy Awards 2021, winning Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress. However, while the internet in China is focused on what Zhao Ting said when receiving the award and the controversy her past “insulting China” comments have caused in China, what is perhaps more worth knowing is what kind of film Nomadland is and the significance of the Oscars’ choice to award it.
Nomadland depicts the story of a group of “modern nomads” who live in the U.S. and work odd jobs all over the place, using the camper van as their home.
Nomadland’s heroine, Fern, lost her job in 2011 when the U.S. Gypsum Company closed its plant in Imperial, Nevada, and the death of her husband made Fern decide to leave home and become part of the nomadic army. The film focuses on the other “nomads” Fern meets on his journey and creates deep or shallow friendships with them. Although some nomads find a house to settle down and invite Fern to stay with them, Fern still chooses to live a wandering life in the camper in the end.
Nomadland has the merit of presenting the daily life of Fern and other nomads working odd jobs and sleeping in the car moving around in a tender and sympathetic way, and presenting the people and things Fern experiences on his journey and the strange and beautiful scenery he sees with very poetic images, which also gives people a certain understanding and appreciation of Fern’s and the nomads’ way of life.
However, Nomadland has a fatal flaw: it only tells half of the story. That is, it only describes the result of these poor elderly Americans becoming “nomads”, but does not present the process and reasons why they became “nomads”; it only magnifies the freedom and beauty of the “nomadic life”, but ignores this It only magnifies the freedom and beauty of the “nomadic life”, but ignores the cost of this life, which is to stuff all the belongings in the camper van, to work odd jobs everywhere to endure the poor labor conditions, and to live alone without any protection. The film uses individualistic choices to conceal the real social contradictions and the hardships, pains and inconveniences of “nomadic” life, and the fact that many nomads are eager to return to stable work and permanent settlement.
In the film, we see Fern sometimes working in a huge Amazon warehouse, sometimes doing odd jobs in a restaurant, sometimes picking beets, and sometimes acting as a campground manager, all of which are short-term jobs, not only “used up and abandoned”, but also low-paying and heavy work. However, despite the repetitive images of Fern stocking goods in the warehouse, there are no shots of her feeling resentful, tired or sad, as if this is a job to be cherished. This is completely different from the film adaptation of the original book of the same name, the “nomads” believe that working in the Amazon is as exploitative as “slaves”.
In the original book written by Jessica Bruder, an American non-fiction writer who interviewed the “nomads”, it is clearly explained that these ordinary Americans are reduced to “nomads” because of the rising rents and stagnant salaries, as well as The possibility of retirement was not in sight, leading to the shattering of the American middle-class dream, so they began to move into campers and trailer-type mobile homes and live a nomadic life. In other words, there are obvious “have to” reasons for such a lifestyle, highlighting the injustice of the economic system, but the film obscures the social and structural reasons, emphasizing instead that Fern and the other “nomads” are motivated by personal circumstances (such as The only slightest touch on the “nomadic” aspect of the film is that it is a “wandering” journey.
The only passage in the film that touches slightly on the “injustice of the economic system” is when Fern visits his sister’s house and has a small argument with his brother-in-law, who is a real estate agent, who talks about the real estate business, which leads Fern to question him to his face: “You encourage people to spend their life savings and take out loans just to buy a house they can’t afford? a house that they can’t afford?” The brother-in-law retorted, “Not everyone can leave everything behind (as you did) and hit the road.” Here, the conflict between the hegemony of financial real estate and the underclass, which was originally revealed, strangely loses focus on some kind of lifestyle debate over whether to choose “fixed housing” or “nomadic living,” obscuring the real issue.
More crucially, although Fern is given many opportunities to return to a sedentary life, she refuses them all and insists on living alone, even paying homage to the “nomad” at the end of the film, celebrating it as romantic freedom of choice. This glorification of the situation of the poor old man who is “homeless” as a gypsy-style wandering life of “home in all directions” not only deviates from the social problems pointed out in the original book, but also completes a kind of ideological self-annihilation.
To some extent, this reflects the political limit of the Academy Awards, which “prefers political flavor”, that is, it can sympathize with the lower class and glorify the way of life of the lower class, but it cannot shoot the political and economic root cause of class inequality, nor can it shoot the hope of revolt of the lower class.
Recall that the last Academy Award for Best Picture went to South Korea’s “Parasite”, which was an in-depth critique of class oppression in Korean capitalist society, but that review was not of the United States after all. If the Academy really has the guts to make a breakthrough and make a thorough reflection on its own social problems, then perhaps this year’s Oscars should give the Best Picture to another nominee, Judas and the Black Messiah, which tells the story of the American Black Panther Party’s struggle with the police in the 1960s, showing the black activists’ resistance to American capitalism and racist oppression. The film is perhaps even more progressive and profound than Nomadland.
Source: dwnews