‘Nomadland’ Is A Heartbreaking Portrait of the People America Pushed Aside

In the first five minutes of Nomadland, Frances McDormand tells a campsite front desk worker that she is “on the Amazon CamperForce list.” The desk worker—who previously couldn’t find the reservation—immediately understands. McDormand is good to go. She’s free to park her van at the campsite.

It was a moment that confused and surprised me. Writer/director Chloé Zhao had already—in brilliantly efficient use of exposition—established that McDormand’s character, Fern, had lost her home, moved into her van, and was working in an Amazon warehouse. But what I didn’t understand—or perhaps what my brain refused to comprehend—was that not only did a billion-dollar corporation know that one of its employees was living out of their car, it also had some sort of system in place to encourage it. Surely, that’s not a thing, right?

In fact, Amazon’s CamperForce is very much a thing. It’s a fast-growing labor program run by the company that is made up entirely of people living out of RVs and vans, many of them elderly. Amazon hires these folks for the Christmas shopping season, gives them a place to park, and provides an electrical hook-up. Fern seems happy enough living this life, heating up ramen on a hot plate for dinner, then waking up before the sun to scan barcodes in the Amazon warehouse. We don’t get the details of Fern’s job in the film, but one of her co-workers, Linda May, is a real-life nomad playing a fictionalized version of herself. May was profiled in a 2014 article for Harper’s Magazine—written by Jessica Bruder, whose 2017 book inspired the film—and revealed that she was paid $12.25 an hour in CamperForce, and worked 10-hour days on her feet. She was in her 60s, as were many of her co-workers. Some were even older.

May was grateful to get the work. Fern, who is fictional, is grateful, too. “I need work,” she tells a temp agent at one point. “I like to work.” You find yourself feeling heartbroken and furious on her behalf. Amazon is providing these people work, yes. But the company is also clearly underpaying and overworking a desperate—and growing—population of the American workforce.

Fern’s story is this: She and her husband spent their lives in a town called Empire, Nevada—a real place—a former mining town that was decimated by the 2008 economic recession, which led to the closure of a United States Gypsum Corporation mine in 2011. Six months later, the Empire zip code was discontinued and became an officially designated ghost town. Fern, now a widow who has been forced out of her home, moves her stuff into storage, buys a van, and moves into it. This is somewhat by choice. She turns down a friend’s charitable offer to stay in their home. With a little encouragement from her friend Linda May, Fern drives to Arizona to attend the “Rubber Tramp Rendezvous,” a gathering of RV-dwellers hosted by Bob Wells, a YouTuber and author who helps financially struggling folks live the #vanlife.

The people Fern meets say they love the nomad lifestyle. But as we learn their backstories, it becomes clear that many didn’t have much of a choice. One is a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD. Another worked for corporate America until she watched a friend dying of cancer field calls from HR in hospice. Not all of them are of retirement age, but the vast majority are.

“The workhorse is willing to work itself to death and then be put out to pasture,” Wells, also playing himself, says to the crowd. “That’s what happens to so many of us. If society was throwing us away, and sending us, the workhorse, out to the pasture, we workhorses have to gather to take care of each other.” Wells teaches them how to find safe parking, how to avoid interactions with police, and how to dispose of their feces in a bucket.

I’m ashamed to admit that I had no idea this subculture existed until I saw Nomadland. Like Wells says, these people have been pushed aside by society and forgotten. Now they are trying to survive in a country that has gone back on all its promises. If you work your whole life and spend a lifetime putting money in a 401(k), you’re supposed to be able to retire. That’s how everyone said it would go. But as Bruder highlighted in her book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, retirement is no longer an option for a growing portion of Americans, many of whom lost all of their savings in the Great Recession of 2008.

New York Times writer Kyle Buchanan suggested on Twitter recently that American Factory would make a great double feature with Nomadland, and I couldn’t agree more. Both movies filled me with the same sort of blood-boiling, righteous anger. American Factory, the Oscar-winning 2019 Netflix documentary from directors Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, offered a real-life look at how global corporations have turned the American Dream into the American Impossibility. The film follows a former GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, that shut down during the recession and re-opened in 2016 as a glass factory owned by a Chinese billionaire. The workers lost their stable, union jobs, and were rehired for far lower salaries with far fewer benefits. Like Fern, it feels unlikely that a comfortable retirement is in their future.

It’s hard not to feel like these people—the people like Fern, and Linda May, and Bob Wells, and the workers in Dayton, Ohio—have been abandoned. The recession may have ended, but the repercussions for them are irreversible. As we head into another economic downturn, with so many still out of work after unemployment rates broke records last year when the pandemic first struck, it’s hard not to think about how many more stories like Fern’s are just beginning. Nomadland is more than just sad. It’s infuriating.

Watch Nomadland on Hulu