From "What ‘Nomadland’ Exposes About Fear in America/People who live in homes-on-wheels should not have to be in constant fear of 'the knock'" by Jessica Bruder (NYT).
Bruder is the author of the book the movie is based on. And here's the Bob Wells video. (Wells is in the movie.)
By the way, Meade and I saw the movie. It was the first time we'd been out to the movies in over a year. I was disappointed in the experience. The image on the screen looked dim and dull. I would have preferred to watch it on TV (but not enough to subscribe to Hulu, which is what you need to do).
I would have walked out if I had been alone. Meade, however, loved the movie. He said it was the best movie he'd seen since he saw "How the West Was Won" when he was a kid — and that movie was in Cinerama (true 3-lens Cinerama). "Nomadland" was my most extreme example of seeing a movie with someone whose opinion of it was the opposite of mine. I said, "I hated it."
FROM THE EMAIL: Kate writes:
It's not a home. It's a car. In the effort to not shame the homeless, this author isn't helping. Be honest. It has no bathroom or kitchen. It's a car. You want to help? Get serious. Build public parking lots with bathrooms. I've lived very rough, and these kind of euphemisms are silly. Shelter, the basic human need, includes a designated place to pee and cook. Any motor vehicle that provides these services is a camper. (I haven't seen Nomadland yet. When it streams on a service I use, I'll gladly watch it.)
The vehicles shown in the movie have something like a kitchen and bathroom. That is, the toilet is a plastic bucket, and there's some device for heating food. Mostly the vehicles are old and quite ordinary vans.
As for the word "home," there's a very important line in the movie. Asked if she's "homeless," the main character says: "I'm not homeless. I'm just houseless." A similar examination of language occurs when she's asked, "Are you married?" She says, "I am, but my husband died." The issue is, what really matters? What is a home? What is a marriage? People with less may have more.
AND: Mary emails:
Now I want to see Nomadland with the love it or hate it take aways you described. I find it disturbing that people are living in their vehicle by choice. Or is it a choice? I know rent and bills can be stressful when there’s no job and no money, but I’m worried people are just giving up on basic housing to save money. This is just wrong. Is it better than welfare? Maybe. Maybe not. There’s an area in my neighborhood here in Portland where an entire stretch of road is bumper to bumper vans, RVs, cars, people living in their vehicle. There is garbage everywhere and it looks just awful. Tents set up as well with junk all over the place. I haven’t seen it myself but neighbors say people are pooping in parks and such. So I don’t have the most positive picture in my mind when it comes to this. I would prefer them to have homes with an address, even if we have to pay taxes to pay for this, I would 100% support that. Many need healthcare as well because of drug addiction.
The main character in the movie used her van to travel from job to job. She preferred the job in the Amazon warehouse, but it was seasonal. It had the benefit of providing free parking for workers, but she had to move on to other jobs — park attendant, sugar beet factory, that sort of thing. She was a very hard worker, and not a person with any mental illness or substance abuse problem.
I’ll have to wait until it’s available other than Hulu and the theatre. Still waiting on second vaccination. I’d like to know your experience in the movie theatre, was it crowded? Did you have to wear a mask the whole time?
You had to look at a seating chart and pick seats. Only 25% of the seats were available. You were required to wear a mask, but no one came around and enforced the mask requirement, so if you took it off at your seat, no one said anything. Food and drink were for sale, so the people who needed mouth access were obviously going to be taking off their masks. I didn't do that, and I kept my mask on.
ALSO: Louis writes:
I saw your comment: “I was disappointed in the experience. The image on the screen looked dim and dull.”
I had an experience like that once. I saw that my local Edwards multiplex had free tickets to a film called “No Pain No Gain.” (It was about bodybuilders.) The image on the screen looked dim and dull. I suspected that they had just brought in a smaller video projector to display the movie, since they were still mostly film at the time.
I don’t know how many theaters have gone 100% digital, but if they didn’t have the proper projector, they might have made do with a lower brightness digital projector. It’s really expensive to purchase a digital, theatrical quality projector. (About $150,000 or so for quality xenon digital projector.) For the last five or six decades, movie theaters have standardized to 6000 watt xenon lamps for film projectors.
Now that digital is here, a lot of theaters have cheaped it out and bought lower output digital projectors to keep costs down. They’re not really “consumer grade.” They’re more like “corporate grade.” They’re used for large meetings and trade shows. But they are significantly dimmer than what is needed for a theatrical movie in a large auditorium. Here is a really boring video about how to change the xenon lamp in a modern theater video projector: Back in the old days, we had to do everything manually. (Including the alignment of the lamp) Now it’s all automatic.
Thanks. I suspected there was a problem like this. I had heard that this was a movie worth seeing in the theater, because the cinematography was wonderful — with views of big Western landscapes. I was afraid I wouldn't like the substance of the movie — an aging woman with problems, driving around in her van, encountering various other people with problems — but I thought there would at least be the vaunted landscape photography. There was a floor to how bad it could be. But no! The photography was not there. But it might be the theater's fault and not the filmmaker's.
BUT: There was something in this movie that I particularly liked, a point where I thought something very predictable was about to happen, and then it didn't. I was considering groaning audibly when this thing happened and leaning over and saying to Meade, "That was the most predictable think in the world." And it didn't happen! I gave the movie points for that. The main character (Fern) picks up a little dog somebody drove off and (intentionally) left behind. She tries to turn it in at the office of the parking facility, and the person at the counter won't take it and encourages Fern to keep it. Fern walks out of the office with the dog, then ties it to a chair by the door. We have a view of the front of the building, with the dog tied to the chair, and Fern walks to the right until she is out of the frame, and we're just looking at the building and the dog for a while. I thought it was soooo predicatble that we'd see Fern walk back into the frame and go over and untie the dog and take it with her. My heart lifted when she did not!
MORE FROM THE EMAIL: John writes:
Until last year I lived in a neighborhood which used to be nice. Then, mysteriously, it began to fill with trash. My wife and I would walk the dog, and she would spend the walk picking up trash. Every day. I gave up.
Drug needles appeared on the ground. Our cars were broken into while parked in front of our house. Our trash and recycling would be rummaged through at night and we'd have to clean up the mess in the morning. Vehicles would park in a nearby side street and sit there until the cops came. They were replaced by more. Finally, we moved. While our house was on the market someone broke in and left used needles in the toilet. Twice. It's a great selling point for potential buyers. In the new neighborhood, my wife doesn't have to pick up trash on our daily walks. The worst thing we've had to deal with was someone leaving dog poop on the lawn. I do not believe in turning the homeless into a class of people who cannot be criticized. There's nothing about being homeless that requires you to leave trash everywhere. There's nothing that requires taking drugs. Or breaking into cars and houses. I suspect, however, that people who are neat and law-abiding don't tend to become homeless. I've worked a lot of minimum wage jobs and restaurant jobs, and I was always able to at least rent a room. What's really being pushed by homeless activists is a lifestyle choice where the homeless are free of all social obligations- work, family, and community. It's an antisocial way of life that harms other people. Homeless people aren't disliked because they are houseless. It's the trash and crime they create. They make life worse for the people around them. But you can't say any of this in public anymore. If you do, you are a privileged jerk because you want to live in a clean neighborhood while so many people are living in squalor.
Similarly, Tom sends a link to "L.A.’s Failed Homeless Policies Turned My Home Into a Prison" (Quillette).
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