Post VI: Grief and Nothingness in “Nomadland”
I watched Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland a couple weeks ago and was surprised by the movie’s structure: there was a noticeably strange lack of EVENTS that actually happened in the movie. At first glance, it felt like an extended train of thought, like a coming-of-age movie for a character already in the second half of life. I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t sure what to take away from it; it felt meaningful, but it also felt impossible to verbalize what gave me that impression. Nothing of typical “substance” happened, but it felt fulfilling.
It took me a couple days, with my train of thought consistently cycling back to the movie, to realize that that was okay. The movie was an accurate depiction of a woman in grief who had lost everything, and that’s what its tender sense of humanity is grounded in: a woman trying to find a sense of community in complete mental solitude.
I’ve come to really appreciate the lack of external conflict in the film. I’d never seen anything like it, as it defies basically everything I’ve learned about what makes a “good” and “worthwhile” movie. Based upon my previous standards, every scene seemed like “filler” material to me, but that’s just it: Zhao refused to dramatize what it’s like to navigate life with a broken heart.
The key perspective-shifting takeaway I gleaned from this film is that nothingness, in itself, is okay. Society has ingrained in its participants that if you’re not being “productive,” your day was meaningless, but if you take more than a second to actually consider that notion, it’s absolutely absurd. We’re intelligent monkeys participating in a system that we made up. Who’s to tell us what inherently has meaning in our own lives other than ourselves? Why is it looked down upon to take time to search for that meaning? How can we be expected to be consciously aware of the direction we want to take our lives in at all times?
Fern (whom I’d deem the “protagonist” of the film, but in this case, seems to be more of its focus rather than its hero) rarely speaks to the depth of her sorrow for her late husband’s passing. In fact, it’s a topic barely mentioned throughout the entirety of the movie. Her emotion and character development is internalized, subtle — everything I’ve been told a movie SHOULDN’T be to be “interesting.” It trusts its audience to accompany her into the unknown of grief, and that mellow journey (or lack thereof) is what makes it beautiful. Under any other circumstance Nomadland would be completely forgettable, but the intelligence of the delivery of its message and the universality of its roots in grief make it an unforgettable masterpiece.
