EPISODE 604: NOMADLAND LAND
Really, who needs Mars?
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
I watched Nomadland and Land this weekend. Both tell stories of women leaving “normal” society behind. In Nomadland main character Fern (Frances McDormand) is living out of a van, moving across the country from job to job and engaging with little communities of people along the way. In Land, Edie (Robin Wright) moves from Chicago to a cabin somewhere far away in the mountain, and with the exception of two people she interacts with no one pretty much the entire movie.
They’re both excellent films, and have a lot of interesting things to say in light of our current experience of isolation.
But what I found most striking about them is the kind of space they opened up in me to contemplate my own life. A lot of good films do that a little—you watch a love story and of course you think about some of your own. But this went much further; it was almost like the goal of the films was to get you to daydream about your own life, to see and lay claim to the beauty and meaning of your own journeys.
This is where my daydreams led me…
On Friday I drove my car for the first time in three months. When the surge started in November things got pretty scary around here, and so it just seemed best to stay home.
It started right up, my trusty little navy blue 2008 Toyota Corolla, though the engine had a kind of low-throated growl that makes me think it needs a good once over from Jiffy Lube. It has 107,000 miles on it at this point. Is that a lot? Honestly, I have no idea. This is the first car I’ve ever been responsible for in my whole life.
I’ve driven up and down the state many times in it, and once a few years ago out to the Grand Canyon and a retreat house in New Mexico. When I pulled up to the Canyon park early on a rainy March morning the ranger said it might not be the best day. I thought he meant the rain. Then I got to the canyon and the fog was so thick you couldn’t even tell there was a hole there. I spent the whole day in a Starbucks just outside the park, watching an incredibly grim documentary about Michael Jackson for an article I had to do and waiting for the weather to change.
Friday I drove by one of the Starbucks I used to frequent here in Los Angeles. The tables inside were all stacked on top of each other, like a classroom during summer holiday, or a restaurant that has folded. But I could see there was someone inside; they were wearing a long white shirt and a white mask. As someone entered from the parking lot they rushed forward like a ghost that’s been alone for too long.
The reason I took the car out was to do a long-overdue smog check necessary to get my also long-overdue registration sticker. As I drove I saw a couple things had changed. The mall in swanky Manhattan Beach has gotten even more upscale, with new buildings of dark textured browns and signs whose fonts somehow magically announce the area’s economic status. (Not sure what the font is called. I’m going to go with NIMBY.)
Most things, though, seemed the same as ever. And not terribly interesting, either. Maybe I was distracted by the fact I was listening to a podcast for the first time in a year. When the pandemic hit, it took my previously enormous appetite for podcasts right with it.
But I also wondered if maybe a fruit of the pandemic is learning that life can still be plenty interesting and meaningful without much in it. I look in my overflowing podcast queue and I see many shows that I feel like I should listen to. But at the same time I don’t know that I feel like I’ve missed anything by not listening to them.
When all is said I think I’ll look on last year of my life with sadness but also a lot of affection, and maybe even affection for the sadness.
In many respects my life has been small, even on hold. And yet I feel like I’ve seen so much and also maybe experienced a lot as well.
With a few exceptions, I’ve had physical contact with almost no one for almost an entire year at this point. I hesitate to say that; it feels like something I should be ashamed of. I swear I am not a member of QAnon. I am not writing this newsletter in my pajamas (although they are very comfortable). The choreography of living through a pandemic with 35 other people just proved too complex for my brain to sort out.
But keeping to myself seems to have allowed me to have more room in my life and more people, too. I’ve become friends with strangers I met online (which is not at all how I normally roll), and also had moments with family and friends that have seemed somehow deeper for our isolation from each other, even as the conversations themselves might just be the weather or can you believe this fucking year.
Last week I was talking on the phone to a guy I used to live with in New York. It’s been a couple years at this point since we caught up. And it was very much a normal kind of a conversation, real enough but nothing dramatic. And yet as soon as he started talking it was like a moment in a Disney movie where a paint brush slides across a white canvas and suddenly the world is teeming with memories of life. It was something about his accent, a kind of a sparkle around certain syllables that I don’t hear around here but that I loved about New York. And suddenly the whole world had more colors in it.
(For me, falling in love with places is always about two things: the terrain and the accent. Truly, once I walk down a great street or hear the funny glottal stop people from a certain place put in the middle of the word “bottle”, I am hooked.)
That’s what this year has been like, lots of little sparkles that stand out so brilliantly against the blandness and the fear of our 2020 reality.
As things have started to settle down here in Los Angeles (knock on wood), I do dream of getting out on the open road and seeing the country some, looking it over like I was looking over West L.A. Friday, trying to learn what journeys others have been on, and to discover what the world looks like now for them and me.
The other thing I find fascinating about Nomadland and Land is that both are stories of women drawing strength from isolation. It’s an idea that I think might resonate with many people who find themselves marginalized or mistreated by our broader society. There are so many rules, many put in place long ago, that tell them who they can and can’t be.
And if you challenge those rules the system is likely to either try to change you, destroy you or reabsorb you. It actually has to do that, in a way, because those rules of standing and relative power are part of the overall system’s underpinnings. To challenge the rules is to challenge the whole system.
This doesn’t have to be about gender, race or orientation, either. In both movies in some ways the real issue is grief and the rules or expectations that are assigned to it--what’s appropriate, for what period, and with what provisos.
Having suffered tremendously both women refuse to live by those definitions. And so they leave.
There’s an idea offered near the end of Nomadland that will stay with me for a long time: you are not required to get over the traumas of your life. That it’s okay if you can’t or you don’t.
Nomadland is streaming on Hulu right now. Land will be coming to streaming in a few weeks.
(P.S. Supernova and Penguin Bloom are also great new movies.)
This got to me today.
I want to live my life like this.
I do not want to live my life like this, but also I cannot look away.
Do you like Columbo? Because my friend Tiffany, who is a great writer and editor, has spent her pandemic rewatching the series with her mother. And she wrote a great article about the experience.
Meanwhile John Carpenter, creator of horror masterpieces like Halloween and The Thing, is also a gifted composer, and he’s just released a new album of songs which someone I follow described as soundtracks for horror movies you get to create in your mind. Try playing one of the tracks and see what story your brain has for you.
I’m doing a thing!
Actually, two things!
I’m going to be on NCR’s Francis Effect podcast to talk about my article about being a gay priest. I think that drops on Wednesday.
And, I’m launching a blog. It’s called “Craft Service”, and it’s all about trying to learn how to be a better screenwriter from television shows and movies.
This is something I’ve talked about doing a long time. The website is still in need of some work, but I’m tired of waiting. So it’s going live tonight and I’m planning to start updating daily with little posts looking at episodes of different shows and movies, beginning with those currently nominated for awards by the Writers’ Guild and also, at some point soon, WandaVision.
If you’re a writer yourself, or you love pop culture, maybe it’s for you. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors.
The last 10 days have been a catastrophe for a lot of people in Texas. Hopefully this week will be better. Spring is coming.
See you next week.
