Years back, a poor man came to my social services agency for help. He worked two jobs, dead-end, empty and unnourishing jobs. His mother died and he faced the funeral costs for her, which came to a few thousand dollars. None of his other family members or friends could help him. Like him, they were broke. He zeroed out his bank account and fronted the funeral costs.
The next month, the man had no money for rent. We cut a check to pay his landlord one month’s rent. That was the best we could do. It covered the past-due rent, stopped his eviction, and kept him housed. A couple of months later, he was evicted anyways. He moved into the local men’s shelter, a decrepit and flood-ridden old water treatment plant.
The people who show up for our help are reminded of their poverty every waking moment. The working poor have to spend precious time solving each day’s needs and wants — which can include paying a past-due childcare bill, fixing the broken car needed to take them to work, or finding more Vicks VapoRub for their child whose rheumy cough demands a doctor’s visit. The time sink called poverty is not what better-off people face. Money consumes their thinking. How to get it. Where to go to get it. Poverty takes away their days.
Nomadland is most like a long road trip into poverty — or, as it turns out, a kind of poverty lite. The film includes many outsiders, runaways, escapees from their settled lives, and even real-life itinerant van dwellers. Many of the characters are like summer carnival workers. They remind me of my happy but off-kilter distant relatives.
At the heart of the film is the main character Fern. Fern lives in the town of Empire, Nevada, a town under the thumb of a sprawling US Gypsum plant. She loses everything when her company town goes under in 2011 with the closure of the plant. She packs up her belongings into a van and joins the nomadic world of van dwellers. She takes up with a group of van dwellers led by the tramp lifestyle seer Bob (“See You Down The Road”) Wells.
The van dwellers are a mixed lot. One of them talked about leaving her corporate life and taking to the road. Others are poor and had no choice but to take to the road. Fern is one of the poorer nomads. She needs to work. While moving around with them, she earns thin wages from working at an Amazon fulfillment center (who is fulfilled working there?), a Wall Drug store kitchen, a beet farm, a rock selling store, or as a camp host.
We watch Fern working hard at her multiple jobs. At her beet farm job, Fern faces personal injury as softball-sized beets tumble from a truck. In her camp host job, she cleans vomit off a toilet in a public restroom. At another time, a man walks in to use the urinal, even after Fern tells him the restroom is closed for cleaning. We see what Fern sees: his use of the urinal is an indignity of the first order.
In her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, the author Barbara Ehrenreich previewed nearly everything in Nomadland. Ehrenreich ventured into self-chosen poverty, where she took dead-end jobs and had to survive on poverty wages. The book was about her struggles and determination to make it working six subsistence wage jobs across the country. Nickel and Dimed was Fern’s working life described by Ehrenreich twenty years ago.
Nickel and Dimed was an authentic depiction of the working poor — among whom Ehrenreich briefly lived. It was where millions worked scattershot jobs to make ends meet every day. Ehrenreich further pointed out that “I’ve had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it’s not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes.”
Ehrenreich knew she was an intruder on a life of poverty. She wrote: “With all the real-life assets I’ve built up in middle age — bank account, IRA, health insurance, multi-room house — there was no way I was going to ‘experience poverty’ or find out how it ‘really feels’ to be a long-term low-wage worker.” She knew she would go back to that world whenever she chose. She had limits on her investigative journalism.
She wrote the book just after the 1990s economic heyday. A whole new credo was in the air: Jobs ended poverty. The working poor would see work as a “source of self-esteem and self-reliance” — as one report on the 1990s welfare-to-work programs boldy announced. It was never true. It was a lie even then, during the Reagan jingoist era of “welfare queens.” Then, as now, the jobs the working poor take just condemn them to cycles of poverty. Jobs for the working poor just keep them poor.
Nothing has changed. Writing about these jobs, Ehrenreich noted that “No one ever said that you could work hard — harder even than you ever thought possible — and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.” A PhD in cell biology, Ehrenreich learned that even the lowliest job was not “unskilled.” These so-called low-skill jobs demanded feats of concentration, skill learning, physical exertion, and coordination. The working poor exercised critical thinking skills in ways company executives, pilots and neurosurgeons never did. Even so, the jobs left the workers nowhere good.
Beyond cleaning toilets — or risking injury standing before a growing pile of beets — Fern also has given up many personal rights and freedoms for work. Like Fern, several of the van dwellers — including her friend Linda May in the film — work all the time. They need jobs, too. At one point in the film, Nomadland director Chloe Zhou shows a workday lunchroom at the Amazon site. Fern and several of her co-workers gather to eat their lunches and have a relaxing, midday conversation. One worker shows off her arm tattoos. The conversation is all very light and easygoing.
The scene also seems odd. Why did their lunchroom conversation among the Amazon workers in the film, including Fern, not include any complaints about their work? Are they under surveillance during their lunch hour (more indignities and loss of civil rights)? I would have loved to hear Fern venting about her work in an unplugged moment.
Something about their Amazon workplace had to seem mightily wrong and unfair to Fern and her coworkers. Even at the Fortune 500 companies where I’ve worked — even there, in the top-floor lunchrooms of gleaming skyscrapers — gripes, complaints, anger and anxieties about work always came up during lunch. The best-paid and most pampered employees complained the most. I longed for just one work complaint at the lunchroom table in Nomadland. We just never saw a Norma Rae moment in the film.
Ehrenreich supplied an answer for Fern’s submission and silence. According to her, “What surprised and offended me most about the low-wage workplace…was the extent to which one is required to surrender one’s basic civil rights and — and what boils down to the same thing — self-respect.” Maybe Fern has accepted her working life: It is just the way it is if you’re living on the road and working these kinds of jobs. We are watching her loss of self-respect and paralysis from her oppressive jobs.
At the same time, we see that Fern is not like other working poor people. Although strapped for cash, and needing a job to survive, money is not at the center of Fern’s waking life. Except for a single van repair, she is not scrambling throughout the film to pay her debts, rent, medical bills, or groceries. Money does not haunt her thinking through the day. It does not consume her. The viewer sees a life unblighted by any of the regular concerns of the working poor.
Fern also has more than one lifeline. The working poor have no lifelines. My working poor clients don’t have a single one, not even the most frayed lifeline found in the trashbin. The poor are truly without supports or a golden road of any kind. But Fern’s life in poverty feels unrecognizable. Is Fern really poor? I counted at least three lifelines thrown to her.
Early in the film, Fern meets one of her students and the student’s mother in a local store. Fern had tutored the girl and, as we learned, had worked as a substitute teacher in the school. The girl asks Fern if she is “homeless.” Fern replies that she’d rather think of herself as “houseless.” Is it one step too far for Fern to acknowledge that she is homeless? The mother then reaches out and offers Fern their house where she can come and live with them.
Another lifeline is when Dave, a fellow van dweller and Fern’s friend, leaves the trail and returns to stay with his estranged son and his young family. Fern comes to visit all of them in their comfortable exurbs farmhouse. (In one scene, Dave and Fern feed the chickens in the yard.) Sensing that she is out of place, longing for a return to the road, and feeling perhaps that the bespoke bed coverings are too much for her, she leaves the house and returns to sleep outside in her rundown van.
The last lifeline, and by far the most substantial, is when Fern visits her well-off sister Dolly and her realtor husband George. They live in a swanky house. Fern asks Dolly for $2,300 needed to fix her van. Her sister complies and the money neatly appears for Fern in an envelope. Dolly asks her to stay with them in their safe and chic suburban house. (Apparently, Dolly had tried to rescue Fern from her near-nomadic, outback life in Empire years before.)
At Dolly’s house, we even glimpse what Fern’s life “out of poverty” would be like. Zhou includes a scene where Fern participates in a backyard barbecue at Dolly’s with her neighbors. The neighbors all suffer from a kind of mind-erasing affluenza. But Fern appears to fit in with them. She blends in, tells a family story about how Dolly met her husband George, holds up well in their conversations, and almost seems to be one of them. She could almost have passed as one of them, one of these boorish, self-contented, and conformist neighbors.
But Fern rejects Dolly’s offer to stay. She walks away trundling a backpack slung on her back. Zhou gives us a panoramic shot of Dolly returning to her lovely house and Fern walking down the street. Fern chooses the life of the road, her unsafe, vulnerable and hardscrabble life. How many times will she be woken up by a knock at her van door and told to vacate the parking lot? Why can’t she mind the “No Overnight Parking” rules? She returns to that life despite the lifelines out there for her.
While Fern would remain definitionally poor (little income) at Dolly’s, she would have a fixed roof over her head, her own bedroom, food, clothing, central air and heat, and a room with wall-to-wall carpeting. That is a world different in its material riches from what my working poor clients have. My working poor clients are definitionally poor (little or no income) and have been thrown deeper into poverty because of one obscenely large expense (like funeral costs to bury a family member). They head straight to work every day from the homeless shelter where they slept the night before.
Fern’s working-poor life does not feel authentic. In a recent New Yorker magazine interview, the film director Paul Schrader called Nomadland, the winner of the 2021 Best Picture Academy Award, “a bit of fake poverty.” The film is like a long visit with the working poor, a weekend’s trip into rural poverty. Like Ehrenreich, we know our visit will end. We will return to our comfortable middle-class lives after two hours. The strange part about it is that Fern, too, has the same option to return. She, too, can leave with us. She has lifelines.
Fern walks away from Dolly’s and the great good fortune of family support. (Fern came into an inheritance of family support because of her luck in the gene pool.) Her poverty looks different from the poverty of so many others, the vast numbers of working poor people. In the end, she lives out a “poverty lite” version of real poverty.
