Wanting to just say “Fuck it”, pack into a van, and go anywhere other than here is a rather common thought nowadays. Even as a functional introvert, I feel as if recent events have been testing my willingness to spend most of my waking hours indoors. So with indie filmmaker and soon-to-be MCU inductee Chloé Zhao’s latest feature, there’s definite timeliness to be gotten out of watching Fern (Frances McDormand) roam America in her RV, and wishing one could do the same in these days of lockdown. Only what’s being tapped into is at once removed from the here and now (taking place in the wake of the global financial crisis), but also informed by events that have been steadily growing worse in the interim.
More so than anything advisory or romanticised, the nomadic vandweller lifestyle is shown as one of necessity. There are moments of acknowledging the beauty of the natural world (like with Swankie’s recollection of the egg shells of swallows floating on the water), but overall, it’s presented as a way of life for these people because it’s what makes the most sense for them. Populating so much of the central cast with real-life vandwellers certainly adds to the documentary-esque effect of the framing, as the depiction of Fern’s life on the road is quite humdrum, and it’s through that that the audience is offered a connection with those on screen.
Which itself is a tad ironic, in the most depressing way possible, as the circumstances behind the nomads, Fern included, has everything to do with their connections. Connections to things, other people, places, even the Earth itself, and most of them have been cut off by forces beyond the characters’ control. An object of sentimental value broken by hapless accident, a job at a factory ended because the factory itself has closed down, a small town deserted because the work has dried up… a relationship that left a widow behind.
In the wake of those kinds of disruptions, where even the semblance of a regular everyday routine has shattered, heading out on one’s own becomes the safe option. Not sticking around long enough to create any new routines, never saying goodbye, only hoping to see others further on down the road, getting seasonal work with little to no guarantee of steady employment, because the sudden finality of it all has grown too much to bear. The notion that a person can put so much into a relationship, the upkeep of a home, or a job, and then have it all snatched away, is sad enough without thinking about how normalised it was during the financial crisis, or the current COVID recession, or in the Western gig economy landscape overall.
As easy as it is to draw lines from the quiet tragedy of Fern’s circumstances and the larger societal systems that allowed it to happen, it feels strange to write down but the political side of things is almost a side dish to the larger mood of unease and anxiety that so permeates this story. It’s the kind of film I can’t say I was really “into” while watching it… but the more I thought about it on the trip back from screen to keyboard, the more I found myself connecting with the inescapable loner vibes found within. It’s a film that insists on humanising everything within frame, possibly even the frame itself, and while it might be a bit early to call this, I get the feeling I’ll be ruminating on this one for a while after I stop writing.
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