The Western Rides Again

So my ears perked up when, maybe two-thirds of the way through watching Chloé Zhao’s third film, Nomadland, my partner, sitting next to me on the couch, suddenly said aloud, as if in recognition, “Oh, right! The Western is always about suicide.”

You might not immediately think of Nomadland as a Western: Zhao supplies no horses, no guns, no cattle, no holdups. The film’s setting is the present day, and instead of John Wayne there is Frances McDormand playing Fern, a woman who has lost her husband, her job, and her home. She never had children, and the town where she lived with her husband before he died has vanished, shriveled to nothing after the mining factory where she worked closed. Now she lives in a white van she has named “Vanguard,” driving around the West to wherever jobs are available: at campgrounds, in an Amazon warehouse, on a farm during harvest season. Fern has unintentionally joined a growing subculture: “workampers,” or people whose economic circumstances have deteriorated such that they lead itinerant lives, following temporary work. According to the nonfiction book by Jessica Bruder on which the film is based, these transient “nomads,” as they call themselves, likely number in the thousands. (Except for McDormand and David Strathairn, the nomads in Nomadland are played by people genuinely living that life.) A lot of them are of retirement age, like Fern—people who were employed by industries that collapsed and didn’t rebound, and whose savings evaporated in the financial crash of 2008.

Read: ‘Nomadland’ is a gorgeous journey through the wreckage of American promise

Nomadland, with its scenes of Amazon-warehouse work and RVs and aging women in sandals, is not the archetypal cowboy movie. Nor does it subscribe to the idea of the West as a vast, exploitable space. The land Fern wanders has been ravaged by now-depleted manufacturing and extraction industries, and is ruled by corporations that plunder a new endless resource: cheap labor. And yet Fern is a cowboy par excellence, an arch and solitary figure, a straight-backed and stiff-legged protagonist driven from the safety of “civilization” toward a different kind of existence, one set against the dusty expanse of the American West. She wears the hell out of a men’s coat, smoking cigarettes broodily in the sunset.

Zhao, whose debut film, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, came out in 2015, is part of a convergence of auteurs who are redrawing the boundaries of the genre and tapping into an anti-triumphalist impulse that has hovered somewhere beneath its surface. Kelly Reichardt (whose First Cow, released last year, followed Certain Women and Meek’s Cutoff ) and Debra Granik (her most recent film, 2018’s Leave No Trace, was preceded by Stray Dog and Winter’s Bone) have been at work for more than a decade. Anna Kerrigan’s first full-length feature, Cowboys, was released this year. Each has different interests and signatures: Reichardt has made period Westerns, while the others have turned to contemporary settings. Zhao works almost exclusively with nonactors. Granik’s first experimentation with the genre’s conventions was set in the Ozarks, not usually a terrain included in the Western, and her recent films portray veterans with PTSD. Kerrigan’s debut features one trans protagonist and another struggling with mental illness. But as this quartet of women filmmakers make new contributions to a very old genre, they’re united by an interest in probing the isolation and alienation of people on the American “frontier”—and in critiquing the frontier illusion itself, the fantasy that fleeing toward the next horizon offers riches as well as freedom from the waste and damage left behind.