See You Down The Road

I watched this film at a pivotal time in my life. A time when I am transitioning from a nomadic existence to a fixed place. Though my nomadic life looked different. I never lived in a van, slept in a car once or twice. We could always stay in Airbnbs, always had a roof over our heads, usually warm and sheltered.

I love this film. It is a wonderful, quiet story that has moved and deeply touched me. The characters are profoundly human, in the way I would define humanity. People are there for one another, help each other, open hearts and doors. Each person is on their own path, alone, and some surely lonely too, and yet there is this community with a deep sense of belonging.

There is always an undercurrent of sadness, one that has settled through irretrievable losses that life brings with it, the longer you are part of it. And through the daily struggle for survival. A survival by one’s own rules, not those of a cold, consumption-driven economic order. One scene shows this particularly clearly, where Fern is visiting her sister and the men talk about how they could have bought a property back then, when the 2008 crisis swept so much away. Today it would be worth so much more.

But material worth is never what the depicted community of nomads is about. It is about freedom – a purer freedom than the kind most of us strive for, if we strive for any at all. A freedom that theoretically means being able to go wherever you want and leave whenever you want. And yet their lives too are shaped by cycles and constraints: they go where they can find work, whether in an Amazon warehouse or in a national park in the summer.

These people moved me in a way few films ever have. In the way they are there for one another, the way they help out, with a genuine kindness and openness toward everyone. Each person is busy with their own life, one that has often been and still is hard. And each carries wounds within them, carried across the vast landscape through all their travels. Perhaps this empathy toward others comes from the fact that these people are so deeply aware of their loss – even as they refuse to be defined or destroyed by it. They carry a dignity outward that makes their lives valuable and gives them meaning.

This community stirs in me the same warm feeling I find in the TGP – The Good Place – of Craig Mod’s membership programme Special Projects. The people are helpful, kind, and considerate. You can simply be present and listen, and take in so much that is new and inspiring. But you can also open up and be welcomed. There is never anyone who thinks themselves better or tries to appear so. That is true humanity.

Nomadland (2020)