Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Nomadland
2021 · Chloé Zhao · Nomadland on Sightlines
Late in the day the light comes in low across the Badlands and falls on Fern's face the way it falls on the rock behind her. Same gold, going fast. Joshua James Richards shot most of Nomadland in that narrow window at dawn and dusk, and the choice quietly rearranges the film's priorities: a face and a cliff hold equal standing in the frame, and neither one is scenery.
Now watch what Fern does in a shot like that. She looks. She stands small in an enormous space without being made small by it, and there is nothing in the scene for her to do about anything.
This is where Deleuze earns his place, and he earns it here in a way he doesn't for most American movies. He split cinema into two large families. In the first, a character sees a situation and acts on it, and the action changes the situation; cutting exists to keep that chain tight. Call it the movement-image. It runs nearly everything you have ever watched. In the second family the chain snaps. A character perceives something too large, too diffuse, or simply already over to be acted upon, and what's left is looking and enduring. Deleuze called that residue a pure optical situation, an opsign, and called the person holding it a voyant, a seer. The seer isn't passive. Seeing is the occupation.
The obvious objection is that Fern never stops working. She works the aisles of an Amazon fulfillment center, pulls a shift at a beet harvest, drives, keeps the van. The film is full of labor. But labor is not action in Deleuze's sense, and that distinction is the gift the lens hands you: an action alters the situation it came from, while Fern's work comes back every season without touching the thing that broke. The gypsum plant closed. Empire, the company town, was erased. Her husband is dead. None of it is available to be fixed by anything she can do, and the film is honest enough not to invent a lever. Maximum motion, no available action. That is a strange subject for a road movie, and Deleuze gives you language for it instead of calling it slowness.
He located this break in postwar Italy, in the two films the lineage names as Zhao's ancestors. Bicycle Thieves gave her the casting philosophy: build a fiction around non-professionals playing near-versions of themselves, on real ground, not sets. La Terra Trema gave her the method underneath it, a director who moves into an actual community and lets its speech and its work shape the story. Bazin defended those films for handing us facts in their ambiguity rather than events pre-chewed by drama, and the desert scenes here, shot inside Bob Wells's real Rubber Tramp Rendezvous with a rig light enough to chase people who aren't hitting marks, are that old contract kept. Chop Shop had already transplanted the method to American soil; Zhao completes the graft. Days of Heaven supplies the other half of the grammar, Almendros's magic-hour landscape treated as a lyric subject, which Richards extends across the high desert and the Nebraska plains. And Two-Lane Blacktop is in the bones of the route: drift rather than destination, non-actors on the highway.
Deleuze listed the symptoms of the snapped chain, and this film has the full set. A dispersive situation, many people loosely attached, arriving and leaving. Weak links, because Zhao (who edits her own films) cuts by landscape and light rather than by consequence, letting a horizon carry a season. And the voyage form, the trip that transforms nothing. The one door onto a conventional third act is Dave, who offers Fern a house and a family and a place to stop. She declines it. So does the movie. Goodbye here is rephrased as "see you down the road," which is a rhyme, not a resolution.
The boldest refusal is the flashback. Fern is mourning two deaths, a husband and a town, and the film never once stages either. The device it skips has a name: the recollection-image, a dated flashback that represents a former present for us. What Nomadland does instead is what Deleuze called sheets of past, the past as a thickness you move around inside rather than a scene you cut away to. It sits in the van, packed with the salvaged objects of the life that ended, and it sits in the emptiness of the country, which is no longer a setting for anything. You never see the husband. You see what Fern keeps.
Then there is the talking, and here is Zhao's actual invention. Swankie tells us about facing her own death. Wells, at the end, talks about grief and reunion. Real people, saying true things in their own words; no script makes that. But Zhao doesn't interview them, which is what a documentary does, and she doesn't write their lines, which is what a fiction does. She gives their speech a fictional listener. McDormand's Fern, all weathered economy and watchfulness and refusal of self-pity, is the film's recording instrument, and precisely because Fern is invented she can absorb testimony without converting it into evidence. Deleuze's word for what the nomads are doing is fabulation: people caught in the act of legending themselves. He thought modern political cinema had to work this way because "the people are missing" — no ready-made collective is standing there to be spoken for. This people exists for two weeks a year in an Arizona parking lot. The camera doesn't speak about them, or for them; Zhao's seeing and theirs run through the same frames.
The politics stay in the bodies. Postures, hands, the ceremony of a shared meal, a shift, a departure. Fern's hands carry the film's economics; nobody has to say the word recession.
You can hold things against it. It shoots inside a real Amazon operation and declines to prosecute. The Einaudi piano, borrowed rather than composed, is the one place the film tells you what to feel, and it tells you often. Fair. Now weigh that against what it won: a picture with no climax, no flashback, and a cast of actual seasonal workers took Best Picture, which permanently changes what an American producer can be told is impossible.
Watch it again for the cuts that accomplish nothing. That's where the time is.
Concepts in play
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns) — Fern held in wide dusk compositions against the Badlands and the Nevada desert, where the human figure is small but not diminished and no action is available to her; wind, engine and gravel as the ambient acoustic field.
- the seer (voyant) — McDormand plays Fern with 'weathered economy — small gestures, watchfulness, a refusal of self-pity'; she endures and observes rather than driving events.
- crisis of the action-image — The gypsum plant's closure and the erasure of Empire, Nevada are already accomplished before the film starts; Fern's constant seasonal labor (Amazon CamperForce, the beet harvest) changes nothing about the situation it answers.
- the voyage / balade form — An episodic, picaresque circuit of the American West that 'consistently declines the resolutions those threads promise' — Dave's offer of a settled life is refused, and endings are rephrased as 'see you down the road.'
- dispersive situation — The film 'accumulates through vignette and encounter — a stranger's story, a shared meal, a departure': Linda May, Swankie, Bob Wells and the rendezvous crowd pass through loosely attached to Fern and to each other.
- weak links — Zhao's own editing is 'patient and associative rather than propulsive,' with transitions moving by landscape and light so the highway and horizon carry the passage of season instead of causal consequence.
- dead time (temps mort) — 'Scenes are allowed to breathe'; the cutting withholds climax and trusts rhythm and repetition to register a cyclical itinerant life.
- sheets of past (order of time) — Grief for the dead husband and the erased town is never rendered as a dated flashback; the past coexists in the van interior 'packed with the salvaged objects of a former life' and in the emptied Western landscape.
- any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — The erased company town of Empire and the vast Nevada high desert function as void, post-economic spaces rather than settings that call forth action.
- fabulation (story-telling / legending) — Real van-dwellers play versions of themselves and narrate their own histories — Swankie's monologue about facing mortality, Bob Wells's closing reflection on grief and reunion.
- speech act (acte de parole) — Wells's and Swankie's testimony is delivered as first-person witness rather than written dialogue, 'documentary authenticity that no script could fabricate,' addressed to Fern as listener.
- the people are missing — A film 'about American precarity that refuses the register of protest': its collective exists only as the temporary Rubber Tramp Rendezvous gathering in the Arizona desert, a people assembled seasonally rather than represented politically.
- free indirect discourse (political) — McDormand's scripted Fern moves among real nomads telling their own stories, staged 'loosely, favoring what feels caught over what feels blocked,' so the director's vision and the subjects' self-narration share the same images.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Handheld observational camera trailing Fern through fulfillment-center aisles and desert camps; the drama carried by labor, small gesture and the everyday body rather than explanatory dialogue.
- the Open — Richards's wide compositions set Fern against 'enormous Western skies and terrain,' the framed figure opening onto a larger changing whole of weather, season and migration.