‘Nomadland’ Commentary: The Crisis of Institutionalized Cinema
Nomadland has been quite a lingering and nostalgic experience for its viewers, but the content it offers as it reaches a wider audience becomes more and more tarnished, and eventually creates a gap from itself. The film expresses a story that resonates to much of us, like me, who no longer wishes to keep these stories silenced. But its compliance with the industry and the academies surrounding it becomes stained from the philosophy it once made it out to be. It even proves its crisis further when director Chloe Zhao ventures into blockbuster filmmaking as she directs the next Marvel feature film Eternals.
I admit, it has been quite a divisive moment for me. When I first saw Nomadland, I was in awe of how it resonated with my story as someone who lived moving in in different cities. Rest assured, the consumptive aspect of Zhao’s touching feature film touches the hearts of many, especially mine. But does the conventional critique of its societal machinery is indeed seen throughout by its external means and consumers?
As someone with a family who struggled from poverty and lower class crisis, the film’s pivotal moments do not urge the underlying problem to burst into what expository device it uses. I click onto Letterboxd, a social networking site for films populated mostly by Caucasian reviewers, sighing at the occasional yet repeatedly written five-star reviews expressing their sense of relief after the film was finished, accompanied by backhanded expression of indebtedness—almost as if it has been stripped off the ultimate message it means to accomplish.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not gatekeeping the film in any way. But due to its expected ideals with the industry’s market expeditions with films exploring poverty, it dresses as performative, pandering to the liberated criteria of films. It perpetuates the industry’s misshapen view in creation of art that only ranges within the institution’s standards. Especially now that the Academy has just recently announced its diversity rules, while I ask myself the same question every now and then — why did we have to make this criteria only now, when the Academy claims itself to be international since 1947? Does this say that films made by or about minorities are intentionally exploited by the Academy?
The culture around Nomadland almost conjures invalidation for the viewers it initially targeted, resulting as a caterer for the industry that capsuled the director’s primary intent and principle. The use of capitalistic tools in an art are not to be condemned, but as the film soon acts as a relief content for upper class people undermining the heart of Nomadland, it polishes yet again the indisputable reputation of the ground from where it stands— the Academy. Recently having been a recipient from the Golden Globes for Best Director and now soon-to-be a strong Oscar contender for Best Picture, it diminishes the power, continuously shoves it down, while also being proudly endorsed as somewhat the most relatable film about poverty the film industry can think of bragging. Nevertheless, I can’t help but congratulate Zhao for being the first Asian woman to win Best Director at Golden Globes— a dream that I had as a young Asian filmmaker once deems to be unreachable. But my inspiration no longer defiles itself into seeking approval for the same establishment that made it almost impossible for Asian and other POC filmmakers to gain for over fifty decades.
Where does this lead us? The incumbent form of Chloe Zhao’s revolutionary filmmaking almost fades out the longer it stays within the industry. It is now being eaten by a couple of rich middle-aged white men, disregarding its radiant soul that results as an empty threat thrown at the Academy. The critical establishment implemented by the bourgeois deflects what Nomadland was supposed to be, who is it for, and what it stands for. From the beginning of the film, it jumps from the struggles of an Amazon laborer— the next minute we see director Chloe Zhao clutching by signing into the contract under the same monopolistic system that enslaved the lives of what she deems to be realistic.
“A documentary film-maker can’t help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.” — Chloe Zhao
All rants aside, the ultimate point of the film is to explore the non-conventional lifestyle of the nomads, as if the choice of living that kind of lifestyle is boiled down to the point of seeking adventure— rather than dressing it as another misery porn, instead gives delight to its viewers— but this kind of film often brings out impugned rebuttals from the environment that surrounds it. And it is dangerous that how it does not align with the values it seems to be pressing itself into.
Is it a good film? Yes. Do we need it? Yes. Is it an important film? Yes. But we don’t need the Academy, or any institutionalized hierarchical system that critics art, to prove that it is.
