“The purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire.”

– Wilfred Bion

I don’t really understand the influential nineteenth century psychoanalyst Bion, but his words suffused me as I watched Nomadland, the widely acclaimed film based on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book and starring the brilliant Frances McDormand.

An article about Nomadland’s director Chloe Zhao describes the essence of her film-making: “Zhao tried to make herself porous, immersing herself in life there and attempting to get past the familiar narratives offered up to expectant visitors.” This porosity feels akin to Bion’s philosophy. It is hard to achieve. 

Just how hard struck me while watching Nomadland. The film is about a widow, Fern, who loses not only her husband but her job, house, and town in the Great Recession. She takes to the road along with a proliferation of older itinerant Americans who live in their vehicles as they travel from one short-term, low-wage job to another. I expected it to be a searing indictment of America’s winner-take-all system that creates down-and-out losers I could pity from a distance of privileged political righteousness.

There are traces of that, but I encountered something quite different. More accurately, I confronted within myself assumptions and biases that got in the way of truly listening, truly seeing each individual. It reminded me a lot of psychotherapy.

Nomadland begins with an economical background sketch: U.S. Gypsum shuts down its plant in Empire, Nevada. A few months later, the town’s zip code is discontinued. It’s like an intake form; we know the broad outlines and can begin to develop a story, but we are ignorant. Unless we have memory apart from the film, we may not even know about the 2008 housing crash and economic collapse that wiped out so much more than a zip code: people’s jobs, savings, homes, and lives. 

The murkiness of our comprehension is accentuated by the film’s naturalistic lighting: so many scenes are shot in the dark, it is hard to discern what’s happening. We form impressions of the people we meet, but it takes time to get to know them, especially if our preconceptions obscure. 

I expected, for example, to feel the heavy horror of victims frozen in trauma and was instead startled by the film’s gentle sweetness. Grief is etched in people’s faces but so are easy laugh lines and the pleasures of ingenious solutions for cramped spaces. The sense of community and resilience often overshadows the pervasive loneliness and precarity of the nomads’ lives. 

The film seems like both a triumph of empathy for each person’s complex humanity and a glossy valorization of overcoming hardship. One critic notes in “What Nomadland Gets Wrong About Gig Workers” that “it feels less like artistic license than a betrayal of workers’ reality.” Perhaps Zhao, by downplaying the structural societal context, obscures something important. Yet what do our socioeconomic-political lenses miss about what the film gets right about grief, the interplay between closeness and distance, resilience and brokenness, freedom and confinement?

I couldn’t help but ponder Janis Joplin’s, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” or my ambivalence about our resilience fetish. Every time we lionize heroic coping, our complicity in tolerating a system that demands it mounts.

Nomadland’s emphasis on deep character exploration rather than the larger cultural context reminds me of psychotherapy’s shift from the intrapsychic to the interpersonal to the importance of externalities. I think of the optical illusion:

Do we see two profiles or an urn? Is our vision flexible enough to take in the totality? 

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Originally appeared in Impulse, an online publication of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy