Nomadland: Wanderings through Late-Stage Capitalism and the American Psyche

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“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

First Day of Spring

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Yes, I know that officially yesterday was the first day of spring, but in my book, the cusp doesn’t count. The real deal is March 21st, embedded in my brain and on my calendars since childhood. That childhood was spent in New England, where usually a blanket of snow lay unperturbed by the date on the page. I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1977, where daffodils burst forth and the Japanese plums are festooned with a cloud of pink blossoms just in time for Valentine’s Day. But the calendar defies lived experience. March 21 is the first day of spring, and that’s that.

March 21, 2020, is also the wedding date of a couple unknown to me to whom I am eternally grateful. Without their long-planned nuptials, my daughter and her boyfriend would have moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn on the first of March. But they delayed their departure to witness a cousin’s joy.

That short time span, of course, was when our world turned upside down. I think of my daughter and her boyfriend trying to find an apartment and navigating the subways, newly arrived in the pandemic’s epicenter. Instead, they scrambled to see if they could rescind the notice they’d given on their nearly packed apartment. (Yes, they could!) They started working remotely for the same tech companies whose New York branches had beckoned. They kept abreast of the cousin’s rapidly shrinking wedding plans and slept unperturbed by constant sirens.

My husband and I drew huge sighs of relief. They were safe, at least for now. Not the fate, sadly, of so many. We felt the shock and sorrow of the deepening horror along with our luck.

We also felt lucky that it was spring when shelter-in-place began. The green hills, blossoms, and soft breezes would see us through until things got better—around July, I figured in those early days. Surely by then universal masking, testing, contact tracing, and cooperation would have contained the virus.

Instead, things got worse, catastrophically so for tens of millions in this country alone. Groundhog Day, the 13th month of March, our long, dark winter, the apocalypse—whatever we called this strange time warp of everything different while also the same, it seemed like it would last forever.

Then the vaccines came. It felt like deliverance, even though we were cautioned that not much could change.

Here’s what changed immediately, though. Despite some lousy side effects those two jabs can cause, the most pronounced and immediate are the rush of joy and hope. Whereas last spring marked our entrance to Hell, this spring feels like we may truly soon emerge if we don’t abandon our senses.

To celebrate (fully masked and vaccinated), my friend Mary and I met at Filoli, a gorgeous estate south of San Francisco known for its gardens.

We’ve visited many times over the years, but savored this time especially. Not just for nature’s splendor, but for the extraordinary appreciation of all the ordinary things like seeing a friend in person and not over Zoom, making plans, envisioning a good future. (Still, nature was pretty splendid):

    As for the couple who saved my daughter and her boyfriend from moving to a Covid hotspot? Today marks their first anniversary (the ceremony occurred as scheduled, though with a tiny group of masked intimates, our two not among them). Happy anniversary—and congratulations on the birth of your baby earlier this month!

    Spring is indeed here again—a time of hope and renewal.

    Our National Holiday

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    Groundhog

    Finally, the day you’ve been living over and over again for almost a year is officially here! I’m referring, of course, to Groundhog Day, hitherto an obscure and underrated holiday whose elevation I’ve proposed as an apt celebration of the American character.

    But I didn’t quite intend this level of elevation, this much capturing of our experience! Seriously, I could do without Groundhog Day as a national meme baked into our collective unconscious because of COVID Times. Like Bill Murray in the famous film, the alarm goes off and we are eternally trapped in the same day. Also with the same people, same four walls, same conversations, same Zoom screens, same Netflix stupor, same quiet unraveling. And that’s if we’re lucky!

    The tedium is broken up by panic attacks about paying the bills, homeschooling the kids, elderly parents dying alone, sniffles spelling death–you name it. Not to mention anxiety about armed anti-maskers storming state capitols and militant anti-reality mobs staging an insurrection at our nation’s Capitol under the direction of Donald Trump. So much for subscribing to the “What’s the downside to humoring him?” theory.

    This got me thinking about whether groundhogs are harmless hibernators who sometimes bite people who haul them out of their slumber, or if there’s a darker side to these reluctant rodent celebrities. As one gardening website asks, “Can that cute groundhog really cause damage?”

    Yes, as it turns out. Much like insurrectionists and their leaders, “If not properly controlled, groundhogs can cause serious structural damage when burrowing. Their tunnels break apart building foundations . . . ” An easy Google ramble further reveals the answers to some of the most vexing questions, including my favorite: “Are groundhogs good for anything?” This is artfully evaded with a sort of “All God’s Creatures” vibe, plus a passing note that they’re vegetarians.

    More pragmatically, we learn how to get rid of a groundhog:

    –Sprinkle blood meal, ground black pepper, dried blood, or talcum powder around the perimeter of your garden.

    –Puree and strain hot peppers and garlic, mix them with water and enough liquid soap to make it stick, and spray it liberally around the garden.

    Would that these methods worked with insurrectionists and conspiracy theorists!

    Anyway, today’s news is that the groundhog foretells 6 more weeks of winter. Had it been cloudy, it would have been slightly shorter. Since the daffodils are currently blooming where I live, and since the calendar notes that Spring will be here no matter what in about six weeks, I smell a hoax. Or some kind of rodent.

    At any rate, we did wake to a slightly new day on January 20. President Biden has a plan to bring us out of our long, dark winter. No groundhog can tell how long it will take to emerge from Covid Times based on the presence or absence of its shadow. Assuming vaccination rates continue to improve, here’s a better predictor of how many more deaths will occur depending on how we (and Congress) all act in the meantime.

    As Bill Murray learned in Groundhog Day, he had choices within his trap, choices that led to remaining stuck or breaking free. So do we.

    Hallelujah

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    On the same day our country marked the milestone of more than 400,000 people dead from COVID, we were finally able to collectively acknowledge and grieve our loss. President-Elect Biden reminded us, “To heal we must remember. . . . It is important we do that as a nation. That’s why we are here today.”

    In the brief space between sundown and dusk, the simple and somber pre-inauguration memorial was electrifying. Lori Marie Key, a Detroit nurse, sang “Amazing Grace”—the same as she did on her shifts tending COVID patients to lift spirits amid all the heartbreak. Gospel singer Yolanda Adams then sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Along the entire length of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, 400 light pillars—each representing 1,000 lives lost—began to glow as darkness descended. The camera slowly zoomed out to reveal the illuminated waterway, Abraham Lincoln frozen in marble and time, the Potomac beyond.

    “In Hebrew, the word hallelujah means to rejoice in praising God,” I soon learned from Kyson Parks’s The Origin and History of the Song “Hallelujah,” by Leonard Cohen. Parks continues:

    It is a bitter lament about love and loss . . . “Hallelujah,” the song teaches us, is a refrain worthy of times of celebration, of mourning, of regret, of catharsis, and reconciliation. Cohen’s song tells a story of broken love, true love remembered and mourned, guilt, penance, and of finding peace in the vicissitudes of brokenness.

    How fitting for what we have been through. In our nation’s capital, the last line of the song—“It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah” soared over the Reflecting Pool as the lights came up.

    For some of us, Leonard Cohen’s song marked the beginning as well as the end of Trump’s  presidency. On the first Saturday Night Live after the 2016 election, Kate McKinnon–who had played Hillary Clinton throughout SNL’s 2016 campaign skits–performed it for SNL’s Cold Open.

    When McKinnon finished, she turned to the audience as Hillary and said, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you.”

    Tomorrow Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in as our new President and Vice President.

    Hallelujah.

    This, Too, Happened

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    Far, far down the very long list of Donald Trump’s transgressions, which range from petty insults to treason, is something trivial that nonetheless bugs me no end: His ability to suck all the oxygen out of everything, grab the narrative, and destroy anything good.

    After Biden’s clear victory in the days after the election, my brief period of joy and relief quickly was subsumed as Trump’s and his enablers’ lies about election fraud sparked widespread denial and defiance among his supporters.

    “I thought at least we’d get a bit of a mental health break,” my husband said, “but things just get worse and worse.”

    Reality played out on a split screen: election officials counting ballots while white mobs screamed at them; many, though not all, GOP state legislators accepting the results while most Republicans in the U.S. Congress acquiesced to the President’s lies; the courts—including the Trump-packed Supreme Court–holding firm against ridiculous claims; Georgia Republicans Brad Raffensberger, Gabriel Sterling, and even the detestable Brian Kemp–all of whom voted for Trump—becoming unlikely Resistance heroes. Biden’s 7 million plus margin in the popular vote coexisted with the depressing possibility that once again the Electoral College would have rendered those votes irrelevant if a slice of votes in a few swing states had gone the other way. But in the end, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, then Georgia all flipped from red to blue.

    Georgia!! Thanks to demographic changes and more than a decade of on-the-ground organizing, mostly by Black women, this deep red state turned a lovely pale shade of blue. Georgia in Biden’s column was thrilling though not decisive. But a tantalizing opportunity emerged: the fate of the U.S Senate rested entirely on the outcome of Georgia’s January 5th run-off elections. Could it happen again?

    I didn’t think so. I thought it was unlikely that the Democrats could win one race, let alone the two that would be necessary to pry the Senate Majority Leader’s gavel out of Mitch McConnell’s hands.

    Stacey Abrams, founder of the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight, likes to say, ““I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic—I’m determined.” I tried to channel her attitude. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, sending postcards through Reclaim Our Vote and phone banking once or twice a week. My husband and I sent a little money to Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, more money to grassroots organizations on the ground .We were among millions who did the same. Whether or not it would do the trick, at least it would be good for my mental health.

    Phone banking is not glamorous. Mostly it’s a tedious exercise in marking “Not Home,” occasional hostility, depressing levels of disinterest. Every now and then, though, a conversation makes it all worthwhile. Calling Georgia for the run-offs had very little of the former, lots of the latter. Caller after caller picked up the phone, especially in the early weeks before every organization under the sun was calling multiple times a day.

    Almost everyone was fired up and ready to go. People expressed appreciation for our efforts all the time. They eagerly agreed to get their friends and family to vote. “Don’t worry, we’ve got this,” one man told me right before Election Day. “We’ll be there with our whole block.”

    They were, and then some—voters who mailed in their absentee ballots, put them in a drop box, or stood in long lines for early voting; newly minted 18-year-olds casting their first ballot ever; a robust Election Day showing. Turnout was high among Republicans, too, but it was higher among Democrats—with impressive gains not only among Black and suburban voters, but also among young people, Latinx, and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders.

    By the time I went to bed Tuesday night on the West Coast, Warnock had been declared the winner, and it was clear that Ossoff, too, was well on his way to victory. The first Black and Jewish senators from Georgia, running on an unapologetically liberal platform.

    All our hard work paid off. Particularly impressive were the tireless and creative efforts of on-the-ground organizers and volunteers who have rolled up their sleeves forever for Georgia and the country. Stacey Abrams, Nse Ufot, LaTosha Brown, and Cliff Albright, of nationally known Fair Fight, New Georgia Project, and Black Voters Matter, are the stars of this movement, this moment. But so are those lesser known who got it done. Abrams noted, “We beat voter suppression.” As Rembert Browne, host of the wonderful “Gaining Ground” podcast summed up, “People stepping up from every corner of Georgia is what turned Georgia blue.”

    On Wednesday morning, even though it was cold, I put on my flimsy peach-colored T-shirt to mark the occasion. I had not felt so jubilant, so emotional, since Obama’s 2008 victory. What a glorious day!

    Or at least it was before it all turned to shit, joy and hope once again snatched away. Shockingly but not surprisingly, the Mob Boss incited his mob to violently storm the Capitol to stop Congress from formalizing the Electoral College votes. Of course this insurrection is the most important story

    But it is not the only one. Remember what happened in Georgia, not just once but twice. This, too, is real. We have the power to help it grow and endure.

    Dark Into Light

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    I have always loved this time of year, when fall turns into winter. The light lessens and nature’s surface goes dormant, yet life and promise teem below and out of sight. It seems that nothing’s happening, but all the while there’s productive churn from the necessary stillness.

    At least that’s what I tell my procrastinating self, especially when I’m tortured with writing. It’s what I convey to clients who feel hopelessly stuck and spend so much energy chastising themselves. Dormancy is vital to growth. Out of darkness comes the light.

    The meaning and metaphor of solstice are even more profound this year. The pandemic has been unfathomably brutal for so many, and will likely get worse before it gets better. The mind-boggling cruelty and corruption of Trump and his enablers has pummeled us into exhaustion. And that’s on top of the usual suspects—the failure to reckon with our original sin of slavery, dire and growing inequality, a warming planet. The demons of our nature too often appear to have the upper hand over the better angels.

    Yet even in these broken times there are fragments of hope. The New York Times has been running answers to “What Was Good About 2020?”: A pared-down wedding. Perspective. Realizing we are all connected. Absolutely nothing. Saving money on gas, dry cleaning, and haircuts. And my favorite: seeing into one’s colleagues’ apartments during Zoom meetings.

    Many people I know have noted how the forced disruption has also eliminated much of the frenzy and artifice life demanded before. Acts of kindness and compassion abound. One of my friends speculated that perhaps the murder of George Floyd sparked a sustained uprising unlike other murders of Black men and boys before him because more White people, experiencing their own hitherto unknown hardship and loss, could at last empathize. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch spinning darkness into light, but there’s something to it.

    And now there is a vaccine, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in January 20. There are dark times ahead, but Spring is coming.

    The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 2020 Edition

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    “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, is as relevant as ever. “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” the essay begins. We have certainly seen this, particularly during the Trump years in which grievance, chaos, and division have reigned. At times it has felt crazy (and crazy-making), but Hofstadter is at pains to state that he is borrowing the clinical term “paranoid” to describe “the heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” among more-or-less normal people that’s existed from the country’s founding through the present day.

    Hofstadter’s essay was published in tumultuous times, with the anti-communist fervor of McCarthyism serving as his contemporary exhibit of the paranoid style and its capacity for wreaking havoc.

    Hofstadter notes the phenomenon’s “apocalyptic and absolutistic framework”:

    Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated.

    Hofstadter notes a key phenomenon of the modern right wing–feeling dispossessed (or at least knowing how to manipulate others experiencing or frightened of dispossession):

    America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.

    Hofstadter then brings his socio-political commentary into the psychological realm: “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.”

    This dovetails with the hallmark feature of clinical paranoia, as described by Nancy McWilliams in Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (1994,The Guilford Press): “The essence of paranoid personality organization is the habit of dealing with one’s felt negative qualities by projecting them; the disowned attributes then feel like external threats.” (p. 205). McWilliams also notes the reliance on denial and high levels of innate aggression among those who skew paranoid. They struggle with anger, resentment, envy, vindictiveness, and—most of all—fear:

    The paranoid stance is a combination of fear and shame. . . Paranoid people use denial and projection so powerfully that no sense of shame remains accessible within the self. The energies of the paranoid person are therefore spent on foiling the efforts of those who are seen as bent on shaming and humiliating them. (p. 208)

    Paranoia, whether clinical or socio-political, is difficult to treat. It remains to be seen how much the passions of the moment will dissipate if not constantly stoked, or if a dangerous fringe that has made it into the mainstream has metastasized beyond control.

    Breakdown Break

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    My favorite Voting Plan comes from my friend Tina, who posted on Facebook: “I plan to fill out my absentee ballot as soon as I get it, put it in the nearest drop box right away, and watch cat videos until after the election.”

    I, on the other hand, even though contemplating how to follow Tina’s example and calm my nerves as we approach E-Day, couldn’t help myself. On my therapeutic walk this morning, I made the mistake of listening to The Daily‘s latest podcast, “The Spector of Political Violence.” It featured Americans of every political (and apolitical) stripe buying guns because they are nervous about everyone else having guns. I suppose it’s a comfort that the story’s angle was deliberately non-partisan. But hammering home the point that people who are scared arm themselves to feel safe–despite all the evidence that the presence of a gun increases the risk of violence–made me even more anxious. I’m a member of a very large club.

    I recommend following Tina’s lead. So in that spirit, here’s some reminders of goodness and beauty from my daily walks of the last few months that are helping me get through:

    • Swinging ducks
    • Sharing
    • Teddy bear scavenger hunt

    • Pandemic baking

    Remember to vote, and remember to set your clocks back Sunday. You’ve got your choice about how to spend your extra hour: sleeping, insomnia, doom-scrolling, watching cat videos. Choose wisely, and see you on the other side!

    With a Little Help from Our Friends

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    You know what motivates me more than almost anything? When someone I know and trust asks me to do something! I joined Weight Watchers with a friend. I took a job I wasn’t looking for because my friend recruited me. I served on our school district’s foundation—and even became its co-chair—because so many people I admired were involved and urged me to get involved, too. I make countless donations, go to events, and buy unwanted wrapping paper and grapefruit from friends’ children. I like to joke that my political activism consists of doing whatever my friend Ruth asks of me.

    It’s not that I’m a pushover or a mindless follower. My parents never had to say, “Would you jump off a cliff just because your friends were?” It’s just that people I know and trust inform and inspire me. They provide good company, hold me accountable, and make me a better person.

    It turns out I’m not alone, and that this has big ramifications for voter turnout. Research shows that the best way to get somebody to vote is when someone they know reminds them. Call it a helpful nudge, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), or benevolent peer pressure–it works! That’s why one of my very favorite acts of political work this season has been Friend-to-Friend Voter Outreach.

    It’s a simple and fun organic way of growing a network of voters not from campaign lists but from within our personal circles. All it takes is asking three people you know in battleground states and districts who share your views to vote, and to ask them to ask three more people. Follow-up with a couple of pre-election reminders, and that’s it!

    Of course, if you’re an overachiever, you can ask more than three people—I’ve cast a wide net, and have also asked people not in battleground states but with roots there to participate.  But three is a perfect number—not too much to ask of anyone (including yourself!), and enough to make a real difference. It’s also a nice way to catch up with friends and relatives where contact might not extend much beyond birthday and holiday cards.

    I’ve had some lovely exchanges with far-flung cousins, Facebook friends, and my daughter’s college roommate. My husband’s best friend, not normally political, agreed to contact his mother and all his high school friends in Cleveland. I’ve never in my life participated in a single chain letter, but this is a chain I love to build, link by link.

    Please join me. Use the resources below, have fun, and let me know how it goes.  Let’s win big.

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    – A good step-by-step guide (you don’t have to attend the ongoing workshops offered by the organizer, though you’re welcome to contact him for next date if you like).

    –If anyone needs voting information, iwillvote.com is a great state-by-state resource.

    -Here’s a handy chart for voter registration deadlines. Note that several have passed, but many states offer ways to register and vote after the deadline:

    -A good read.

    -Stress-buster:

    Crunch Time

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    I clipped this cartoon from The New Yorker soon after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and it’s been on my refrigerator ever since.

    The first week of this Administration seems practically quaint compared to what’s happening now. Those were the days of a flurry of executive orders loosening environmental protections and going after immigrants; lies about crowd size and voter fraud; Kellyanne Conway’s injecting “alternative facts” into the Trump Apologists’ Lexicon; and, most notoriously, the Muslim Ban.

    It took three attempts to craft a travel ban that passed muster with a willfully obtuse U.S. Supreme Court. It’s a useful model for the trajectory of the last four years: Initial incompetence–along with intense resistance by an outraged opposition not yet exhausted by relentless provocations–contained the damage for awhile, until it didn’t.

    But the only ways in which Donald Trump and his enablers have gained competence is to divide and better manipulate the considerable levers of power they control for corrupt, unlawful, and dangerously destructive ends. The takeover of the spineless Republican Party is complete. Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr, the Scylla and Charybdis of the whole treasonous enterprise, guard the rot with a competency and smooth veneer that will forever elude the obviously unfit Trump himself.

    The resistance is still strong, but exhausted.

    It is Labor Day, the traditional start of the home stretch of every presidential election. November 3, 2020–the day we have been waiting for since November 8, 2016–has taken forever to come but it’s almost here.

    So imagine the word “term” instead of the word “week” in the cartoon above.

    Summon everything you have in the next few weeks to make sure it doesn’t come to pass. Talk to similarly inclined people in your circle to make sure they are registered to vote, and that they do vote, either with enthusiasm or holding their noses. Sign up for phone banks, text banks, letter and post-card writing. Make donations if you can. There are a million opportunities available, and participating in them may save your mental health as well as the future of our country and planet.

    This is it. Let’s do this thing.