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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n\u201cThe purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n – Wilfred Bion<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t really understand the influential nineteenth century psychoanalyst Bion, but his words suffused me as I watched Nomadland<\/em>, the widely acclaimed film<\/a> based on Jessica Bruder\u2019s 2017 book<\/a> and starring the brilliant Frances McDormand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An article<\/a> about Nomadland<\/em>\u2019s director Chloe Zhao describes the essence of her film-making: \u201cZhao tried to make herself porous, immersing herself in life there and attempting to get past the familiar narratives offered up to expectant visitors.\u201d This porosity feels akin to Bion\u2019s philosophy. It is hard to achieve.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just how<\/em> hard struck me while watching Nomadland<\/em>. 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\u2019s winner-take-all system that creates down-and-out losers I could pity from a distance of privileged political righteousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nomadland<\/em> begins with an economical background sketch: U.S. Gypsum shuts down its plant in Empire, Nevada. A few months later, the town\u2019s zip code is discontinued. It\u2019s 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\u2019s jobs, savings, homes, and lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The murkiness of our comprehension is accentuated by the film\u2019s naturalistic lighting: so many scenes are shot in the dark, it is hard to discern what\u2019s happening. We form impressions of the people we meet, but it takes time to get to know them, especially if our preconceptions obscure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I expected, for example, to feel the heavy horror of victims frozen in trauma and was instead startled by the film\u2019s gentle sweetness. Grief is etched in people\u2019s 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\u2019 lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The film seems like both a triumph of empathy for each person\u2019s complex humanity and a glossy valorization of overcoming hardship. One critic notes in \u201cWhat Nomadland<\/em> Gets Wrong About Gig Workers<\/a>\u201d that \u201cit feels less like artistic license than a betrayal of workers\u2019 reality.\u201d 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\u2019t help but ponder Janis Joplin\u2019s, \u201cFreedom\u2019s just another word for nothing left to lose,\u201d or my ambivalence about our resilience fetish. Every time we lionize heroic coping, our complicity in tolerating a system that demands it mounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nomadland<\/em>\u2019s emphasis on deep character exploration rather than the larger cultural context reminds me of psychotherapy\u2019s shift from the intrapsychic to the interpersonal to the importance of externalities. I think of the optical illusion:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Do we see two profiles or an urn? Is our vision flexible enough to take in the totality?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n * <\/p>\n\n\n\n Originally appeared in <\/em>Impulse<\/a>, an online publication of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cThe purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire.\u201d – Wilfred Bion I don\u2019t really understand the influential nineteenth century psychoanalyst Bion, but his words suffused me as I watched Nomadland, the widely acclaimed film based on … Continue reading
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