The problem with the Amazon warehouse scenes in Nomadland

When journalist Jessica Bruder started reporting her 2017 book Nomadland: surviving America in the twenty-first century, foreclosures and vaporized investments from the Great Recession were driving many elderly people to hit the road. She met elderly Americans across the country who lived without vehicles to save their meager Social Security benefits and did strenuous physical work to survive – people like Linda May, then 64. A seasonal worker at CamperForce, Amazon jobs program for retirees living in a van, she felt dizzy during her shifts in the Amazon warehouse that took her to the emergency room and had a repetitive motion injury using her sweeping gun. Another CamperForce worker, Chuck Stout, 71, was hit by a box that flew from the conveyor belt on Amazon, his head hitting the concrete floor with a thud; moments later, the inmates put him on his feet, declared that he did not have a concussion, and sent him back to work.

The nomads were not only hurt on Amazon. While working as a hostess at a camp in California, Linda May broke a rib while protecting a trash can; Charlene Swankie, 72, broke three ribs while staying at a camp in the Rocky Mountains. While working for an amusement park, Steve Booher, 68, fell off a loading dock and fell on a conveyor belt, fracturing his skull. He died.

Bruder describes the nomads as “plug-and-play work, the epitome of convenience for employers looking for seasonal staff. They appear where and when they are needed. They bring their own homes … They haven’t been around long enough to join a union. In jobs that are physically difficult, many are too tired to even socialize after their shifts. ”As a 77-year-old worker said:“ They love retirees because we are reliable. We will show up, work hard and work basically as a slave. “

Reading Bruder, we understand that these “accidents” are the logical results of an economic system that takes advantage of the most vulnerable in the country. So when the 60-something protagonist Fern (Frances McDormand) arrives in an old white van to work at a real Amazon depot in the first three minutes of Nomadland, fictional adaptation of Bruder’s book by director Chloé Zhao, we are tense by the class conflict. But the adaptation of Zhao, who follows Fern as she drives through majestic landscapes in the American West in search of a temporary job, is only superficially the same narrative.

Already an Oscar favorite, many critics praised Nomadland as a portrait of modern America. The idea of ​​authenticity was central to Zhao’s previous films, which were developed around the real-life stories of his cast of mostly non-professional actors; she imports this technique for Nomadland, featuring real nomads from Bruder’s book, including Linda May and Swankie. Fern, however, is a fictional character, sutured in the landscape by Zhao and McDormand to be our compassionate, dryly humorous, Shakespeare recitation guide for the nomadic world. Crucially, contrary to the subjects of the book, Fern has no complaints about her jobs – including her time at Amazon. And because the film is mainly a study of her character, he exchanges Bruder’s acute indignation about capitalist exploitation for a confusing message about individual freedom that minimizes the real bets of concert work.

According to the film’s story, Fern lost her job and home when the United States Gypsum Company closed, and along with it the small town of Empire, Nevada in 2011. Fern is the widow of a man who also worked in plaster. plant before you die; they never had children. She is haunted by the memory of her late husband, recalling a simpler and safer time, when “there was nothing in our way”. She chooses the path, we learn, not because she has no other options, but so that she can cry and regain a sense of possibility.

At McDormand’s recent Vogue cover story, she reveals that Fern was an emanation of a fantasy she had in her 40s, saying to her husband, filmmaker Joel Coen: “When I’m 65, I’m going to change my name to Fern, I’m smoking Lucky Strikes, drinking Wild Turkey, I’m going to get a trailer and hit the road. It was McDormand, who, after reading Bruder’s book, summoned Zhao to bring that vision to life. In an interview during Nomadland’s Circuit of film festivals, McDormand, an adoptee who still calls herself and her biological mother “white trash”, says that she modeled Fern after her younger self while she launched herself into the world. “There is a childlike quality that interests us a lot for Fern … where I started at 17, it starts at 61.” This may explain why McDormand’s Fern insists on self-sufficiency so much: it rejects the offers of extra rooms from the financially secure suburban people who care about it, preferring its Econoline to its neat and tidy homes. When she has to borrow money from her sister (Melissa Smith) to pay for the repair of the van, she repeatedly insists that she will pay. She may have to shit in a five-gallon bucket, but it’s worth it, because she’s a free woman, not a victim, and is going to smoke those Lucky Strikes.

There is nothing wrong with portraying people deprived of their rights as bold, resilient, people – most of them are – as long as we fully consider the structures aligned against them. That is why it is not enough to call essential workers “heroes”: we need to make them pay for dangerousness, time off and PPE. But this is where Nomadland stumbles, apparently deciding that it was not possible to portray Fern as worthy and portray the harsh truth of migrant work. The edges have been sanded: we see Fern roam the floor of the Amazon warehouse with a trash can, smiling at Linda May, who is examining packages nearby. We see her at lunchtime with a table of smiling coworkers; his cheerful supervisor shows the lyrics of the songs tattooed on his arms. After work, Fern meets an old friend, who asks, what is it like to work at Amazon? “A lot of money,– Fern replies. And this is the extension of the film’s vision of the e-commerce giant, which ends up disappearing smoothly in Nomadland ‘terrain s. Zhao opts for a similar view of nothing at Fern’s other shows as a camp host, line cook and beet plant worker. They are launched as interchangeable scenarios, not as specific challenges to be overcome. It seems less an artistic license than a betrayal of the workers’ reality.

In interviews, filmmakers gave mixed answers about whether Nomadland it is a “political” film. Zhao told Indiewire last September that he wanted to avoid politics: “I tried to focus on the human experience and the things that I feel go beyond political statements to be more universal – the loss of a loved one, the search for a home.” She told Alison Willmore of Vulture that the policy was embedded Nomadland’s each picture “if you look deeply … it’s just, yes, there is a beautiful sunset behind it.” But in an interview with The Wrap earlier this month, Zhao’s partner and director of photography, Joshua James Richards, said it was a “strange argument to say the film is making a big critical statement” about Amazon. “I mean, we just showed Fern working there. We also showed a Ford Econoline, but I don’t think we are making a big critical statement about Ford. Obviously, you can find politics in anything. “

We have a little more insight from McDormand, who explained that he got permission to film on Amazon by sending an email to the company’s senior vice president of business development, Jeff Blackburn. “It was just before they started giving people $ 15 an hour,” she told The Hollywood Reporter last fall. “This was a really smart move for them because … we are telling a story about a person who is benefiting from hard work and working at Amazon’s call center is hard work, but it pays a salary.” Of course, paying a salary would be considered the minimum necessary. (And if it is a fair wage it is far from being a consensus among the workers themselves.)

What kind of movie would it be Nomadland would it have been if the prospects of the real nomads were in the front and in the center? Amazon warehouse workers reported walking up to 20 miles a day on concrete, transporting goods through huge warehouses while trying to beat a digital timer, with no benefits for CamperForce recruits other than a scholarship to help cover camp fees. Near the end of Bruder’s book, Linda May offers an exciting view of Amazon, with a clarity that is completely overlooked in her performance in Zhao’s film: “I hate this fucking job,” she says, calling the company “probably the largest slave owner in the world. “Another elderly CamperForce worker, Patty DiPino, confesses to Bruder that she tells her friends not to buy on Amazon.” I mean, the rich are getting richer while we’re sitting here and staying poorest. ” Bruder informs us that DiPino eventually dies of cancer. On the DiPino Facebook page, a friend publishes a memorial: “You are finally debt-free and live in your home forever! No more freezing in the desert or Kansas! No more tight spaces … I will miss you a lot. “

These stories are blatantly absent from the film adaptation. By skipping the mistreatment that circumscribes so many final years of nomads, filmmakers end up provincializing their experiences and diminishing them. It’s the favorite starting point for platform capitalists: that temporary job, devoid of all rights and benefits, is what workers want, because freedom! because flexibility! He portrays concert work as a refuge during difficult times, when the truth is that temporary jobs are often more difficult to find during crises such as the pandemic – and only exacerbate workers’ uncertainty. By telling half the story, the film loses the central insight that made Bruder’s book so moving: that there is no escape from the American economic system, and attacks the nomads continuously. Not only leaving them homeless, but also exploiting their precariousness to put them right on the floor.

Over the past year, the inhumanity that Bruder described has become clear. Amazon bosses gained surprising wealth as they threw their workers in the path of a virus that left nearly half a million Americans dead. As I write this, Amazon workers in Alabama are voting for a historic union effort. They are protesting unsafe working conditions on the front lines of the pandemic; they want to have lunch and take breaks to go to the bathroom without fear of being fired. The company’s efforts to cancel the move speak for themselves.

Not every story about the present needs to be explicitly political. But why cast real survivors in a drama about their fight and then invent a new, less vulnerable character just to mitigate it? It seems like a missed opportunity, as if filmmakers squeezed real life into a narrative that they hoped would resonate more widely – but left out precisely what made it so urgent. For many people, there is no way to drive until sunset. There is only the edge to break, again and again.