The End of the Road
thedriftmag.com
The End of the Road
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Re: The End of the Road
#2It is called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
—- George Carlin
Re: The End of the Road
#3an informative read, with personal connection, spanning a large economic and societal time, contrasting a recent Oscar winning movie to myths of the Pioneers and conservative politics. Thank you for posting
Re: The End of the Road
#4an informative read, with personal connection, spanning a large economic and societal time, contrasting a recent Oscar winning movie to myths of the Pioneers and conservative politics. Thank you for posting
Seconded. I liked that there's no romanticizing or villifying of the nomadic lifestyle, just tells it as is - it's compromises, lack of options, need to feel free, allure of the nature and everything in between.
Good info on the homestead act and its actual effects too.
Re: The End of the Road
#5Well, seems like opening up a new frontier will help American society a lot.
Re: The End of the Road
#6This is quite poignant. It reminds me of my own time in middle school, which also happened during the recession of the early 90s, when the endless optimism and expansionism of the 80s, with the Berlin Wall coming down and boundless real estate gains and an expanding economy, finally came to an end. There was the oil price shock, the fall of the Soviet Union, and of course my most notable memory of being briefly trapped in a house while helping my dad on a contract job doing a second floor addition by the expanding wave of the LA Riots. 63 people killed and the National Guard marching through Los Angeles.
And I didn't know it until I read Into the Wild a few years later when I went to college, but 1992 was the same year Chris McCandless died, with great debates in all outdoor communities on whether he was an idiot or a hero. He stayed for a while in Slab City out in the Imperial Valley, with many residents living permanently in RVs. That place is amazingly still there, maybe an even better expression of whatever is left of the myth of the American frontier, public land owned by the State of California, donated by the Marine Corps, with people allowed to just live there as long as they want, with no real addresses or government-provided services and sometimes not even real legal identities.
Re: The End of the Road
#7[deleted]
Re: The End of the Road
#8Not having money is horrible.
The only benefit of not having money is that it makes all other horrible life conditions and outcomes seem somewhat less horrible comparatively. It dulls the pain and stress receptors.
Re: The End of the Road
#9The author mentions various denials in his review, ironically, in my view, missing the pivotal case of denial that forms the conceptual warhead of the piece. Look at Fern. Why Fern? Why her, as the key nomad, rather than anyone else? The author's explanation is trite and contradicts points he highlights earlier in the piece:
>Fern, like the protagonists of many frontier stories, is called to represent nothing short of the national project itself — its triumph and, in the case of this film, its decline. These narratives have always been de-politicized, their origins in genocide rubbed clean, their most reactionary elements tucked away. We are asked to empathize with the pioneer as a universal American subject in a way we are not asked to empathize with stories about more banal forms of poverty, or homelessness, or the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land. Frontier stories are like the public lands the film relishes — pretty, but rooted in a violence that their prettiness only obscures.
but see:
>Nomadland is the highest-profile cultural engagement with the nomad phenomenon to date
and
>Chloé Zhao, a Beijing-born director whose previous film was about a struggling Lakota rodeo star, is fond of making films from a far outsider’s perspective.
The suggestion that the film is yet-another misbegotten paean to the American Dream falls flat in light of its creator and its context. Nor does the bleak outlook of the protagonist seem emblematic of the ideology of capitalism. But alluding to the horrors of the past is a lot easier than original thinking.
Fern is a consciously chosen protagonist. Her motivation for nomadism is not an inessential part of the narrative. It is revealed in her reaction to her in-laws' trivializing and romanticizing her situation. But it is also revealed in her refusal to settle down.
If you never find a new home, it can't replace your old one. As long as Fern still lives in the van, home will always be in Empire, Nevada. That's the infrasonic melancholy resonating through every scene.
Fern, the metonymic American, is in denial that Empire is gone. End scene.
Re: The End of the Road
#10It’s a minor footnote, but the article specifically says that the Homestead Acts were for white people, twice, which didn’t sound right and made me curious enough to look it up. The 1862 Homestead Act, passed during the Civil War, made anyone 21 and older eligible, including freed slaves after the Fourteenth Amendment. Here’s an article about African American homesteaders:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/african-american-homesteaders-i...
Though of course the results were far from equal. Apparently it was much abused.