Our Movie with a message for this week is Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand, which won the Golden Globe award for best movie last Sunday. It is streaming on Hulu. It is based on the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the New Economy, about van dwellers, mostly older folks who find that even though they have worked all their lives, their retirement benefits aren’t enough for them to rent a home or stay in their home after the death of a spouse. So they buy a van or a cheap RV and live in it, traveling the country, taking part -time jobs in order to buy gas and food. The book was written by Jessica Bruder, a journalist, who lived and worked as a van dweller for three years. The movie was adapted and directed by Cloe Zhao, who won the Golden Globe for best director. She spent 5 months in a van shooting Nomadland across 5 states, hiring many of the real van dwellers as extras and to play themselves. Even though the main character, Fern, is fictional, the life that that it portrays is real. The setting is 2011 and the van dwellers are mostly people who couldn’t recover from the 2008 recession. Fern is a woman in her 60s who worked with her husband at the Gypsum factory in Empire, Nevada. When the recession hit, and there was less need for sheetrock, the plant closed, and in less than a year , Empire’s zip code was discontinued, as banks foreclosed and people moved away to find jobs. Fern’s husband died during that time, and she only had social security, which wasn’t enough to live on. A friend told her about a website called Van Dwellers, so she bought an inexpensive van and became one of many older, dispossessed Americans who live in their vehicles. Her first road job is in an Amazon Warehouse. You might know this, but I did not. Amazon has a job program for van dwelling retirees. They pay their campground fees and pay to them to stock merchandise during their busy seasons. So if you are driving around the country, living in your van, there are Amazon warehouses where you can get a job during Christmas. Fern’s other jobs included, working the line for the sugar beet harvest, working in a rock quarry, and being a camp ground hostess, which basically meant cleaning the bathrooms and emptying trash cans. Along the way, Fern met Bob Wells, who plays himself in the movie, the person who made the website, so that van dwellers could meet up once in awhile. Bob hosts a rendezvous once a year at an Arizona campground, as a support system for van-dwellers who need help. There, they trade can openers for pot holders, learn how to patch tires and find the safest illegal place to park in different towns. It’s a sad predicament that they try to make the best of. The primary theme of the movie is economic injustice. The fact that, because of circumstances beyond their control, older Americans, most of them women, cannot afford to pay rent and buy food, so live in their vehicles, eat canned soup off a hot plate, and go to the bathroom in a bucket, while begging for low paying, temporary jobs is a travesty. As one of the documentaries I watched about van dwellers said, “The three legged stool of social security, private pensions, and personal savings has given way to a pogo stick, with social security as the only wobbly leg.” Fern puts it more bluntly, saying, The American dream is a lie. The Amazon Camp force is blatant exploitation of cheap seasonal labor by people who can’t even afford a home. Because I am a person of privilege, before I turned 65, I naively thought that all of Medicare was free. Medicare is very expensive. The majority of older people in our society can’t afford it. What does it say about us that we treat our elders this way? Another theme in the movie is loss and grief. Like most of the people she meets, Fern is alone. She lost her husband Bo, her home, her town, and her friends. At one point, she goes back to Empire to sell what little she had in storage there, and she walks through what is now a ghost town, we can see in her face and her gait what all this loss has done to her. Like so many of the other van dwellers, she is grieving. We don’t see her doing anything enjoyable, just existing from one day to the next. Finally, though, there is the theme of community. Nomadland reminds us that we can find community anywhere, no matter how poor our circumstances. While Fern keeps mostly to herself, she does make some good friends. And the scenes of the real van dwellers show how much they depend on each other, enjoy each other’s company, and come to love those they only see a few times a year. The need for community is the reason Bob Wells started the website and the meet-ups. And they are a lifeline for them. It seems that almost all of my sermons have a theme of community. I think it’s because community is so important to me. Even when we desire solitude, we still need to know that there are people who care about us, and who we can depend on. Jesus taught us about community in the Sermon on the Mount and in the way he lived his life. And we, who today are marking one year since we worshipped together in our sanctuary, are just as strong a community as ever. We love each other, and we are there for each other, not matter what. And that is something we can all be grateful for.
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