Always Plays It Safe
Publicizing suffering; "Nomadland"; "I Care a Lot"; and more.
It has been a gospel of neoliberalism ever since it began its dominance of the American economy over forty years ago: privatize profit, publicize risk. No longer happy to simply make profit the sole measure of any human endeavor, no longer satisfied to convert every public service and common resource into an engine of capital, the bosses and owners decided that any earnings from the process would go only into their pockets, but the consequences of any failures would be spread around, through the mechanism of taxation, to everyone. But even this has proved to be not enough: now, they have decreed that they will not just publicize the risk, but the repercussions as well.
While this is nothing new – the capitalist class has been passing down the pain of their depredations to its victims since empire existed – what’s changed is the moral shape of the argument. Before, the little people were little people; now that even the CEOs have to pretend like they care about others, they’ve designed new arguments. It’s no longer the case that we have to eat their shit and pretend to like it; we now have to act as if eating their shit is an ethical imperative, and that if we don’t do it with a smile, we’re not holding up our end of the social contract.
It’s easy to see this in action. We first caught a glimpse of it in the ‘90s, when hyper-financialization started to kick into high gear; wages were stagnant, but costs began to skyrocket. It was the bankers and brokers who made the cost of everything from housing and education to health care and utilities go through the roof, but the responsibility of dealing with it was not theirs; it was ours. If we, the people they were pricing out of every market, wanted to own a home, retire, or send our kids to school, it wasn’t’ up to them to raise wages or control costs; it was up to us to make sacrifices, to scrimp and save, to work harder and suffer more, to cut back on buying the infinite consumer goods for which they were constantly bombarding us with advertisements.
This approach then moved on to its most famous iteration: as a response to environmental devastation. Is the air poison, are the seas boiling, is the ground no longer capable of sustaining life? Then it’s the responsibility of ordinary people, whose role in creating the problem ranges from minuscule to infinitesimal, to fix things. Reduce, reuse, recycle, consume less and labor more, sort all your empties and get rid of your straws. Never mind that it’s a hundred or so huge conglomerates responsible for the lion’s share of pollution and ecocide. It’s not even that these are bad ideas, or that we shouldn’t do them; it’s that they shift the responsibility away from where it would do the most good to where it is largely superficial. This was followed by waves of greenwashing, as the capitalists lined up to sell us solutions to the problems they created.
Even in the COVID-19 era, the model plays itself out. I have, as we all should, followed the suggestions of public health experts: I have worn a mask wherever I’ve gone (and I’ve gone almost nowhere outside a five-block radius of my apartment in almost a year); I’ve eschewed travel, gone through gallons of hand sanitizer, and avoided public places like, well, the plague. Now I’m told that I should wear two masks, and while it seems pretty absurd, I’ll do that too. I want to keep myself, my loved ones, and my community healthy. But when I’m told that I should be careful to get the right kind of N95 mask, because some 60% of those on the market are counterfeit, I can’t help but wonder: why is this my responsibility? Why do I, a complete non-expert, have to vet every mask I buy online when Amazon could simply refuse to sell any noncompliant masks, or the federal government could provide the consumer safety protocols that are suddenly my job to enforce? Why isn’t there the same urgency to provide safe, affordable vaccines as there is for me to single-handedly save the world?
Of course, I’ll wear two masks, and make sure they’re the right ones, and keep quarantining myself in what I know to be a safe environment. But I shouldn’t have to! This is a problem that the billionaire class could solve by tomorrow if they so desired! Of course, I’ll keep tipping 30% every time I place a delivery order, because I don’t want frontline workers to die in poverty. But that’s a much bigger expenditure of capital for me than it is for the huge corporations that employ them, and who are, under any rational understanding, more responsible for their well-being than I am. And, of course, it will come to pass that those same corporations are robbing them of their tips, and it’ll then be my responsibility to find this out and act accordingly, and tip in cash or use a different company or some other contrivance, rather than it being their employers’ responsibility to pay them fairly and the government’s responsibility to ensure that they do so.
This is austerity in action. In order to accommodate the greed of a handful of people at the top, life gets worse, and then we are asked to not only accept it getting worse, but to volunteer to mitigate the conditions we had no say in creating, in ways that will make it worse still. As I write this, some of my comrades are on a hunger strike to protest the construction of a metal recycling facility linked to disease and death in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. This is what capitalism demands of you: If you wish to resist its creeping toxicity and harm, you must throw your bodies into the gears and smash yourselves to pieces. You must sacrifice your comfort, your health, your time, and your sanity in small ways now, or completely later on. They are the profit; you are the loss.
With the pandemic-induced sparsity of cinematic product ‘solved’ by another painful sacrifice – losing the whole century-long experience of going to a movie theater in favor of paying $20 to see the same mediocre pictures in your living room via streaming – 2021 is off to a much better start than 2020, even in the early goings. But one of the most buzzed-about films of the year, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, is one that I found utterly arresting while I was watching it, but deeply troubling after it was over.
The movie, based on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 non-fiction book, focuses on ‘nomad’ Fern (played by Frances McDormand, also Nomadland’s producer), an older woman who, after losing her husband and her job at a mining operation in Utah, wanders the American Southwest in a beat-up cargo van. The van becomes her home as she befriends other wanderers, and we encounter a well-drawn cross-section of largely white working-class people who, without jobs, families, or stability, follow the same route, becoming a large temporary labor force for seasonal attractions, part-time gigs, and, of course, Amazon.
There’s no denying the movie’s appeal. Zhao has a tremendous eye and great patience, and she composes her scenes with care. The cinematography, by her partner Joshua James Richards, is quietly spectacular. McDormand is predictably terrific, having settled into a career as a sort of working woman’s Meryl Streep, and the supporting cast of drifters and vagabonds, some of whom are the actual, real-world nomads that Bruder interviewed for her book, are achingly human. It is a deeply sympathetic movie about the way we understand freedom, the way we choose our communities when the ones we don’t choose are taken away from us, and the way we exert dignity in the face of systems that discard the very ideas as unprofitable.
But…it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It wasn’t just the difficulty of translating a documentary narrative into a fictional one; it’s that Nomadland was an urgently and expressly political book, and Nomadland is an almost suspiciously nonpolitical movie – to the degree that its makers have taken pains to deny that it has, or should have, any political content at all. While I’m not thrilled at violating the critical rule that you should judge the movie you saw and not the movie you wanted to see, it’s hard not to when the distance between the intention of the source material and the reality of the adaptation is so vast.
Fern herself is an invented character, whose wanderings are in service of her emotional needs and not her material ones. Her voice is privileged over the actual people who appear in the book, some of whom rail in no uncertain terms about the pain, cruelty, and exploitation they suffered at corporate jobs; here they are reduced to supporting roles, and their protests are silenced. McDormand herself negotiated with Amazon for permission to feature one of their warehouse facilities Nomadland; at what cost? The muting of the voices of these desperate, lost souls who likened their conditions working at the company to slavery? All for the verisimilitude of using a corporate logo and saving a few bucks on sets?
Nomadland is a beautiful and moving film. It could have been just as beautiful and moving, and much more effective, if it hadn’t torn out the soul of its source.
Nowhere near as lovely, but much truer to its own heart of darkness, is I Care a Lot, a razor-sharp crime thriller by the British director J Blakeson. Rosamund Pike stars as Marla Grayson, an iron-willed hustler who gets rich off of bribing doctors to declare elderly patients incapable of caring for themselves, after which they are committed to a nursing home she operates, ruthlessly stripping them of their assets. Trouble starts when she pulls the grift on a woman named Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest in an absolutely stunning performance in a movie full of them).
Directed in a brisk, energetic style, I Care a Lot lives on the strength of its performances. Pike is spectacular as the unstoppable Grayson, Peter Dinklage is terrifyingly calm as a Russian gangster who clashes with her, Isiah Whitlock Jr. is all authority and misplaced pity as the judge in her pocket, and Chris Messina and Alicia Witt have juicy minor roles as a crooked lawyer and a corrupt doctor, respectively. (It’s one of those movies where pretty much everyone is on the take.) Only Eiza González seems a bit out of place as Grayson’s partner; she doesn’t have much to do acting or plot-wise, but it’s easy to overlook when everyone else is so good.
I Care a Lot is thorny, mean, and hilarious. It plays for much of its run time like a particularly vicious neo-noir: the sense of fatalism, the cynical milieu, the moments where someone runs into someone too dangerous to swindle but can’t help but try anyway. Towards the end, though, it takes a turn into a particularly nasty satire of capitalism. After all, Grayson’s scam doesn’t work really well as a con – too much overhead, too many people, too many moving parts – but it works perfectly well as a reflection of the real-world way privately operated nursing homes work. A brutal piece of work, just like its lead character, and very much of its time.
This week in links: struggles at Google’s Stadia game lab; gymnast McKayla Maroney’s tragic flirtation with a cult; Amazon’s war against unionization; the unsustainable loss of fertile soil in the US; and the unsustainable loss of fish stocks in the UK.