In Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhism, a “hungry ghost” is a species of spirit driven by a need that went unfulfilled in mortal life.
Karmically condemned to repeat its suffering, the ghost haunts the empty spaces where its family has forgotten or neglected it—its tomb, for example—and beats itself senselessly into a foregone past. Sometimes it’s a ghost of no wealth, with a flaming mouth and belly as vast as a mountain range, suffering deep thirst from a life of deprivation. Otherwise, it might be a ghost of little wealth, with foul-smelling hair and a spear-like body, wreaking havoc on anyone who comes between it and food. Such ghosts are traditionally tamed in rituals of material offering which serve as a distraction from their greed. In any case, the earthly world is overburdened with a teeming throng of such ghosts, reeling from their mortal toil, and with no one to mourn them, stuck in time-limbo.
“That’s the star Vega, but it’s 24 light-years away,” says Brad, a tour guide of the North American West, in Chloé Zhang’s “Nomadland.” “The light that you’re looking at left Vega in 1987 … and it just got here,” he goes on, lit from below by harsh red light. “Hold out your right hand and look at a star—there are atoms from stars that blew up eons ago.” The crowd chuckles, and a dazzled Fern stretches out her fingers to get a closer look. She’s a self-described “nomad,” laid off from a Sheetrock factory and widowed by her husband, Bo, back in their company town of Empire, Nevada. Now her life belongs to a mid-sized, decked-out white van, lovingly dubbed Vanguard, and a string of jobs—Amazon, Wall Drug, campsite-cleaning—out on the open road.
Brad’s star is a parable, reminding us that the past always reaches us too late. So, too, is Fern’s world, where elderly people dying of disease till the land and cook by the fire while spaceships fly overhead. The film is littered with such disparities: Fern enters a glowering, techno-futuristic Amazon factory to sort and label boxes, then returns to her van to celebrate New Year’s Eve with a single orange sparkler. She bathes naked amidst ancient rock structures, screams from the tops of mountains with abandon, and still weeps in earnest when a single white plate—a gift from her father—shatters on the ground.
There are never really “first” or “last” times; Fern’s friend remarks that in the life of a nomad, “goodbye” often gives way to “I’ll see you down the road.” The people of Fern’s story have quickly adapted to the new: new responsibilities, new realities. They only receive $550 in social security payments and can’t afford to retire. They are kicked out of parking lots and gas stations by neighbors or lose their vans to too-costly mechanical issues. There is no end to their stories because they lead lives of survival and sustenance, of risk management and interdependence and self-protection. Their depth of human feeling jostles constantly against the frustration of their tasks and the pain of their human situations. Lingering in the great stretches of land is an unshakeable feeling that the future has arrived too early.
In a new book, “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World,” Professor Timothy Morton of Rice University argues that “hyperobjects”—think climate change, nuclear meltdown, capitalist disenfranchisement—have “zones,” great environments that surround and are informed by them. We are embedded in these zones depending on our proximity to the hyperobjects, and no matter how we feel about them, their influence burns through to us. Zones are fundamentally apocalyptic (from the Greek, meaning “to uncover”) because they allow us to see things for how they really are—but they do not, in Morton’s view, liberate us entirely. Their motherboard is too strong, and we are too thoroughly caught in the web. Vega’s light doesn’t just arrive too late: it is out of our reach.
It is not too difficult for the average person to perceive late capitalism’s “zone.” Who among the twenty-first century working class has not shouldered the burden of student or medical debt or noted the rising inequities—now greater than pre-Revolution France—between the wealthy and the poor? If you weren’t convinced, a five-minute drive through any American metropolis would betray a problem. Yet despite our best intentions, we remain caught. We are, in many ways, hungry ghosts, wandering up and down the length of our lives, anticipating a dissatisfaction that can only grow stronger with time under this system, grumbling at the sudden coming of the future.
In a late scene of “Nomadland,” Fern returns to the factory encrusting the Gypsum mine, her former place of work, and wanders through the enormous hangar-like building. She scoops dust off a conference table with her finger and stands in the darkness weeping at the sight of an old hard-hat. This, too, is a feature of the great American outdoors, a relic as soon-to-be ancient and mystical as the redwoods or ocean previously explored. The camera cuts away, and swaths of snowy meadow fill up the screen. Fern is only one person in this lifetime, swept up by a future that has forcefully arrived. She is part of a new Gothicism part and parcel of late capitalism—a brigade of empty places and abandoned people that haunt the system, wandering off the grid. But she is kind, and good, and wants for very little. She is a wonderful friend and a pleasure to have around, a deeply-human person.
Are we destined for this dystopia of stopped-time and broken promise? Maybe so, “Nomadland” answers, but I’ll return with a quiet resistance: pick up your hand and look at it awhile—
—did you know that you are made of star-stuff?
