The opening title-card of Choe Zhoas’s Nomadland describes a real life event. In 2011, U.S. Gypsum Corporation shut down their mining operation in Empire Nevada. The town had been entirely owned by the company and, at its peak, had sustained a population of 750 people. Empire was a company town, an artifact of the industrial era. After Gypsum closed down their mining operation, Empire became a ghost-town and lost its zip code.

The film opens on its main character Fern, played by Francis McDormand, going to work at an Amazon warehouse. Fern had lived and worked as a teacher in Empire along with her husband, before he passed. After losing her husband, her job, and the town she called home, Fern adopted a nomadic lifestyle — traveling and living in a converted van that she names ‘Vanguard’, working jobs at Amazon warehouses, RV Parks, and industrial farms to get by.

In an early scene, Fern runs into one of her former students at a big-box store just outside of Empire. When the concerned teenager asks her if she’s homeless, Fern responds. . .

‘I’m not homeless, I’m just houseless. Not the same thing right?’.

The film follows Fern on her journey across the American West as she travels in search of gig work, community, and sometimes just a place to park. Early on in the film, Fern’s co-worker Linda invites her to come down to Arizona for an annual gathering of nomads. This gathering is based on a real life annual event called the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. Every year, hundreds of van-dwellers — or Rubber Tramps as they affectionately call themselves — meet in the desert to trade goods, share food, and commune.

Most of these Rubber Tramps are 60+ years old, past retirement age with no social security or retirement benefits to live on. The event is hosted by Bob Wells, a permanent vandweller, YouTuber, and author who provides advice and helpful tips to others nomads. Wells (pictured below) plays himself in the film, sporting a saintly white beard and a congenial personality.

Wells is one of many non-professional actors in the film. Other than McDormand and David Straitharn, who gives a wonderful performance here as a fellow van-dweller and who takes a romantic interest in Fern, the majority of the actors are real-life itinerants who agreed to be in the film. Fern’s playful, silver-haired friend Linda is played by Linda May. The character Swankie, a vandweller with a deadly cancer diagnosis living out her last days traveling the country, is played by Charlene Swankie.

There are a host of other characters that Fern meets along her journey who are real houseless nomads. Jessica Bruder, the author of the non-fiction book the film is loosely based on, immersed herself in the nomad community and met the fascinating people who play themselves in the screen adaptation.

Chloe Zhoa, in partnership with producer Frances McDormand, decided to adapt the book as a narrative centered around Fern — herself a fictional character. Sending an accomplished professional actor into a real life community to act alongside non-professionals could’ve easily been condescending or contrived. However, McDormand is such a talented performer that she blends seamlessly into her surroundings, often ceding scenes to characters like Swankey so they can tell their stories.

The approach blends the best aspects of the documentary and the narrative feature, portraying its subjects with empathy and curiosity that never crosses over into sanctimony. Director Chloe Zhoa has experience working with non-professional actors from her last two features, The Rider and Songs My Brother Taught Me. She manages to draw candid and naturalistic performances out of them in a way that few other filmmakers can.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Nomadland is the empathy with which it portrays its subjects. Fern has a series of touching and tearful conversations with nomads on her journey. Most of these conversations, shot in close up, keep the camera tightly focused on the characters as they share their stories. As the audience, we are not invited to pity them but, instead, to admire them.

These are human beings who have chosen to place themselves on the outskirts of modern society, a choice which has afforded them a unique and rich perspective on life.

Despite forming unforgettable bonds with fellow travelers along the road, Fern remains independent and pluckily self reliant throughout the film. Francis McDormand is doing some of the best work of her career portraying a character with a tough, outer shell who is concealing a hidden grief.

Fern is hesitant to accept help, even from her fellow nomads. But after her van breaks down, she is forced to swallow her pride. She travels by bus to visit her sister and ask for a loan so she can get her home back. When Fern arrives at her sister and brother-in-laws tidy suburban home, we can immediately sense her unease and discomfort.

After staying for a few days and declining her sisters offer to live in their guest room, she heads back to rescue Vanguard from the auto shop. This is not the last time Fern is asked to move in with someone and not the last time she declines. Even though she struggles to explain her reasoning to her friends and family, calling any physical address home again is not an option for her. We come to understand why she has made this choice in a devastating final scene that I will not spoil here.

The nomads portrayed in the film are, as Ferns’ sister remarks at one point, a part of the oldest American tradition. They are travelers on the American frontier, untethered to a plot of land, free to explore the wide open country. It’s a romantic and classically American idea. However, the romanticism of this lifestyle is undercut by the economic reality.

Fern, like many of the nomads we meet in the film, fell out of the bottom of the American economy. Her life and her home were collateral damage of opaque shifts in economic demand. At the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, Bob Wells reminds his fellow nomads that they collectively opted out of a raw deal. Many of them had worked to survive and keep a roof over their head for their entire lives without any savings or security to show for it. For these people, living on the road is the last chance to live in true freedom that they will ever have.

The ever quotable author G.K Chesterson once said that. . .

“The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see”.

Director Chloe Zhao, a first-generation immigrant born in Beijing, explores the landscapes of the American frontier with the keen eye of a traveler. The cinematography offers breathtaking shots of rolling hills, desert canyons, and snow peaked mountains.

Zhao, working with cinematographer Joshua James Richards, captures the rugged, windswept beauty of the frontier — from the Black Rock Desert of Nevada to the Badlands of South Dakota. The film manages to capture the distinct, exhilarating feeling of traveling through wide open spaces. As the audience, we become just as endeared to the road as Fern herself.

Nomadland is a film about many things. It’s about a character wrestling quietly with her grief, it’s about a fascinating sub-culture of people who have been displaced by our society, and it’s about the feeling of being unmoored, of unbelonging. But, most of all, it’s a film about the understated beauty of everyday existence.

The conversations we have with friends, moments of laughter, the sun setting behind a mountain range — these slivers of life are life itself. As we enter 2021 and look back on a year characterized by anxiety and isolation, Nomadland might be just the film we need. It’s a road-movie for our time that invites us to be present, to take in each moment as it passes into our rear-view.

John Roderick has been many things to many people. He is best known as the frontman for the Seattle based indie\rock group The Long Winters. He’s also a former drug addict, a former house-less nomad, a pilot, a history buff, and, most recently, the most hated man on Twitter. Now, he is better known by his nickname, ‘Bean Dad’. Roderick earned this nickname by posting a series of Tweets in which he related a story about his 9-year-old daughter.

According to Roderick, his daughter was hungry so he advised her to cook some baked beans. When she complained of not knowing how to use a can opener, Roderick saw the opportunity as a teaching moment. He took to Twitter to describe his parenting moment in a since deleted thread.

Rodericks first Tweet read. . .

“So, yesterday my daughter (9) was hungry and I was doing a jigsaw puzzle so I said over my shoulder ‘make some baked beans,’. “She said, ‘How?’ like all kids do when they want YOU to do it, so I said, ‘Open a can and put it in pot.’ She brought me the can and said ‘Open it how?’”

The next Tweet read. . .

“So I said, ‘How do you think this works?’ She studied it and applied it to the top of the can, sideways. She struggled for a while and with a big, dramatic sigh said, ‘Will you please just open the can?’ Apocalypse Dad was overjoyed: a Teaching Moment just dropped in my lap!”

Roderick continued describing, through a long Twitter thread, how his daughter was vexed by the can opener and his continued insistence that she figure it out herself. Apparently, the trial and error continued for about 6 hours or so before the can was finally opened. Roderick, at this point fully in character as ‘Apocalypse Dad’, gleefully described how he upped the stakes by telling his daughter that no one, including her, would eat until she figured out how to open the can of beans herself.

The Fallout

It didn’t take long for the Twitter mob to sharpen their pitchforks. ‘Bean Dad’ started trending on Twitter as users re-shared the thread and lambsted Roderick for being an abusive father. The backlash was swift and harsh. For users of the platform, this pattern is familiar. Someone posts a thread that is either intentionally or unintentionally offensive and, as the thread begins to trend, they are cast as the villain of Twitter. Then an army of Twitter users take their turns skewering and publicly shaming the villain. Roderick, a liberal Seattle dwelling musician, was an unlikely villain. However, this cred didn’t shield him from being, in his words, “the locus for a tremendous outpouring of anger and grief”.

A thread that was intended as a trolling joke was received as nothing less than a story of child abuse. Twitter was united in their hatred for ‘Bean Dad’. Shortly after, users began re-sharing old Tweets from Rodericks account. They went as far back as 2011, resharing Tweets that were clearly lampooning anti-semetism and intolerance but through a 2021 lens were read as simply being anti-semetic and intolerant.

Following this controversy, Roderick deleted his Twitter account and penned a nearly 1000 word apology statement on his website.

In the letter he acknowledged that. . .

“My story about my daughter and the can of beans was poorly told’. . . ‘I didn’t share how much laughing we were doing, how we had a bowl of pistachios between us all day as we worked on the problem, or that we’d both had a full breakfast together a few hours before.”

He further responded to the army of Twitter users who accused him of emotional violence toward his daughter when he wrote. . .

“I was ignorant, insensitive to the message that my ‘pedant dad’ comedic persona was indistinguishable from how abusive dads act, talk and think”.

I stopped using Twitter sometime in 2020 when I determined that it was detrimental to my mental health — even the most active users of Twitter often acknowledge how toxic the platform can be. However, the ‘Bean Dad’ saga was viral enough to break into my regular news feed.

Articles, like this one from the BBC which bore the headline “Outcry as ‘bean dad’ forces hungry child to open tin can”, were being circulated.

I recognized John Rodericks name because I’m a subscriber to one of his podcasts — The Omnibus podcast which he co-hosts with G.O.A.T Jeopardy Champion and now interim host Ken Jennings.

This is the part where I show my hand. I like John Roderick. As a long time Jeopardy fan, I discovered him through Ken Jennings. They are old friends and a delightfully nerdy pair of co-hosts. The Omnibus podcast is a show that compiles stories and esoterica from our time as a sort of time capsule for ‘futurelings’. It’s a good premise and a show that has provided me with countless hours of entertainment and obscure knowledge — which happens to be my favorite kind. The strange thing about podcasts is that, if you listen to a show for long enough you start to feel like you know the hosts personally. Turning on a familiar podcast begins to feel like hanging out with old pals. So naturally, I was disappointed when I first saw the headline about Rodericks fall from grace.

However, as I began to read through the Tweets my disappointment gave way to confusion. The ‘Bean Dad’ story was intended as a sardonic joke. It was hyperbolic, winking, and knowingly absurd. You have to imagine that if Roderick thought for a second that the Twitter-verse would take this story as literally true, he wouldn’t have shared it in the first place. But even when it became clear that he was joking and not actually starving his 9-year-old daughter, it was too late. The mob had already descended.

Ken Jennings stepped in to bring some levity to the situation when he Tweeted. . .

“Extremely jealous and annoyed that my podcast co-host is going to be a dictionary entry and I never will”.

The Tweet was met with calls for Jennings to condemn his friend and co-host. He Tweeted in response. . .

“If this reassures anyone, I personally know John to be (a) a loving and attentive dad who (b) tells heightened-for-effect stories about his own irascibility on like ten podcasts a week. This site is so dumb.”

For context, Jennings recently took over as interim host of Jeopardy following the tragic passing of Alex Trebek. He is in talks to become the permanent host but for now, he is relegated to the title of ‘Guest Host’. After stepping up to defend Roderick, Jennings also came under fire.

The controversy even threatens to jeopardize — pun intended — Jennings new hosting gig. Some Twitter users began calling for Jennings to be fired from the role. A Mashable article was published entitled, ‘Ken Jennings may have botched his chance at hosting ‘Jeopardy!’

‘Sounds and Fury Signifying Nothing’

As I’m writing this, the ‘Bean Dad’ controversy is already ancient Twitter history. The platform is a revolving door of outrage and since Rodericks departure, a new villain has almost certainly been cast. However, this story remains illustrative of an important point. On Twitter, fueling outrage is often an end in itself.

The most valuable currency is righteous anger and the most popular users are those who can express their anger quickly and pointedly. Sometimes, this righteous anger is appropriate — like the time when Amy Cooper called the cops on a black man in Central Park simply for asking her to leash her dog. Other times, the outrage seems wildly disproportionate to the thing the users are, ostensibly, angry about. Whether Twitter users are calling out real racism or percieved child abuse, being righteously indignant appears to be more important than being right.

Many people have wrung their hands and complained about so-called ‘cancel culture’. To be clear, I am not one of these people. In a majority of cases, it seems that public figures who are ‘cancelled’ are merely forced to weather some bad press and a period of unpopularity. To paraphrase Churchill, the rumors of their demise are often greatly exaggerated. If someone is deplatformed, it’s usually because they are a liability to the social media platform that has been hosting their content. These are natural market forces at play and not, in my opinion, omens of an Orwellian future.

However, group-think dynamics on platforms like Twitter can still be instructive and even cautionary. Twitter, like many social media platforms, has become a space where context has collapsed. People learn only as much information as they need to be sufficiently outraged before Tweeting a response. You don’t have time to educate yourself on the trending topic before feeling you must offer your take, the revolving door of outrage moves too quickly for that.

Which brings us back to ‘Bean Dad’. Was John Roderick actually starving his daughter? Was he actually being cruel and abusive? The answer appears to be no, but the answer is irrelevant. Once Roderick became a stand-in for shitty fathers everywhere, he was doomed. In the court of public opinion on Twitter, the verdict gets handed down quickly and there are no appeals.

Twitter user Heno reflected on the efficiency of Rodericks judgment when he Tweeted . . .

“guy posts annoying thread of something that probably never happened, people make least charitable reading of it, people find bad tweets from 2011, guy erased from various podcasts etc. that cycle used to take like a week, twitter now knocks it out in 18 hours flat”.

The old reshared Tweets from 2011–2012 were the final nail in Rodericks coffin. Some of them made reference to subjects like sexual assault, antisemitism, and racism. The fact that the tone of the Tweets is clearly sarcastic and deflating doesn’t make them any less cringe inducing. Roderick acknowledged how poorly these old Tweets had aged in his apology letter when he wrote. . .

“As for the many racist, anti-Semitic, hurtful and slur-filled tweets from my early days on Twitter I can say only this: all of those tweets were intended to be ironic, sarcastic. I thought then that being an ally meant taking the slurs of the oppressors and flipping them to mock racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry. I am humiliated by my incredibly insensitive use of the language of sexual assault in casual banter. It was a lazy and damaging ideology, that I continued to believe long past the point I should’ve known better that because I was a hipster intellectual from a diverse community it was ok for me to joke and deploy slurs in that context. It was not”.

Oftentimes apology letters of this sort seem perfunctory and inauthentic, but here Roderick describes a journey of growing awareness that many of us have been on over the past 10 years. If you were to wind back the clock to 2011, you would find gay slurs and upsetting racist caricatures being used for comedic fodder on shows like 30 Rock and SNL. Since then, we have developed a more acute cultural conscience. As historically marginalized groups have become more represented in popular culture, their voices have been elevated.

Thanks in part to discourse on social media sites like Twitter, we’re growing in our collective awareness of how jokes about marginalized groups have impacted people from those groups. We still have a long way to go toward being an inclusive society that celebrates diversity, but we’ve also come a long way since 2011. So when someone like John Roderick says, I thought I was being an ally back then but it became clear to me that I was just being an asshole, I tend to believe them. I can empathize because that tracks with the journey that I’ve been on.

Becoming Better is a Journey

Unlike Roderick, I was raised in a conservative, evangelical, Christian home. It pains me to say this now but racial minorities, gay people, and the mentally challenged were all the butt of many of the jokes my friends and I used to tell. Anyone who was the other — i.e, not a straight, white, cisgender, American-was fair game for mockery and caricature. In my adulthood, I left the evangelical Christian community in which I was raised and embraced values that I still hold, including equality and social justice. Being progressive became an important part of my identity as I tried to get as far away from the bigotry of my upbringing as possible.

It took years of deprogramming for me to unlearn the worldview I had been taught. To this day, I still catch myself having thoughts that I know are prejudiced toward people who are different from me, people who I still sometimes see as the other. Alas, the unlearning continues.

For this reason, I can’t subscribe to retroactive purity tests because I wouldn’t pass them. We have to give individual people the grace to evolve as a part of our broader social evolution. If public figures are still being bigoted and wilfully ignorrant today, despite being given chances to learn, then they deserve the social opprobrium that comes with that. But if someone has become aware of how their language affects others and stops using that language, that’s called growth.

John Rodericks demise on Twitter highlighted some fundamental truths about the platform. Twitter, like many social media platforms, has become a place where some users ostracize others in order to feel better about themselves. The goal is to stay outraged and the Twitter algorithm provides users with new fuel everyday.

There are times when an overflowing of outrage is called for — like last summer when George Floyd was suffocated by a white police officer kneeling on his neck. There are other times when it is not, like when someone tells a tongue-in-cheek story about forcing their 9-year-old to open a can of beans. It seems the users of Twitter can no longer tell the difference.