An Unexpected Return Home via Nomadland

Film theorist André Bazin famously stated, 'Photography does not create eternity as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.' Bazin was absorbed with film and its relationship with reality and singled out cinema for its technical nature as the artform which is most able to impersonate, or allude to reality because of its capacity to project moving photographs with sound. Cinema, therefore, as an artform that contains photography in its very DNA, both creates eternity and embalms time.

These characteristics of cinema are what make it so singular as a medium. Watching one of the Lumiere Brothers' first films from the late 1800s is so fascinating, because, as we watch their workers leaving the factory we are witnessing a moving picture, a moment in time that has been preserved for forever. The men and women who leave, their clothes, smiles, and inaudible conversations are so extraordinary precisely because of how unextraordinary they really are. What the Lumiere Brothers did is capture a few seconds of time. They shot something that happens everyday, but, now, some 126 years later, by simply opening Youtube, I can watch the same people nonchalantly stroll out of their workplace. Their image has become immortal long after the actual 'actors' have grown old and perished.

This idea of 'eternity' is why we take photographs. In the early days of photography perhaps you would get your photo taken once in your life. But once you had it, it was proof that you had been here. Your image frozen in time 'embalms' you in a two dimensional paper that documents your existence. Nowadays with the facility we have to whip out our smart phones and snap a picture of any irreverentional object, sign, landscape, person or what have you, perhaps we do not think so much about this, but given time for contemplation, our desire to take photographs of ourselves remains the same, to archive a moment in time, to show that we are present and share it with others, only now we do not put it on our walls or in a photobook, but on Facebook, Instagram or Tinder.

This concept is not always present in my mind as I go to the cinema, but often creeps back into my mind when I watch an older, more wrinkled Daniel Craig save the world yet again when he was so young, rugged, and beautiful in Casino Royal, or when a beloved actor dies like James Gandolfini and I can go back and watch his now legendary portrayal of Tony Soprano, or when Steve McQueen recreates black history in England for the specific purpose of creating a historical document of people who were not given the resources to tell their own stories in the past.

However, never in my life have I been so impacted by this sensation of the power of the immortal image as I was when I watched Nomadland last year. I have been living in Spain for 6 years and have not returned home now in more than 4. I am from a small town in Western Nebraska that is unremarkable in almost all aspects of the word. It is the 'urban' hub of a very rural district covered in flat plains of corn and cattle, where at 14,000 inhabitants we have the supermarkets, shopping centers, hospital, schools, cinemas, and even a zoo for the residents of surrounding towns and farms to come to.

While I miss my family and the odd restaurant in the town, I cannot say it is a place I think about all that often unless I am describing it to some new curious friend or acquaintance what it is like where I am from (which actually happens more often than I probably realize). But even in these conversations my description is now well rehearsed and varies so little between tellings that I now report it without much in depth thought or analysis.

But, one rainy day in Numax, the independent theater in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia I encounter my hometown like a giant slap to the face. There is Frances McDormand strolling in front of the iconic Midwest theater on Broadway in downtown Scottsbluff, the only building with any type of interesting architectural design in the town. I was stunned, flabbergasted, taken aback, shocked. What the hell was my dinky hometown doing in the Best Picture Oscar winning film of the year? What is 3 time Oscar winning actress Frances McDormand doing strolling around the streets of Scottsbluff? It felt like a dream.

The first hint of Scottsbluff I had was when they mention offhand something about working in Nebraska with sugar beets, and the Sugar Factory quickly wizzed in and out of my mind. Then, as McDormand is sitting atop an enormous pile of beets, four big white towers, blurry in the background, look strangely familiar to me. Then the shot of the Midwest comes up, its neon light shining and The Avengers advertised on their giant Now Showing board, and a wave of emotion runs through me. The image of that cinema, now preserved forever in a film that will go down in history for its awards success, brought me physically and emotionally closer to home than I have been for years. That was the cinema I watched my first R rated film in with my Dad (Scorsese's The Departed, what a great memory), the cinema where I would work for a school association every once and a while, the cinema that I would cruise by with my friends in their second hand cars and pickups every Friday and Saturday night listening to the radio. It was curiously also the cinema where, after a beer at the bar just in front, my Mom and I went to a casting of extras for the Coen Brothers’ film of Western shorts, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, another miraculously outrageous chapter in the cinematic history of Scottsbluff (In this case, they were filming a segment set on the Oregon Trail some kilometers outside of town). Unfortunately we did not get a call back. Joel Coen, the elder Coen is the husband of McDormand, something that cannot be a coincidence and must explain how Zhao found out about and chose to shoot part of the film in Scottsbluff.

After McDormand wanders past our 'iconic' cinema, we get another shot of McDormand, this time eating a hamburger in a sketchy rundown restaurant which could not be mistaken for anywhere but Scotties Drive-In, a classic burger joint make in the style of a 1950s drive thru that remains there, untouched, exactly the same as the must have been since it was built decades ago. No one has better milkshakes and fries than Scotties, and if you, like the average American, are a fan of overly fried greasy hamburgers, nuggets, or anything else, you should look no further. Watching McDormand sink her teeth into that juicy burger I can even taste it, along with their amazing, oily, fries, and, my favorite, Marshmallow shake.

Finally there is an establishing shot of WTT gas station, A gas station with enormous screens on its roof where they display advertisements. This place is burned into my mind because of an incident with an ex-boss of mine. One of my first jobs was working at a Mexican food restaurant, the owners were an elderly couple and their 30-something son 'helped' them run the business. Except it turns out their son was dealing meth over the counter when someone ordered a Coca-Cola and handed him a 100 dollar bill. He was released from prison for giving the police details on the drug organization, but was later picked up again for selling (or was it buying? Now I don't remember) in the WTT parking lot.

Seeing all of these familiar places completely took me out of the film and sent me back into my memory. Someone from New York or any other big city in the world is sure to find my experience even silly, but the fact that I was seeing this remote corner of the United States, completely unexpectedly (how the hell did none of my family of friends tell me about this?!), on the big screen thousands of miles away just meters away from the humid, granite, medieval walls of the Cathedral of Santiago, was a complete shock for me. And though McDormand's stay in Scottsbluff is short, and not very enjoyable to say the least, I felt like her and director Chloe Zhao had put certain places of my childhood on the cinematic map, forever preserving them for posterity. I walked out of the film trembling with excitement, melancholy, and surprise and turned to my friends ecstatic with emotion that had only decreased slightly since the first images of my home flashed on the screen. They looked at me with disbelief as I told them they had actually witnessed shots of very specific places from the Nebraska I had told them so much about.

It was easily the strangest cinematic experience I have had in my life. I would like to thank Zhao and McDormand for giving me this outburst of nostalgia, and for somehow deciding to show the world this unknown town in the very center of the United States. The film itself is poetic, powerful, and visually stunning. Zhao is at the beginning of what looks to be a brilliant career (Let's just hope that she sticks to her personal, independent roots and does not abandon films like The Rider to make films like Marvel's The Eternals from now on) and McDormand is one of the greatest, most unique actresses in American history. Their presence alone should make the film last the test of time. And I can only hope that some 126 years from now some cinema lover will be there watching images of the Midwest theater, Scotties, and WTT, which have now been embalmed in time for eternity.