HOT06: White Mind Deserts
I saw two movies recently that were about the desert; one was “Dune,” which is an orientalist fantasy about what white people think brown people do in the desert; vie for supremacy through primitive & ritualistic battles, descend into feudalism, have spiritual epiphanies, fight for oversaturated metaphorical fuel sources. The other movie I saw, “Nomadland,” is about what White people actually do in the desert: die slowly while partaking in a frontier fantasy enabled by their disposability under capitalism.
I should mention I’ve never read Frank Herbert’s Dune because like a lot of people I have trouble with the prose in a lot of science fiction, particularly classic science fiction, I fell asleep reading “Foundation” many times until I eventually gave up. I know Dune mostly as “the movie with sandworms that isn’t Beetlejuice.” I only recently watched the David Lynch’s Dune which I somehow imagined would be campy & beautiful but was genuinely very frustrating, boring, needlessly gross and actually very confusing?
I vaguely know what the mission of Frank Herbert’s Dune is from podcasts and from essays, so I’m not criticizing the books, they seem like they’re good at whatever it is they’re trying to do: criticize white saviorism? Imagine a caucasian Islamo-futurism? I don’t actually know. But Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was about the desert’s innate cosmic horniness and how white desires for relevance, destiny, for war as a force that gives us meaning are projected on top of tragically positioned, orientalist imaginaries, usually set in the desert, the mountains or rural “third world” villages where it’s okay to spill blood because life is capricious and meaningless. Yes it stars Jason Momoa and Oscar Isaac and Zendaya in the roles of knife friend, exploding dad & hallucinatory muse, respectively, but it is mostly the drug-fueled tale of what Timothee Chalamet does when he dozes off in his bedroom after modding his x-box and buying supreme drops. I don’t actually have anything else to say about the movie mostly because I saw it weeks ago & everything in my brain has been dragged to the trash after multiple firmware updates.
But I did immediately watch Nomadland after and it made me think about what the white imagination thinks the desert is vs what the desert actually is for white people, which is like, a place they struggle to survive. (Because most people can’t survive there. It’s hot! There’s not a lot of water! You start to see wavy lines & then your friends start to look like bottles of water? Sorry if this is the looney tunes imaginary.)
In Nomadland, Frances Mcdormand portrays a widowed forced retiree sheltering in an RV who is invited to a somewhat secluded RV community in the Arizona desert. She lost her job following the closing of the US Gypsum plant in the company town of Empire, Nevada, part of a spate of deindustrialization that coincided with the 2009 recession. The community in the film is founded by real life van camper and “minimalist” Bob Wells, who plays himself, as do a bunch of other elders living in RVs. At times the fictional story of Mcdormand’s character, Fern, serves as a wraparound for verite interviews with people surviving in RVs, so the movie functions as both documentary and as a drama, albeit a kind of slow-moving, quiet one.
The film works because it is sad, because it is not always clear that anyone is having a good time in the desert, because the fantasy of RV life is so romanticized by campers despite being thorny and painful, but mostly because peoples’ motivation for being at the camp is a uniquely american cocktail of wanderlust, deferred dreams, and forced obsolescence.
Much has been written about how these white American fantasies of independence and freedom have existed since the earliest European settlers. I think Nomadland is instructive because it shows us some of these people - most of whom are not professional actors, but “ordinary” people playing a version of themselves - who are essentially forced to test-drive this fantasy after being ejected from another American fantasy, of homeownership and a middle-class life. I don’t mean this at all as a criticism of the white people in the film; it’s a genuinely sympathetic portrait of people trying to make the best of their - in many cases - forced obsolescence under capitalism. A glance at Mr. Wells’ YouTube channel, which maybe paints a more rosy picture than the film, shows a mix of middle and working class people with different motivations, some of whom have found a sense of fulfilment in the camper world. To the extent that they form a kind of interdependent network and are able to rely on one another they have reconstituted something lost in the American doctrine of economic productivity that devalues the life-affirming skills each of us practice with one another when obstacles are removed. But I also think it’s revelatory to think about the philosophy behind camper culture and what it ignores.
Wells, the central figure in the contemporary RV/van living movement, essentially teaches people that the camper life fulfills a (white American) promise of freedom; a truly liberated life disconnected from social norms about retirement, norms which anchor people to one place for the rest of their lives and which are devoid of, in his view, adventure and novelty. His youtube channel gives survival advice including how to get cheap dental care in Mexico. (??) He actually does not own an RV but a van, which he prefers because in his view larger vehicles that provide more comfort have tradeoffs in “freedom.”
But individualism and the fantasy of creating a bubble society away from the larger social world and its obligations is also a big part of it. Though there is a sense of community in the camp (Wells hosts an annual gathering that boasts thousands of attendees), it is less of a cooperative vision than a libertarian one of detaching from society. It’s a vision arguably evoked among a younger and more affluent class as cryptocurrency utopianism. But it’s from this vantage point that Wells leads people out into the desert, a pristine autonomous zone replete with space to dream.
I don’t want to criticize the elders in the film nor people generally who live in RVs; across the country, living in one’s car has increasingly become a reality, as housing values have skyrocketed and economic mobility and wages have soured. Many living in RV’s in urban centers are also non-White, though I don’t know if there’s a comprehensive racial census of this population. The reality is that while living in RVs is logistically difficult and expensive it is still, for many, far cheaper than renting a room and provides a sense of ownership, for better or worse, that is increasingly impossible to attain through homeownership. As I wrote about recently, people living in RVs in urban centers are too often targeted by police and by tow-trucks, who essentially steal their homes until they can pay an exorbitant ransom. In this context, it makes sense to haul ass for the desert, where there is space, like-minded folk and less enforcement. Nomadland focuses on people who tow the line between being propelled into the desert due to job loss, trauma and death and who also stick around out of some type of restlessness, anomie and frontier fantasy. Whatever the motivation there is a pre-made American fantasy to plug into it and like all fantasies it is conspicuous for what it omits, who it fails to blame and who it fails to credit.
Rarely is the promise of a social safety net that could sustain Americans into retirement a subject of concern to the residents of Nomadland, though millennials and Gen Z watching the film may begin to wonder if they are watching some version of their own future. And for many (maybe me? I’m a freelance writer!) the sense of precarity, and promise of some sense of fulfillment amid it, will resonate. Rarely too is the history of the land on which these campers alight taken into consideration; its theft, its exploitation and its preservation are secondary to its role as aesthetic backdrop for ecstatic nomadic fantasy.
There’s really so much to be said about American fantasies of the desert and how they form foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, where this deluded pursuit of adventure, perseverance and conquest have led to a world-shaking volume of bloodshed and militarized terror. I’m not going to delve into that but I will say that I feel like ongoing climate catastrophe will exacerbate this desert fantasy as Americans cede from flood and storm prone coastal areas into the desert. I just hope when this happens that restless evacuees have some reverence, or condemnation, for how this world came to be, who it was stolen from and how, and what our responsibilities are to sustain it, ideally with one another.
Music I’ve Been Listening To
Here’s some music I’ve loved since last we spoke!
Grouper - Shade (2021)
Tirzah - Colourgrade (2021)
Mach-Hommy - Pray for Haiti (2021)
Sarah Davachi, Sean Mccann - Mother of Pearl (2021)
James Blake - Friends That Break Your Heart (2021)
Semiratruth - I got Bandz for the Moonlandin’ (2021)
Serpentwithfeet - Deacon’s Grove (2021)
Domenique Dumont - Comme ça (2015)
Bronze Nazareth - Ekphrasis (2021)
Sun Ra - The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra Vol.1 (??)
Beverly Glenn-Copeland - Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined (2021)
Cities Aviv - The Crashing Sound of How It Goes (2021)
Books I’ve Been Reading
Spaces of Global Capitalism - David Harvey - An examination of neo-liberalism in global trade and economic development, a little dry and rote but has a few zingers.
Priestdaddy - Patricia Lockwood - This book! Is so funny! Genuinely funny writers are rare, Lockwood is one of the best.
Debt: The First 5000 Years - David Graeber - What is money? I listened to this audio book because I wanted to know. I still do not know, but feel more assured in my confusion.
The Year 1000 - Valerie Hansen - An examination of ninth century “global” trade between african-european-middle-eastern-asian empires of the day, and within the indigenous population of the americas (and a little bit about conflicts between vikings and Amerindians) I mainly am listening to this audiobook because I wanted to know more about the Indian Ocean trade route that existed for most the millenium preceding 1000 A.D. and died down during the centuries that European colonization began.
Playing In The Dark - Toni Morrison - I almost quoted this book in the above essay but instead I’m placing the quote here: “Eventually individualism fuses with the prototype of Americans as solitary, alienated, and malcontent. What, one wants to ask, are Americans alienated from? What are Americans always so insistently innocent of? Different from?,” Morrison asks. In Morrison’s view all of these presumptively neutral and pristine visions of freedom were notable for what and who they excluded, in this quote specifically the Black population of early America in whose subjection white settlers measured their own relative freedom and felt a sense of control.
That’s all for now, I hope you are all having a “rad” 2022. I am “staying inside a lot” and “sometimes going for walks.” Eventually I will “emerge forever altered” and “sprint joyfully into your outstretched arms.”
See you next time