ABSTRACT
By discussing the films Paterson (2016), directed by Jim Jarmusch, and Nomadland (2020), directed by Chloé Zhao, this chapter seeks to bring out an often overlooked but, in the conception of Phil A. Neel, inseparable and indispensable element of hinterland topography – the desert, a utopian no-place. Yet this site might be appropriated by various opponents of the late-capitalist economic mechanisms. A desert in Arizona in Nomadland or a metaphorical desert – a poet's empty notebook in Paterson – facilitates a “weak resistance” of the impoverished and dispossessed protagonists of both films against being reduced to what Zygmunt Bauman called wasted lives, or what Neel referred to as “material community of capital” entrapped in the condition of the “unity of separation”. The poetic minimalism of both films’ realistic presentation of how communal values are salvaged can be traced to the directness of the American poetic tradition, with its intensity of attention to the immediacy of the mundane experience, rootedness in the reverence for the tangible texture of the world, and insight into the condition of common Americans.
