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Inside Gods waiting room, an abnormality bides his time.
He is looking for women and for something else.
He wants security, he says inSome Kind of Heaven, Lance Oppenheims new documentary about Floridas strangest enclave.
What Im looking for is a companion, a nice-looking lady with some money, he says bluntly.
He needs a home, and for that, he needs a wealthy girlfriend.
Widows abound in the Villages, and so does money.
But the classic lady of his dreams is rare, Dean complains, so he becomes a poltergeist.
He haunts the bars, the churches, the swimming pools.
His van rattles down well-groomed roads, a reminder that all is not well outside the Villages.
Within the Villages, a figure like Dean is almost unthinkable.
The place isnt meant for him.
Homes arent cheap, and the community itself is privately owned and managed by a holding corporation.
Schwartz says would-be residents have one question for him.
They want to know the towns story line, its reason for being.
So he appealed to an old Florida fantasy.
He told them that inside the Villages, a person could find the Fountain of Youth.
But the town does not reward Deans exploratory spirit.
Dean finds out exactly how hard those white gates can swing.
I kept seeing this guy sneaking around and looking at me in his golf cart, he says.
Then a note appeared on Deans van: I know you dont live here.
If you want to avoid trouble, dont come back.
The Villages are private property, and if poverty exists, it can be pruned.
The Villages are more biosphere than town.
You dont have to go outside the Villages, one man observes, and this is a selling point.
There is a hospital; the town website says its one of the fastest-growing acute-care centers in the country.
There is a TV station, a radio station, a newspaper.
Everything is just the way the residents like it.
I dont see the slums, one says early in the film.
I dont see death and destruction.
I dont see murders.
He makes the fantasy impossible to sustain.
He ruins the story line.
The Spanish-mission-style architecture is all fake.
The Villages arent organic but a cynical capitalist creation and a selective one at that.
Outside the town limits, reality can look like an old van.
COVID did come to the Villages; it reported an Octoberspikein cases.
Its residents could take advantage of a vigorous testing programadministeredby the University of Florida.
Its hard to know how the nomads fared by contrast, whether their isolation protected them in the pandemic.
Vans dont have on-site hospitals.
Fern, the films lonesome hero, calls hersVanguard.
When the vans break down, so do the people who call them home.
They are undesirables, cousins to Dean.
Nomadlandshows an America that the Villages wants to keep out wants to deny altogether.
Age into poverty and nothing waits to catch you when you fall.
Sometimes theres only a van.
In both films, the government is a nonentity.
The town strives for total self-containment, a feat made possible by the wealth of its residents.
She belongs to the corporationsCamperForceprogram.
I think Ferns part of an American tradition.
I think its great.
In the world ofNomadland, Ferns Amazon warehouse juts up from a bare landscape.
Inside, its as pristine as anything in the Villages, all bright lights and clean floors.
Alone in the night, its easier to imagine a different kind of life.
The Villages exist because people feared the world outside it and had the means to build an alternative.
Fantasy is less visible among the nomads, but its not totally absent, either.
In the limitations of their circumstances, they elect to see freedom.
Fern never suffers from sore feet orleg cramps.
Nobody docks her time for going to the bathroom.
Even on the open road, freedom is scarce.
The residents of the Villages have gated themselves off from everyone else.
Outside the gates, its every Fern for herself.
The same villain oppresses both films, though it never receives a name.
Capitalism devoured America from the inside out and then spat out the bones.
Whats left behind is bare rock and a white gate.
