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A Predicament of Precarity: Wendy and Lucy and the Impossibility of Neoliberal Self-Care

At root precarity is a condition of dependency – as a legal term, precarious describes the situation wherein your tenancy on your land is in someone else’s hands.

(Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism)¹

Introduction: Precarity on Film

Films both reflect and construct social reality, especially in the way in which they participate in the reproduction or interruption of not only the discourses but also the affects, images and sensory perceptions through which we grasp political life. Often, contemporary films represent the exercise of freedom in a decontextualised and depoliticised way, ignoring the dependent and precarious character of social and economic life while at the same time eschewing the attendant anxieties. Into the Wild (Penn, 2007) is one example of this approach. Other films, however, do attend to the unchosen relations and circumstances that cannot be willed away but must instead be negotiated, putting the work of such negotiation at the centre of their on-screen drama. What is more, some of these films also address the fretful insecurity that is increasingly inescapable in today’s neoliberal political economy, and which is characterised by the notion of precarity. Films of this sort illuminate precarious lives, shedding light on the ways in which individual subjects are always already non-sovereign – dependent upon, as well as sensing and acting in, conditions and contexts not of their own choosing. As part of our investigation into the dependence and subjectivity that necessarily accompany freedom despite liberal common sense’s claims to the contrary, we now turn our attention to a consideration of the contemporary economic pressures shaping freedom and subjectivity, examining in particular the contemporary film Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008). Director Kelly Reichardt’s focused and contemplative piece offers a compelling portrayal of a woman negotiating a set of unchosen circumstances and affects, indeed foregrounding the unchosen in a way that many movies do not.

The two films Wendy and Lucy and Into the Wild are effectively mirror images in terms of their representations of freedom and the unchosen, even as they share many similarities of plot and imagery. Both are variations on the “road movie,” a genre that has always played a role in the construction of a certain imaginary of freedom in the United States. “Forging a travel narrative out of a particular conjunction of plot and setting that sets the liberation of the road against the repression of hegemonic norms, road movies project American Western mythology onto the landscape traversed and bound by the nation’s highways.”² Both Into the Wild and Wendy and Lucy tell stories of protagonists travelling West and North to Alaska, representing in a sense the final American frontier of freedom and self-determination. These characters, Chris McCandless and Wendy Carroll seek freedom – or, at least, an opportunity to make ends meet – each in the spirit of the American tradition of self-reliance.

Whereas Into the Wild is a more traditional road movie in contrasting the freedom of the road with stifling, ordinary society, Wendy and Lucy turns the genre upside down, interrupting Wendy’s planned journey with car trouble and other unchosen events in order to offer the audience a clear-eyed vision of the harshness exerted by the expectation of autonomy in a world of dependence. By contrast Chris McCandless holds a seductive but illusory vision of freedom as freedom from the unchosen, freedom from dependence. Though compelling in a way, Chris’ vision is impossible given the necessity of unchosen powers and influences on subjectivity, though the film underemphasizes these forces and instead foregrounds Chris’ courageous deviance. However, when compared with the realistic hardships and setbacks that Wendy must face on the road, the class and male privilege in McCandless’ choices comes into view. In contrast, Wendy is presented on screen not as a hero/heroine or “free agent” but rather as someone who adapts and survives, someone who is connected to and dependent on others (including non-human others, especially her dog Lucy) in ways that are sometimes challenging to sustain. Wendy tries her best to preserve the relationships that she depends on, even as everything threatens to slip away. In other words, Wendy and Lucy is captivating for the manner in which it addresses and makes visible some of the ways in which precarity is lived in today’s America.

In addition to offering incisive critiques of the American mythology of independence and “free agency” through its depiction of multiple and complex dependencies, Wendy and Lucy also helps to illuminate the contemporary condition of precarity that characterizes more and more of the experience of working people in today’s capitalism. In particular, this film can be helpfully situated within what Lauren Berlant has called the “Cinema of Precarity.” While the discourse of precarity charts some of the consequences of neoliberalism’s advance and the State’s retreat, Berlant does excellent work detailing the way in which some cultural texts, including films, bring into view both the ordinariness of economic crisis and the affective demands and challenges induced by precarity. Or, to be more precise, Berlant’s intervention supplements the discourse of precarity with precarity’s affect, for as she notes “the present is perceived, first, affectively.”³ The cinema of precarity, she argues, “melds melodrama and politics into a more reticent aesthetic to track the attrition of what had been sustaining national, social, economic and political bonds and the abandonment of a variety of populations to being cast as waste.”⁴ Berlant’s insight illuminates the important intersection of structural economic conditions and stories of particular lives lived amidst prevailing norms about “what it means to have a life.” She highlights the affective challenge of trying to survive economic precarity and live. In writing, for instance, that “Even those whom you would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism they have for that, at least,”⁵ Berlant wants to help us better appreciate those cinematic narratives that offer insight into the affective structure of our precarious times. Though she focuses on a handful of contemporary European films and analyses no American movies, Wendy and Lucy shares many of the characteristics that she outlines.⁶

Wendy and Lucy focuses on a marginalized younger white woman who struggles against being cast off and seeks help navigating the challenging situations with which the unchosen presents her. The fact that Wendy is precarious and dependent is revealed directly in her need for help, while the larger “precarious public sphere” is exposed indirectly through Wendy’s difficulty finding that help. There is no shame in needing support, but this story, and others like it, of trying to find help while facing the daunting prospect of being completely on one’s own reveals the inescapability of dependency. It is this dependency that the individualistic ideology of liberalism (and neoliberalism) consistently disavows. Dependency is not merely something to be suffered, however, for there is of course always the possibility and potential for enrichment and happiness from our dependency on, and relations to, others (just as there is from the constitutive ambiguity of our vulnerability). Thus, dependency is ambiguous, and as such can be considered a feature of our political ontology.⁷

This film, coupled with Berlant’s analysis, gives strong insight, affective as well as conceptual, into the political ontology of precarious dependency. The attrition of sustaining bonds together with the casting off of these populations points to two of the central features of precarity: economic insecurity and an impossible expectation of independence and self-sufficiency. The first becomes manifest in the film through an economic as well as a temporal index. While Wendy struggles to sustain herself and the one she cares most about, her dog Lucy, she seems to occupy a perpetual present, barely able to even dream about the future much less plan for it. The second central characteristic of precarity, the expectation of independence, figures in the film through not just the indifference that Wendy encounters when seeking assistance but also her own reluctance to ask for help. For she seems to have absorbed the (neo)liberal expectation to the point where she wears it with pride. Before turning to a reading of Wendy and Lucy that reveals the merciless logic of individual self-sufficiency that inspires today’s neoliberal capitalism, let us begin to appreciate the harsh experience of trying to stay afloat in today’s economy with a consideration of one of the more intriguing theoretical political concepts of recent years: precarity.

Precarity’s Dependency and Neoliberalism’s Self-Care

Precarity is a capacious term that has in recent years come to do a lot of work, theoretically and politically, to illuminate the changing conditions of contemporary life under capitalism. Part of the argument connected to precarity suggests that the experience of uncertainty derived from contingent labour is no longer, if it ever was, confined to the workplace. Instead, the practices of contingency come to permeate the atmosphere, as it were, “becom[ing] a byword for life in late and later capitalism.”⁸ Uncertainty and insecurity are everywhere. The effects of atmosphere and structural conditions, together with those on leisure and labour, can be hard to capture and harder still to use as the basis for political organization, and yet the discourse and politics of precarity has more than made an attempt to do just that. Surveying the various uses of precarity among analysts and activists, Lauren Berlant in her recent book Cruel Optimism registers the compound nature of the term:

This emergent taxonomy raises questions about to what degree precarity is an economic and political condition suffered by a population or by the subjects of capitalism generally; or a way of life; or an affective atmosphere; or an existential truth about contingencies of living, namely, that there are no guarantees that the life one intends can or will be built.”⁹

Indeed, it is all these things, depending on who is using the term and in what context.

In this account, I want to try and preserve some of the connotative multiplicity associated with the term precarity, for two reasons. Firstly, as a node of thought and action, precarity represents a rather distinct and productive site for grasping the contemporary links between structure and agency, conditions and subjects, affect and action. Secondly, the audiovisual medium of cinema proves to be a valuable means through which to explore and explain the many valences of precarity, especially given its relation to the senses and to affect. Moreover, not only is precarity a capacious concept, it also names a relatively ambivalent condition – one that is sometimes praised, sometimes condemned by both workers and employers, and that is in some ways beneficial but in other ways detrimental to workers. Primarily, however, it is used to talk about a historically particular experience of unsecure labour under capitalism.

A term rooted in political analysis and organization, “precarity” originated in Europe in the 1980s in response to deepening conditions of economic insecurity associated with the advance of neoliberalism coupled with the retreat of the welfare state. Indeed, the primary connotation of precarity concerns the uncertainty and anxiety related to unsecure employment. The term speaks to the way that late capitalism is experienced today, and points toward links between economy and psychology, structure and experience. For instance, on the economic and structural side, Andrew Ross explains in his book Nice Work if You Can Get It that precarity

is most often used as shorthand for the condition of economic insecurity associated with post-Fordist employment and neoliberal governance, which not only gives employers leeway to hire and fire workers at will, but also glorifies part-time contingent work as “free agency,” liberated from the stifling constraints of contractual regulations. Low-wage immigrant service workers and high-tech consultants alike might share these conditions, and this commonality has inspired activists who see the opportunity for cross-class solidarity.¹⁰

Notice that Ross’ characterization is not simply economic and structural, for his description also points to the way in which capital legitimizes, rhetorically and culturally, the structural changes that it undertakes, even as it exploits them. Or, as Rob Horning puts it,

Though the word precarity is only necessary because of the political urgency of describing this widespread insecurity, the experience of precarity is not inherently or completely negative. The “positive” components of precarity – the sense that it provides for the freedom of flexibility, rewards certain kinds of creativity and opportunism, promotes a kind of absolute individualism that can be taken for dignity, and accommodates or even requires a degree of social and geographic mobility – are part of what has allowed for neoliberalism’s implementation.¹¹

These linguistic and political ambiguities, which are associated with the condition of precarity, point to the ideological contradiction at the heart of neoliberal capitalism itself: neoliberalism demands self-sufficiency or self-care while disavowing the realities of social dependency, even as it increases workers’ reliance on help from others by shrinking the State. Precarity, then, is a lens through which we can apprehend the social wreckage done by neoliberalism to workers in the name of “freedom.” Wendy Brown has written insightfully about the political rationality associated with neoliberalism, and in particular about the kind of subjectivity that neoliberalism solicits through its devious use of the idea of individual freedom. Thus, she writes that “neoliberalism normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life. It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self-care’–the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions.”¹² Precarity, then, registers in part the anxiety of trying to meet the demand for an impossibly complete self-care in today’s economic environment.

Of course, the liberalism of neoliberalism is primarily economic in the usual gloss – and yet there is a clear resonance with political liberalism’s idea of the free individual, but less as a bearer of rights and more as a framer of life plans. (This idea often implies pretentions to control or mastery, such as in John Stuart Mill’s comment that “He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.”)¹³ There are, as Brown notes, political implications to the demands for self-care issued by neoliberalism, particularly when it comes to the inevitability of hardship and failure. “Correspondingly,” she asserts, “a ‘mismanaged life,’ the neoliberal appellation for failure to navigate impediments to prosperity, becomes a new mode of depoliticizing social and economic powers and at the same time reduces political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity and political complacency.”¹⁴ In other words, you might say that it is only big business whose losses are socialized, while everyone else is on his or her own. Precarity, then, might be said to register something more than the kind of dependence that has always characterized labour’s relation to capital. It refers a more multiple dependence – on a withered state, on family and other social relations – at the same time that it names a frustration with the impossibility of self-care.

Economic insecurity for workers thus grows as capital becomes more flexible, and this has affected a wider and wider range of people, not just a few marginal groups. Two of the original academic investigators of precarity argue that

Precarity, then, does not have its model worker. Neither artist nor migrant, nor hacker nor housewife […] Rather, precarity strays across any number of labour practices, rendering their relations precisely precarious – which is to say, given to no essential connection but perpetually open to temporary and contingent relations. In this sense, precarity is something more than a position in the labour market, since it traverses a spectrum of labour markets and positions within them.¹⁵

Certainly this is true economically and sociologically, but it is also true aesthetically as well as cinematically.¹⁶ As we will see, part of what characterizes the disparate films of the “cinema of precarity” is not so much the subjects as the subjectivity, not so much the identities of protagonists as the experience of similar structural positioning and similar affective states (and stakes) in the contemporary world. This precarious position is situated and figured both temporally and spatially. That is, from this position subjects suffer relentless economic insecurity in relation to the future and experience their own ineluctable and natural social dependence as a failure of self-sufficiency.

Wendy’s Predicament

Wendy and Lucy is an unconventional offering, both stylistically and narratively, as you would expect of a film that speaks to contemporary conditions of precarity. It is a remarkably good example of the cinema of precarity set in an American context. It tells the story of a young woman (Wendy) and her dog (Lucy) navigating a series of challenges as strangers in a small city in Oregon. Over the course of the film, these challenges, namely Wendy’s car breaking down and Lucy going missing, turn into real losses that only further confirm Wendy’s lonely precariousness. But at first, the film starts with Wendy just passing through with Lucy, trying to make her way to Alaska to find work on the “slimeline” in one of the salmon canneries. As an audience, we enter her story in medias res as she has stopped along this journey for the night, somewhere in Oregon. We soon gather that Wendy is living on a very tight budget, tracking her expenses with a pen and a small notebook, counting every penny before she and Lucy bed down in the car for the night. When she is awakened the next morning by a security guard’s knock on her window, her journey comes to an abrupt halt. Not because she has broken the law, but because her car will not start when he asks her to leave the parking lot. The rest of the film tracks how Wendy copes with the challenges of losing her car and her dog over the next 48 hours in this small, unfamiliar city. It is a road movie, interrupted: freedom interrupted by the unchosen.

Wendy’s general situation of unemployment and itinerancy, together with her specific challenges of car failure and losing her dog, can be helpfully characterized as a predicament. The film’s director, Kelly Reichardt, herself, together with reviewers of the film, have repeatedly described the collection of challenges that crop up for Wendy as a “predicament.”¹⁷ In particular, predicament is used in ways that emphasize two of the key aspects of precarity – social relations of dependence, and temporal uncertainty – without actually invoking the discourse of precarity. On the one hand, Reichardt’s use of the word “predicament” emphasizes social relations and dependence braided together with loneliness, as when she says, “There’s a certain kind of help that society will give and a certain help it won’t give. So we imagined Wendy as a renter; no insurance, just making ends meet, and a fire occurs due to no fault of her own and she loses her place to live. We don’t know her backstory in the film but we imagined Wendy was in that kind of predicament.”¹⁸ Much of the drama of the film, such as it is, involves how Wendy will negotiate this predicament socially and economically, and whether she will receive help. On the other hand, reviewer Rick Groen, for instance, writes that “That’s the real purpose of Wendy and Lucy: to make us see this young woman, to attend to her present predicament – three days and nights stranded in a small Oregon town – and to wonder about her perilous future. And maybe to find a reason to hope, on her behalf but on ours too, because, of course, we’re all just passing through.”¹⁹ Groen’s use of “predicament” brings to the fore the temporal dimension of precarity, the way in which the present threatens to eclipse the future.

Still, the word predicament is perhaps more apt than these critics, and perhaps even Reichardt, realize. As a name for a difficult situation, predicament resonates not only phonically but semantically with the idea of precarity, which is, after all, a situation and an ongoing economic difficulty. What is more, because of the film’s particular stylistic choices, predicament names a narrative construct that is not overly dramatic but that unfolds slowly and somewhat flatly, or matter-of-factly. By contrast, there are other, more severe words that could be used instead of predicament to give a more dramatic connotation – such as ordeal, plight, calamity, or emergency. Many of these terms, however, impart connotations of extraordinariness and finality, and yet what is precisely valuable about the idea of a predicament – both for Wendy and Lucy in particular, and for the purposes of illuminating precarity more generally – is its suggestion of understatement and ordinariness.

Paradoxically, then, “predicament” might be said to name an “ordinary crisis.” In fact, Lauren Berlant suggests that the affects associated with precarity do make crises ordinary and familiar, folding precarity into the normal and transforming it. “Crisis,” she points out, “is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming.”²⁰ Navigating is a telling word here, for it has the helpful connotation of acting in a context not fully in one’s control, which is apt for precarity’s dependency and contingency. (It expresses a similar idea as the word negotiation.) But enduring or surviving precarity tends to reduce navigating to merely treading water rather than actually getting ahead.

Through the general effect, as well as affect, created by Reichardt’s stylistic choices, Wendy’s slowly unfolding predicament comes to reflect the precarious aesthetic that Berlant identifies in some of the films of French director Laurent Cantet. Speaking of Cantet’s films in particular and the cinema of precarity more generally, Berlant describes “an aesthetic shaped by the fraying of norms, that is, of genres of reliable being. Fraying implies something slow, delicate, processual, something happening on its own time. Aesthetically, we observe this political-affective condition mainly in messy situations, episodes, incidents, and gestures, and not often in the gesture of the dramatic event.”²¹ Or, we might add, predicaments. Berlant’s invocation of “fraying norms” brings together the two elements of the predicament – social relations and time – that are key aspects of precarity. Thus, we can add the figure of the predicament to this list of messy and less-than-dramatic events. For Reichardt’s method of training our attention on Wendy’s predicament is very much consistent with the slow, processual wearing out that Berlant discerns in precarity. For instance, Reichardt often uses long takes and employs no music at all in the film, contributing to the experience of the duration of Wendy’s predicament. Even the more dramatic moments in this film are represented in a modest and deliberate way, suggesting a distinctive blend of form and content.

Slowness, or Stuck at an Impasse

Reichardt’s film represents Wendy’s predicament as much through its visual style as through its scripted content. The film is brief, but adept in its focus and compelling in its artistry. For while its running time is a mere 80 minutes, Reichardt’s style of direction and editing (she edited the film, too) blends the classical influence of Italian neorealism’s attention to working-class characters’ circumstances and concerns with a measure of the observation and contemplation more recently associated with “slow cinema.”²² Adopting a more deliberate pace, Reichardt allows the camera to linger, and thereby enjoins the audience to endure Wendy’s predicament along with her in this small town where she is marooned without a functioning car. For example, the camera repeatedly tracks Wendy as she walks, and walks, and walks all over this town. She walks to and from the grocery store, to and from the dog pound. She walks around taping up missing posters for Lucy as well as leaving articles of her own clothing tied to signposts for Lucy to find, and finally she walks to and from the woods on the edge of town seeking a place to bed down for the night, since her ordinary sleeping place is locked up at the repair shop.²³ Whereas many other films would use editing to severely telescope the time it takes Wendy to walk these distances, Reichardt’s camera forces the audience to accompany Wendy on these walks and induces us to feel the duration and weight of her predicament.²⁴

The film’s focus on walking is not purely stylistic, of course. Wendy’s walking is driven narratively by the loss of her car, a remarkably American symbol of personal autonomy (an auto-mobile for the autonomous individual, you might say)²⁵ and key to any road movie – except, of course, a road movie that comes to an abrupt, unchosen halt. To depict precarity’s ordinary crisis, Reichardt narratively engineers the loss of Wendy’s automobile (the antithesis of slowness), making walking a necessity and changing the way in which Wendy experiences space. Wendy’s overall predicament has important social dimensions, and yet, more immediately, her predicament is spatial and temporal simply because she is stuck both in this small Oregon city and in the present, with her plans for the future thrown into doubt. So, when her cross-continental trip to Alaska is called into question by these ordinary crises, Wendy arrives at an impasse. She is literally stuck and cannot get moving, and instead the film focuses on the slow fraying of her stability and relationships.

Wendy’s impasse turns out to be emblematic of precarity, emblematic not only for her individually, but also for the social and economic context in, and through which, she experiences precarity. The whole town in which she is marooned is figured in the film as being itself at an impasse – having witnessed the departure of a key industry, which has left many people out of work. In one of the few moments in the film that speaks directly to the larger, precarious economic circumstances, the security guard²⁶ in conversation with Wendy characterizes the town’s economic losses and their impact on lives. The conversation occurs after Wendy has just used the security guard’s cell phone to call the city dog pound to see whether Lucy has been found (a rare instance when she calls instead of walking). After handing the phone back to the security guard, Lucy says, “Not a lot of jobs around here, huh?” and he responds, “I’ll say. I don’t know what the people do all day. Used to be a mill, but it’s been closed a long time now. Don’t know what they do.” He delivers this last sentence with a sense of bewilderment, as if it is such a shame and a puzzle that so many people are unmoored. It is a casual but striking characterization of the effects of capitalist dynamism, or “creative destruction” as Joseph Schumpeter famously put it. Immediately following his remark, Wendy voices her own identification with the uncertain and unrooted character of precarity, saying, “Can’t get a job without an address anyway […] or a phone.” Her statement serves as a reminder for the audience that in her circumstances of itinerancy and precarity, she in fact lacks all these conventional markers of stability. The security guard then immediately responds with what is certainly the line of the movie: “You can’t get an address without an address, you can’t get a job without a job. It’s all fixed.” This line is conspicuous and remarkable, particularly in a film that has less dialogue than most. It is remarkable regardless, and yet when viewed through the lens of precarity, it speaks volumes to the temporality and social conditionality that precarity exposes. For what his comment captures is the almost self-perpetuating character of precarity, such that loss of job or loss of house can cascade and cause other losses that leave one unable to really find one’s socioeconomic footing at all. The crowning blow is suggested in his final statement, for when he says, “It’s all fixed” he is conjuring a sense of fatalism that comes from one’s fate being in the hands of another – namely, capital. We are all always dependent in larger and smaller ways that we may be more or less aware of depending on stability and privilege, but those coping with precarity are constantly, anxiously aware of their dependence.

In addition to this rather explicit thematization of generalized precarity, the film further conveys a sense of precarity through Wendy’s particular, personal impasse. The manner in which she is stuck in this impasse keeps her moving in the same space again and again. The impasse is a figure Berlant finds to be characteristic of precarity cinema for just the way in which it uses the personal to track the structural. “The impasse is a cul-de-sac,” Berlant notes, “In a cul-de-sac one keeps moving, but one moves paradoxically, in the same space.”²⁷ What better way to illustrate such an impasse than walking in a small city? Wendy walks and walks and walks in this film, giving us a sense of the duration of her impasse. She is seemingly locked in the same town, walking back and forth, hoping to find her dog, get her car fixed, and get back on the road. In other words, she wants to resume her journey, and by the end of the film, she does – in a kind of way.

Again, however, the payoff from this film comes not in a dramatic and complete resolution of this impasse in any conventional sense. Rather, the film makes a point of attending to the way in which Wendy navigates challenge after challenge over the course of 48 hours in this small town. In this respect, its approach is consistent with the emerging genre conventions that Berlant sees in the figure of the impasse. Firstly, consider that Berlant wants to think “about the ordinary as an impasse shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on.”²⁸ Wendy’s cinematic story fits this description, for even without knowing exactly why she is living out of her car and trying to get to Alaska, as an audience we can see that she adjusts to whatever comes her way as she tries to stay afloat while dreaming of getting ahead. The contending spatial metaphors used to contrast the American dream of getting ahead with precarity’s reality of treading water to stay afloat mark a significant shift in the frame of reference for what optimism means.²⁹ That is just the kind of change that Berlant is interested in tracing through the notion of “cruel optimism,” which she says is “what happens to fantasies of the good life when the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to ‘have a life’ that adjustment seems like an accomplishment.”³⁰ The film puts the audience in the position of rooting for Wendy to simply re-equilibrate herself and get back on track toward the mere possibility of having a life.

Secondly, it is important to situate Berlant’s diagnosis of the impasse as part of her larger effort to see the ways in which precarity makes crisis ordinary. As she says, “In the impasse induced by crisis, being treads water; mainly, it does not drown. Even those whom you would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism they have for that, at least.”³¹ While in some ways Wendy is marginalized and defeated, she also has a degree of pride and dignity, and as an audience we see her trying to figure things out and get along, even as the setbacks crop up again and again. In keeping with the cinema of precarity’s reticent aesthetic, Wendy’s continual adjustments are not portrayed with any melodramatic flourishes, but simply and straightforwardly as what she has to do in order to keep moving (in place). That she appears capable and confident in addressing these challenges makes it all the more frustrating to see her struggling economically. In light of precarity, these continual adjustments are themselves an achievement, Berlant reminds us.

Returning once again, finally, to the scene referenced earlier, we consider the conclusion of the conversation between Wendy and the security guard, for it is also quite revealing. In response to the security guard’s distillation of precarity – “You can’t get an address without an address, you can’t get a job without a job. It’s all fixed” – Wendy declares, “That’s why I’m going to Alaska. I hear they need people.” Her attachment to the idea of life in Alaska is the very seed of her own cruel optimism. In a way, her most significant adjustment is her recalibration of her dreams in light of precarity. It is a statement that betrays the cultural persistence, even under conditions of precarity, of a peculiarly American idea of freedom. For not only does Wendy intend to travel by automobile (a symbol of self-sufficiency, even though its operation relies on a whole host of social and technical infrastructures), but she intends to reach Alaska – perhaps the last instantiation of the great frontier, to which Americans have fled to again and again to start over, remake themselves, and make their fortunes. However, much of this idealism appears drained from Wendy’s invocation of Alaska. She does not expect to become rich; she just hopes to be able to land a job for a time without having those conditional roots, phone and address, typically associated with formal employment.³² The vagueness of Wendy’s plan for the future suggests precarity’s toll on our very temporality – the way in which it makes the future uncertain and the present intractable.

Precarity’s Perpetual Present and Receding Future

Wendy experiences this precarious impasse not just spatially but also temporally, affecting her plans for the future and prolonging her present predicament. In fact, the temporal dimension of precarity is one of its most prominent features. Much precarity talk concerns the anxious relation to the future produced by employment insecurity. What’s more, this temporal uncertainty reverberates well beyond mere work such that it becomes difficult to form a credible plan for the future, to “build a life.” In a discussion of precarity and performance, Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider explain, “Precarity is life lived in relation to a future that cannot be propped securely upon the past. Precarity undoes a linear streamline of temporal progression and challenges ‘progress’ and ‘development’ narratives on all levels. Precarity has become a byword for life in late and later capitalism.”³³ Clearly, the larger precarious predicament in which Wendy finds herself (i.e. whatever has propelled her to live out of her car) makes her economically vulnerable. Given this precarious vulnerability, the film focuses on how car trouble and losing her dog undoes her progression toward her goal of Alaska for a time. To be precise, the extent to which she is delayed in reaching that goal is the exact timespan that this film covers. In the very last scene of the film, Wendy resumes her journey toward Alaska by hopping a freight train (a very precarious mode of transportation in itself). So, by virtue of the film’s focus on Wendy’s predicament with the car and Lucy, her future is always uncertain for the audience.

In addition to throwing the future into doubt by pushing it out of reach, precarity also transforms one’s experience of the present. When one has little security about one’s income and consequently the life that one is trying to build, the present comes to feel unending. In a commentary on “precarious dystopias” in today’s cinema, Mark Fisher describes “the ambient dread of precarity in a world stripped of (job and social) security, in which the poor are trapped in a perpetual present tense, unable to plan or dream, all their mental and physical resources devoted to the exhausting hardscrabble for bare survival.”³⁴ Fisher captures the aura of anxiety that characterizes today’s experience of capitalism for many workers under conditions of precarity. Lest Fisher’s language of “perpetual present” convey an inaccurate impression of stability,³⁵ we should note Berlant’s formulation that the cinema of precarity gives audiences an affective sense of “the instability of the ongoing present as the ground for living.”³⁶ The atmosphere of Wendy and Lucy echoes Fisher’s “ambient dread” to the extent that the audience is led to wonder what else will go wrong for Wendy and how will she continue to adjust. The film is also suffused with a sense of the “instability of the ongoing present” insofar as the audience must endure the ongoing anxious present with her as she tries to regain her footing.

In keeping with precarity cinema’s aesthetic, Reichardt allows her audience to feel the seeming permanence of the present through the unhurried nature of the film’s pacing, instead of deploying the rupture of the dramatic gesture. This slower style reflects the way in which the future recedes and the present becomes all-consuming for Wendy once her car breaks down. Wendy wants to get to Alaska where she hopes to be able to count on a certain term of employment to replenish her bank balance. But when her car breaks down, that goal quickly recedes and all of her energy becomes devoted to addressing the immediate crisis, in a strange town, with no friends, and little money. This stylistic stretching-out of the present is key to the way in which the film conveys the sense of precarity’s affective anxiety that pervades Wendy’s lonely present. It is felt throughout the film, whether in waiting for the repair garage to open, waiting for the dog pound to call her back with news of Lucy, or waiting to be released from jail after being picked up on a heavy-handed shoplifting charge.

“Just Callin’,” or, Fraying Social Bonds

Shifting registers, consider the uncertainty with which the film addresses the social dimension of Wendy’s past as well as her future. It leaves the audience deliberately uninformed about her past, with only the suggestion that she cannot count on her family for help. Kelly Reichardt in interviews suggested that Wendy was the victim of some kind of catastrophe, such as fire or hurricane, that left her living out of her car.³⁷ And so she is unmoored and alone in the unending present when she loses her car.

While the film never explains exactly why she has undertaken such a long journey for work, what is clear is that Wendy is on her own not only because she is a stranger in this unfamiliar town a long way from home but also because her family offers her no support, neither monetary nor emotional. What is even worse, Lucy (Wendy’s best friend, maybe her only friend) goes missing after Wendy spends most the day in jail on a shoplifting charge (she takes two cans of dog food).³⁸ An early, telling, and difficult, scene in the film shows Wendy calling (home) to speak to her sister and brother-in-law, just after having learned that she’ll spend the night without her car and her dog. We sense that she might ask for help paying for the car repairs, but she does not. Nor does she even solicit any emotional support from her sister or brother-in-law, Dan. Instead, her exchange is terse and awkward, illustrating her isolation as well as a perhaps a degree of pride:

Dan:	“So what’s up?”
Wendy:	“Nothin,’ I’m just callin’, just …” [trails off]
Dan:	“Nothin’?”
Wendy:	“Car broke. [pause] I dunno. It’s kinda bad here actually. [pause] Lucy’s lost.”Sister picks up phone and breaks in: “Who’s that?”
Dan:	“It’s your sister. She broke down in Oregon.”
Wendy:	“Hi Deb.”
Sister:	“Oregon! What does she want us to do about it?”
Wendy:	“Nothing. Nothing. I’m, I’m just callin’ …”
Dan:	“She’s just callin’.”
Sister:	“We can’t do anything. We’re strapped. I don’t know what she wants.”
Wendy:	“I don’t want anything, I’m just calling.”

As an audience we can sense that Wendy has come to an emotionally vulnerable state that nearly matches her economic vulnerability. She reaches out, in a way, by calling her sister and brother-in-law, but that is all she does: just call.

Wendy’s emotional duress is indicated in the slippage in Dan’s description of her predicament, when he says to Deb, “She broke down in Oregon.” In his telling, Wendy and the car are conflated, such that a car breakdown becomes Wendy’s own breakdown, even though Wendy shows little sign of breaking down emotionally. Dan’s slippage coincides with Deb’s own rebuff of a request that is not even made. For all along, Wendy has seemed reluctant (too proud? too self-reliant?) to come right out and ask for help, but we get the sense she wouldn’t refuse it if Dan offered. Once her sister butts into the conversation, however, we intuit Wendy’s spine stiffening and her pride swelling, such that her reluctance comes to be infused, even replaced, with the prideful sense that it would be somehow wrong, a failure on her part, to ask for help – as if accepting help would be confirmation of weakness. And she can’t allow herself to be seen as this kind of failure, perhaps especially to her sister. Wendy seems to be struggling with the ideological contradictions of the neoliberal expectation of self-care, which become even more difficult under conditions of precarity. She wants to be able to fully take care of herself, and her accounts notebook together with her composure suggest that she is careful and capable. But as unexpected challenges arise through no fault of her own, she finds it increasingly difficult to do it all on her own. This tension persists throughout the film as Wendy faces more challenges and slowly, reluctantly reaches out for help in small ways. The small changes in her relations with others in Oregon over the course of the film suggest that Wendy is becoming more comfortable with the limits of her self-reliance.

In addition to its unsettling temporality, precarity has another important characteristic, and that is dependence. Precarity names not only the social and existential fact of dependence but also registers the anxiety and insecurity associated with it. Such dependence stands in stark contrast to the “brave new world” of neoliberal freedom populated by fully self-possessed individuals (or so the ideology tells us). Berlant thus notes that “At root precarity is a condition of dependency – as a legal term, precarious describes the situation wherein your tenancy on your land is in someone else’s hands.”³⁹ Of course this has always been true to an extent as long as people have lived in communities with a social division of labour, not to mention as long as people have participated in family life. In other words, people have always already been dependent, but the contours and valuation of that dependency vary from culture to culture. So what is distinct about contemporary life that has caused the advent of this new concept, this neologism “precarity”? And further – dependent on what? Certainly on capital, as much of the discourse of precarity indicates – but also on others, on conditions, and on norms. Neoliberalism’s market ethics trumpets the virtues of free choice and self-sufficiency while denying or diverting us from our dependency on others as well as on larger social and economic conditions.⁴⁰ However, “the ambient dread of precarity” increasingly does not allow us to forget our dependency. More than that, it can help to make dependency visible and present (and potentially challengeable and changeable) in new ways. The cinema of precarity generally, and Wendy and Lucy in particular, participates in such a project, giving visual and narrative form to this set of conditions and experiences.

In a remarkable pair of comments that bring together the affect of precarity with the social effects of neoliberal rationality’s growing normalization, Reichardt and Berlant express very similar ideas but in different languages. Where Reichardt asks whether responsibility is purely personal, Berlant identifies three key elements of precarity and its cinema. Discussing her ideas behind scripting Wendy’s predicament, Reichardt speaks to what Berlant calls the fraying of social bonds. “Wendy and Lucy asks the question of what we owe each other, and what’s our responsibility to each other?” says Reichardt, “Wendy is a stranger: We don’t know where she came from, and people have to decide in the moment where they meet her what their obligation to her is. Or maybe there is no obligation. Is it every man for himself now?”⁴¹ Similarly, but in a more theoretical register, Berlant argues that the cinema of precarity “emphasizes the present as a transitional zone where normative forms of reciprocity are wearing out” such that “the films record the loneliness of collective singularity, the impacts of affective fraying, and the tiny optimism of recuperative gestures in the middle of it all, for those who can manage them.”⁴² These three features – collective loneliness, affective fraying, and tiny recuperative gestures – bring out the affects and consequences of neoliberalism’s injunction for self-care. Individuals in the era of neoliberal precarity are supposed to be responsible and self-reliant, and traditional forms of obligation show signs of withering.

Let us return for a moment to the phone conversation between Wendy, her sister, and her brother-in-law: this illustrates the presence of these first two features of precarity cinema (collective loneliness and affective fraying) as well as the absence of small recuperative gestures that suggest a hint of optimism. That is, the phone conversation shows evidence of the impacts of affective fraying and the loneliness of collective singularity, while also allowing us to feel the absence of even the smallest recuperative gestures that might sustain optimism (Wendy’s and the audience’s), however tenuously. The structure of the conversation, with Wendy’s sister interrupting and rebuffing an unstated request for help, shows that with precarity everyone is on his or her own, even with regard to family. The visual presentation of the scene also echoes this loneliness of collective singularity, as the camera shows Wendy talking on a pay phone, seemingly zoomed in from a distance and through glass that reflects car lights as they pass by. (Since the car itself can be seen as a figure of autonomy/loneliness, the shared isolation is doubled here.) The impact of affective fraying is felt through Wendy’s reluctance to ask for help as well as her sister’s pre-emptive rejection and her brother-in-law’s conflation, “She broke down in Oregon.” There is a sense of defeated realism from all three sides of this strikingly indirect conversation, and that mood is characteristic of precarity.

In this conversation scene as well as many others, Wendy and Lucy puts the audience in the position of enduring Wendy’s negotiations of the frayed norms wrought by the neoliberal demand for self-care. For while she has difficulty finding reliable assistance (much less intimacy) in her predicament, the film presents her foundering not in a (melo-)dramatic fashion but rather in an understated and rather naturalistic way.⁴³ Whereas the phone conversation evidences the absence of recuperative gestures, even from family, another relationship illustrates their presence but also their smallness under conditions of precarity. The setting for these small recuperative gestures is the one human relationship of significance in the film – that between Wendy and the security guard. The same security guard who in the drugstore parking lot near the start of the film wakes Wendy to tell her she can’t park there, goes on to show her many small kindnesses over the course of the film. He comes to provide something of an avuncular presence for Wendy, as he is senior, gentle, and wise. He gives her help pushing her car off the lot when it won’t start; he gives her directions to the grocery store, and later the dog pound; and he insists that she use his phone to call the dog pound even when she demurs, having only asked for a quarter in exchange for nickels and dimes. The posture of authority that the uniformed but privately-employed security guard adopts as he almost reluctantly enforces the rule that she can’t park overnight and sleep contrasts sharply with the pretentions to police authority that a young grocery-store clerk assumes in his effort to make an example of Wendy when he catches her shoplifting. Indeed, the security guard goes on to give Wendy help, whereas the clerk causes her to lose Lucy on top of already having lost her car.⁴⁴ And when Wendy later sees the clerk behind the store as she’s looking for Lucy, his first response is “What are you doing here?” before getting into his parent’s car.

These small kindnesses shown by the security guard to Wendy are the backdrop for the last and most fraught exchange between them, showing just how tiny the optimism of recuperative gestures can be in light of precarity. The exchange occurs on Wendy’s last morning in town, after having spent hours in front of the drugstore waiting for the security guard. When he finally arrives, he walks up, sees her and says, “You look a bit stricken.” Wendy responds, “Well, I’ve been here since 8. Where have you been?” in a pointed way that she has not quite shown before in the film. She has endured a strange incident in the woods the night before,⁴⁵ and both he and we see Wendy’s frayed affect and sense that she is starting to have trouble holding it all together. He tells her that it is his day off, and that she got a call after she left the drugstore last night. He hands her the phone and she calls the pound to learn that Lucy has been taken in by a foster family. Her mood lightens and her face brightens as she lets out a sigh of relief. She then tells him the good news, and this exchange follows:

Security Guard:	“So that’s it, you’re gonna be pulling out?”
Wendy:	“Yeah, that’s the plan.”
Security Guard:	“Well, I hope it all works out. I know it will. Uh, I want you to take this. Don’t argue. Just don’t argue. Don’t let Holly see. If you ever come by here again, you just stop by here and say hi.”
Wendy:	“Thank you. I will.”

As he walks away, Wendy looks down at her hand and unrolls the bills that he has given her to reveal a five-dollar bill and a one dollar: a total of $6. This registers as a small and surprising disappointment, as we might have expected a larger gift. Notice, however, the contrast between the qualification that Wendy offers, “Yeah. That’s the plan” and his reassurance “I hope it all works out. I know it will.” We sense that she has learned the hard lesson that precarity makes all plans utterly contingent, we also sense that this is more than just pro forma sentiment, given the other generous assistance and understanding that he has given Wendy. (Note that this is the only time we see him in “civvies” rather than his security guard “uniform.” Perhaps in staging it this way, Reichardt wants to make sure that his help can’t in any way be interpreted as corporate or official help.) And so, the gift is a remarkable example of Berlant’s notion of the “tiny optimism of recuperative gestures” because it represents an act of generosity rooted in a real relationship with shades of intimacy, but we also sense that it is constrained by his own precarious circumstances (note how he’s concerned for her not to let Holly see)⁴⁶. The gift followed by the revelation of the $6 in Wendy’s hand lands with an affective mixture of hope, sadness and realism, registering as a sort of cruel optimism.

Self-Care’s Impossibility

Finally, we come to the end point in this film of the experience of precarity, and what we are left with is a pure individual, shorn of meaningful relationships and still trying to find stable footing. After parting from the security guard and his small kindesses, Reichardt gives us a brief shot of Wendy enjoying a pastry and coffee while charting her route on a map and tallying her remaining assets in her notebook. (She is once again humming the same tune that she has hummed earlier in the film at small interludes of peace and stability.)⁴⁷ Then she walks across to the car-repair shop, and immediately learns the bad news that her car is broken almost beyond repair. It is going to cost more to fix it not only than the car is worth but also than Wendy has. Having no other choice, she decides to abandon the car, but to add insult to injury, she has to pay $30 for the towing and disposal of it. This loss, following on the cruel optimism of the $6 help, sets up Wendy and the audience for the film’s final coup de grâce.

Next Wendy arrives by cab near the address where Lucy has been taken in. After walking the last few blocks with all her belongings in hand (her car is gone for good now), Wendy watches a man leave the house and drive away, and then she approaches the fenced-in area where she sees Lucy. She says, “Hey Lu,” and then, “I’m sorry. Come here.” As she kneels down outside the fence, she says to Lucy “I know, I know. Come on, Lu, don’t be mad.” After playing catch with Lucy and a stick, Wendy says “It’s so nice here, Lu. That man seems nice,” as her face starts to curl up with emotion. Again she kneels down, and says “I lost the car,” as a few tears roll down her face. And then she pauses looks intently at Lucy and says, “You be good. I’ll come back. I’ll make some money and come back.” As Lucy whimpers, Wendy gathers up her things and starts to walk away, and soon hop a freight train. This most emotionally laden scene of the film is the culmination of Wendy’s predicament, and it exhibits the very personal and affective cost of precarity’s cruel optimism. With the loss of her car, Wendy cannot afford to keep Lucy with her, and decides, perhaps cruelly, to leave her there while she resumes her optimistic journey to Alaska in an even more precarious mode of transportation. Still, Wendy maintains hope that she will return once she has made “some money.” It is a modest ambition, and it should not be too much to ask to be able to make a living in a way that allows the preservation of such a relationship. But that is precisely the kind of insecurity that precarity sows as it undermines any assurance we might think we have about being able to build the kind of life we desire.

In interviews about the film, director Kelly Reichardt refers again and again to American myths of individual initiative. She notes that she was struck by the idea often publicly expressed after the devastating 2005 Hurricane Katrina that “if people hadn’t left themselves so vulnerable, if they didn’t live so precariously, they wouldn’t have found themselves in that situation.”⁴⁸ Such a political judgment stems directly from the proliferation of a neoliberal political rationality that, as noted earlier, political theorist Wendy Brown insists casts such predicaments as “mismanaged lives,” thereby personalizing failure and depoliticizing precisely those social and economic powers that make people increasingly precarious and vulnerable. The way in which Reichardt tells it, she and screenwriter Jon Raymond were inspired by the idea of challenging and trying to undermine this “bootstraps” myth. She says

I called Jon Raymond after hearing an interview where someone used the proverbial ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ image, and we were musing over what happens if, like Wendy, you have no safety net, you have a nothing education, you don’t have family support, and certainly there’s no trust fund. How do you pull yourself up by your bootstraps?⁴⁹

Reichardt, then, is clearly self-conscious about the way in which she hopes Wendy and Lucy can speak to the impossible demands for personal responsibility that ignore the necessity of various supports and interrupt the familiar judgment associated with this proverbial image. But of course the wonderful thing about a feature film, even an independent film, is that it doesn’t speak in these terms, but in more familiar terms and images.

To be sure, Wendy’s situation was already precarious and lonely before she ever arrived at this predicament in Oregon, travelling across the country to find work and sleeping in her car along the way. In fact, her past, present, and future are all precarious, and so the predicament in Oregon that is the focus of the film is especially revealing. Wendy’s journey is interrupted not just by losing her car, but also by her dog going missing. Therefore, at the same time as the loss of her car puts her literally on her feet and pushes her into the community, the loss of Lucy threatens the apparently only stable and meaningful relationship in Wendy’s life. On the one hand, in the American imaginary Wendy becomes less free without her car, while on the other her life threatens to become less fulfilled. The contradictory implications of these two losses – one increasing Wendy’s dependence, the other inducing independence, but both unwanted and both arguably contributing to her unfreedom – point to the effects of neoliberal precarity and are key to the way in which the film illuminates Wendy’s life as a precarious neoliberal subject. Wendy Brown observes that “Neoliberal subjects are controlled through their freedom […] because of neoliberalism’s moralization of the consequences of this freedom” (emphasis original).⁵⁰ This film refuses to moralize Wendy’s challenges as failures of her own rationality, her own fault, but instead offers them for observation as the effects – both structural and affective – of unchosen precarity.