Adam Ochonicky: I want to begin by expressing my admiration for your fantastic book, Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema (2024)! After sampling some of your preliminary work on this subject matter in the “Media, Precarity, and the Home” roundtable (2021), it’s been a pleasure to experience the full scope and depth of Unhomed. Along with the detailed analyses of individual texts, I especially enjoyed your ongoing attentiveness to the precise contexts in which your chosen film cycles emerged; while reading, I felt immersed within overlooked histories from across the nation’s past 150-ish years. And I must admit that your book has prompted me to reconsider both past and contemporary films through the lens of homelessness! In your conclusion, you assert “that there have been genres of precarity all along,” and Unhomed certainly enables readers to recognize the recurrence and even omnipresence of this subject matter across film history.
Simply identifying relevant works seems like one of many challenges for this type of far-ranging project. As a starting point for our discussion, then, I’m curious to hear more about your methodology: in short, how did you arrive at this set of filmic case studies?
You note that the epilogue is based on a talk (and subsequent book chapter) that linked what you label as twenty-first-century “slow death films” with Depression-era tramp films. What were the initial films that sparked this connection for you? You also reference some keyword searches in the AFI library. How else did you go about expanding your inventory of case studies? Had some films been tangential to your prior books on place and/or of personal interest? Which new discoveries were particularly exciting for you to bring into this project?
Pamela Robertson Wojcik: Thanks for the question. Yes, the idea for the book began with what became the last chapter. I was invited by Yannis Tzioumakis to give a keynote in Liverpool at a conference on Youth and Mobility. I had been thinking about films in which characters move constantly but go nowhere. My initial sample, and it was just based on what I had watched recently, included Tangerine (2015), Gimme the Loot (2012), and Good Time (2017). I developed the project for the talk and then as a chapter, “Perpetual Motion: Mobility, Precarity, and Slow Death Cinema,” for the volume Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures that I co-edited with Paula Massood and Angel Matos.
As I wrote, I started thinking about other films like American Honey (2016), The Florida Project (2017), Heaven Knows What (2014), Lean on Pete (2017), Tramps (2016), and The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019). Some were films I happened to see as I was thinking about it, some were recommendations, and some were following the work of directors like Sean Baker and the Safdie brothers. I made reference to tramp films at the very end as I was differentiating these films from earlier films about doomed youth road films like They Live by Night (1948), Gun Crazy (1950), Badlands (1973), or True Romance (1993); and I argued that tramp films like Beggars of Life (1928) or Wild Boys of the Road (1933) were a closer match. Both slow death cinema and earlier tramp films portray forms of mobility that do not have hope of social mobility, wherein mobility stems from insecurity and does not have an end point. These films show characters as unhomed and disoriented toward the future; and, taken together, point to a suddenly large and mobile populace whose stories underscore the limits of social mobility.
This would have been the end of my interest in tramps, but when I started thinking about my next book project, I found myself returning to questions of mobility. I developed the book proposal by thinking backwards about moments when unhomed characters seemed to come to the fore. I landed on tramps, WWI soldiers and veterans, hitchhikers, the homeless, and precarious youth. I chose each because I believed there was a cycle of films related to them and thus a corpus to work with. I had no idea. When I started researching tramps, I was stunned to find how many titles were in the AFI catalogue alone. Between 1914 and 1920, the AFI catalogue shows ninety-two tramp films, and from 1921 to 1929, another eighty-one. During the Depression and World War II, another 178 films with “tramp” or “hobo” as keyword appear. All told, the AFI catalogue turns up seven hundred results for films with “tramp” or “hobo” as keywords between 1895 and 1945. If we take out Chaplin, that is still over 600. I had a research assistant who helped me search for films – and I watched everything I could get my hands on.
For other chapters, I had some ideas starting out – I knew many of the WWII films, for example. But as I read about the period, I discovered other films that were relatively minor. I also got recommendations from friends for many chapters, leading me to such films as C.H.U.D (1984) for the 1980s homeless chapter. The big difference between chapters is where films were located. While many films were available through mainstream channels – streaming services, college libraries, easily available DVDs – the chapter on hitchhiking took me to archives of paracinema – websites dedicated to exploitation, especially, and many films were available only through sites that specialize in forgotten films and sell homemade DVDs.
All in all, there are many hundreds of films discussed or mentioned in the book. Looking at so many films was exciting. It helped me see patterns across different cycles. It let me write about films that I have loved for years like The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) or The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and it also led me to many films I did not know that I found delightful like The Impatient Years (1944) and Johnny Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1944), all from the chapter on WWII. Reading these films together, and in the context of discussions about the veteran problem and housing, made me see them in new ways. I was also really happy to dip into made-for-TV movies like Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring (1971), for the hitchhiking chapter – this film was revelatory not only for hitchhiking but to consider how avant-garde TV could be in 1970.
AO: It’s fascinating to hear about your process for locating works while developing Unhomed. Before returning to the topic of film cycles, I want to take a brief detour into the realm of aesthetics and production within your case studies. In short, this a question of form and content: are certain aesthetics and/or production techniques necessary for depictions of precarity and homelessness to be credible or nuanced?
As context for my question, you consider multiple works by directors like Sean Baker and the Safdie brothers, and you’ve observed that “slow death cinema” tends to be “auterist and independent” (and has some shared elements with Italian Neorealism). When discussing selected 1970s female hitchhiker films, you highlight their “techniques of the avant-garde,” and you critique the middlebrow aesthetics (and overall sensibilities) of various 1980s Hollywood films. So, do particular formal elements seem to be aligned with more sophisticated or complex depictions of homelessness? If so, then does the relationship between form and this subject matter fluctuate at different points in time (that, say, past Hollywood productions were better able to grapple with these topics or could do so in different — but still effective — ways from contemporary films)?
PW: I don’t think there is a best practice for representing precarity and homelessness. Each film cycle differs and I would not claim that one does it better or worse than the others. I would say, though, that there are ways that the attitude toward the various unhomed figures is reflected in their production and aesthetics, and vice versa, that the aesthetics and production reflect attitudes. Since the problem of how to rehome and recivilize Word War II veterans is taken up as a major issue of the day – both by the government and by Hollywood – they get mainstream Hollywood attention, and thus Classical Hollywood genre films. Because hitchhiking is seen as more marginal, it is no accident that hitchhiking films tend to exist in exploitation genres. The mainstream middlebrow films about homelessness in the 1980s, and the tendency to treat homelessness largely as fodder for comedy and bromance, on the one hand, and earnest social problem films, on the other, contributes to the way that homelessness is viewed as a scourge but is also curiously glossed over and treated as something that will be solved by individual philanthropy or individual grit.
AO: This notion of aesthetics/production reflecting cultural attitudes is very helpful for thinking about why and how your selected film cycles developed at particular points in time. Regarding your focus on five distinct film cycles, I was also wondering if you’ve kept a list of relevant works from outside those cycles. With Unhomed, were there any individual films that you would have liked to address (but that were produced during different time frames)? Or did you encounter any smaller groupings of films — what might be called “micro-cycles” — of even more fleeting cultural attitudes about and/or representational conventions for precarity and homelessness? If there were any one-off films or micro-cycles, then how did they relate to/differ from the cycles that you do address?
PW: Of course there are films like Wendy and Lucy (2008) or Wanda (1970) that show women adrift, precarious, and homeless; and there are films about unhoused people like The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) or recent TV shows like Maid (2021), which may be part of a microcycle of shows and films about the homeless, as Anna Viola Sborgi discussed in her introduction to the Mediapolis roundtable on “Media, Precarity and the Home.” One of my claims in the book is that precarity has been central to the American imagination all along and to American cinema. But I chose not to try to discuss every film made about these things or to provide a catalogue. I am not claiming a genre or tracing a character type across time. I am specifically interested in moments when issues of mobility and placelessness come to the fore as a moral panic and cycles that serve to work through those historical moments when they are fresh and sticky.
AO: Your deep exploration of particular eras — and their attendant film cycles — clearly displays that recurring concern across the history of cinema. And I feel that your study provides further insights about contemporary American culture. In my own work on regional identity, I continually encounter discourses that elevate certain places and populations to the mythical status of the “authentic” or “real” America. Such reductive labels are a constant presence in media coverage of national elections (particularly within commentaries on trends among voting demographics or electoral outcomes in general). In Unhomed, you consistently observe that perceptions of authenticity are associated with the central unhomed figures in your film cycles. Even characters who willingly embrace aspects of unhomed experiences acquire (or at least claim) some degree of enhanced “authenticity” (such as “imposter” tramps or hitchhiking hippies “rejecting mainstream lifestyles” or yuppies interacting with homeless characters).
I’m interested in hearing more about this running thread in your book. Why might American culture consistently associate “authenticity” with its most precarious populations? Is the “authenticity” of unhomed characters always bound to the specific contexts in which each film cycle was produced or is there a “continuity of authenticity” across cycles? And do you see ways in which the perceptions of authenticity highlighted in Unhomed speak to discourses of authenticity in other American contexts (contemporary politics, popular culture, etc.)?
PW: Authenticity is tricky. There are ways, of course, that authenticity gets projected onto people of color as well as the unhomed and/or precarious. Richard Dyer and many others have discussed this brilliantly. Regarding precarity, I mention Jane Feuer’s ideas about yuppie guilt in my chapter on the 1980s. Maybe there is always a sense of guilt or inauthenticity associated with success and privilege and money. We are taught to want it and strive for it, but think, or know, that it does not make us better people and may move us away from our best, most authentic selves. The recent spate of films and TV shows that seem to boil down to “the rich are terrible” seems to be about this – I’m thinking of Succession, White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness (2022), Knives Out (2019), etc. – as well as a kind of ressentiment. In viewing those with less as more authentic, maybe we also excuse our own guilt by claiming that they have a “better” because more authentic life despite not having a home or food. Nomadland (2020) – the film, not the book – partakes of this, I think.
Sticking to Unhomed, I think the characters I discuss get viewed as authentic because they crisscross so many ideals we have. We have so many conflicting ideas about mobility. While some of the more negative ideas about mobility are certainly at play – in viewing the 1980s homeless as trash, for example – others, associated with freedom, dynamism, or resistance to norms come to the fore, especially, but not only, with characters like tramps and hitchhikers who are perceived to be placeless and mobile by choice. Being unmoored and mobile can mean you are precarious or lost but it also means you are free.
AO: Your comments about perceptions of authenticity indicating a (possible) collective displacement of guilt are intriguing. Within that framework, could these film cycles be understood as manifestations of such guilt? That some degree of obscured guilt is a part of the impetus for the cycles to emerge (in tandem with their era-specific “moral panics”)?
PW: I don’t think guilt is a major motivator. I think the moral panics are more about fear. People fear those who are unhomed, mobile, and placeless because they seem unmoored from society and thus societal rules. There is also a perception that they will try to invade your home, your world. This is especially clear with respect to tramps, who are often pictured as ubiquitous and invading domestic space. The panic around veterans is that they will not be integrated back into society, that they have been uncivilized. With homeless people in the 1980s, there is fear of something like contagion. The homeless are seen as trash and trash that cannot be contained. Hitchhikers create a different fear related to entering the private space of your car. There is also a fear related to the female runaways that they are some symptom of a breakdown in society – they are too free, too sexual, not going to college or getting married.
AO: With fear being the compelling force behind these cycles, the minimal presence of horror films stands out. You include a few references to horror in your chapter on 1970s hitchhiking films, and you address a few horror case studies from the 1980s. But the genre that’s regularly discussed as being engaged with societal fears and anxieties is largely absent in Unhomed.
Is this absence related to the distinctions that you (and other scholars) draw between film cycles and film genres? Are the ways in which the horror genre engages with topics like mobility, precarity, and homelessness too far removed from the representational practices and/or specific cultural contexts of your selected film cycles? Or is it simply that you found a lack of engagement with such topics in the horror genre?
PW: I think it is because I am focusing on cycles. During a film cycle, many contradictory feelings are being worked through. There might be fear, but also envy. The tramp cycle is not all negative about the tramp and, in fact, shows a lot of curiosity about the figure and a lot of respect. The anxiety around veterans is not the stuff of horror but concern. Hitchhikers are sometimes seen as super dangerous but at other times, even within a few short years, as sexy and free. With hitchhikers, the horror films start when ideas about hitchhiking have solidified more – when the activity is largely considered dangerous. So, we get films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Road Games (1981). The one cycle I discuss that has horror upfront is the cycle related to homelessness in the 1980s. Then, you get C.H.U.D., Street Trash (1987), and Prince of Darkness (1987). Those films take the contemporary view of the homeless as trash to an extreme and render them as non-human monsters and garbage. These views are not too far from the more earnest films or the comedic ones which also associate the homeless with trash and view them as disgusting, albeit sometimes redeemable.
AO: This multi-genre dynamic is among the many fascinating aspects of your selected film cycles. To some extent, that variability of works within film cycles reminds me of the projections of authenticity that you detect within individual films. Is there something innately “authentic” about the messy relationship of film cycles to their general subject matter (that is, their often-contradictory perspectives)? Or, following how Klein discusses film cycles as emerging from overtly commercial impulses, is there even something “authentic” about the transparency of cashing in on a trend (within and across genre lines)?
PW: I would avoid “authentic.” Instead, I would say that cycles have a messy immediacy that has to do with their timeliness.
AO: “Messy immediacy” is a fantastic phrase for thinking about film cycles!
At this point, I’d like to shift to another topic that features variable (and often contradictory) meanings and uses: nostalgia. While reading Unhomed, I kept thinking of how relevant your book is for scholars working in the multi-disciplinary field of nostalgia studies. In Unhomed, though, you only make brief references to nostalgia, and such instances seem to be critical (or perhaps implicitly critical) of the concept.
Could you elaborate on your own views about nostalgia and your usage of the concept within Unhomed? Do you feel that nostalgia has any intrinsic values that make it more or less useful for thinking about issues of mobility, precarity, and homelessness?
PW: Because I am working on film cycles that respond to a perceived crisis around unhomed figures in the present, rather than films that look back, I am not looking at films that are nostalgic. I mention nostalgia as a form of erasure that has made us forget much of what I talk about in the book. In the chapter on tramps, for example, I mention the wearing of tramp costumes for Halloween as an activity that renders the tramp nostalgically but doesn’t account for how complex a figure he was. Similarly, I talk about views of WWII that view it nostalgically as the “good” war, as if it was relatively unproblematic. Aside from all the other erasures this nostalgia entails, I focus on how complicated and gnarly “the veteran problem” really was and how much conscious effort went into rehoming veterans who not only suffered physical and psychological damage but were also unmoored from conventional sexual morality, views on race, and more. In a different vein, I know that when I discuss hitchhiking with people, especially people a bit older than myself, they have a lot of nostalgia for it that I do understand – they talk about how they could hitch and feel safe, and they reflect on how crazy that seems now. But nostalgia does not seem to me to be a very useful mode for thinking about the unhoused in general.
AO: I’m always interested in how scholars conceptualize nostalgia in their work, so thanks for indulging my question on the topic. To begin wrapping up our conversation, let’s turn to some of the most present-oriented aspects of Unhomed.
You critique both affluent “vanlifers” on social media and the general emphasis on genre and franchises in twenty-first-century Hollywood cinema and television. Aside from the grim insights of “slow death cinema,” do you see potential for any other media forms to “work through” the contemporary problems of mobility and placelessness in ways that reach general audiences? Is the current media environment simply no longer conducive to such mainstream discourses (as with past film cycles)?
PW: My discussion of #vanlife is not negative about social media. It is more about the way that #vanlife monetizes itineracy to escape the drudgery of work, where van dwellers function as social media influencers who earn money as brand ambassadors and by garnering multiple sponsorships with product placements, often using images of beautiful white women doing yoga to earn money. Social media is actually very useful and helpful for people who are mobile and placeless in certain ways – the real life nomads discussed in Jessica Bruder’s book Nomadland, for example, find community, tips, and strategies on social media.
While film has been dominated by franchises and superheroes, I don’t think it is impossible that that will shift. Certainly, what I describe as slow death cinema tends to be aimed at an art house/academic audience more than garnering mainstream attention, but many of those films can and do find audiences via streaming services. And global art films like Parasite (2019) and Shoplifters (2018) have found audiences. Streaming services have also been showing precarity in things like Squid Game (2021) or Maid as well as numerous documentary series about homelessness. The question is whether media attention to precarity will help lead us to adopt useful and caring governmental policies to address the crisis of homelessness. I am not at all convinced of that.
AO: Regarding your comment on governmental policies, you conclude Unhomed by calling for mobilization to support those who are unhomed, mobile, and placeless. Setting aside the uncertain impacts of media attention, what forms might (or should) such mobilization take? In the wake of the presidential election, do you envision a need for different forms of advocacy than prior to the publication of Unhomed in spring?
PW: To be clear, I am not a housing expert, just a film scholar. My sense is that the need for advocacy is no more or less than before the election. Frankly, there has been no national governmental program to help the unhoused. What is needed is housing. There have been local successes with Housing First programs and uses of motels, including in my academic home town in South Bend, but there needs to be much more effort put into building affordable homes and creating affordable rentals rather than just clearing encampments, a practice which smacks of the mode of “getting rid of the trash” that I discuss in relation to the 1980s.
AO: Just this week, I read an article in The Guardian about a Housing First program in a Louisville hotel. Because of your work, a fleeting comment especially stood out to me: the hotel’s “leadership has started to put a big focus on sharing their story,” partly due to a need for more funding. I was left wondering if, in the past, sites like these hotels would have greater cultural visibility as settings in film cycles—and, accordingly, greater support or at least heightened public awareness. Even indirectly, this piece seemed to reaffirm the importance of both media representations and scholarship such as Unhomed.
To conclude our conversation, I’m interested in hearing your thoughts about future scholarship on precarity and homelessness within film and media studies. In your own work, do you plan to research this subject matter further? Will the “Unhomed, Unhoused, Homeless” conference that you organized last spring become a recurring event? Are there points of interest that you hope other scholars might explore in the wake of Unhomed?
PW: I have no immediate plans to run the conference again, though there are others at Notre Dame working on homelessness who have continued the conversation. I do not foresee doing more research on homelessness and film myself. Having written about over a century of film with a corpus of many hundreds of films, I have said what I can. I am not sure what my next project is. But I know that others are working in this area. Lorrie Palmer’s recent edited collection Home Screens: Public Housing in Global Film & Television, for example, takes up issues around public housing and precarity. And the conference at Notre Dame had terrific papers on motels and film (which talked about The Florida Project among other films), immersive narratives on home and homelessness and documentaries as ways to create sympathy for the unhoused, homelessness in films by Antonioni and Rogosin, and more. So, many people are working on these issues from many different perspectives. I am happy to see diverse approaches that address the issue in different locales and nations and across different kinds of media. I hope people take up my book, discuss it, and use some of the ideas to extend the conversation.
Adam Ochonicky is Associate Professor of English in the School of Media, Arts, and Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. His research and teaching primarily focus on nostalgia and regionalism across a variety of mediums, contexts, and eras. He is the author of The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism(Indiana University Press, 2020). His work has appeared in journals and collections such as Science Fiction Film and Television, Adaptation, Horror Studies, Screening the Past, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Flyover Fictions: Polarization in U.S.-American Culture, Media, and Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia (Routledge, 2024), and ReFocus: The Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
Pamela Robertson Wojcik is Professor and Chair of the Department of Film, TV, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. Her work on urban space in cinema includes The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (Duke UP, 2010) and Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction(Rutgers UP, 2016).
