In this rich cultural history, Pamela Roberston Wojcik examines America's ambivalent and shifting attitude toward homelessness. She considers film cycles from five distinct historical moments that show characters who are unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed—characters who fail, resist, or opt out of the mandate for a home of one's own. From the tramp films of the silent era to the 2021 Oscar-winning Nomadland, Wojcik reveals a tension in the American imaginary between viewing homelessness as deviant and threatening or emblematic of freedom and independence. Blending social history with insights drawn from a complex array of films, both canonical and fringe, Wojcik effectively "unhomes" dominant narratives that cast aspirations for success and social mobility as the focus of American cinema, reminding us that genres of precarity have been central to American cinema (and the American story) all along.

About the Author

Pamela Robertson Wojcik is Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre and Concurrent in Gender Studies and American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of several works of film and cultural studies, including Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction and The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction. All Over the Map: Figurations of Mobility and Placelessness
1 • Ubiquitous: The Tramp’s Mobile Masculinity
2 • Uncivilized: World War II Mobilization and Homecoming as Social Problem
3 • Adrift: The Ambivalent Freedom of the Female Hitchhiker
4 • Trash: The Homeless as Urban Waste
Epilogue. Stuck: Precarity and Perpetual Motion as Slow Death

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Reviews

"Wojcik’s scholarship reminds us that popular American depictions of homelessness used to be different: flawed, shortsighted, and ambivalent, but guided by the dim sense of one another’s humanity."
— Los Angeles Review of Books

“My admiration for this book is immense. Impeccably researched and written with compelling clarity and wit, Unhomed has much to teach us about film’s participation in modern American life.”—Dana Polan, author of Dreams of Flight: "The Great Escape" in American Film and Culture

"Pamela Wojcik provides a fascinating look at recurring portrayals of uprooted, unhoused, and transient figures in American cinema, including silent-era tramps, World War II combat veterans, hitchhiking dames, Reagan-era street people, and the precariat. In doing so, she unearths contradictory longings for both home and mobility, fixity and freedom at the heart of American culture."—Shelley Stamp, author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews