Unhomed examines America’s ambivalent and shifting attitude toward placelessness through marginalized figures of mobility in film. The book examines films that show characters as unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed: failing, resisting, or opting out of the mandate for a home of one’s own. These narratives show a tension in the American imaginary between viewing homelessness as, on the one hand, deviance, or a threat, and, on the other, as freedom and independence. At the same time, Unhomed provides a new way of viewing American film history. While these stories may appear to be insignificant trend-driven narratives of people on the fringe, they are in conversation with more conventional narratives of success, social mobility, and home: they are the flip side. Rather than marginal, these films about unhomed figures remind us that genres of precarity have been central to the American cinema (and story) all along.Unhomed considers mobility and placelessness in five different historical moments and distinct film cycles. Often, film cycles emanate from moral panics about a perceived threat to societal values or interests. These panics are media-driven projections of an alleged social threat onto figures whose behavior—and, here, specifically, their status as unhomed, mobile, and placeless—is perceived as deviant and dangerous. Film cycles both exploit and fuel moral panics, ginning up concern about the threat, but they often marshal potentially contradictory discourses and create sympathy for the supposedly deviant or troublesome figures rather than support the moral panic’s attack on them. By looking at distinct film cycles, Unhomed seeks to explore why and how ideas about mobility and placelessness come to the fore at certain points in time, what anxieties and/or fantasies they manifest, and how they change over time.The film cycles are about 1) the figure of the tramp as a ubiquitous and threatening presence in the cultural imaginary from the start of cinema until World War II; 2) the “veteran problem” in the years after World War II when the temporary unhoming of soldiers and civilians alike are seen to be life-changing (as citizens are liberated from conventions associated with civilized life and unmoored from the norms of society related to sex, marriage, race relations, and more); 3) the figure of the female hitchhiker in early 1970s films whose voluntary countercultural precarity and mobility threaten ideals of home and family and challenge conceptions of youth; 4) the unhoused that appeared as the new category of “homeless” was just emerging in the 1980s and produced a moral panic that denigrated the unhoused as a scourge on the gentrifying city; and 5) the contemporary precariat in 21st century realist films that reveal the normative orientation itself—the assumptions about social mobility and the ability to successfully enter adulthood (i.e., having a home, family)—as having been bent, distorted or derailed.