Description
There is an evolving dialectic of claustrophobia and non-confinement in Songs My Brothers Taught Me (Zhao, 2015), The Rider (Zhao, 2017) and Nomadland (Zhao, 2020). This dialectic is unsentimental but sensitive to contrasting binaries of humans and nature, wealth and poverty, domesticity and wilderness, homeland and wasteland, youth and age, health and decrepitude, kinship and grief, individualism and the collective, earthbound existence and transcendence. In sum, as Zhao works towards synthesis, these binaries form a Hegelian dialectic that works through the juxtaposition of these theses and antitheses until a higher meaning is reached. The dialectic structure and approach of the three films individually and together aligns with the yin and yang of Buddhism that signals ‘the way’ of Taoism. The ‘trilogy’ thus posits a dialectical framework for working towards understanding that identifies a moral imperative and the acquisition of knowledge as a means of ascension towards a higher meaning. Thus, as this paper will contend, these films are structured as devotional paths that focus on the struggles to survive of marginalised characters in modern America and the sense that life should be a purifying journey. However, Zhao’s films also ask a crucial question: what if the way to the imagined life is blocked? In Nomadland, Zhao presents the movement from claustrophia to non-confinement of Fern (Frances McDormand), like that of Jashaun (Jashaun St.John) in Songs My Brothers Taught Me and Brady (Brady Jandreau) in The Rider before her, as a somewhat paradoxical synthesis of potential and its lack: “Desert, desert, desert: there was nothing in our way.” This paper therefore contends that Jashaun, Brady and Fern’s ultimate transcendence may result from suffering through bereavement, grief, and perpetual displacement, but, crucially, it also relies upon their understanding that these are natural cycles that exist and have meaning far beyond the lives that they might imagine to be economically gratifying, socially acceptable, politically integrated, and aesthetically pleasing.| Period | 7 Nov 2025 |
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| Held at | University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom |
| Degree of Recognition | National |