"It's hard not rodeoing anymore."

Brady Blackburn gouges out the staples securing a bandage to the side of his head with a pocket knife, revealing a Frankensteinian gash. He wraps his head in cellophane before taking a shower to prevent the water from seeping into his skull. After cleaning off, he unsuccessfully attempts to lasso an artificial bull. His father Wayne returns home, drunk, and mocks his failure: "What the hell, can't you rope anymore?"

This is how The Rider begins and how writer/director Chloé Zhao tells us what's on her mind. There's a lot going on in the film, but most of it can be traced back to these brief moments where Brady finds himself with a massive head wound struggling to perform relatively simple rodeo activities and his father ridicules him for his inability. Brady loves the rodeo; it's where he finds meaning and purpose in life, but in return it does irreparable damage to both his body and his mind. We feel his fragility, we feel the delicate nature of the skeleton that keeps our sensitive insides from becoming outsides, and alongside this we see his stubbornness, we see his refusal to give up despite the all-too-clear toll it's taking on him. And we see the way he's externally pressured to ignore that toll, the way his father patronizingly bullies him into concealing his insufficiency.

There's an interesting false parallel here: both Brady and his father want Brady to return to the rodeo, but they want it for very different reasons. Brady wants it because the rodeo is where he finds personal fulfillment, but his father and the world around them don't have Brady's best interests at heart. Their desire for Brady to saddle back up again is something more ethereal, some desire to justify their own bad decisions. Wayne has worked hard to make this life a possibility for Brady; how dare he throw it away? Brady's friends casually discuss their own injuries: "by NFL standards I should be dead," but they never "let no pain put you down," so what would it mean if Brady stepped back? How would his better judgment invalidate their own poor life decisions?

This social pressure is explicitly gender-coded: Brady's sister Lilly and his female friend Terri both repeatedly encourage him to stop putting his life on the line in direct opposition to his male friend's recklessness. It wouldn't be a western if it didn't have something to say about masculinity, after all. These men are caught up in cycles of self-destruction; even Brady passes down his legacy of sacrifice to a fan he meets at the grocery store and to his friend's little brother. Their manhood is riding on this self-inflicted violence, and if Brady steps away from it then they all could have stepped away for it as well. They can't let that happen. Masculinity is thus presented as stubborn self-flagellation, but even if it seems like an artificially constructed social norm, it has undeniably created a meaningful network for Brady's self-knowledge.

Brady rings so true not merely because he's a compelling victim of masculine normativity, but because he taps into a deeper psychological tendency buried at the heart of human nature. The Rider was such an emotionally ragged experience for me because I’ve been there myself, and it’s hard to watch Brady throw himself so desperately back into his passion when it’s done nothing but hurt him. Maybe we're not all being trampled by horses who open cracks in our skulls, but Brady's extremity just makes him a more powerful embodiment of the same drive. We all sacrifice something of ourselves in an effort to become what we want to be.

Sometimes life demands too much of us; sometimes the toll on our body and mind is too great, and that's what hurts so much about The Rider. It's a hard world out there, and sometimes everything that we have to give just isn't enough. But life doesn't end with our dreams. Turn around and rejoin the family who showed up to see you hurt yourself one last time even though they didn't want you to go. Hold your brother's hands and ride with him through the open valley. Find the other dream that was right there in front of you all along.

"I'm not going to end up like you."

For ScarlettDubois
2017 | Directed by Women | Westerns