Lone Star

 

Blood only means what you let it.

Manifest Destiny

Fifty years ago, no one would have predicted that the destiny of the United States would be decided by events at our southern border.  I’m old enough to know this.

In 2025, the current political regime is largely a product of what has happened on the frontier between Mexico and the United States.  The current dysfunction in our political parties and the present assault on our institutions stems from an election that was decided, in large part, on the basis of what people imagine happening on the border.  Immigration from the south into the US has largely driven policy, and dominated the political debate since Donald Trump descended a gold escalator in his tower and declared that Mexico was flooding our country with murderers and rapists.  These issues resonate with voters in many ways – the border is the ultimate focus for fantasies involving law and order as well as paranoia as to American national identity.  One might argue that irrational anxiety about the Mexican border in the American southwest has brought this country to the brink of fascism.  The argument would be wrong in one crucial respect – we have already crossed the line, another politically significant frontier, into totalitarian territory.  

John Sayles’ Lone Star is now thirty years old.  The picture was made in 1995, but released in 1996.  This sprawling, messy epic about the frontier in Texas is prescient in every respect.  In fact, the issues raised by this film have a greater urgency and significance than they possessed when the movie was first released.  We are living in a distorted reality created by the experiences depicted in the film. 

With the massacre at Wounded Knee, Frederick Jackson Turner declared that the manifest destiny of the United States had been realized and that this was a sort of end of history.  America as agon, as the struggle to import European civilization into the wasteland, had reached its end-point.  When the real West closed and the permeable, wavering border between the wild and the settled dissolved, the movie Western was born.  Sayles’ Lone Star, of course, is a kind of Western fused with film noir and a murder mystery.  The frontier imagined as an invisible line between the wild Indians and encroaching villages with merchants and schoolmarms didn’t vanish completely.  Instead, as Sayles shows, the frontier shifted south to the contested terrain where the United States collides with old Mexico.  Turner thought America’s destiny was forged by the nation’s experience of the West; our contemporary political ecology is a product of the nation’s experience with migration across the southwestern border.  

Film as novel

John Sayles’ roots lie in literary fiction, specifically novels and short stories.  He began his career with The Pride of the Bimbos (1975), a much-acclaimed first novel about baseball.  He seems to be ending his career writing novels as well.  Since 2020, he has written three novels but does not seem to have directed any films.  

Sayles’ films frequently are “novelistic” in character.  This is particularly true of Lone Star, a film with a large cast, many subplots, and a complex, almost Proustian, time-traveling structure.  Lone Star raises a theoretical question – is there such a thing as film-novel?  (Of course, novels are often adapted for the screen; however, those adaptations generally prove the point that the novel and feature film are two widely disparate forms – ordinarily film versions of novels greatly simplify and streamline their source materials, eliminating digressions, sub-plots and minor characters.)  Like many novels, Lone Star presents a very complicated plot and takes care to develop the “back stories” of its characters.  There are many subplots and, even, digressions that don’t really contribute to the narrative – examples are the school board scene in the first part of the film, a dramatic and interesting sequence but one that has no narrative role in the plot; similarly, the allusions that the film makes to the community of Perdido (“Lost”) submerged under the waters of the reservoir is a digression that goes nowhere.  We learn that the military base at Frontera, the border town where the story is set, is going to be closed.  The townspeople fear the economic effects of this closing.  But this element of the story, also a subplot, is abandoned.  As with classical novels, the web of relationships, including secret consanguinity is central to the novel.  Sayles’ point is that everyone is bound together, connected by occult ties.  This aspect of the story relies heavily on concealed identities and various types of coincidences.  One intriguing and showy episode in the film, Sheriff Sam Deeds visit to his ex-wife, Bunny, is a showcase for Frances McDormand’s acting “chops” but has next to nothing to do with the film’s narrative.  In short stories, a form that Sayles has also mastered, plot is everything.  In the novel, atmosphere, milieu, and character for the sake of character are integral – these are the features that animate Lone Star.  

The great film critic, Siegfried Kracauer, begins his book The Theory of Film with the proposition that every esthetic form has an excellence that is particular to that art.  (For instance, painting is about depicting reality plausibly in two-dimensions until the advent of photography.  Post-photography painting is about the decoration of a two-dimensional plane defined by the canvas.)  Kracauer struggles to find a definition for the nature of film and its particularly metier, that is, the characteristics of expression that can be accomplished in film and only in film.  Arguably, Kracauer doesn’t succeed. Nonetheless, Lone Star which is, in effect, a large-scale novel realized visually in film is a test case for the cinema – can a movie achieve the effects that we associate with the literary form of the novel?

Sayles

John Sayles was born in Schenectady, New York in September 1950.  He initially distinguished himself by writing short stories for The Atlantic.  (These stories were collected in a 1977 book, Union Dues.)  Sayles was interested in film and went to Hollywood where he was hired to work with the exploitation director and producer, Roger Corman.  Corman taught Sayles to write terse, perfectly crafted scripts and, throughout his life, Sayles has held “shadow employment” as an uncredited “script doctor”.  For instance, he wrote dialogue and scenes for Ron Howard’s Apollo 13.  Sayles prefers writing to filmmaking in one respect – the writer controls entirely everything that appears on the page.  Sayles has tried to adapt this approach to making movies: he writes his films, directs them, and, then, edits the picture into its intended final form.  (Sayles says that if he could, he would shoot the movies as well, but this would distract him from directing the actors – nonetheless, photographs of Sayles on-set show him holding up his arms to “frame” the shots that he is directing.)

Sayles wrote a string of successful genre films for Corman’s studios, most notably Piranha and Alligator (knock-offs of Jaws).  With the money earned from this work, Sayles independently produced his first feature The Return of the Secaucus 7 (1979).  This low-budget Indy film depicts a weekend gathering of seven college friends, several of whom were campus activists.  (If the film’s premise seems familiar, this is because Lawrence Kasden’s The Big Chill, a successful and much more expensive studio film, imitates Sayle’s movie.)  Sayles wrote some more scripts including for the horror film The Howling, and, then, was able to use the proceeds paid to him to make Lianna (1983), a film about a lesbian love affair and, then, a conventional romantic comedy Baby its You (also released in 1983) starring Roseanne Arquette.  Over the next dozen years, Sayles made a string of independently produced films (the movies are produced by his companion Maggie Renzi) on which his critical reputation rests – these movies include Matewan, The Brother from Another Planet, Eight Men Out, The Secret of Roan Inish, and Lone Star.  Other estimable films include Men with Guns (1997), Limbo (1999) and Sunshine State (2002).  During the last twenty years, Sayles has made fewer movies and they have achieved less critical success.  However, he continues to write, acts occasionally, and directs, mostly cable TV episodes.  

Sayles is politically progressive and his films show a strong liberal bias.  Generally, his features explore some social or political problem.  His cinema, accordingly, can be considered “engaged” – he addresses problems such as racism, immigration, bigotry against sexual minorities, corruption in society and politics, and America’s culture of greed.  Sayles’ artistry, however, prevents him from dogmatic or ideologically doctrinaire presentations of these issues – his novelistic inclinations make his characteristic work exceedingly complex and intricate with a multi-faceted approach to the subject that he is studying.  His films are intriguing because he infuses them with the genre zing and sizzle that he learned working with Roger Corman on exploitation films.

Genre

Lone Star alludes to various previous films and genres.  The picture’ style is that of a classical Western, highlighting vistas of desolate terrain and saloons full of armed men.  Stuart Drybaugh, Sayles director of photography for Lone Star shot the film in wide-screen cinemascope format, using Panavision stock.  The first confrontation between men with guns in the flashback to the tavern is staged in the manner of gunfights in Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West, a model, Drybaugh says, for much of the film’s camerawork.  Once upon a Time in the West features Henry Fonda playing against type as a vicious murderer (he shoots a child at point-blank range in one scene); Lone Star cast the avuncular Kris Kristofferson against type as the murderous and bigoted sheriff Charlie Wade.  (Kris Kristofferson, of course, was indelible as the gunfighter Billy the Kid in Peckinpah’s masterpiece Pat Garret and Billy the Kid.)  Lone Star’s themes relating to history becoming legend invoke John Ford’s The Man who shot Liberty Valence.  The border setting dominated by a corrupt sheriff alludes to Orson Welles Touch of Evil, another picture set on the Mexican border near Tijuana in which Welles himself plays the part of the racist and brutal District Attorney – in that film, Welles’ corrupt Hank Quinlan “frames” a Mexican kid who turns out to be guilty.  There is a puzzling subplot in Lone Star involving a Chicano village named Perdido that is callously drowned when a reservoir is built – this part of the film, complete with diagram maps as to the location of the dam and the submerged village seems derived from Chinatown.  Miriam Colon, the Cuban actress who plays the restauranteur Mercedes Cruz was first featured in Marlon Brando’s art-house Western, One-Eyed Jacks.  Sayles’ script plays with audience expectations based on our recollection of these earlier films – we understand the Lone Star’s genre aspects and this understanding contributes to our interest in the movie; the political anti-racist aspects of the film are fed to us in a format that dissolves ideology in a welter of allusions to other movies.  

Frontera

Initially, Sayles planned to shoot Lone Star in Austin, Texas.  The script had a long gestation – Sayles recalls writing early drafts as far back as 1979.  (Sayles recalls that he was in Austin, Texas to play a small role in exploitation film that he had written Piranha.  Joe Dante directed the picture.  On his day off, Sayles went to San Antonio to see the Alamo.  At that time, Chicanos were protesting at the historical site, carrying banners that said “Tell the whole story.”  These experiences inspired some of the script.)  In the mid-nineties, Sayles returned to the project, initiating efforts to raise funding for the movie.  At that point, the script was not yet complete. However, once he secured the money to begin making the movie, he worked quickly – he had his script substantially complete in about 2 months.  Sayles recruited Stuart Drybaugh, a New Zealand cameraman, to shoot the movie after seeing two of Drybaugh’s films at the South by Southwest festival in Austin – those films were The Piano (Jane Campion) and Lee Tamahori’s Once were Warriors.  Drybaugh recalls the shock he felt, at first, encountering the vast Chihuahuan desert in west Texas.  “I had come,” he says, “from New Zealand where everything is green and wet and, suddenly, I was surrounded by cactus.”

Drybaugh and Sayles quickly concluded that Austin, Texas was too urban and Anglo to represent the fictional border town, Frontera.  So the production was moved to Eagle Pass where almost all of Lone Star was shot.  Eagle Pass, of course, is a real border town on the Rio Grande river across from Piedras Negras in Mexico.  The old downtown had been emptied-out by a Walmart “big box” on the edge of the village and Sayles was able to cheaply rent some downtown buildings for his locations – this includes the restaurant operated by Mercedes Cruz in which much of the action takes place.  The only significant set built entirely for the movie is the Vaquero Drive-In, an abandoned outdoor movie theater that Sayles had constructed from the ground-up.  (This location, also, alludes to Peter Bogdanovich’s modern Western, The Last Picture Show.)  The scenes of migrants crossing the border by wading in the Rio Grande (to Mexican’s the Rio Bravo el Norte, “the wild river of the North”) were actually shot with handheld cameras in the river itself.  In 1995, the Border was not militarized.  Sayles was able to easily pass back and forth across the border.  In one sequence, the audience is shown a turnstile at the border that people crossing activate by paying a dime to cross between old Mexico and Texas.  Matthew McConaughey, who was not an important movie star at the time this film was made (he had appeared in one previous movie, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused) knew the area well; he was born and raised in Uvalde, the site of a notorious school shooting about 60 miles to the northeast of Eagle Pass.  Sayles remarked that he cast McConaughey as Buddy Deeds because he needed a charismatic actor whom he could afford, that is, someone who was not a movie star yet, but with sufficient gravitas to effectively play against Kris Kristofferson.

Flashbacks

Lone Star is notable in that its flashbacks are not signaled by any kind of camera dissolve or, even, edit.  Sayles just tilts the camera away from the scene posited to take place in the present (the mid 90's)  to reveal actors who are performing in scenes imagined to occur forty years earlier.  This is a device that appears frequently in Tarkovsky pictures.  Sayles’ use of this technique is another form of “border crossing” – just as the border between Texas and Mexico is porous so, similarly, the border between past and present is completely permeable.  The past is always present and insistently available, coloring everything that occurs in the here and now.  In one scene, involving a confrontation over a basket of tortillas, Sayles moves the camera from the face of the mayor (and previously sheriff’s deputy) Hollis down toward the tortillas that a waitress has set on the table.  When the camera tilts back up to the right from the table surface, the background has changed and we are in the restaurant as it looked in the late fifties with the corrupt sheriff Charlie Wade reaching for the tortillas – these effects are all “practical”, accomplished by off-screen grips simply moving away and out of the frame painted flats, beige brown for the present-day café and dark blue for the same place as it existed in the fifties. The actor playing the town’s mayor, Clifton James, was too old and stiff to get off-screen before the camera tilted back in his direction and, so, several other grips simply lifted him up in his chair and hustled him off-screen.

Incest

Alert viewers will likely perceive that the relationship between Pilar and Sam Deeds is incestuous long before the definitive reveal in the last scene at the abandoned outdoor movie theater.  The shadow of incest hangs over the entire picture and represents a fundamental truth about the American enterprise.  We are all brothers and sisters despite apparent differences.  The film presents incest, and the acceptance of incest, as the solution to the dilemmas of our history.

Epilogue

In 2023, Sayles went back to Eagle Pass.  Things on the border were far worse than they had been in 1994 -1995 when the film was made.  “The border is now a nightmare,” Sayles said.  He recalled that,  in the old days, the border patrol agents would shout at Mexicans crossing the river or desert: no hagas correr – that is, “don’t make me run.”  The illegals would, then, stop and allow the border patrol to apprehend them.  Border patrol would drive to the nearest bridge over the Rio Grande, escort the undocumented immigrant to the Mexican side.  “Maybe, I’ll see you again tomorrow,” the Border Agent would politely say.  “Maybe,” the illegal might say in return.  

The border is now militarized.  Sayles walked up to the wall.  He said it looks like a bizarre piece of conceptual art, something on the order of Christo’s “Running Fence”.  Sayles and his buddy urinated on the wall, got in their pickup and drove back to ole San Antone.