Texas

https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/30-minutes-on-lone-star

Released 25 years ago this week, John Sayles’ “Lone Star” is the director’s best film and the most wide-ranging and sophisticated drama ever set in Texas. And it is the movie that best understands how Texans mythologize and lie about themselves, and how the lying and mythologizing dovetails with deception and self-deception in the rest of the nation, and the world.

“Lone Star” is set on the border separating Texas from Mexico in the fictional town of Frontera. As the story unfolds, we keep returning to the concept of the frontier as precisely that: a concept, not a real, measurable thing. The idea of “the frontier” nevertheless defined the self-image of white settlers in the 19th century, and powered the next 150 years’ worth of Western fiction, films, and TV series, as well as works in other genres that are essentially Westerns in science-fiction, crime thriller, or action movie drag (see in particular the career of director Walter Hill, who has worked in all four genres but ultimately always makes Westerns.)

But “frontier” means something different to Native Americans, Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Black Americans who were either displaced from their land or prevented from owning land in the first place. To them, the word was not a promise, but a threat. The phrase Manifest Destiny was even scarier, because it meant the assimilation and conquering was ordained by a higher power. The word ‘border,’ likewise, can mean everything or nothing depending on who’s using it. As one “Lone Star” character points out, a bird flying from the US to Mexico doesn’t see, much less recognize, a border.

Sayles’ script starts out telling stories of white, Black, Mexican-American and Mexican people that seem to be unfolding along parallel lines, with rare points of intersection. But when you get to the end, you realize they were never really separate—that, in fact, seemingly independent, self determined lives were set in motion decades ago by actions of parents or ancestors that our main players barely knew (or were told lies about). The result is a web of interdependence that requires representatives of every major demographic group to compromise their values, initially for survival and then (after they assimilate and have children) for land, money, and comfort. The separations cease to be important except as arbitrary markers of power, and by the end of the movie, all boundaries dissolve, even those determined by race, culture, and family bloodline. What makes “Lone Star” feel so honest and timeless is its insistence that its characters are just human beings, and when they act in cowardly, acquisitive, or treacherous ways, they are behaving in accordance with their conditioning, in ways they may not realize. And even when they strive to do their best, they fall short.

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