SOURCE: Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack. “Forget the Alamo: Reading the Ethics of Style in John Sayles's Lone Star.” Style 32, no. 3 (fall 1998): 471-85.

[In the following essay, Davis and Womack praise the visual style of Lone Star and discuss the film's handling of the cultural history of a Texas border town.]

Blood only means what you let it.

—John Sayles, Lone Star

In an editorial of 26 March 1997, Linda Chavez, the President of the Center for Equal Opportunity and a nationally syndicated columnist, laments Hollywood's subtle “chipping away at the incest taboo,” arguing that John Sayles's 1996 film, Lone Star, advocates incest as “just another alternative life style choice.” While Chavez derides the film as a “boring, politically correct saga about prejudice and murder in a small Texas town,” her critique of Sayles's narrative neglects the tremendous import of incest as a metaphor for the history of ethnic struggle in Frontera, Texas, Lone Star's fictive cultural battleground (“Kiss” 25).¹ Similarly, Laura Miller of Salon Magazine ridicules Lone Star as “a sort of Frankenstein's monster cobbled together from dozens of garden-variety movie clichés and ordered by its creator to deliver a moral of bland multiculturalism” (3).² As with Chavez, Miller seems loathe to recognize Sayles's deliberate narrative design and his express interest in commenting upon the fractious cultural dilemmas of our past and their often silent impact upon the present. In Lone Star, Sayles skillfully exploits the incest taboo as the vehicle for his analysis of the interconnected ethnic threads that constitute contemporary American life and the often uneasy relationships that continue to exist between the races. Sayles's incest metaphor also provides the writer and filmmaker with a prescient means for exploring the ways in which our shared history impinges upon the ethical choices that confront us in the present.

Sayles constructs his ethical examination of Frontera's historical and present-day cultural dilemmas by virtue of an arresting and carefully plotted visual style. As Martha C. Nussbaum notes, an artist's sense of style—whether visual, literary, or otherwise—often functions as a means for rendering ethical judgments. In Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990), Nussbaum argues that “form and style are not incidental features. A view of life is told. The telling itself—the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader's sense of life—all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life's relations and connections,” she writes; “life is never simply presented by a text; it is always represented as something” (5). In Lone Star, Sayles employs the film's cinematography as a dramatic means for commenting upon the nature of Frontera's shared sense of culture and community. By using a series of flashbacks and flashforwards, Sayles highlights the sociological disjunctions between Frontera's segregated past and its relationship to the ethnic tensions that plague the border town's historical present.

Sayles produces Lone Star's striking visual style through his careful manipulation of the audience's sense of time and place. By altering our traditional understandings of temporality and setting, Sayles succeeds in demonstrating the ethical interconnections between the past and the present. In Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1981), the French rhetorician Gérard Genette offers a useful mechanism for exploring the particular narratological elements that establish style and tempo within a literary work, in Genette's case, Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. These narrative movements—specifically, summary, ellipsis, descriptive pause, and scene—reveal the stylistic foundations that produce the overall impression that a given narrative evokes. Such movements establish a tempo within a text, and their efficacy can be measured by the effects they create within that narrative. With Lone Star, the application of Genette's narrative principles usefully demonstrates the moral impact of Sayles's visual style, as well as of his strategic, ethically motivated tampering with traditional conceptions of time and place. Genette's narratological schema also underscores the manner in which the narrative elements inherent in Sayles's film function as a means for considering the “disruptive power” of history, in the words of Richard Schickel, and its remarkable impact upon the present when the past remains obscured by a veil of silence (95).

Yet the application of Genette's theories of narrative discourse to film calls into question many of the rhetorician's arguments regarding temporality and textual duration. In contrast to the variable nature of the reading experience, the cinema confronts its audience with a markedly different, more controlled form of narrative consumption. Simply put, the notion of screen time differs dramatically from reading time because film—at least under normal, theatrical viewing conditions—never stops rolling; the conditions of cinema strictly control narrative duration, itself a more elastic and mutable concept during the reading experience. “Just as we cannot choose to skip around in a film or go back and rewatch a portion,” David Bordwell observes in Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), “so we cannot control how long the narration takes to unfold. This [limitation] is of capital importance for filmic construction and comprehension” (80). In short, projection time governs the audience's reception of film narrative. While Genette's theories of discourse prove revelatory when applied to the cinematic experience, a stylistic reading of film demands consideration of the various narrative properties specific to film as a storytelling genre. As Edward Branigan notes in Narrative Comprehension and Film (1992), “By linking style to the fundamental time of projection, style becomes a basic ingredient of cinema—one of the ways in which the medium controls narration and the spectator's perception of plot and story” (149).

Although understanding the constraints of projection time highlights the inherent stylistic differences between filmic and literary narratives, the notion of cinematic implied authorship demonstrates the decidedly similar function of authority in each medium. While the contingency of the projector seems to negate some of the value of Genette's theories to film study, particularly his notion of the descriptive pause, understanding the role of authorship in film underscores the cinematic relevance of his theories regarding summary, ellipsis, and scene. “Films, like novels,” Seymour Chatman argues in Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (1990), “present phenomena that cannot otherwise be accounted for, such as the discrepancy between what the cinematic narrator presents and what the film as a whole implies” (130-31). For this reason, as consumers of film narrative—as with literary texts—we depend upon a given film's implied author for the manner in which we consume the cinematic experience.³ Simply put, we perceive what implied authors or narrators perceive; we often share in their speculations about the narrative's possible outcomes, as well as in their emotional responses to the events that they encounter on the screen. The cinematic narrative's principal focalizer essentially operates in this sense, then, as the director's alter ego, the character through whom the audience experiences the film's story, plot, and dialogue.

In Lone Star, Sayles's narrative traces the multicultural progress of Rio County by following Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper)—both the son of Frontera's former and legendary sheriff, Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), and the film's implied narrator—in his investigation of the apparent murder of his father's misanthropic predecessor, Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson). In the film, the specter of his celebrated father's local mystique haunts Sam as he begins to discover the mysterious past shared by Frontera's at-once segregated and interconnected Anglo, Hispanic, African-American, and Native-American communities. While Sayles uses the conventional stylistics of the murder mystery to establish the frame of the story, his true search remains clear: Frontera, once a town on the margin of Anglo-American expansion, now resides on the frontier of American multiculturalism. As with many border towns in the United States, Frontera's limits of demarcation seem arbitrary in nature. Those who live in town share a heritage and a history that binds them to one another in unexpected, and, at times, shocking ways; because of the bonds of history, Sayles seems to argue in Lone Star, it is often difficult facilely to sort out the good from the bad, the right from the wrong. Sayles further complicates the intersections of race and class, for by placing a military base in Frontera, he establishes the historical precedence of protectionism that permeates much of the thinking in Frontera and in America in general. The presence of the military base also allows Sayles to introduce a number of African-American characters into Frontera's predominantly Anglo and Hispanic multicultural mélange. Together, these afford the director a microcosm of race in the United States, as well as an element of flux, for those who live on the base are not rooted in Frontera's past in the same ways as the locals.

Early in the film, Sayles establishes Sam Deeds as Lone Star's principal focalizer. Because he represents the law, his search—while personal in some regards—touches the lives and locations of virtually all of the characters. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan explains that “focalization has both a subject and an object. The subject (the ‘focalizer’) is the agent whose perception orients the presentation, whereas the object (the ‘focalized’) is what the focalizer perceives” (74). In many ways. Sam serves as the moral or ethical compass of the film; his perceptions of Frontera and its inhabitants certainly orient the viewer to the landscape of intersecting cultures while also allowing for a form of mediation. Because Sam appears to be a man of reasonable actions and reasonable conclusions, he creates a sense of reserved judgment that in turn permits the viewer to watch and wait. Sayles exploits the conventions of the murder mystery in Lone Star as a means for heightening his audience's curiosity about the puzzling events of Frontera's past; as the film's literal detective, Sam leads us on a quest for the truth—not only about the identity of Wade's killer, but also about the truth of Frontera's cultural history. As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson note. “It is the detective's job to disclose, at the end, the missing causes—to name the killer, explain the motive, and reveal the method” (69). Transcending the genre, Sayles's murder mystery does not push the viewer toward a verdict; rather, Sayles seems more intent on challenging the viewer to deliberate over the affairs of Frontera instead of merely judging them.

In this fashion, Sayles narrates much of Lone Star—especially Sam's own uneasy relationship with his father and with the past—through the use of summary.⁴ What makes Lone Star of interest stylistically is the fact that Sayles actually uses summary as more than simple connective tissue. While Sayles employs summary in order to underscore the importance of other moments in the film that take place in the historical present, the summary scenes, nonetheless, transcend their role as mere background. In effect, by placing more weight upon summary than is customary, Sayles suggests the ethical portent of history and its intimate relationship with the present.⁵ To this end, Sayles projects Sam, as “listener,” into several summary scenes by using ellipsis, a narrative element that highlights the connections between the past and present, elucidating the shared interstices of the Frontera community. In his study of narrative discourse, Genette establishes two forms of ellipsis, explicit and implicit. Explicit ellipses clearly indicate a lapse of time, according to Genette, while implicit ellipses suggest a more indefinite time-lapse and can only be inferred by the reader based upon a gap in a given narrative's continuity (106-09). Most often using explicit ellipses, Sayles signals such transitions in Lone Star by drawing the viewer's eye toward details of historical significance. First panning either left or right, up or down, Sayles then uses a form of the elliptic cut to connote a shift in time, and, in certain instances, a shift in place as well. Bordwell and Thompson define this process generally as elliptical editing, which consists of “shot transitions that omit parts of an event, causing an ellipsis in plot and story duration” (260).

The first instance of explicit ellipsis occurs early in the film in the Café Santa Barbara. There, Hollis Pogue (Clifton James), former deputy and current mayor of Frontera, holds forth to a court of “two good old boys” on the legendary subject of Buddy—whom he hopes to honor with the naming of a park and the commissioning of a statue.⁶ Before Sayles shifts his narrative into the past through the stylistic device of ellipsis, he allows Sam to engage Fenton (Tony Frank), one of the good old boys listening to Hollis, in a dialogue about the commemoration in the present. Fenton is enraged because, as he puts it, “every other damn thing in the country is called after Martin Luther King; they can't let our side have one measly park.” Pointing out that the other possibility for the park commemoration concerned a Mexican-American youth who was killed in the Gulf War, not an African American, Sam goads Fenton into a more animated racist diatribe. In response to Fenton and Sam, Hollis suggests that “the Mexicans that know, that remember, understand what Buddy was for their people.” At this juncture, Fenton entreats Hollis to tell the story of how Buddy came to be sheriff in 1957. Although at first Hollis demurs because “everybody heard that story a million times,” he eventually agrees when Sam says he wants to hear Hollis's “version of it.” At each point in the film when Sayles shifts, through ellipsis, from the present into the recounted past, he purposively demonstrates that what we are receiving is a “version” of history. Sayles's use of summary prods the viewer toward an understanding that history is personal, political, and, perhaps most important, contextual; his decision to use the generic conventions of the murder mystery, moreover, supports the idea that the truth of the past is always shifting in relation to the vantage point of the observer. While many readers might struggle with the idea that history shifts depending on context, few would deny that a murder investigation involves finding clues within the stories of witnesses and suspects, that the objective act of the crime is lost to the past and may only be discovered through the myriad tales of those who live on. In Lone Star, we journey through ellipsis into summary so not only that the story the silence of historical memory seeks to avoid may be heard, but, as Lone Star's conclusion reveals, that all stories inevitably impinge upon one another.

While Genette's theory originates with written narratives, the principles of ellipsis and summary offer insight into film as well. In this case, the film cut—the most common transition between shots—functions in film in a manner similar to an ellipsis in print narrative. Sayles uses the traditional cut in Lone Star to great effect in his visual narration of Frontera's multicultural tableau. For instance, the film opens with three simple cuts that establish the army base, Pilar Cruz's school, and Mercedes Cruz's café as important settings for the story. Sayles chooses, however, to use elliptical editing—which he achieves with tracking shots—at several strategic points in the film to emphasize the interconnections within Frontera's many different histories, the ways in which the past and the present preside over the actions of those living in the here and now. In the first instance of elliptical editing, Hollis begins his version of the story about the night that Buddy became sheriff. As the ellipsis begins and Hollis's story shifts into summary, the camera moves from the faces of the men who are gathered around the restaurant table in the present moment to a tight focus on the tortilla basket that rests in the center of the table. Sayles cues the audience to the shift in time by highlighting the basket's plastic construction in the present in contrast to its straw fabrication in the past. Far more subtle than a superimposed date on the screen, this technique not only emphasizes the fluidity and consequence of time's passage; it also serves as the means via which Sayles symbolically conflates Frontera's sense of cultural past and present.

Hollis's story serves as a striking visual introduction to Buddy's character and creates a moment in which we may observe Sam's reactions to the looming presence of his dead father. One of the ancillary themes running through Lone Star concerns the relationship between fathers and sons. When Frontera's citizenry often remind Sam in direct and indirect ways that there will never be another sheriff like Buddy, they imply that Sam will never live up to the standards of his father. In a corollary story, Colonel Del Payne (Joe Morton), the new commander of the army base, struggles both with the forty-year divide that rests between himself and his father, Otis Payne (Ron Canada), owner of “Big O's,” the only bar in town where African Americans feel welcome, and with the increasing separation that grows between himself and Chet (Eddie Robinson), his high-school aged son. Sayles emphasizes the significance of knowing the past through interpersonal relationship as he explores the dynamic within these families. The notion that knowledge comes through such relationships is introduced early in the film at the school board meeting where angry parents argue about the multicultural pedagogy that Pilar (Elizabeth Peña) employs in her history courses. The assembled parents challenge her current teaching methodology because she supplements the approved textbook with lessons that attempt to expose students to several different perspectives of a single historical event, a technique replicated by Sayles himself as he offers multiple perspectives in the narrative construction of Lone Star. The meeting exposes the divisions in the community that have evolved over time because of the lack of intercultural relationship and communication among Frontera's citizenry. As with Sam or Del or Chet—whose personal lives have been separated by anger and misunderstanding—the community as a whole can come to no true understanding of its many histories without the ability to listen to one another in human relationships.

On one level, by making a film like Lone Star Sayles encourages his audience to engage in ethical debate with the very problems that threaten his characters. Through the compelling form of the murder mystery, Sayles draws the audience into a relationship of desire for the knowledge of what actually transpired at the scene of the crime, but, as a result of that knowledge, he presents us with a story that transcends generic boundaries and moves us into closer relationship with the concerns of the other cultures he introduces in the film. In “Film and Cultural Identity,” Rey Chow explains that because “cultural identity is something that always finds an anchor in specific media of representation, it is easy to see why the modes of illusory presence made possible by film have become such strong contenders in the controversial negotiations for cultural identity; film has always been, since its inception, a transcultural phenomenon,” Chow contends, “having as it does the capacity to transcend ‘culture’—to create modes of fascination which are readily accessible and which engage audiences in ways independent of their linguistic and cultural specificities” (169, 174). Without the relationship that Sayles creates via the murder mystery, however, the transcultural experience that Lone Star offers would not carry the same ethical import. Because Sayles draws his characters together naturally through Sam's detective work, their lives and histories commingle in an authentic fashion, compelling the audience toward a deeper understanding of race and family. As with his earlier films such as The Brother from Another Planet (1984) and City of Hope (1991), Sayles establishes cultural metaphors in Lone Star in order to highlight the deeper interconnections that define our shared sense of humanity. As we discover in the film's startling conclusion, Sayles's primary concern—although we become involved with the very real families that populate Frontera—is that we come to a knowledge of the universal family of humanity, an idea, he suggests, that ultimately binds us to one another.

Yet Sayles's films inevitably recognize that coming to an understanding of the nuances of interpersonal connection often exacts a painful price. In effect, as we move through the stories of characters whose lives were touched by Buddy, we begin to recognize that Sam's efforts at solving the murder of Wade indicate a cultural shift that many in Frontera simply don't wish to make. In his review of Lone Star, Schickel suggests that “the silence of [Wade's] grave symbolizes a larger and more conspiratorial silence afflicting Frontera. […] Sayles wants us to count the costs of silence too—in the baleful distortions it imposes on the people who keep it, in the damage it eventually does to innocents like Sam and Pilar when they are not let in on the secret it shrouds. Above all,” Schickel continues, Sayles “wants us to understand that when we deny history we grant it a more disruptive power” (95). The cultural shift that must occur in Frontera involves the embrace of histories, not the denial of history. In the past, when Frontera was a town ruled by Anglos, order was founded upon a single narrative, and Buddy not only helped author that narrative but also worked hard to enforce it. While he certainly did not use the sadistic measures of his predecessor, the desire for a peace founded upon a single narrative remained. Not surprisingly—as we see in the stories told in visual summary by Minnie or Big O or Chucho—the African-American and Hispanic communities did not seek to disrupt Buddy's narrative or abolish his rule as sheriff. The conditions they lived under during Buddy's tenure were far more amenable than those during the tyranny of Wade. But at the current juncture in Frontera's history, the next generation is no longer satisfied by the single historical narrative embraced by the town's elders, and, because of this turn away from a single organizing myth of the good Buddy Deeds and the evil Charley Wade, we witness the disruptions at the school as Pilar attempts to demonstrate the diversity and complexity of history or the revelation encountered by Del as the young female private in his command explains to him that she is in the army because “this is one of the best deals they [the white majority] offer.”

The use of visual summary, and, in some instances, descriptive pause, also provides Sayles with a means for imbuing the setting of Lone Star with a striking sense of the various ethnic figures who surround greater Frontera—from the Mexicans who live just beyond the nearby river's watery borders to the Native Americans selling cultural artifacts on the outskirts of town and the Texans themselves, who function as modern caricatures of mythic Western archetypes from a bygone era. Sayles allows his audience to encounter these different cultural factions by placing Mexican, Native-American, and Texan characters, respectively, in the path of Sam's murder investigation. While attempting to learn about the circumstances of the death of Eladio Cruz (Gilbert R. Cuellar Jr.) during Wade's tenure as sheriff, Sam visits Chucho (Tony Amendola), a former Texas resident and the current owner of a tire repair shop, in the Mexican border town of Ciudad León. Known locally as the Rey de las Llantas (“King of the Tires”), Chucho narrates the events surrounding Wade's cold-blooded murder of Eladio by way of summary, while also musing about the “invisible line” that divides Mexico and the United States. This invisible line not only divides those two countries, but also the past and the present, imbuing the boundary with both geographical and historical significance. Hoping to learn more about his father's past, Sam later visits Wesley Birdsong (Gordon Tootoosis) at the Native American's roadside stand. During their ensuing conversation, Wesley sifts through a variety of cultural artifacts, from a longhorn skull and a wooden replica of the Alamo that also functions as a radio to a rattlesnake skin and souvenir buffalo chips. Through a series of descriptive pauses, Wesley informs Sam about Buddy's restless past, as well as about the former sheriff's extramarital relationship with a mystery Frontera woman. According to Genette, descriptive pauses occur when the author withdraws from the diegesis, or story, to describe a scene that the reader and other characters in the passage are not currently viewing (99-102). In this manner, Wesley—as he pauses to examine the found objects of Frontera's past and narrates the events of Buddy's youth—provides Sam with valuable personal insight into his father's personal history.⁷ The dusty, unsold contents of the Native American's roadside stand also signal the viewer about the ephemeral nature of Texas's Western past and the declining value of that past in the state's shifting multicultural present.

Finally, Sam's encounter with his manic-depressive ex-wife offers valuable visual clues about the fate of the archetypal Texan in the modern world. Once a cultural icon of Western life and values, the Texan—represented by the personage of Bunny (Frances McDormand), Sam's former wife—now struggles to find a sense of identity as the exaggerated caricature of the sports fanatic. Disparaged by her father for being too “high strung,” Bunny sits in a living room that functions as a virtual museum of Texas sports memorabilia. Wearing a Houston Oilers sweatshirt and a Dallas Cowboys hat and sitting in front of a big-screen television, Bunny perches on a couch surrounded by signed footballs, team posters, and videocassettes of Texas professional and college football games. Bunny's obsession with the world of Texas sports manifests itself in her wide-ranging knowledge of football statistics, even including such sports ephemera as the weight-lifting abilities of local high-school football players and the nuances of the professional football draft. Yet, as with Chucho and Wesley before her, Bunny functions as but one more piece of the multicultural puzzle that confronts Sam as he searches for Wade's killer.⁸

In order to illuminate further the ethical nature of Sayles's use of visual summary, we must first examine the narratological element that Genette refers to as scene and how scene in Lone Star pushes Sam and Pilar toward radical insights about their love and their relationship to the community of Frontera. Although the most startling revelations in the film occur in summary passages, as an audience we remain concerned about the effect of these revelations on the characters in the present. A scene most often occurs in dialogue, says Genette, and “realizes conventionally the equality of time between narrative and story” (94). Sayles skillfully uses summary to comment on such scenes in his visual narrative, and their juxtaposition in Lone Star is loaded with ethical import. Sayles concentrates the film's most dramatic energy in three scenes involving Frontera's painful, yet ultimately remedial, excavation of its monocultural past. In the first scene, Sayles narrates Mercedes's arrival in Texas and her first meeting with Eladio, her future husband, using a brief visual summary that provides a flashback to 1945 of Mercedes crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to Texas by moonlight.⁹ Sayles carefully juxtaposes this summary with a scene depicting Enrique (Richard Coca), one of the employees in Mercedes's restaurant, begging her to help him care for his girlfriend, who has broken her leg while illegally entering Texas. When Enrique confronts her with his dilemma, Mercedes instinctively decides to call the border patrol, for she prides herself on only hiring legal immigrants, whom she admonishes to speak English—“This is the United States,” she recites to the employees of the Café Santa Barbara, and “we speak English.” Yet Enrique's situation reminds her of her own initial passage to Texas and Mercedes eventually chooses to assist Enrique in his plight without notifying the border patrol. By deciding to act on Enrique's behalf and implicitly sanction his girlfriend's illegal entry into Texas, Mercedes opts to embrace, rather than redact, her own personal history.

Sam comes to a similar conclusion about Frontera's jaded cultural past when he finally discovers the identity of Wade's killer. As the narrative of Lone Star seems to reach its dramatic apex, Sam confronts Hollis and Otis late one night at Big O's, the last place where anyone ever saw Wade alive. As Otis begins to narrate the events of that fateful evening, the camera pans from the present into the past through the bar's back room, where we suddenly see a much younger Otis engaged in an intense card game with four other African-American youths. Interrupted by Wade, Otis's after-hours guests scatter, leaving him alone to face the sadistic sheriff. As Wade prepares to shoot Otis at point-blank range, Hollis, the sheriff's ever-present deputy and the witness to his numerous human atrocities, fires upon his superior just as the shadowy figure of Buddy enters the bar. Fearing for Hollis's safety if the truth of Wade's death ever emerged, Otis, Hollis, and Buddy decide to allow legend to narrate the tale of the late sheriff's disappearance. As “time went on,” Otis explains to Sam, “people liked the story that we told better than anything the truth might have been.” Yet with the identity of Wade's killer finally revealed, Sam chooses to ignore the literal truth of history and let Buddy's role in the popular story of Wade's death endure. “Buddy's a goddamn legend,” Sam concludes; “he can handle it.” Again, as with Mercedes before him, Sam—through the visual auspices of Sayles's narratological summary—allows history to repeat itself rather than correct the fraudulent narrative of the past. By letting Buddy's legendary deeds on behalf of Frontera survive, Sam embraces, rather than disavows, the border town's ethnically beleaguered past.

While the knowledge of his father's actual role in the disappearance of Wade provides Sam with some sense of conclusion to the murder investigation that he conducts throughout Lone Star's narrative, his close inspection of Frontera's past confronts him with several alarming questions about his personal heritage. During the course of his forensic study of Frontera's cultural past, Sam and Pilar rekindle a romantic relationship that finds its origins in their teenage years. Sayles employs summary as a means for informing the audience about their romantic past and the sudden, dramatic demise of their relationship at the hands of Buddy. In one instance, Pilar laments—rather ironically, considering her enduring feelings for Sam in the present—that “nobody stays in love for twenty-three years.” Sayles segues from Pilar's words in the present to a 1972 summary scene at a drive-in movie theater, where we witness Buddy and Hollis in the act of surprising the half-clothed Sam and Pilar in their car. As the sheriff and his deputy separate the couple and begin taking them back to their respective homes, the crowded drive-in erupts in a round of car horns and brightly lit headlights. Sayles skillfully shifts from his summary of the past into a present-day scene depicting Sam alone at the abandoned drive-in theater, sitting on the hood of his squad car and staring at the broken-down movie screen.

Sayles later contrasts the image of Sam's lonely vigil at the drive-in theater with the meeting between Sam and Pilar at the drive-in that closes the film and also provides the impetus for Chavez's strident critique of Lone Star. For the first time in his narrative, Sayles chooses to dispense with his summary of the past and confront his characters in a mimetic scene that boldly and completely interacts with the present, with the here and now of Frontera.¹⁰ As Sam reveals the identity of Buddy's mystery woman as Mercedes Cruz—and, in the process, finally explains the intensity of the connection that they shared for so many years—Pilar reacts to the silence that suddenly and conspicuously lies between them: “So that's it?” she asks; “you're not going to want to be with me anymore? I'm not having any more children,” she continues, and “I can't get pregnant again, if that's what the rule is about.” With the narrative of Frontera's past once again confronting them in the present, Sam and Pilar decide to “start from scratch”: “Everything that went before, all that stuff, that history,” Pilar remarks, “the hell with it.” As the couple stare at the blank tableau of their future in the image of the abandoned drive-in's dilapidated movie screen, Pilar confidently urges Sam—indeed, Frontera's entire populace—to “forget the Alamo.” Sayles shatters the visual silence of the screen with the optimistic strains of Patsy Montana's 1935 hit, “I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart.”¹¹ Through his depiction of Sam and Pilar in the act not only of reconfiguring their shared past together but also of assenting to their incestual relationship, Sayles once again demonstrates the manner in which his characters opt to revise the narratives of the past—to allow history to repeat itself while simultaneously reviving their love for each other—in order to facilitate senses of community and interpersonal connection, elements of humanity previously denied to them by Frontera's culturally fractured past.

By constructing his visual rendering of the interconnections between the past and present communities of Frontera, Sayles succeeds in fashioning the elaborate incestual cultural metaphor that so troubles Chavez. In Lone Star, Sayles reminds us about the tremendous pull that the past exerts upon our lives in the present, as well as about the necessity of reading contextually the narratives of the past in order to glimpse the possibilities of the future. In her introduction to the anthology Two Worlds Walking: Short Stories, Essays and Poetry by Writers with Mixed Heritages, Diane Glancy claims that in America there is a movement toward wholeness based on our diversity, that we need to examine “the worlds that walk within us,” to recognize the “new order of migration, in which the going is the journey itself, rather than arrival at a destination” (xi). By allowing his characters to embark finally on the journey of Frontera's future, Sayles confronts the denizens of the border town with the need to establish and maintain a genuine sense of community, an aspect of humanity withheld from them previously both because of the tyranny of Wade and because of the rigidity of the cultural narrative authored by Buddy. While Sam's murder investigation never results in an arrest, trial by jury, or verdict, his search for the truth—even as he chooses to embrace the narrative of the past—reveals the value of community to Frontera's endurance and cultural health. As Julie D. Balzekas, an executive committee member of the Joint Center for Poverty Research, reminds us, “Responsible behavior is at the core of all moral teachings—in fact, one could argue that those lessons of responsibility most essential to the healthy functioning of a culture become the morals of that group” (14). Finally recognizing themselves as a community of disparate cultures with a shared sense of history, the citizens of Frontera under Sam Deeds's watch succeed in accepting the responsibility for their past, their present, and, ultimately, their future.

Imbuing Lone Star with a carefully constructed incestual metaphor—as opposed to the incest taboo that Chavez laments—allows Sayles to underscore the ethical force of his screenplay, a narrative that achieves its moral aims through Sayles's skillful use of visual style. “Style itself makes its claims, expresses its own sense of what matters,” Nussbaum remarks. “Literary form is not separable from philosophical content, but is, itself, a part of content—an integral part, then, of the search for and the statement of truth” (3). In this way, style functions essentially as an ethical construct, as a vehicle for Sayles's considerable cultural and ethical arguments. Reading Lone Star in terms of Genette's narratological elements reveals the manner in which Sayles's film succeeds as a dramatic rejoinder to the cultural dilemmas that mark our past, as well as a genuine vision of American life and the shifting sense of identity that defines our contemporary value systems. “The urge to find one's place, to create and feel the comfort of community, is the abiding American story,” Edward Guthmann observes. “Whereas European, African, and Asian cultures are marked by diaspora—by parents losing their children and populations struggling to preserve tradition and continuity—the American story is one of improvising an identity” (D1). In Lone Star, Sayles narrates an essentially American story, for his characters not only struggle to embrace the competing narratives that mark our past, but also attempt to improvise the stories that will decide the course of our shared cultural future.

Notes

1. It should hardly be surprising that Chavez proves to be equally critical of the initiatives of the multicultural project. In “Multiculturalism Is Driving Us Apart,” Chavez argues that “the re-racialization of American society that is taking place in the name of multiculturalism is not a progressive movement, but a step backward to the America that existed before Brown v. Board of Education and the passage of major civil rights laws of the 1960s” (41).

2. As with Miller, Barbara Shulgasser seems unconvinced about the ethical imperatives that mark the narratives of Sayles's films: “You want to stay with him because Sayles really is on the side of morality, fairness, and sensible thinking,” Shulgasser writes, and “you want his movies to be as entertaining and riveting as he is ethical and high-minded. But they just aren't” (D3).

3. In Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell describes the implied author of a given film as an “invisible puppeteer, not a speaker or visible presence but the omnipotent artistic figure behind the work.” Because of the peculiar nature of the cinematic experience—and particularly because of the fact that in most films “we are seldom aware of being told something by an entity resembling a human being”—Bordwell questions the necessity of determining a film's implied authorship. “To give every film a narrator or implied author is to indulge in an anthropomorphic fiction,” he writes (62). Yet in a film such as Lone Star, with its explicit cultural agenda, the character of Sam Deeds clearly functions as Sayles's alter ego and the cinematic vehicle through which he exerts his own “visible presence” upon the film.

4. Genette defines summary, in terms of his narratological schema, as those moments in a narrative that provide the background or history for later scenes. In fact, says Genette, “summary remained, up to the end of the nineteenth century, the most usual transition between two scenes, the ‘background’ against which scenes stand out, and thus the connective tissue par excellence of novelistic narrative” (97).

5. As Chatman observes in Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978). “The cinema has trouble with summary, and directors often result to gadgetry.” In summary scenes, Chatman adds, “The discourse is briefer than the events depicted” (68-69). In Lone Star, Sayles constructs summary scenes by depicting Sam in the acts of “listening” to past events. By creating a series of flashbacks, Sayles provides his detective with a mechanism for assembling clues from the past in order to solve the mysteries that confront him in the present. A mere observer of such moments in the film, Sam never actively participates in the summary scenes' construction. Rather, Sam—along with the audience—witnesses the events as they unfold and purposefully withholds judgment about their significance until the film's conclusion.

6. The eventual statue itself functions as a microcosm of Frontera's monocultural past. In the screenplay, Sayles offers the following description of Frontera's memorial to Buddy Deeds: “The cloth drops to reveal a bas relief in brass set in a block of smooth limestone. A decent likeness of Buddy in uniform, his hands on the shoulder of a small Mexican-looking boy who stands beside him, eyes raised worshipfully” (57).

7. In effect, Sayles employs Wesley's analysis of the various objects in his roadside stand as a means for providing Sam—and indeed, the audience—with essentially nondiegetic material about past events taking place outside of Lone Star's narrative space. In this way, the descriptive pause usefully applies to filmic narrative by fulfilling Sayles's desire to provide Sam and the audience with significant extratextual information about Buddy's mysterious past.

8. In his review of Lone Star, Mick LaSalle fails to recognize Bunny's significant cultural import: “Frances McDormand has a bit as the sheriff's football-fanatic ex-wife,” LaSalle writes, “a role that should have been left on the cutting-room floor. It's five minutes of McDormand, bug-eyed, rattling about football statistics” (D3).

9. In this instance, Sayles essentially merges Genette's notion of summary with his use of the traditional flashback scene. In Lone Star, summaries provide significant background material that Sam—the implied author and narrator—will later employ in his solution of the film's murder mystery. Yet such scenes also function as flashbacks because they allow us, in Branigan's words, to “see an actual, present memory image of the character” as he or she relives a past experience (176).

10. While much of Lone Star's narrative essentially summarizes the past as Sam attempts to solve the detective story that undergirds the film, the mimetic scene at the drive-in signals a dramatic shift in the manner in which the audience consumes Sayles's narrative. Suddenly thrust into the present, viewers no longer interact with Frontera's history as they did throughout the rest of the film. The drive-in scene takes place in real time and without narratological intrusions from the past in the form of summaries or ellipses. As the film closes, this scene produces a startling visual and emotional effect on the audience by forcing us to consider fully Frontera's multicultural present, as well as “the way we live now,” in the words of Roger Ebert (449).

11. Interestingly, Montana crossed several cultural barriers of her own, becoming the first female recording artist to enjoy a million-selling record. She later performed “I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart” as a duet with Smiley Burnette in Colorado Sunset (1937).

We would like to thank Ryan Kelly of the John Sayles Border Stop and the proprietors of the Script Shop for their assistance in procuring a copy of the unpublished Lone Star screenplay. Thanks are also due to David Bordwell for his advice and guidance during the production of this essay.

Works Cited

Balzekas, Julie D. “Loss of Taboos.” Letter. Chicago Tribune 31 March 1997: 14.

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

———, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.

Branigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge, 1992.

Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

———. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.

Chavez, Linda. “Kiss and Tell.” Chicago Tribune 26 March 1997: 25.

———. “Multiculturalism Is Driving Us Apart.” USA Today: The Magazine of the American Scene 124 (May 1996): 39-41.

Chow, Rey. “Film and Cultural Identity.” The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 169-75.

Ebert, Roger. “Lone Star Holds a Mirror to America.” Chicago Sun-Times 3 July 1996: 37.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.

Glancy, Diane. “Introductory Note.” Two Worlds Walking: Short Stories, Essays, and Poetry by Writers with Mixed Heritages. Ed. Glancy and C. W. Truesdale. Minneapolis: New Rivers, 1994. xi-xii.

Guthmann, Edward. “Lone Star—Summer's Smart Sleeper Hit: Sayles Film Quietly Builds an Audience.” San Francisco Chronicle 1 August 1996: D1.

LaSalle, Mick. “Sayles Connects in Lone Star: An Old Murder Looms over Border Town.” San Francisco Chronicle 21 June 1996: D3.

Miller, Laura. “Virtue's Hack: John Sayles Makes Movies with All the Right Messages—and No Surprises, Madness, or Life.” Salon Magazine 29 July-2 August 1996.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge, 1989.

Sayles, John. Lone Star. Unpublished screenplay. 2 January 1995.

———, dir. Lone Star. With Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Peña, Kris Kristofferson, and Matthew McConaughey. Castle Rock, 1996.

Schickel, Richard. “Look, Ma, No Space Invaders!: John Sayles Makes the Summer Safe for Grownups.” Time 22 July 1996: 95.

Shulgasser, Barbara. “Lone Star Is Classic Sayles: Full of Commitment, Ethics.” San Francisco Examiner 21 June 1996: D3.