Lone Star: Past Is Present

A couple of years before the release of Lone Star, as I worked my way through the inventory of the local video store, I had discovered John Sayles’s early films Lianna (1983); Baby It’s You (1983); The Brother from Another Planet (1984), where I was first introduced to the wonder that is Joe Morton; and Matewan (1987), which marked Sayles’s first pairing with Chris Cooper. Morton and Cooper would both go on to collaborate frequently with Sayles, including on Lone Star—two members of a regular troupe of actors who helped ground his character-driven, socially aware films with a sense of realism and moral urgency. On the strength of such richly textured filmmaking, Sayles became one of the leading independent writer-directors of his generation. Among his many accolades, he has twice received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay, including one for Lone Star.

That film found Sayles distilling his approach. In it, he gradually heightens the tension of multiple story lines, as he did in his directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), in which a group of old college friends reunites; creates a strong sense of place and mood to rival that found in his period coal-mining drama Matewan; and reprises the social commentary that has characterized much of his work since The Brother from Another Planet, a sci-fi parable that addresses head-on the subjects of racism and immigration. A narrative of Faulknerian density, Lone Star intertwines the stories of many inhabitants of Frontera (which means “border” in Spanish). The action is set in motion when a decomposed body is unearthed on an old military rifle range, a discovery that also establishes the central themes of the film: border crossings, the weight of history, the revelation of long-hidden secrets, and the vagaries of memory, both collective and individual.

The film unfolds across two timelines. The portion set in the 1950s chronicles the extortion and racist violence committed by Anglo sheriff Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson), who expects his deputies, including Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), to carry out his reign of terror against the Mexican and Black residents of the town. Buddy’s refusal to serve as Charlie’s agent creates conflict between the two that finds resolution when Charlie unexpectedly disappears. With a coolly defiant slouch and a bona fide twang, McConaughey—whose hometown of Uvalde, Texas, is located an hour away from Eagle Pass, the border town where the film was shot—convincingly inhabits his small but pivotal role: Buddy Deeds’s legacy looms large over Frontera.

But as the film reveals, other sites of power exist in Frontera. The owner of Big O’s lounge, Otis Payne (Ron Canada), is known colloquially as “the Mayor of Darktown,” a man who provides a haven for the town’s small Black community, including soldiers from the local military base. Whereas Sam returns home voluntarily, Colonel Delmore Payne (Morton) and his family are relocated by the army back to Frontera, where his estranged father still lives. Morton—who does more with a thoughtful glance and small gesture than many actors do in an entire role—subtly conveys Delmore’s resentment of Otis, who abandoned the family when Delmore was a child. Though Delmore is once again in the same town as his father, this history impedes their reunion.

Throughout Lone Star, the weight of the past is underscored by the film’s artful transitions. When moving between the two timelines, Sayles pans slowly, often from side to side or vertically, occasionally following a character’s line of sight or tracking with a character from one setup to the next. In these instances, he does not cut between the two settings or time periods, instead moving the viewer fluidly from one to the other, creating the sensation that the boundaries between the past and present are permeable, each exerting influence on the other. This technique is especially useful in telling a story that depicts and alludes to a host of border crossings that include racial and cultural mixing.

Nowhere is this mixing more prominently displayed than in the Black Seminole Museum, housed behind Big O’s. It is in this memorabilia-filled back room—set up by Otis as a tribute to the multiracial group from which he is partly descended—that he speaks, with a hint of caution, one of the most oft-quoted lines from Lone Star: “Blood only means what you let it.” Otis delivers this advice to his grandson, Chet (Eddie Robinson), whom he is meeting for the first time formally in the museum. The seven-word sentence captures the very essence of what is at stake in the film. Otis’s declaration is weighted with the history of slavery and racism, and calls to mind the Jim Crow–era “one-drop rule,” which held that one African or Black ancestor was enough to classify someone’s racial identity as nonwhite; it also speaks to the long-standing racist sentiments directed against Black Indigenous people. The proximity of the words blood and let in Otis’s statement also always puts me in mind of another way of framing the film’s view of the past: untangling history is like opening a vein—the act can be healthy, cleansing, liberating, or it can open an old wound, causing pain anew.

Another crucial utterance comes in Lone Star’s final scene, with Pilar’s suggestion that she and Sam “forget the Alamo.” Few would contest the significance of the Alamo Mission in Texas history. In 1836, the Alamo, built by Indigenous people of the region during the period of Spanish colonization, served as the site of a crucial fight in Texas’s struggle to gain independence from Mexico. After holding off Mexican forces led by General Antonio López de Santa Anna for thirteen days, the garrison inside the Alamo Mission was ultimately defeated. Few recall, or even know, that Mexicans, Europeans, and an enslaved man were among the defenders of the Alamo. People mainly remember the Anglo heroes of the battle: Davy Crockett, James Bowie, and William B. Travis. “Remember the Alamo” became a rallying cry of vengeance at San Jacinto, where Mexican troops were eventually defeated. The Alamo, both as a historical site and as a symbol, looms large in Texas mythmaking. But Sayles’s film is more about revealing the dark secrets behind, rather than building up, a myth—the myth of Buddy Deeds. Pilar and Sam’s resolve to forget represents a turn away from that legacy as they attempt to write their own futures, ones not beholden to any history.

At one time, Sayles considered titling his film Forget the Alamo. Still, the contentious early scene in Pilar’s classroom demonstrates the difficult task of such forgetting. In July 2021, the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin abruptly canceled a promotional event for the book Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. The museum had faced criticism of the event from the public and its board members, including the Texas governor and lieutenant governor. The objection focused on the premise of the book. In it, authors Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford argue that the desire to preserve the institution of slavery served as the primary driver of Texas’s bid for independence—an idea that parallels the claim made in Lone Star by Danny Padilla (Jesse Borrego), a reporter covering the parent-teacher meeting: “The men who founded [Texas] broke from Mexico because they needed slavery to be legal to make a fortune in the cotton industry.” Pilar criticizes Danny’s claim as “a bit of an oversimplification.” But the incendiary reaction of an Anglo father, who sees Danny’s perspective as “propaganda,” reflects the deep investment many have in preserving prevailing views of the Alamo.

Just weeks after the cancellation of the Forget the Alamo book talk, Texas lawmakers passed a bill restricting how teachers in the classroom can address current events and severely limiting discussions of race in America’s past and present. For many years after its release, history, literature, and social-studies teachers in Texas had included Lone Star in their curricula, as part of larger conversations about the state’s fraught racial and cultural history. Under the new state law, the film would not meet the criteria for use in the classroom.

I have been thinking, teaching, and writing about Lone Star for almost two decades. Each time I return to it, I discover something new. More recently, in preparing to write this piece, I watched Lone Star with three young people who had never seen it. Their admiration and enthusiasm for the film helped me to see it with fresh eyes. I wasn’t only struck by the timeliness of its theme of how we choose to interpret history—I also marveled anew at the very intricacy of its construction: the genius of the film’s editing; the breathtaking composition of its individual scenes; and the ambitious scope of the narrative, across timelines and ethnic groups. We should all take another careful look at this filmic masterpiece.