28.11.1996

The ties that bind

Kevin Watts reviews Lone Star, directed by John Sayles

John Sayles’ fine contemporary western Lone Star continues to ride the thematic trail of his earlier film City of Hope which focused on the way the racially dominated pork barrel politics of a hollowed out inner city on the US eastern seaboard both thrived upon and obscured the deeper subliminal mainsprings of class division and conflict in present day American society.

With Lone Star Sayles explores the pioneer myths of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, its stubborn survival and continuing impact on the white, black and Hispanic communities of a contemporary Tex-Mex town called Frontera to provide a powerful allegory of the bloody historical trajectory blazed by US capitalism.

The film begins when the skeleton of the murderously corrupt, racist and six-gun toting Sheriff Wade (Kris Kristofferson) is dug up in the desert (Wade’s death is literally the film’s ‘primal scene’). According to local legend Wade had been run out of Rio County, High Noon fashion, by his successor, the now dead civic hero, Buddy Deeds.

Effortlessly moving between past and present, Sayles excavates the subterranean history that binds as well as divides the different communities of Frontera and reveals its distance from the history of the Anglo ‘victors’. Yet the very economic forces that delivered this victory and continuing resistance challenge the dominance of whites. At the local high school white parents loudly protest the attempt of hispanic teachers and parents to teach the hidden history of the black and hispanic oppressed in a town where Mexicans now form the majority.

Against this background, discovering the truth of Wade’s death 40 years before falls to Buddy’s son, Sam junior, whose embittered memories of a father who had compelled him to part with his adolescent hispanic sweetheart years before inclines Sam not only to question Buddy’s Gary Cooper hero status, but also suspect his dead father of killing Sheriff Wade.

Indeed the real mystery of Lone Star turns on the status of Buddy Deeds - the mythologised mediatory figure present throughout in his absence - who marks a transition between the racist ‘good ol’ boy’ Wade, still recognisably in the heroic mould of the good-versus-evil Hollywood western and representative of a bloody laissez-faire capitalism, and Sam Deeds, the pen pushing Sheriff, trying to resist the blandishments of the ‘civilised’ forces of corporate graft to endorse the building of a county jail no one needs by the big business sponsors of his election.

It is testimony to Sayles’ ability to weave a narrative embracing an ensemble of characters, while projecting a wider allegory of the larger forces shaping their lives, that when the ‘mystery’ is finally unravelled and the official myth is disenchanted, the audience is as surprised as the chief protagonist, Sam Deeds.

Kevin Watts