Forget the Alamo: Lone Star (1996)

John Sayles and the west

John Sayles has one of the most bifurcated careers in Hollywood. As a screenwriter and script doctor, he’s turned his hand to horror, action, and space opera, but largely as a means to fund independent films that he can write and direct on his own terms. He established his modus operandi early: in 1980, he used the money he’d earned writing scripts for Roger Corman-produced cheapo B movies to fund his own independent film, Return of the Secaucus 7, a drama about 1960s college activist friends reuniting years later at a very different point in their lives and in American history. 

Sayles’s 1996 film Lone Star is one of his independents, but it’s got traces of genre movie in its DNA. I instinctively reach to call it a western, but it’s more like the aftermath of one. Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) is the sheriff of a small town in Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border who has been elected almost entirely because his late father, Buddy Deeds (played in flashbacks by Matthew McConaughey), was sheriff before him. For most of the town, Buddy is a beloved figure who has already entered into myth. The local courthouse is being renamed in his honor, and apart from a smattering of detractors citing Buddy’s corruption, the renaming seems to have cross-community support. This is a diverse town, one in which Anglos (white people) are now outnumbered collectively by Tejano (Mexican), Black, and Native inhabitants. They all buy into the folktale of Buddy Deeds—it might be the only thing they agree on. But it can be tweaked just a little for one’s own purposes: both racists and people of color imagine him as their ally. 

But Sam doesn’t buy in.

I wrote about Lone Star for the 50th(!) issue of Current Affairs, and it’s now available to read online here. It’s about people’s relationships to history, borders, and each other, featuring beautiful illustrations from John Biggs. Give it a read.

parting recs

Listen: You know, I love John Mulaney, think he’s a genius, blah blah blah, but it remains true that he — and culture as a whole — peaked in 2009 with the salt and pepper diner routine from his album The Top Part. Go on, have a treat.

Watch: Ignore the Netflix true crime slop branding — The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping is a great and horrible and revelatory docuseries about the troubled teen industry (“schools” where kids are sent to straighten them out). Made by a survivor of the Academy at Ivy Ridge, it combines victim testimony and journalistic rigour in a way that doesn’t seem like a combination at all, just two sides of the same coin.

Read: Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It by David Graeber is probably the best book I’ve read this year. It is insightful and funny and brilliant, and could make an anti-work leftist out of the most dignity-of-work-pilled amongst us.

Check out otherwise: If you get the chance to see Handel’s Messiah this Christmas season, it is, turns out, full of bangers.

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