Lone Star
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Alfred Hitchcock once said, some people make films that are “slices of life, mine are slices of cake.” For any preferring the former versus the latter, John Sayles’ Lone Star is as much a slice of life as one can digest in two hours and fifteen minutes of cinema. It is such because, if film is to be a question, climax and resolution, like life we see many questions and many climaxes but few resolutions. The film is a portrayal of the lives of many individuals living in a small border town called Frontera, which is Spanish for border. The film begins with the discovery of the skeletal remains, a badge and a Masonic ring from what the Sheriff, Sam Deeds, believes may be the body of the Sheriff, Charley Wade, who, forty years earlier, used to run Frontera with the barrel of a gun and an open pocket. The find occurs on the eve of the dedication of a monument to the Sheriff who took over after Wade, Deeds’ father, Buddy. Sam has a hunch his father may have been involved in the murder, and this sets the wheels of the action in motion. Before we resolve the murder, we come to know the lives of many people in the town. However, like a Faulkner novel or like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the characters on screen are not the only members in the film. It is also populated by the ghosts and actions of the past, both of which remain as wounds or “hauntings” of the characters in the present.Frontera is a town dominated and controlled by the 10% of white
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en Otis Payne is reunited with his son, Del. Otis senses his son still is angry with him, but instead of explaining or justifying his absence, he says, “It’s not like there’s a line between the good people and the bad. It is not like you’re one or the other.” This is especially significant because Del has thrown himself fully into his military career with a vengeance. It is all cut and dry for him in the controlled microcosm of the military, as we see when he understands a young black female soldier’s explanation that the outside if “bad” and “chaotic.” This film demonstrates that in order to understand the chaos of the present or to give it come kind of coherence, we need to uncover, appreciate and come to terms with the past.
The film is also about how difficult it is for people to change their preconceptions and “learned” attitudes and behaviors. John Dewey argued in his philosophy of education that if people lose the ability to learn in an unjaded manner they typically are incapable of learning past the age of twenty-five. We see this with one of the few attempts at humor in the film, when Sam is in a bar and a white bar owner complaining about how whites are an endangered species in Frontera, says, “I’m as liberal as
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2416
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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