Toward a Politics of Reconciliation: John Sayles’s “Lone Star,” after 25 Years

“Sayles’s 1996 film, Lone Star, is arguably his greatest work to date. And after 25 years, given the tensions that continue to circle around issues of race and immigration, it certainly has not lost any of its original force and relevance.”

John Sayles is perhaps America’s foremost independent filmmaker. Since directing The Return of the Secaucus 7 over four decades ago, he has been crafting films that explore the complex psychologies of his characters as shaped by very specific cultural and geographical settings—from Florida to Alaska, from West Virginia to Texas. By drawing our attention to the typically unexamined relationships between people and place, Sayles has given us thoughtful perspectives on a wide variety of distinctly American “types,” slyly revealing not only what matters—both personally and politically—to a very diverse suite of individuals but also why the American project of forming a more perfect union is constantly under stress.

Sayles’s 1996 film, Lone Star, is arguably his greatest work to date. And after 25 years, given the tensions that continue to circle around issues of race and immigration, it certainly has not lost any of its original force and relevance. The film is ostensibly a “Whodunit” mystery revolving around the murder of a corrupt sheriff, but Sayles’s thematic preoccupations are best revealed by situating Lone Star within the tradition of the classical American Westerns, for they too—at their best—pose deep questions about the very possibility of political association and order, the nature of authority, and about who did or did not fall within the real or imagined borders of the American national family. Indeed, as John Ford did back in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Sayles similarly asks troubling questions about how people of different races, languages, economic interests, and histories can “get along” and live together in a viable and respectful political community, without having to resort to seemingly efficacious myth-making or historical denial—or to the use of the very extralegal violence, which civil society is officially charged to contain. This is not to say that Lone Star actually is a Western (except, perhaps, in a revisionist or heterodox sense), but by setting his film in Frontera, a Texas border community along the Rio Grande, and by invoking many of the old conflicts and the stock character types (the corrupt sheriff, the good teacher, the indifferent politician/mayor, the saloon keeper, etc.) that dominate the Western genre, Sayles is inviting his viewer to ask those same deep and worrying questions about the possibility of political community. He also asks viewers to think about how America has (or has not) become a more tolerant, inclusive society since the West was settled or “founded.”

Of course, Sayles is not suggesting that the great, great grandchildren of those early white settlers, Civil War veterans, Mexicans, freed African-American slaves, and various Indian nations are simply reproducing the ancient disputes of their ancestors. Instead, he is furnishing a thoughtful portrait of where the great American experiment currently stands, warts and all. Despite the lingering racism and inter-group suspicions, however, the film is actually cautiously optimistic about the possibility that even the most hard-hearted people, so caught up in the pursuit of their own narrow interests (or the interests of their tightly circumscribed communities), can expand the circle of moral concern by confronting their own (and never quite buried) personal experiences.