1998

20.3

Melissa Clark-Jones
Lone Star’ Renovation of the American Dream

John Sayles’ 1995 Western, Lone Star, demonstrates elements of both the classic Western genre and the urban Cop genre that James Cayrn suggests replaced the Western’s bygone primacy on TV (C1). Unlike cable TV reruns, however, the current Western film revival involves all the issues surrounding new productions. These issues are perhaps "revisionist," but they may not be so merely along superficial lines such as "political correctness," antiheroism, or the explicitness of violence. My focus and analysis here will be less about audience demographics and such surface kinds of revisions than about the reconstruction of a set of fundamental values and the continued appeal of the Western as a means for doing so. My principal argument is that ideologies about race, ethnicity, immigration and first origins are mediated in popular culture, especially in film. Authority and equality rights have long been ideologically and artistically reconstructed in the Western genre. In Lone Star we can see how such values as multiculturalism or racial tolerance are situated within a context of contemporary American political and cultural review. Nominated for an Academy Award in 1996, this film exemplifies a successful artistic and political treatment of these themes in dramatic, if not commercial, terms. The recurrence, relevance, and particular treatment of these themes, in turn, is related to some significant demographic and political shifts throughout America and their ideological treatment in relation to fundamental premises of the American Dream and nationhood.

Archaeologists commonly document American settlement in ways that can be used publicly either to affirm or to challenge received truths about lineage and legitimacy. One disputed truth is just who is "American" and who was "here first"— the Anglos at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; the French Huguenots at Charlesfort, North Carolina, in 1562; or the Spanish at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565 (Wilford A1 and A21). In this sense, the film’s seemingly trivial barroom jokes and schoolbook squabbles are not merely situating devices. They are really about these quintessentially American questions of rights, inclusion and democracy. "Who was here first?" "Who belongs?" "Who rules?" John Sayles, as a director, is concerned with asking his audience to consider which or whose "truths" are at stake. Which ones have been or should be established and disseminated as "legitimate?" How is a consensus on "we the people" constructed, not just once and for all, but again and again, in daily life, politics, education and history, and, not least of all, in popular film? His film constructs a version of how such politically-charged "revisions" occur in the setting established within the film, as well as in an audience’s everyday experience. Hence, unlike many traditional Westerns, this one opens in a contemporary, rather than in a historically distanced, nineteenth-century past. It is set in an imaginary town near the Mexican border, whose surrounding desert links it to a seemingly timeless past. In this setting, borders are constantly called into question, both literally and metaphorically.

The community is peopled, not by the Anglo cowboys and entrepreneurs of cinematic yore, whose enemy was typically the racially distinct, Indian or Mexican "other," but by a racial mix of types who are no more neatly divided between "them" and "us" than is Sayles’ audience. Each group’s inclusion, dominance, or marginalization remains in question and in flux. An Indian sells quirky artifacts to tourists by the roadside. These stand out as a kind of idiosyncratic museum of a Native American past. A small-time, Anglo Sheriff and his aide comb the sands for traces of the past with a metal detector. A Hispanic school teacher turns out to be not only the Sheriff’s childhood and contemporary sweetheart but, more provocatively still, his half-Mexican, half-sister. All kinds of boundaries are continuously thrown into question within a cinematic form which is characterized by ambiguity. Its rhythm juxtaposes unique, ethnically different characters and their individualized cultural heritages and artifacts. Cultural recognition and normalcy jostle against difference, mystery and unfamiliarity.

The Hispanic heroine, Pilar Cruz, is introduced to us as a history teacher who struggles locally to mediate the community’s tensions about a multicultural heritage. She sustains a version of the past that is inclusive, democratic, drawn from both dominant and conquered groups’ experiences and stories in constructing a newly legitimated, local and national history. The once dominant White Anglos’ defence of the traditional mythology of the Alamo and the Lone Star State of Texas is threatened. They defend it explosively in an early scene in a meeting of that all-American, democratic institution, the PTA (Parent Teacher Association). Such feelings of threat derive from the reality of shifting demographics in the town, population changes that challenge Anglos’ numerical, political, and ideological dominance. Such is the contested ground experienced as an assault on, or a renovation of, historical truth at the community level. Such mythic touchstones have been part of the legitimation of heroism, conquest and settlement of Texas and the United States for generations. They are part of the symbolic landscape of the traditional Western. They surface in commemorative statues, the naming and renaming of places and institutions, the adjudication of land disputes and the extension or contraction of rights. They are at the heart of the contestation and the content of textbooks and classroom pedagogy that shape a common cultural heritage. This scene thus serves not only to situate Pilar as a teacher in a divided community, but to invite a multiculturally-divided audience to identify through her with this national dilemma, with the communal, existential processes of history-making in everyday contexts.

The film’s title and its visual emblem— a corroded sheriff’s badge retrieved from the desert— mark the lonely quest by its sheriff hero to solve the mystery and crimes of his predecessors. All these are metaphorically and iconically linked by a "lone star." Sam Deeds, as Rio County’s contemporary sheriff, is the inheritor of this literal badge of authority, along with its mythic and dramatic burden. His and his office’s worthiness, heroism, and integrity are to be tested. He is an inheritor of power in three senses, all previously patriarchal. One is at the personal, familial level; a second is at the political or social level; and, the third is at the mythic level, whose white-cowboy-hat and sheriff badge he wears unaffectedly. He seeks to uncover a murder which interfaces with those legacies, exposing what is valuable or corrupt in each. The resolution of this mystery and classic film narrative must prove his own mettle, his difference from his forebears, and, unwittingly, the tabooed relationship that underlies his links to both his father and his lover, Pilar. Like classic heroes, Sam’s integrity will be in terms of public and private "deeds." Some of the Anglo townspeople expect him to fill the traditional sheriff’s shoes and their own expectations of law and order. They would like him to authorize their social and economic dominance, to mitigate or stem the contemporary tide of change that demographic multiculturalism and democracy represent for them. Blacks, Hispanics, and Indians have other hopes and less heroic stories to tell of sheriffs. There is an uneasiness about both political and paternal authority reflected in the film’s cuts between scenes and the audience’s perpetual uncertainty about who, if anyone, really "wears a white hat." The name of this border town itself, Frontera, epitomizes this ambivalence about membership, settlement, freedom and authority.

In a barroom scene, Sheriff Sam Deeds says, referring to the Spanish or Mexicans, "They were here first." But, another character reminds him, "Yeah, but the Native Americans were there before." When John Sayles is asked in the interview, "Borders and Boundaries," if he sees what he is doing, as a director, in terms of ethnic "revisionism," he points to the fact that American urban multiculturalism is itself a lived reality for most people today. We are no longer, if we ever were, he suggests, a monolithic culture. "Odds are you’ll live in a neighbourhood where people don’t necessarily speak English," Sayles argues, " . . . it is not revisionism to include Mexican-American culture or African-American culture . . . if you’re talking about those things from the get-go" (15). An Anglo character in the film remarks rather ruefully, however, "We got this whole damn ‘menudo’ down here." The blander Anglo "melting pot" metaphor has given way grudgingly to a spicier Spanish "stew." When Deeds crosses "The Border," a Mexican draws a line in the sand with a Coca Cola bottle and says, "You’re just some gringo with a lot of questions; I don’t have to answer you. That badge doesn’t mean anything down here." The bartender in Texas says, "This bar is the last stand, Buddy." These gestures and credos themselves recall the Alamo, where Travis drew a line.

Even Sayles’ choice of music underlines this mix and flux of culture, with at least a third of it being Spanish and the rest Black and White rock and blues. This clearly multivariate choice of music never feels awkward or artificial, though. It suits the settings, characters, and the broader landscape of socio-cultural history. The first romantic scene between Sam and Pilar is in her mother’s slightly old-fashioned Mexican restaurant. Alone, after hours, they dance to a handful of jukebox tunes that hark back to the days of their high-school romance, with all the yearning and steam articulated in both languages’ popular music. In the end we discover, as they do, that it was not their ethnic differences that caused his father and her mother to tear them apart. It was the fact that Sam and Pilar are ill-fated half-siblings, joined by their parents’own secret love. This mythic incest dilemma, the ultimate taboo or barrier, might have overpowered the whole dramatic thrust of the film. Instead, it is held off until the final denouement, when the audience’s sympathy is clearly with Sam and Pilar, and is resolved in a mutual, humanized way.

The history of conquest and struggle between racial supremacy and multicultural inclusionism is addressed implicitly and explicitly in Lone Star. It challenges several received myths about America’s history of settlement by introducing the reality of racial conflict and assimilation in Frontera. Its overall method involves the melodramatic uncovering of Black, Hispanic, and Anglo families’ histories and interfaces in community politics. Pilar’s own mother, a seemingly self-made Hispanic restauranteur, is one key example of an immigrant’s success story. She has to confront her own tokenist denial of "wetback" roots and oppression, finally helping, instead of turning in, a group of illegal Mexican immigrants. While she habitually insists that they and all her immigrant staff "speak English!" she provides the community with Mexican food and ballads. Yet, even this secondary character is a complex one whose survival and denial are inextricably linked to the murder of her more radical Mexican husband and her subsequent affair with Sam Deeds’ father, who helped her financially and with whom she secretly produced Pilar. This same sheriff, however, seems to have been part of a system that punished and plundered both Hispanic and Black communities. The owner of the Black nightclub, who experienced such humiliation, is another possible suspect in the previous sheriff’s murder, which is the plot’s central, unifying mystery. That individual’s badge is the one whose recovery by Sam, in the desert, first brings the crime to light. All protagonists are plausible suspects.

The Black club owner has established his own in-house museum of Black Buffalo Soldiers, who assimilated with the Indians they were engaged in displacing Westward as part of the US Army’s unacknowledged genocide. He seeks a more personal reconciliation with his contemporary Army officer son. The latter, like Pilar’s mother, has succeeded in part through the denial of ambiguity and bigotry and by closing the door on a painful past. Each family’s generational and emotional scars are salted with racial insults experienced in this once Anglo-dominated community. Their stories crosscut one another, providing both a richer, multi-layered plot and a more interesting, believable set of protagonists. Such voices from the margins provide a critique of traditional, dominant narratives and history. Although they offer no comfortable, ready-made identities or solutions, they affirm tolerance and democracy both ideologically and dramatically, through their content and form.

The film re-examines not only received history, but also the mythic and patriarchal authority of traditional heroism. Like Wotan, the chief God of Wagner’s operatic epic, The Ring Cycle, these characters exercise free will, bringing upon themselves a kind of Twilight of the Gods. Through sordid commercial deals or incestuous philandering, mythic characters, past and present, test the limits of universal morality and law. Unlike the superficial antiheroes of contemporarily revised Westerns, the hero of Lone Star affirms, while questioning, fundamental heroic ideals. This quietly unassuming, but persistent hero confronts and transcends his patriarchal, corrupt, and bigoted predecessors, regardless of the dangerous personal consequences. Sayles manages, therefore, to articulate heroism in a search for love, integrity and meaning at three levels: the personal-familial, the public-community, and the heroic-mythic. His hero is neither nihilistic nor superhuman, neither entirely vindicated nor irredeemably compromised. By cutting between characters’ stories and by juxtaposing past and present with no traditional cinematic markers, such as dissolves or fades, Sayles makes this moral and formal dialectic "work" and remain compelling, in the same way that Wagner’s film-like "transitions" do in opera. Despite the seemingly objective pragmatism of his optic, Sayles’ view and style are not dehumanized, but are informed by a populist faith in the heroism and social agency of ordinary people. He shows them shaping life and history in psycho-socially believable ways. He avoids stereotypic or cardboard characters, manipulative plot twists, special effects, and overly polemical or dramatic solutions. Instead, his characters come to their personal transformations and understandings through narratively overlapping micro-epics. In this way, he creatively revises the audience’s experience of traditional genres, history, and heroism.

Sayles uses the Western’s popularly accessible formula, myths and setting, in direct and reflexive or ironic ways to affirm classic American values. Individualism, open achievement opportunities, and such freedoms as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are each affirmed and contextualized in realistic settings. Integrity is shown to be rooted in both individual and social actions. These fundamental concerns and themes, anchored by two typically American forms—melodrama and the Western— make this popular, critical treatment of American history work, without becoming maudlin, abstruse or polemical.

The Western’s hero remains ever-changing, continuously revised, in motion; therefore, he does not risk becoming dated or irrelevant as a vehicle for heroic concerns. His timeless desert settings are always both "then" and "now," horizontal backdrops against which to project both personal and national struggles. In its mythic and narrative conventions, Sayles’ film articulates the conflicts and ambiguities of a multiethnic community without avoiding specificity or settling for what Cliff Thompson calls merely "politically-correct" or stereotypic characterizations. Its ideals of tolerance and inclusion are extricated, like the sheriff’s badge, from the dead weight of convention. The film achieves this feat at accessible mythic and narrative levels because it draws upon any audience’s familiarity with the Western as epic, without replicating a rigid formula or manipulating arcane symbolic references. It thereby implies that claims to the land and to the American Dream inherently involve all comers, all conquerors, whose roots reach into the present in a complex, lived reality. In so doing, it traces how the promise of access to land, civil rights, and equality are continuously contested and affirmed in the nation’s consciousness.

In reality, too, it is not only Natives who have continued to contest land claims in court. Mexican Americans in Texas have recently begun legal battles to affirm their claims against those of Anglo ranchers who often resorted to violence and trickery in grab lands. This contestation challenges fundamental tenets of Texan history. It is their very demographic and political strength that has made such legal battles possible. New scholarship has engaged in the radical reinterpretation of Texan history, showing that, not only force, but the institutionalization of Anglo political dominance has been at stake. As Sam Howe Verhovek writes (1997), "(Anglo) ranchers essentially used their leverage over law-enforcement agencies, including the Texas Rangers and the court system, to steal land from the Mexicans" (A12). For example, even if a contemporary suit by the 800 Balli descendants against the Kenedy and King ranchers of South Texas fails, it will have proven to be a bombshell and a landmark case. As Professor Alonzo of Texas A & M suggests in Verhovek’s article, "We’ve had so much change, social and economic change, their chances are better today than they ever were" (A12).

Sayles’ choice of the Western, then, at a time when many had assumed it was dead, is important to consider from other perspectives, including the Western’s continued function in the display, the challenge, or the displacement of specific ideological tenets of national import and scope. Whether old or new, the Western and its contemporary TV stand-in, the Cop Show, have continued to share a narrative and action formula for the testing of common cultural ground on authority and morality. Both genres construct a moral difference between and judgment about similar violent actions that disrupt or re-establish order. The policeman’s "clean shoot," as James Caryn shows, matches or replays the sheriff’s or hired gun’s "showdown." Both encounters are about the legitimation of power as authority, whether that inequality or power is based on land, water, cattle, food, oil, money, or access to other resources and forms of force or legitimation.

If the Vietnam War cut shared moral ground from under America, TV and film audiences, it was only in terms of moral specifics. In some ways it was a moral wake-up call. The need for power to be publicly legitimated, whether as personal integrity or state authority, remained and transcended that tragedy. It is now well known, if no less shocking, that Hollywood took some fifteen years to treat the Vietnam War explicitly in film, because Americans were so seriously divided in their views about the legitimacy of the state’s exercise of power in that war. Its avoidance as an explicit topic in Hollywood was not based, however, on either moral apathy or state censorship, but on the film industry’s commercial fears of risk-taking on many controversial topics. Despite this avoidance of direct treatment, however, the underlying moral, political and racial dilemmas resurfaced elsewhere during the War. These were either treated metaphorically or "displaced" to other genres, eras, settings, or conflicts, as the Korean War was in M*A*S*H. The sit-com version of M*A*S*H was then and is still popular. Some even argue that science fiction epics like the Star Wars trilogy carried traces of a tendency to blame the Vietnam "fathers" for their adolescent children’s difficulties. Others, including Mark Crispin Miller, see the spate of antiheroic and antiestablishment 1960s and 1970s Westerns as related to Vietnam’s violence. The most striking example of this Vietnam War "displacement," however, probably occurs in the 1970 film, Soldier Blue. As John Lenihan explains, the My Lai Massacre directly stimulated the director of Soldier Blue, Ralph Nelson, to show Vietnam’s explicit genocidal correspondence to the US cavalry’s infamous Sand Creek Massacre, a century earlier (49). While Lone Star makes neither direct nor displaced reference to aboriginal genocide, it does refer obliquely to it through Black and Native characters’ idiosyncratic museumizing of historical artifacts. Interestingly, John Sayles’ subsequent film project is explicit on genocide, however. Shot in Spanish, with English subtitles, Los Armados (The Armed Men) is set in Guatemala, where the indigenous military are shown systematically exterminating Mayans, the only aboriginals who remain a demographic majority in the West (Simon; West and West).

Black-white racial crises of national conscience have been a second major form of displacement in American Westerns. Again, though Sayles includes both Natives and African Americans, he does not treat these conflicts through displacement, but through the experiences of multidimensional, multiracial protagonists’ stories. In contrast, in 1950s, as Lenihan shows (chapter 6), Westerns, Indian Wars and Indian-White romantic alliances became foils for the treatment of white racist resistance to desegregation and miscegenation in real life. It was only later that Westerns directly questioned American imperialism of Natives. This also meant eventually using Natives, rather than Anglos made up to look like Natives, for key roles. Finally, in Dances with Wolves, we had the portrayal of Natives speaking their own languages, whereby the latter were afforded respect and status through the use of English subtitles. These are all important cinematic means of legitimating their cultures and versions of history by translating them rather than using pigeon English to mimic and edit them.

The current tests of a social consensus about class and race, inclusion and exclusion from citizenry, opportunity and rights, also call for cultural expression and political resolution. Some critics, like James Cayrn, consider contemporary audience demographics incompatible with risky revisions of the Western. Some cultural analysts see TV programming costs and the medium itself as better suited than film to contentious and commercial risk-taking, regardless of audience demographics. The assumption that TV, unlike film, pitches to a younger, female audience, rather than to a plethora of audiences, seems outdated, however, in a world where both men and women tend to work for pay during the day. Indeed, the notion that it was previously older or male audiences who were attracted to the Western may be equally suspect, as Tompkins and Haskell suggest. In 1958-59, four of the five top, prime-time programs were Westerns. These can hardly have won such ratings on the basis of one small demographic sub-audience, however. I was probably not alone in having an attraction to the heroes of TV Westerns, like Paladin, in Have Gun Will Travel. Gunsmoke, for example, provided a set of characters whose dilemmas one could identify with, from Matt Dillon and Doc Watson to Miss Kitty and Chester. From a rural, horseback-riding and ballet-dancing childhood, I was as interested in the hero as in the heroine, despite her usual marginalization, or the fact that, as my grandmother would have said, Paladin’s love interests and Miss Kitty, were "no better than they should be!" If memory serves, it was my grandmother, too, who took me to my first moving picture, that strangely gender-ambiguous Western: Annie Get Your Gun. Jane Tompkin’s lively book, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, agrees that men and women respond to this genre in many ways that overlap, despite its conventional relegation of women and Natives to the margins and the typicality of its "obsessions with masculinity."

Thankfully, popular cultural analysis breeds a healthy distrust of consumer-demographic explanations of cultural production, consumption, and reception of meaning. Genres, by nature, persist by responding to a popular need for the treatment and renovation of contentious dilemmas, as much as they do by offering the comfort of the known through a recognizable formula. The content for such works is not detectable or predictable by corporate market survey instruments. These are not necessarily objective, either, but are wielded by those very much interested in the commercial exploitation of consumer aggregates and in control over the products aimed at such artificially constructed targets. Films that are overly sensitized to box-office statistics or predictors would undoubtedly underestimate an audience’s desire for more challenging and creative material that aims beyond the bottom line or engages controversy. John Sayles’ critical film represents a successful revision of the Western and a sign that it is far from dead, in both cases flying in the face of the commercial use of audience demographics and bland marketing wisdom.

Its contemporary relevance needs, instead, to be situated within a socio-political context of conflict, policies and their resonance in people’s everyday lives. Sam Howe Verhovek reports (1996) that in 1996, more than 1.1 million immigrants took the oath of citizenship; 6,000 of them, from eighty different countries, were sworn in at the George R. Brown Convention Centre in Houston, Texas, in September; 10,000 did so at Texas Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys; about 15, 000 took the oath in San Jose, California. Similar numbers were predicted for 1997. These figures and venues represent geometric increases. The surge in naturalization is recognized to be related not only to federal and state political campaigns, but to recent strictures in the immigration, sponsorship, and welfare laws which both Republicans and Democrats have fostered (A1, A16). These laws have allowed all levels of government, for instance, to sue any sponsor of an immigrant, if the latter attempts to use public assistance. New income tests require that sponsors themselves make 125% of the poverty line, or about $19,500 for a family of four. Sponsored immigrants can now sue their sponsors for support, and sponsors can be held responsible until the immigrant becomes a citizen or has been working and paying taxes for ten years. This sounds like a set of barriers and litigations that only a nativist or a lawyer could love. The Census Bureau estimates, however, that even 26% of native Americans would themselves fail such sponsorship tests and 40% of immigrants would, including at least one-half of Mexicans and Salvadorans, the most disadvantaged immigrants. The Texas Republican Representative, Lamar Smith, sponsored those laws during his chairmanship of the House Immigration Subcommittee. The more conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform wants still more restrictions, saying, as Celia Dugger reports, "We don’t need to import a poverty class into this country" (A1, A39). These and other indications imply that Republicans are more likely to call for restrictions on both immigration and welfare largesse. However, under the Democratic Clinton Presidency, these meaner and leaner federal policies have resulted from bipartisan compromise.

Older-style, liberal Democrats think these laws and recent welfare "reforms" have gone too far, hurting those least able to defend themselves. Peter Edelman, for example, resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton Administration in disgust over recent welfare laws that drastically limit coverage. As Robert Pear reports, Edelman warned these laws will increase homelessness, malnutrition, crime, infant mortality, drug, alcohol and child abuse. "The deck is stacked," he said, in the pretense that such people can easily ‘find a job,’. . . because there simply are not enough jobs" (A39). Some far-right politicians have even contemplated the rearming of the Mexican-American, if not the Canadian, borders against such an onslaught of "aliens," and closer inspection has been installed at both borders. Californians have limited immigrants and their access to public assistance and resources. Several other states have taken advantage of recent federal devolution of powers to "experiment" with workfare models or found ways to encourage the poor to leave their premises. These measures combine with an increase in mergers and downsizing, which keep employment opportunities problematic, to present a meaner welcome to the "wretched,"despite relatively low official unemployment figures. The recent changes in immigration, naturalization, and welfare laws are key markers of, as well as a sources of, political tensions around both race and class issues in the United States.

In the past, basic notions of fairness and integrity have often been adjudicated against the physical geography of the Western. It is neither hyperbole nor exaggeration that we find in returning to Frederick Jackson Turner’s epochal paper of 1883, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Turner first argued that "American society owes its distinctive characteristics—individualism, enterprise, democracy—to the effects of the Western frontier." Such "truths" seem almost "self-evident" by now, like our national rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This kind of thinking and rethinking of such national moral identity crises about "who we are" and "how we came to be a nation" can never be entirely repressed, denied, or laid to rest for all time in either American history or film. These inherently American preoccupations will out: through displacements in time, setting, or genre; through the introduction of new, or previously silenced, edited, or margi_s; and by way of a particular set of choices and characterizations of a film’s heroes and protagonists, as victims and/or villains.

Consequently, Lone Star both challenges and reaffirms American ideologies about heroism and the promise of that whole "menudo" of immigrants to achieve some form of leveling, some accommodation. Long encoded in the Western, these features of the American dreamscape have sometimes been taken for granted or revised clumsily, when they underestimate the difficulty of change and the audience’s ability to deal with that in fiction or reality. It is then that new cliches known derisively as "political correctness" crop up, with women, African-Americans, or Hispanics merely replacing WASPS in stereotypic roles. It is not mere baby-boomer demographics nor the nostalgia of audiences for simpler times or childhoods that underlie the appeal and resurgence of the Western. Such analyses underestimate the complexity of past and present times and their Westerns, as well as the tolerance of most film audiences for ambiguity and difficulty. What remains compelling for audiences, still, is the Western’s epic and melodramatic potential for reconstructing history and popular consciousness. It is not in spite of, but because of, conflicts about social values that the popular film remains the quintessential medium for this imaginative collaboration between audience and filmmaker.

Melissa Clark-Jones

Bishop’s University

Lennoxville, Quebec

15 Sep. 1996: Sec. 2:1,39.

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