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Passing for Solitude: Incest and Ideology in the Lone Star State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2012

ELENA LAHR-VIVAZ
ELENA LAHR-VIVAZ
Affiliation:
Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Cultures, Princeton University. Email: elahrvivaz@gmail.com.
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Abstract

John Sayles's Lone Star, released in 1996, repeatedly challenges traditional definitions of the nation as a strictly bounded entity through its depiction of the area that Américo Paredes described as “Greater Mexico” and Gloria Anzaldúa more recently referred to as the Borderlands; the film's promotion of a potentially productive love affair between half-siblings further challenges the status quo. As I argue here, however, while the film undeniably underscores the fragility of the nation in an era of global trade and travel, it also suggests the difficulties of escaping nation-based ideologies and interests. As I will show, Lone Star in fact highlights the ongoing importance of the nation-state through its attention to the institutions and individuals that Louis Althusser associates with state apparatuses, ultimately pointing to the fraught nature of avoiding the influence of the nation as a construct.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 203 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Lone Star, DVD, dir. John Sayles (Los Angeles: Warner Home Video, 1999; first released 1996). Sayles readily admits that Lone Star is a film about borders. See Steve Gravestock, “Lone Director: John Sayles Discusses the Making of Lone Star,” in John Sayles: Interviews, ed. Diane Carson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 235–38; and Megan Ratner, “Borderlines,” in ibid., 202–9.

2 At times, the dialogue in Lone Star differs from Sayles's published film script, Men with Guns and Lone Star (London: Faber and Faber, 1998)Google Scholar. All quotes here are from the film.

3 Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999)Google Scholar, 25. As Anzaldúa states in her preface, at 19, Borderlands are not specific to the Southwest: “the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.”

4 See, respectively, Neil Campbell, quoting Mary Helen Washington, “ ‘Forget the Alamo’: History, Legend and Memory in John Sayles' Lone Star,” in Paul Grainge, ed., Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 164; Kaminsky, Amy, “Identity at the Border: Narrative Strategies in Maria Novaro's El jardín del Edén and John Sayles's Lone Star,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 25, 1 (2001), 91–117Google Scholar; Rebecca M. Gordon, “Psychic Borders and Legacies Left Hanging in Lone Star and Men with Guns,” in Diane Carson and Heidi Kenaga, eds., Sayles Talk: New Perspectives on Independent Filmmaker John Sayles (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 215–37; and Joshua Miller, “The Transamerican Trail to Cerca del Cielo: John Sayles and the Aesthetics of Multilingual Cinema,” in Doris Sommer, ed., Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

5 Rosa Linda Fregoso and Katherine Sugg highlight the patrilineal, patriarchal aspects of the narrative. See Rosa Linda Fregoso, “Reproduction and Miscegenation on the Borderlands: Mapping the Maternal Body of Tejanas,” in Gabriela F. Arredondo, Aída Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, and Patricia Zavella, eds., Chicana Feminisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 324–48; and Sugg, Katherine, “Multicultural Masculinities and the Border Romance in John Sayles's Lone Star and Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 1, 3 (2001), 117–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Magowan, Kim, “‘Blood Only Means What You Let It’: Incest and Miscegenation in John Sayles's Lone Star,” Film Quarterly, 57, 1 (2003)Google Scholar.

7 Kaminsky, 110, 111. See also Magowan; and José E. Limón, “Tex-Sex-Mex: American Identities, Lone Stars, and the Politics of Racialized Sexuality,” in Larry J. Reynolds and Gordon Hutner, eds., National Imaginaries, American Identities: The Cultural Work of American Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

8 In adopting this stance, Lone Star participates in a broader trend, as Gordon, at 215, notes: “Postcolonial theories of nation, narration, and sexuality; recently created political associations like NAFTA and the EU; the emergence of transnational capitalism; immigration, birth rates, and other demographic shifts all call the notion of a nation's singular identity into question.”

9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 114.

10 Ibid., 175.

11 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” in Slajov Žižek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), 100–39.

12 Magowan, 24.

13 Sayles, Men with Guns and Lone Star, 175.

14 As Margaret E. Montoya details, the two versions of the songs have different meanings, offering “a contrast between the carnal and sexual love between Sam and Pilar and the familial love between Otis and his grandson” that is highlighted in the scene featuring “Since I Met You Baby.” I would add that the repetition of the song also hints at the convergence of family and romance in Pilar and Sam's relationship, a fact that they do not yet “know.” Montoya, Margaret E., “Lines of Demarcation in a Town called Frontera: A Review of John Sayles’ Movie Lone Star,” New Mexico Law Review, 27 (1997), 234Google Scholar.

15 In much the same way, Pilar's own name reminds the spectator of the tower in which Santa Barbara was locked away. For further discussion of names and their significance in Lone Star, see Campbell, “Forget the Alamo,” 170.

16 While Partha Chatterjee differentiates between public and private space in The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, arguing that the Indian nation is conceptualized in the realm of the private, Lone Star demonstrates that there is no such division; the walls of the home will ultimately reflect the same flickering images as the public screen. As Althusser states, “It is unimportant whether the institutions … are ‘public’ or ‘private.’ What matters is how they function.” Althusser, 111.

17 Handley, George B., “Oedipus in the Americas: Lone Star and the Reinvention of American Studies,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 40 (2004), 177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Campbell notes that Lone Star refers to the debate over multiculturalism that occurred during the US “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, reminding his reader of Lynne Cheney's 1988 argument that “history textbooks needed to be like those of the ‘early decades of the century … filled with stories – the magic of myths, fables, and tales of heroes, providing ‘symbols to share … help[ing] us all, no matter how diverse our backgrounds, feel part of a common undertaking.’ ” Campbell, 163 (ellipses in original). See also on this point Miller, “Transamerican Trail,” and Sugg, “Multicultural Masculinities.”

19 Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2003), 92.

20 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 175.

21 Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture,” in Grainge, Memory and Popular Film, 148–49.

22 As Susan Felleman states, “even with its striking originality, Lone Star is a film with its own considerable Oedipus complex.” Susan Felleman, “Oedipus Edits (Lone Star),” in Carson and Kenaga, Sayles Talk, 159.

23 West, Dennis and West, Joan M., “Borders and Boundaries: An Interview with John Sayles,” Cineaste, 22, 3 (1996), 15Google Scholar. Felleman argues that other influences might include the detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), and Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974). Felleman, 159.

24 A drive-in movie featuring Pam Grier, Black Mama, White Mama is also known as Chained Women, Chains of Hate, Hot, Hard, and Mean, and Women in Chains. In the film, two women prisoners (one black, one white) are chained together for transfer. They escape, and must work together to achieve their separate goals.

25 Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 359.

26 For further discussion of Sayles's innovate pans see, among others, Bakewell, Geoffrey W., “Oedipus Tex: Lone Star, Tragedy, and Postmodernism,” Classical and Modern Literature, 22 (2002), 35–48Google Scholar; Barr, Alan, “The Borders of Time, Place, and People in John Sayles's Lone Star,” Journal of American Studies, 37 (2003), 365–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Felleman; Magowan, “Blood Only Means”; and Miller.

27 Quoted in West and West, 15.

28 Handley, “Oedipus,” 160.

29 Ibid., 176.

30 Basterra, Gabriela, Seductions of Fate: Tragic Subjectivity, Ethics, Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 90. On Lone Star and tragedy see Bakewell; Barr; Handley; Kaminsky, “Identity”; and Whitehouse, Glenn, “Remember to Forget the Alamo: The Dynamics of Cultural Memory in John Sayles’ Lone Star,” Literature and Theology: An International Journal of Religion, Theory, and Culture, 16 (2002), 291–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Althusser, “Ideology,” 119. On this point, see Mark Bould, who writes, “By arguing for the need for a more complete picture and demonstrating the complexities which underlie both personal and public history, this multiculturalist perspective [in Lone Star] risks relativising all experience.” Bould, Mark, The Cinema of John Sayles: Lone Star (London: Wallflower Press, 2009)Google Scholar, 142.

32 See, respectively, West and West, 16; and Magowan, 28. See also Ann duCille, “Response: The Sterile Cuckoo Racha: Debugging Lone Star,” in Arredondo et al., Chicana Feminisms, 352, who queries, “Historically, sterilization has been used to contain and control the growth of certain unpopular populations, including, if not especially, people of color. Is sterility also a containment strategy here[?]”.

33 Quoted in West and West, 16.

34 Magowan, 30 n. 14.

35 Ibid., n. 28.

36 Felleman, 161, original emphasis.

37 Referencing what she describes as the “ethnically correct cast,” duCille goes as far as to suggest that “all except perhaps Pilar are typecast bit players who strut and fret their seconds on the stage, sometimes full of sound and fury, but ultimately signifying nothing new.” DuCille, 351.

38 Colón, the actress who plays Mexican immigrant Mercedes, is in fact Puerto Rican.

39 The use of a Coca-Cola bottle in this scene is not coincidental. While Coca-Cola convinces consumers across the world that they too can share “a Coke and a smile,” first-hand access to First World goods may not be as easy as it is in the company's shiny Atlanta headquarters. Coke holds out the promise of prosperity, constituting itself as part and parcel of the American dream, yet it also represents a transparent source of division, a shared experience that nonetheless occurs under widely varied circumstances. See Magowan, 24; and Sugg, “Multicultural Masculinities,” 122, who argues that Lone Star can thus be considered a “fiction of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), one that celebrates bicultural and transnational contact yet ensures that particular economic and political structures remain intact.”

40 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 42.