Reconstruction 7.3 (2007)
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Re-Making Time: Chronotopes of the West in Lone Star (1996) and The Searchers (1956) / Martin Flanagan
Abstract: This essay argues that Lone Star emerges as a valuable companion text to John Ford's canonical Western The Searchers (1956) because, through its position as a generic "outsider", Sayles' film is able to historicize adequately the same themes of masculinity, race and displaced frontier existence that Ford was undoubtedly interested in, but found incompatible with the generic and ideological profile of the Western in the mid-1950s. The two movies take place in roughly the same geographical locale; however, the Texas of The Searchers is separated from the modern day Texas of Lone Star by nearly 130 years. Implicit in Sayles' film is the fact that the Western has taken on the status of national myth in the intervening years, representing to America the legend of its own origin. However, this process has not been without its harmful repercussions, resulting in indentations on the national psyche that leave a heavy burden of authority on emotionally incapable men and all but exclude the feminine and racial other from the picture. In Lone Star "the West" is no longer a frontier but a porous, tension-ridden partition between the United States and South America, a geographical fissure reflecting the fragility of gender, racial and national identities. The same concerns can be seen to thread through Ford's film as well, although they are obviously less explicit and tempered by some of the casual racism and sexism that many critics, perhaps letting the filmmakers off the hook too easily, have identified as virtual prerequisites of the genre (Pye 235).
Introduction: Bullets and Borders
<1> The massive influence that the Western has exerted on world film culture has led to the form being spoken of in terms of "genre imperialism" (Maltby 123). Initial innovations in Western form went hand in hand with the development of the cinema as a narrative medium, as is evinced in The Great Train Robbery. Edwin S. Porter's 1903 film, with its depiction of temporally parallel story lines, "defined the limits of a certain kind of narrative construction" that would become Hollywood's fundamental storytelling mode (Musser 256). Later, the iconographic apparatus of the Western would ensure its status as the perfect conduit for the demonstration of technological advances such as widescreen, with the genre exemplifying, for André Bazin, "the American film par excellence" (140). However, all empires, even those of genre, are built on a kind of oppression; when do innovations become limitations? The marginalization of the racial and sexual other in the classical Western, when viewed from a perspective of 2007, rightly problematizes our political reading of the genre. The rigid ideological character of the genre is linked, in some way, to the attitude displayed by the films to history: the makers of history - the white males - are glorified; those who live under its terms - everybody else - are all but removed from the picture. Representational strategies, of course, play a huge part in the promulgation of this myth, and within the Western aesthetic a decisive role is played by time/space formulations that can be productively analysed using Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of "chronotope".
<2> Chronotopes can be thought of, most straightforwardly, as segments of spatialized time (or temporalized space) that congeal into arenas for the action - physical and emotional - of narrative texts. Proffering classic literary examples such as "the road" (in the picaresque adventure) or "the castle" (in the Gothic novel), Bakhtin characterizes the chronotope as "the ground essential for the showing forth, the representability of events" ("Forms" 250); in other words, chronotopes generate the spatio-temporal fabric of texts. Generically speaking, the dominant chronotopes of the classic Western consist of such spaces as the prairie or homestead, and such zones of time as the raid or the cattle drive. More specifically, in the cinema of John Ford, for example, we might identify Monument Valley as a dominant chronotope, a loaded presence in the text where physical landscape doubles as "mental traumascape for character and spectators alike" (Walker 225). Bakhtin argues that genre is defined by the activity of chronotopes, and notes that different narrative forms bring into play different time/space configurations. The protagonists of the pre-novelistic Greek Romances experience what Bakhtin terms "adventure-time": disjointed, unpredictable, prone to contingency and abrupt change ("Forms" 86-7). This chronotopic variation contrasts with that found in texts based upon "folkloric time", such as the works of Rabelais, where rhythms will be cyclical, regenerative, and correspond to phases of human existence ("Forms" 206-9). Such distinguishing temporal features come to define generic qualities in the literary texts discussed by Bakhtin; extrapolating this to cinema, we might recognise that the period drama and the science-fiction film, for instance, do not unfold within strictly the same spatio-temporal regime. This is less due to a fundamental historical incompatibility than because the nature of time within each form, and how this influences narrative development, is radically different.
<3> A central function of genre is to render social myths into digestible narratives. As the "organizing center" ("Forms" 250) through which generic construction is effected, the chronotope thus becomes implicated in social value. The way in which a genre interacts with the social experiences and expectations of an audience is regulated by "genre memory" - "the continuing existence of an earlier generic paradigm in the narrative sediment of a later one", as Janet Walker puts it in her useful gloss of Bakhtin (222). Through the notion of genre memory, Bakhtin emphasizes the transformative potential of new contexts upon established chronotopic patterns: "A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning" ("Dostoevsky's Poetics" 106). For Bakhtin, time and space are not dead inside chronotopic images. They retain the ability to radiate new meanings, to alter the "emotions and values" with which they are colored ("Forms" 243). It follows, then, that formal conventions can be reaccentuated and given fresh relevance through the adoption of a new context within the framework of genre memory. This is the approach taken by John Sayles' Lone Star (1996), a film that exploits aspects of its own temporal and industrial outsideness - produced at least two decades after the commonly agreed moment of the Western's demise in the mid-1970s, and originating from outside the studio mainstream - to impart a fresh perspective upon that genre. Unlike affectionate tributes like Silverado (Lawrence Kasdan, 1985), or movies that are predicated on a deliberate ideological shift but are more interested, ultimately, in knowing pastiche (such as Tom Dey's Shanghai Noon [2000]), Sayles' film manages to make a genuinely telling contribution to the cultural debate around the Western, engaging with the central issues of gender, race, history and form that underpin both the genre itself and its critical context. Perhaps this task is made easier because Lone Star itself is not a Western, and because its metatextual commentary on the genre is allowed to come out through the exploration of a theme - that of the nature of borders, social, racial, sexual and temporal - that situates itself squarely within the racial discourse of millennial USA, while also acknowledging the role of past cultural productions within that historically charged sphere of debate.
<4> This essay argues that Lone Star emerges as a valuable companion text to John Ford's canonical Western The Searchers (1956) because, through its position as a generic "outsider", Sayles' film is able to historicize adequately the same themes of masculinity, race and displaced frontier existence that Ford was undoubtedly interested in, but found incompatible with the generic and ideological profile of the Western in the mid-1950s. The two movies take place in roughly the same geographical locale; however, the Texas of The Searchers is separated from the modern day Texas of Lone Star by nearly 130 years. Implicit in Sayles' film is the fact that the Western has taken on the status of national myth in the intervening years, representing to America the legend of its own origin. However, this process has not been without its harmful repercussions, resulting in indentations on the national psyche that leave a heavy burden of authority on emotionally incapable men and all but exclude the feminine and racial other from the picture. In Lone Star "the West" is no longer a frontier but a porous, tension-ridden partition between the United States and South America, a geographical fissure reflecting the fragility of gender, racial and national identities. The same concerns can be seen to thread through Ford's film as well, although they are obviously less explicit and tempered by some of the casual racism and sexism that many critics, perhaps letting the filmmakers off the hook too easily, have identified as virtual prerequisites of the genre (Pye 235).
<5> The really fascinating link between the two movies is a temporal one. Lone Star's narrative hinges on a sub-plot buried, metaphorically and literally, in 1957 - a year after the release of The Searchers - concerning the death of a corrupt racist sheriff, Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson). Wade is an archetypal "bad guy" hypocritically wearing the clothes of authority; the manner of his death, and the implication in it of the legendary Sheriff Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), leads to an unravelling of a history that an entire town has come to depend upon. Seeming to meditate, intertextually, on the famous line from Ford's 1962 Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ("When the legend becomes fact, print the legend"), Lone Star looks for the roots of modern social tensions in a past at least partly determined and colored by cinematic culture, and examines an ambiguity in the concept of heroism that mines the same unstable territory as The Searchers. The complex timeframe (1868, 1956, 1957, 1996) evoked by the two films adumbrates a problem of identity that finds its expression in the movie frame. The ownership and composition of that privileged and mysterious space is thus the main focus of this paper.
Lone Star as a Critique of the Western
<6> Texas , 1996. On an abandoned military firing range in Rio County, a skeleton is discovered that is later identified as that of Charley Wade, a corrupt sheriff and scourge of the Tex-Mex border region in the 1950s. Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), struggling to assert his own identity in a role identified by all of the Frontera townspeople with his legendary father Buddy, begins to suspect his late father of some involvement with Wade's death. Setting out to debunk the local myth that Buddy heroically ran Wade out of Frontera before cleaning up the town, Sam explores Buddy's history and learns of financial irregularities and a hushed-up affair with a local woman. Meanwhile, Sam rekindles a relationship with the recently-widowed Pilar (Elizabeth Peña), his Mexican high-school sweetheart. Their interracial affair is conducted against a tense backdrop of local politics; the Mexican, American and Afro-American communities of the town are at loggerheads about diverse economic and social matters, foremost among these a plan to dedicate a new statue to the memory of Buddy Deeds. Otis Payne (Ron Canada), owner of a bar frequented by the local black community, and estranged father of Delmore (Joe Morton), incumbent colonel at the nearby army base, is one of several Frontera residents to recount Charley Wade's racist brutality when questioned by Sam. Gradually, Sam pieces together the events of 1957, learning along the way that Buddy's mistress was in fact local restaurateur Mercedes Cruz (Miriam Colon), Pilar's mother. Sam confronts Hollis (Clifton James), Buddy's colleague and now outgoing mayor, with his interpretation of events: Buddy killed Charley, appropriated $10,000 of embezzled funds from Wade and used the money to set up Mercedes Cruz (who was bearing his child Pilar) in business. Hollis reveals that only one detail of Sam's version is wrong: it was Hollis himself, and not Buddy, who shot Wade to prevent him from unjustly killing Otis. Satisfied that it would serve no purpose to charge Hollis with Wade's murder, and leaving his father's reputation intact, Sam returns to Pilar, breaking to her the news that they are in fact half-brother and sister. The film ends with the couple apparently deciding to pursue the relationship.
<7> The above synopsis barely scratches at the surface of LoneStar's finely interwoven and deeply complex tapestry of stories, versions and counter-versions, myths and legends. Sam's excavation of the memory of his dead father has implications for the cultural heritage of several communities, and expands to take in the psychic history of the entire town of Frontera. Along the way, Sayles' intelligent and richly demotic screenplay touches upon a huge range of issues from race relations to political corruption, incest to modern military policy, while the restlessly mobile camerawork (in evocative widescreen) traces elegant circuits around the various plotlines, eloquently conveying the conflicting emotions of warmth and icy distrust that characterize border existence. Form in Lone Star is dictated by the social diversity of the locale; the intricate structure that oscillates between past and present, official word and conjecture, and various racial positions is motivated by Sayles' intention that all viewpoints involved in the events around Charley Wade's death and Buddy's term as Sheriff should have equal access to the narrative means.
<8> In contrast to the classical Western, where domestic spaces tend to be anathema to male protagonists and thus are often avoided,[1] much of the action of Lone Star takes place in everyday domestic circumstances; in schools, houses, bars, diners. The use of such familiar chronotopic contexts is part of a broader strategy to open out time and space, to tap into the mystery and drama of everyday life ignored by other genres (underlined by the device of exploring the mundane reality, the affairs and the backhanders, behind Buddy's legend). The relationship of Lone Star to the Western is an ambiguous one, but one that must be analyzed in order to comprehend fully Sayles' meditations on myth and storytelling. Firstly, the title of the film delineates a typically complex nexus of meanings. While ostensibly referring both to the state of Texas and the distinctive badge worn by that most American of archetypes, the sheriff, it also harks back to dime novel Western literature (Limón 598). The discovery of Charley Wade's 'tin star' sets the machinery of the plot in motion. However, the only time that the phrase appears in the film itself is graphically, as a neon beer advertisement in the bar run by the racist Cody (Leo Burmester). Invoking the town's volatile racial mix, Cody anxiously warns Sam that "the lines of demarcation are getting fuzzy" and that Frontera needs someone like his father, who was a natural "referee" with the ability to mediate (for which, read keep separate) the various racial communities. Unable to see the irony of the symbol of Texas independence denigrated to the level of beer commercial, a way of profiting from Texans' unquestioning fidelity to the ideal of an America free from Mexican rule, Cody sees his bar as a mini-Alamo, "the last stand" for white people in the town. The presence of the "Lone Star" sign indicates the inevitable commodification of such nationalistic sentiment, and perhaps doubles as a subtle comment on the process by which Western myths and archetypes became cash cows for the movie industry, not only providing the American public with an appropriately heroic self-image but also selling the idea of the nation to the world.
<9> Cody's misreading of his bar as the Alamo serves to somehow "de-chronotopize" the locale, or, more accurately, to de-mythologize it as a chronotopic context. Sayles shows us that, rather than being a site saturated with the symbolic power of a historical event, it is merely a bar, a place for people to conduct their everyday relationships, some of them interracial ones. Cody is the embodiment in the narrative of truculent refusal to concede white American dominance, but the film's project is to defuse such hostility through a re-evaluation of the past, an intention that is summed up in the final line of the movie, Pilar's "Forget the Alamo". The past is not written in stone, but eternally transformable through memory (or in this case, the exercise of forgetting), echoing Bakhtin:
It is impossible to change the factual, thing-like side of the past, but the meaningful, expressive, speaking side can be changed, for it is unfinalized and does not coincide with itself (it is free). The role of memory in this eternal transformation of the past. (cited in Morson and Emerson 230)
<10> Human memory is not the only register of memory central to the text, however; genre memory is a fundamental element in the Western, and manifests itself in Lone Star's self-conscious generic discourse. Sayles' film covers much of the same conceptual territory as the classic Western - racial disharmony, threatened masculinity, the spatialization of time, the process of history - but inverts many of the Western's formulations of these issues, turning reification to critique. To examine this process further, we shall focus firstly on character (including star casting), and continue by looking at frame composition and format.
Space, Masculinity, Representation
<11> Charley Wade and Buddy Deeds is a pairing as central to Lone Star as that of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) is to The Searchers, even though the former is extremely limited in terms of screen time. In fact, many comparisons can be made between the two sets of characters. Charley Wade has the external accoutrements of the good guy (his tin star and sheriff's outfit), but is soon revealed to be racist, corrupt and brutal. His first appearance sees him explaining arrangements for the collection of bribe money to new deputy Buddy. Ethan Edwards is less conspicuously villainous, but his racism is pronounced; indeed, it propels the narrative of The Searchers. Ethan appears compelled to rescue his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood) from the Comanche party led by chief Scar not only by the need to restore the family, but from a powerful, personal urge to vengeance; by killing Scar he will recover a measure of racial and masculine supremacy. Both Edwards and Wade manifest their racism in irrational behaviour that ranges from petty to homicidal. Edwards kills buffalo rather than let Comanche feed off them and shoots the eyes out of a dead buck to prevent his spirit finding rest in accordance with Indian beliefs; Wade humiliates black bartender Otis by forcing him to spill his drink and then insisting that he clean it up, and shoots Eladio Cruz in cold blood for running illegal immigrants over the border and not cutting the sheriff in on the deal. Furthermore, suggestions of robbery, and underhand tactics at gunplay, are attached to Ethan.
<12> Perhaps most significantly, both characters seem out of step with their respective times. Wade is described as "an old-fashioned bribe or bullets kind of sheriff" by Hollis, already a relic long before his bones are found on the firing range, while Ethan's alienation from the settling impulse of post Civil War society is repeatedly underscored in The Searchers. The similarities between the characters of Wade and Ethan Edwards are compounded by the casting of Kristofferson as Wade. The actor's physical stature is comparable to Wayne's, and his presence brings intertextual resonances from other Westerns into the film.[2] The pairing of the veteran, rugged Kristofferson with the younger, good-looking Matthew McConaughey as Buddy also echoes the John Wayne/Jeffrey Hunter combination in The Searchers. Buddy and Martin are also analogized: both are associated with dutiful, under-represented females (Laurie in The Searchers and the absent, "saintly" Muriel in Lone Star), and conduct interracial affairs (the mixed race Martin courts the white Laurie Jourgenson, but is also associated with the Comanche squaw Look; Buddy Deeds conducts a relationship with the Mexican Mercedes Cruz). Finally, both Martin and Buddy are only able to establish themselves in symbolic and social orders when their ambiguous paternal figures Ethan and Charley are removed from the picture, and both characters threaten to kill their elders although in neither case is this threat carried out.
<13> Both films, then, utilize the familiar organizing principle of the Western narrative that is the oedipal trajectory. In Lone Star, however, this reading is complicated by the fact that Sam Deeds' oedipal passage must be negotiated not with the personage of his dead father, but with the memories of him held by the Frontera community. Sam is pilloried by members of Buddy's generation for having none of his father's manly stature; town elder Fenton refers to him as "all hat and no cattle", expressing his disdain in terms of a cowboy archetype. Yet, Sam is perceptive enough to see civic proposals for a new jail as a matter of political expediency devoid of any real value to the town, and, through his relationship with Pilar, embodies the hope for a symbolic interracial union. Sam is determined to conduct his relationship with Pilar in the open, even after discovering their shared paternity; the taboo of incest thus represents less of an obstacle for Sam than the spectre of social condemnation was for Buddy, who kept his adulterous affair with Mercedes quiet while hypocritically breaking up interracial alliances in the community for the supposed good of the town.[3]
<14> "All hat and no cattle": Fenton's comment highlights a crisis in masculinity, a rift between the iconic image of the stoical, commanding lawman and the diminished emotional reality of the individuals selected to discharge the responsibilities of this almost mythical figure. None of the lawmen, the wearers of the hat and tin star in the film, is what he seems. Charley Wade is a criminal and killer; Buddy Deeds is corrupt, albeit in a politically desirable and socially acceptable way; Hollis profits from Buddy's deals and kills Wade; Sam's colleague Ray (Tony Plana), who announces his contestation of Sam's position at the next election, is a malleable "yes man" in the pocket of the local politicians, while Sam himself is too liberal for the role and comes to realize that he does not even want it. In The Searchers, the role of the Western patriarch is tested but eventually reaffirmed through Ethan's final display of tolerance (in other words, his abandonment of his original, secret plan to kill Debbie rather than let her live tainted by the Comanche); in Lone Star, the archetype is revealed to be a complete redundancy, a model of masculinity lifted from local legend and inflated by the movies, whose formidable boots cannot be filled even by decent men like Sam Deeds. The assignation of authority on the basis of white malehood is a farcical anachronism in a town, like Frontera, charged with the volatile energy of racial and sexual otherness; the hat and star are signifiers cloaking a void.
<15> Unlike The Searchers, star power is not reinforced in Lone Star; indeed, an apposite and only slightly facetious alternative title for the film might be "No Star". Whereas the former film revolves around the monumental visual centre of John Wayne, the most famous faces in Sayles' film, those of Kristofferson and McConaughey, are relegated to a meagre, but telling, slice of screen time. In fact, Wade and Buddy's presence is felt more strongly on a discursive level than a visual one, in the testimonies and anecdotes of the Frontera townsfolk; Sayles frustrates our desire to see these legendary figures come to life by restricting their appearances. The central roles of Sam and Pilar are assigned to Chris Cooper and Elizabeth Peña, actors who carry little of the intertextual baggage that Wayne or Kristofferson bring to the screen.[4] Wade and Buddy's story, despite its legendary status, climactic stand-off and centrality to the dramatic fabric of Lone Star, is deliberately reduced in narrative proportion, while Sam's investigation, and its manifold repercussions in the community, are foregrounded. This process represents another inversion of classic Western practice: the equivalent in The Searchers would be to follow Ethan and Martin's odyssey only fleetingly, and spend the lion's share of the narrative watching the settlers, the Jourgensons and Charlie McCorry, as they got on with their everyday lives. Such an approach is unthinkable precisely because of the representational prohibition on domestic events and spaces already mentioned in relation to the classical Western.
<16> Lone Star's denial of star status and epic Western convention emerges most clearly in the visual presentation of Sam . Whilst it is regularly noted that John Wayne's Ethan is relentlessly centralized and fetishized in the frame of The Searchers,[5] Chris Cooper's performance as Sam is constructed along altogether different lines in Lone Star. In fact, it is the ostensible villain, Charley Wade, who looms into the frame and dominates the space of his few scenes in the patented Wayne manner. Sam is depicted in a less aggrandized fashion, to the point where he is often marginalized by the frame, reflecting his peripherality in the town's consciousness (where he dwells in the shadow of Buddy's vast reputation), and his lack of control over the events of the past. The scene of Sam's visit to Mrs Bledsoe demonstrates this strategy. As Sam introduces himself as "Sheriff Deeds", he is barely visible over a high wall and partially obscured by shadow; the lack of authority that this position affords him is reflected in Mrs Bledsoe's withering comment, "Sheriff Deeds is dead, honey. You just sheriff junior". "Story of my life," replies a resigned Sam, who then proceeds to take up a position to the left of frame while he listens to Mrs Bledsoe's account. Sam's role in piecing together an interpretation from various testimonies is a passive one; he relies on other people for information, and this sense of helplessness is conveyed in frame composition. The strategy is not designed simply to make Sam look less formidable than his father or Wade, but to question the validity of putting real, complex human beings into simplified, fixed positions such as those of the sheriff, the cowboy, the star or the hero of the narrative. Storytelling for Sayles is a plural form, served badly by such monologic devices.
<17> The allusive use of the widescreen ratio also functions to question the validity of the Western template. In its 1950s and 1960s heyday, the Western often sprawled across widescreen formats, which exaggerated its horizontal landscapes to great effect. Formulated in the early 1950s to shake up a stagnant industry, widescreen processes such as CinemaScope and Ultra Panavision were designed to convey precisely the kind of sweeping panoramas found in Westerns and historical or biblical epics such as The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965), the latter film featuring John Ford's evocative Monument Valley standing in for the middle eastern locations of the four gospels. The Cinerama experiment How The West Was Won (1962) saw co-director John Ford take the Western's propensity for exaggerated cinematic dimensions to a new technological extreme. Today, the "event" status of widescreen presentation is diminished, as the format is commonly used for productions from a variety of genres. Sayles' selection of the widescreen ratio does not seek to exploit the same sense of epic space and panorama that many widescreen films aim for; interiors are generally favoured over external locations and Western-style desert landscapes are limited to a muted role in the film's opening. Rather, in the fashion of Gordon Willis' photography for the widescreen Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979) and several Ingmar Bergman films shot by Sven Nykvist, Lone Star seeks to create a sense of psychological space, conveying emotional states rather than physical relationships.
<18> Strange but revealing compositions result from this strategy, such as the shot in the cantina where Sam and Pilar are depicted in profile bunched on the right side of the frame with the rest of the frame visually sparse save for a jukebox placed far from the camera. The void that they stare into suggests the emptiness of the years they spent lost to each other, the topic of the dialogue in the scene. When Pilar rises and walks to the jukebox, the shot switches to a reverse angle originating to the side of the jukebox, boxing the tiny figure of Sam into the bottom right quarter of the screen. The image is a startling one, and one that demonstrates the method by which Sayles and cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh extrapolate visual drama from everyday domestic circumstances. The warmly suggestive but muted lighting of the scene and the use of the nostalgic diegetic music of the jukebox contribute to the sense of an unravelling of time and a rediscovery of suppressed passion. When the space between the characters is transcended and they embrace and dance, the camera floats away before cutting to their lovemaking. Camerawork is often imbued with this floating, circling mobility in the film, as if, unsure of where to position itself to best capture the story, it elects to trace edgily around the periphery of events. This fluidity is in marked contrast to Ford's more deterministic camerawork in The Searchers, where movement is principally used to convey action (for instance, in any of the raid sequences) or underline high emotion (in a number of "push-in" shots framing Wayne in glowering close-up). Sayles forsakes the visual excesses of the Western for a more personal tone that reinforces his almost forensic attention to the detail of relationships and his preoccupation with how these relationships provide the testing ground for broader social issues.
Re-Presenting the Past: Challenging Notions of Cinematic Time
<19> In a text steeped in the discourse of borders and boundaries, a special treatment of the frontier between past and present is especially noticeable. The structure of Lone Star hinges upon a series of flashbacks; this structural dependence on privileged segments of time exemplifies Bakhtin's observation that "the knots of the narrative are tied and untied" within the organizing centers of chronotopes ("Forms" 250). The most crucial of these flashbacks take the narrative back to 1957 and convey the tension between Wade and Buddy through a series of incidents: the issuing of Buddy's ultimatum, several illustrative examples of Wade's brutality, and, finally, the killing of Wade by Hollis in Roderick Bledsoe's bar. A number of subsidiary flashbacks stretch over a wider temporal range and are thus less easy to attribute to specific dates, but are used to fill in some of the suggestive areas of plot: Sam and Pilar are seen embarking on their teenage romance and, later, have a secret tryst at a drive-in movie humiliatingly gatecrashed by an irate Buddy; a young Mercedes is seen illegally crossing over to the US, where she is assisted by Eladio Cruz, the man she will marry and whom Pilar will know as her father. Conventional filmic techniques such as dissolves, fades or straight cuts are used in some instances to mark off the flashback from the present of the story. However, a number of these analeptic episodes feature an unusual, almost theatrical technique whereby the movement through time is entirely staged within the frame, without the benefit of any kind of cut. This intriguing method of articulating in the filmic space what Janet Walker terms "a hybrid zone of memory" (246) deserves close scrutiny.[6]
<20>The first instance of this striking device comes early in the film, when Sam enters the cantina run by Mercedes Cruz to find Hollis and his friends in the middle of a nostalgic celebration of the Buddy Deeds era. Sam, his interest in his father rekindled by the discovery of the skeleton, asks mayor and orator of local history Hollis to tell the old story of how Buddy faced down Charley Wade in 1957. As Hollis begins the tale, our understanding of film narrative instructs us to expect the image to dissolve into the flashback; however, the camera instead moves down onto Hollis' hands, which rest on the restaurant table. As Hollis opines that the disagreement "started over a basket of tortillas", the camera continues its pan across the table to show the basket of tortillas in question. Hollis' hands withdraw, and the camera pans up an arm reaching into the basket, which we soon identify as belonging to Wade. This is our first sight of Wade, and the process of identification is eased by our recognition of Kristofferson, whose physique and demeanor correspond readily with Hollis' prior description of Wade as an "old fashioned bribe or bullets kind of sheriff". The original master shot of Hollis and his cronies in the cantina suggests a set of spatial relations that, in accordance with the conventional processes of film viewing, implants in our minds a sense that we are looking at a stable space that could be reproduced in reality. However, Sayles' method destabilizes this sense of spatial security, totally reconfiguring spatial relations in the frame; without a cut, the scene has shifted, disorientatingly, to a brand new interior set. To emphasize this, seconds later, the camera swings back round to the space that Hollis had filled, and we see that he has been replaced by Buddy Deeds, while the wall that stood behind Hollis has vanished to reveal another part of the new set. It is a virtuoso, and technically elaborate, piece of film craft; the gulf of forty years is elided within the frame but without the aid of editing. The strategy is repeated when the scene returns to the present, and then occurs, in slightly modified form, several more times in the text. The lack of external markers between the images of past and present, the co-existence in the same frame-space of two different timezones, is extremely significant in terms of the film's thematic discourse of temporality. The effect is one of collapsing the conventional borders between cinematic past and present, and involves a radical reconstitution of the core chronotopic values of time and space that serves to reinforce Sayles' fluid conception of identity and history. The technique fashions a new, dual chronotope showing how past and present inflect each other dialogically.
<21>Reinforcing a prominent socio-sexual theme in the text, Sayles' cinematographic strategy enunciates a kind of incest between timezones, generating an ontological impossibility: two historically marked and separate eras coexisting in the same frame . Civic (and, by extension, national) history merges with its personal counterpart, acknowledging all those competing narratives that have a stake in its articulation. The contrast with the historical project of The Searchers is considerable. As has frequently been noted in analysis of his Westerns, John Ford's mythic space works to preserve the historical moment in the visual contemplation of landscape, to abolish time's natural progression and establish in its place a frozen "golden age".[7] Philippe Haudiquet has characterized the resulting temporal register as an "ideal time [that is] outside real time" (cited in McBride and Wilmington 155-6). This process imbues time with a monumental aura, inaugurating a great distance between humanity and the history of which they are supposedly a part; the net effect is to remove human agency from historical progression, and to give cinematic spatio-temporality an idealized, irrevocable quality.[8] In this formulation, chronotopes are predetermined and fixed; the minute variations and possibilities of natural time are ironed out, and temporal shifts become a matter of visual shorthand (for instance, the weather montage that is used to mark the passing of time in Ethan and Martin's search). Time is unknowable on the level of spectatorship - although the audience might well be interested to know the exact duration of Ethan and Martin's odyssey, the epic conventions of the tale determine that this information should be omitted.[9] Sayles' approach, on the other hand, is far more pluralist and democratic. He sees the relationship between story time and frame space as a permeable border to be explored, stretched out, compressed, and generally played around with. Sayles refuses to treat time as a barrier obstructing traffic between past and present; instead, he reconfigures it as a border to be crossed at will. Time is understood as an internal value that can be measured in people's lives and memories, as much as it can be inscribed in the external registers of weather and landscape. The tight, volatile space of the Tex-Mex border, the physical manifestation of a political and historical bone of contention, is given more room to breathe in this formulation. Yet the intimate chronotopic connection between time and space remains intact, is even strengthened, in Sayles' film. In the segue from Hollis' monologue into the Buddy/Wade confrontation described above, space becomes "charged and responsive to the movements of time" (Bakhtin "Forms" 84), its proportion and character changing completely in a matter of seconds during which the attention of the camera is focused on the table.
<22>Linking time to human emotion and psychology destabilizes any monologic pretence to definitiveness: time becomes intersubjective, multifaceted and personalized. The flashbacks, at least those attributed to Sam, Pilar and Mercedes, delineate a transgression of time with positive and healing consequences. Almost all of the major characters effect some kind of internal examination of their pasts, and use what they find there to underwrite change or reaffirmation in their lives in the present. Sam's reunion with Pilar is originally engendered as a by-product of his investigation into the life of his father; even the disquieting nature of their discovery about Buddy's relationship with Mercedes appears to be used by the couple to reinforce their love at the end of the film. Mercedes Cruz herself, a Mexican businesswoman so comprehensively assimilated into the American system that she reports illegal border jumpers to the authorities, delves into her own past and finds the emotional space that allows her to help a band of struggling immigrants. Elsewhere in the text, familial bonds are strengthened through an awareness of history and the healing power of time. Black bar-owner Otis Payne, an amateur historian obsessed with the story of a little-known ethnic strand of black Indians, the Seminole nation, is reunited with his son Delmore because the initially resentful army man discovers accidentally that Otis has kept a shrine, or even museum, detailing all of his son's achievements over the years. This discovery, in turn, alerts Delmore to the distance between himself and his own son Chet, and spurs him to a resolution to prevent the estrangement of his own childhood from being repeated.
<23>The extraordinary sensitivity of the town of Frontera to the operations of history, suggested in the scene where concerned parents and educators clash over the local school's history curriculum, will never be completely resolved, and Sayles includes nothing to indicate that such an outcome would be desirable. Somewhere in the midst of these conflicting viewpoints and voices resides the "truth" that can help Frontera to survive; mutual interaction and conflict actually generate that truth rather than serve to obscure it. Grey areas, rather than arbitrary lines of demarcation, are to be celebrated and maintained. Delmore, sceptical of the services offered by Otis, the self-styled "Mayor of Darktown", is encouraged by his father to re-evaluate the terms on which he contemplates his own neatly ordered existence and to take note of how these rigid lines of discipline are suffocating the aspirations of his own son Chet: "It's not like there's a border line between the good people and the bad people. You're not on either one side or the other". This crucial remark not only articulates the moral thesis and emotional geography of the film (reinforcing the central "border" trope), but also illuminates the method chosen for the flashbacks. Time is no less difficult to order into manageable blocks and discrete compartments than is moral value, so why use cinematic methods that give this false impression? Sayles' rejection of the edit, the device most commonly used to signify temporal and spatial change, is in one sense uncinematic, but the intention is to challenge easy assumptions about the nature of cinema and how it represents time and life. This problem is incorporated, microcosmically, into the text. Chet expresses his own boredom and disillusionment with the path of education eulogized by his father through a form of escape that has a filmic element: he attempts to animate a character drawn repeatedly, with minute differences, over dozens of pages of his exercise book. This experiment with time and space metaphorically denotes his desire to find a way out of the linear life plotted for him by his father.
Conclusion: "Print the Legend"
<24> Lone Star's attitude to the Western is never less than respectful. As an uncredited scriptwriter on the Sharon Stone vehicle and revisionist/feminist Western The Quick and the Dead (Sam Raimi, 1995), John Sayles demonstrated a familiarity and assurance in reaccentuating Western conventions for modern audiences. Lone Star goes much further, recontextualizing the form through a critical awareness of genre memory. In this process Sayles as author can be compared to his character Mikey (Stephen J. Lang), the treasure hunter who discovers Charley Wade's skeleton at the outset of the film. Mikey, as his friend Cliff tells Sam Deeds, hunts for spent bullet shells on the abandoned firing range, takes them home and "makes art out of them".
<25> Although this essay has concentrated on the discursive relationship between Lone Star and The Searchers, echoes of another Ford Western figure prominently in the film. Like Lone Star, the narrative of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is predicated on a crucial misreading. In Sayles' film, the misinterpretation is by Sam, who falsely surmises that his father killed Wade when in fact the deed was performed by Hollis. In Liberty Valance, the community of Shinbone mistakenly credits Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) with dispatching the cruel robber Valance (Lee Marvin) when in fact it was the bullet of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) that killed him. In both cases, legends form around the apparent heroes, who go on to improve nominally the lot of their respective communities (Ranse entering the world of politics, Buddy becoming Sheriff). Both films are alert to the idea that violence is stitched into the fabric of history. The name of "Shinbone" evokes the human cost of civilizing the west, an association that is ironically cited in the opening scenes of Lone Star when Charley Wade's bones are discovered in the Texas earth. In these two films, Ford and Sayles dissect the notion of heroism and the cultural conditions that allow legends and stories to take root in the popular consciousness. Liberty Valance, although popularly regarded as an elegy for the purity of earlier Westerns, actually goes further in deconstructing John Wayne's star persona than does The Searchers; his act of heroism overlooked, Doniphon passes through stages of drunkenness, loneliness, and ends up dead in a cheap coffin minus his gun and boots.
<26> "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend" is the famous reaction of the newspaper editor when Stoddard attempts to put the story straight after Doniphon's death. Stories acquire their own logic and momentum, the film appears to be saying; the power of myth is greater than the claim of fact. In Lone Star, Sam makes a tacit decision to "print the legend" by hushing up his findings in the Charley Wade murder investigation; his father's reputation will remain unsullied, even though Sam has found ample evidence of abuse of office and sexual infidelity. Sam's decision to leave his father's legend intact is his way of "forgetting the Alamo", to paraphrase Pilar. The phrase signifies the effort of will and co-operation that is needed to wipe the slate clean in a place like Frontera.[10] The destructive tendency to rake over an inglorious past must be resisted if the town is to succeed as a multicultural entity; memory must first be mobilized on a personal level to grant the perspective needed to comprehend the broader social outlines of past events. The positive results of reassessing one's own emotional history are contrasted with the damage effected on a racial level by adherence to fixed versions and resistance to compromise. The fact that Sam and Pilar are able to resolve their own personal border dispute, that of their biological connection, by rejecting its terms gives hope for the wider society.
<27> With particular reference to Dostoevsky, Bakhtin developed the notion of the "threshold", a certain chronotopic context that "takes on the meaning of a 'point' where crisis, radical change, an unexpected turn of fate takes place, where decisions are made, where the forbidden line is overstepped" ("Dostoevsky's Poetics", 169). Such spaces tend to be impermanent and unfinalizable, reflecting their status as crisis points for the ultimate testing of values rather than places to actually play out a life. Significantly, Pilar's statement "Forget the Alamo" - the utterance that will activate her and Sam's transgression of the "forbidden line" - is spoken at the loaded threshold location of the drive-in movie theatre. This is the place that she and Sam have chosen for the symbolic re-ignition of their relationship (it was curtailed there by Buddy, as one flashback shows us). They are drawn to a place where memories seem to speak particularly strongly, the perfect location to make up for lost time and rekindle thwarted desire: the cinema. However, in keeping with Sayles' bittersweet evocation of the power of movies, the theatre has fallen derelict, and does not appear to have shown a film in years.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, M. M. "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel". The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. 84-258.
---. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Bazin, A. What is Cinema? Volume II. Trans. Hugh Gray. London: University of California Press, 1972.
Boyd, D. "Prisoner of the Night". Film Heritage 12: 2 (1976-7): 24-31.
Courtney, S. "Looking for (Race and Gender) Trouble in Monument Valley". Qui Parle 6: 2 (1993): 97-130.
Engel, L. "Mythic Space and Monument Valley: Another Look at John Ford's Stagecoach". Literature Film Quarterly 22: 3 (1994): 174-80.
Limón, J. E. "Tex-Sex-Mex: American Identities, Lone Stars and the Politics of Racialized Sexuality". American Literary History 9: 3 (1997): 598-616.
McBride, J. and Wilmington, M. John Ford. London: Secker and Warburg, 1974.
Maltby, R. Hollywood Cinema. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Morson, G. S. and Emerson, C. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. California: Stanford University Press, 1992.
Musser, C. Before the Nickolodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Oxford: University of California Press, 1991.
Pye, D. "Double Vision: Miscegenation and Point of View in The Searchers". Movie Book of the Western. Eds. Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye. London: Studio Vista, 1996. 229-35.
Pym, J., ed. Time Out Film Guide. London: Penguin, 1997.
"John Sayles". Internet Movie Database. 5 Aug. 2003. <http://www.imdb.com/Name?Sayles,%2BJohn>.
Walker, J. "Captive Images in the Traumatic Western". Westerns: Films Through History. Ed. Janet Walker. London: Routledge, 2001. 219-51.
Weaver, D. "The Narrative of Alienation: Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver". CineAction (Summer/Fall 1986): 12-16.
Notes
[1] In The Searchers, for instance, John Wayne's Ethan Edwards appears trapped and uncomfortable when entering the homes of relatives or other settlers; in Raoul Walsh's Pursued (1947), Jeb Rand (Robert Mitchum) traumatically associates his childhood home with a haunting, barely-repressed memory of the death of his father. Many other classical-era Westerns, from They Died With Their Boots On (Raoul Walsh, 1941) to Shane (George Stevens, 1953), play out the inability of the male hero to settle into domestic life. [^]
[2] Underlining certain similarities in the star personas of the two actors, Kristofferson actually essayed the archetypal Wayne role of the Ringo Kid in a television remake of Ford's Stagecoach in 1986. He has also appeared in latter-day Westerns such as Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980). Kristofferson's career as a country singer also trades on a certain rugged cowboy quality in his looks and personality. Interestingly, in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Travis Bickle, a character widely interpreted as an updated version of Ethan Edwards (cf. Weaver 1986; Boyd 1976-7), is compared to a character in a Kristofferson song by Betsy (Cybill Shepherd). [^]
[3] Ironically, given the racial agenda of the text, it is Sam and Pilar's sameness, not their ethnic difference, that constitutes the threat to their relationship. [^]
[4] Cooper's Academy Award success in Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002) was seven years away. Similarly, Lone Star anticipated, but was unable to capitalize upon, McConaughey's later rise as a heroic male lead in films such as U-571 (Jonathan Mostow, 2000) and Reign of Fire (Rob Bowman, 2002). [^]
[5] Janet Walker cites Janey Place's assessment of a critical close-up of Wayne as 'astounding', and postulates that this charged moment might be the referent of Steven Spielberg's oblique comment that Ford's film 'contains the single most harrowing moment in any film I've ever seen' (cited in Walker 222). [^]
[6] Sayles' technique could be seen as an inflection of the strategy employed by Ingmar Bergman in Wild Strawberries (1957), another film centrally concerned with the visual representation of memory. I am thinking, in particular, of the scenes where Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström), as an old man, witnesses events of his youth from a vantage-point that is represented by Bergman as within the same diegetic space. [^]
[7] See Engel (1994) for a further elaboration of Ford's "mythic space". [^]
[8] Janet Walker identifies a slightly different quality of irrevocability in Ford's temporal construction in her analysis of The Searchers, arguing that what she terms the "prospective pastness" of the traumatic episode of Scar's attack constitutes the paradoxical temporal engine driving the grim search of the title. Having been drawn away from his brother's family by his involvement in the Reverend's posse, Ethan instinctively realises the true intent of the Comanche activity. However, he is too far away to intervene; even though the unspeakable moment has not occurred yet, his unprotected family is effectively already dead - "It's already too late, even though it hasn't happened yet" ( Walker 223). [^]
[9] Critical consensus suggests that the duration of the search is between three and ten years (see Courtney 128). [^]
[10] The mention of the Alamo also evokes a key John Wayne text, sending us back once more to The Searchers. The Alamo (1960) was Wayne's directorial debut, an "elephantine, historically inaccurate" (Pym 14) tribute to the defenders of Texan independence. John Ford apparently gave novice helmsman Wayne uncredited assistance on the film. In a further (if not final) twist of these metatextual affinities, IMDB reports that John Sayles has recently contributed script work to John Lee Hancock's upcoming version of The Alamo (2003). [^]
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