The Borders of Time, Place, and People in John Sayles's Lone Star

Abstract

John Sayles's Lone Star (1996) is the embodiment of a “frontier” film; he himself has described it as “a story about borders” (West, “An Interview with John Sayles,” 14). The film's genre, its locale, its incorporation of history, ethnicity, generations, and sexual proscriptions, and even its use of pans to cut across time all cohere around this perspective. Nor, as I will indicate, is this concern with borders new to Sayles's art; Lone Star, which taps a number of motifs and conventions familiar to American culture, bringing together a multitude of meanings of boundaries and margins and frontiers, intensifies a theme that exists in every one of his films.