Lone Star (1996, John Sayles) with Domino Perez - Criterion Collection Spine #1202
Why This Film
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"Blood only means what you let it."
In this episode of Why This Film?, I'm joined by Domino Perez to explore Lone Star, John Sayles's 1996 neo-western murder mystery and Criterion Collection Spine #1202.
A skeleton turns up in the Texas desert, and Sheriff Sam Deeds starts pulling a thread that leads straight back to his own father: Buddy Deeds, the legendary lawman the whole town reveres. What emerges is a film about how a community survives the gap between the story it tells about itself and the truth sitting underneath it.
My guest is Domino Perez, Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She's the author of There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture and Fatherhood in the Borderlands, and her scholarship spans Mexican American and Latinx literature, film, and popular culture. She's also the person who wrote Lone Star's actual Criterion booklet essay, "Past is Present," which makes her about as close to the ideal guest as this show could find for a film built entirely on the questions she's spent her career studying.
We discuss:
Reading Mercedes and Pilar as Mexican American women rarely given this kind of complexity on screen.
The La Llorona folklore and the film's relationship to water and loss
How four very different fathers are portrayed
Chucho's line in the dirt and what border means
The real world 1836 project and how this 1996 film predicted it
What "Forget the Alamo" actually means
Whether you're discovering Lone Star for the first time or returning to it decades later, this conversation explores why a film about a murdered sheriff ends up being about everyone else in the town. It's a story where solving the crime is almost beside the point.
Domino Perez
La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture
Fatherhood in the Borderlands
Follow the Podcast:
WhyThisFilm.com
Instagram
YouTube
Lone Star (1996, John Sayles) with Domino Perez - Criterion Collection Spine #1202
Why This Film
22 views
"Blood only means what you let it."
In this episode of Why This Film?, I'm joined by Domino Perez to explore Lone Star, John Sayles's 1996 neo-western murder mystery and Criterion Collection Spine #1202.
A skeleton turns up in the Texas desert, and Sheriff Sam Deeds starts pulling a thread that leads straight back to his own father: Buddy Deeds, the legendary lawman the whole town reveres. What emerges is a film about how a community survives the gap between the story it tells about itself and the truth sitting underneath it.
My guest is Domino Perez, Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She's the author of There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture and Fatherhood in the Borderlands, and her scholarship spans Mexican American and Latinx literature, film, and popular culture. She's also the person who wrote Lone Star's actual Criterion booklet essay, "Past is Present," which makes her about as close to the ideal guest as this show could find for a film built entirely on the questions she's spent her career studying.
We discuss:
Reading Mercedes and Pilar as Mexican American women rarely given this kind of complexity on screen.
The La Llorona folklore and the film's relationship to water and loss
How four very different fathers are portrayed
Chucho's line in the dirt and what border means
The real world 1836 project and how this 1996 film predicted it
What "Forget the Alamo" actually means
Whether you're discovering Lone Star for the first time or returning to it decades later, this conversation explores why a film about a murdered sheriff ends up being about everyone else in the town. It's a story where solving the crime is almost beside the point.
Domino Perez
La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture
Fatherhood in the Borderlands
Follow the Podcast:
WhyThisFilm.com
Instagram
YouTube