Frontiers and Border-Crossing: Incest, History, and Cinematic Structure in John Sayles's Lone Star

John Sayles's Lone Star (1996) takes the occasion of Hispanic and Anglo cultural differences to concentrate thematically on an array of epistemological borders: between history and myth, parent and child, and genders, as well as racial and cultural matrixes. And the cinematic structure of the film itself compounds these efforts through a fragmented presentation that engages viewers self-consciously in the problematic seamlessness of any narrative sequence. In every way, the film ponders the question of unified identity, shared and nearly shared, simply by dramatizing the contrasts that allow for coherence itself to be achieved.