SOURCE: Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack. “Forget the Alamo: Reading the Ethics of Style in John Sayles's Lone Star.” Style 32, no. 3 (fall 1998): 471-85.

In the following essay, Davis and Womack praise the visual style of Lone Star and discuss the film's handling of the cultural history of a Texas border town.

Blood only means what you let it.

—John Sayles, Lone Star

In an editorial of 26 March 1997, Linda Chavez, the President of the Center for Equal Opportunity and a nationally syndicated columnist, laments Hollywood's subtle “chipping away at the incest taboo,” arguing that John Sayles's 1996 film, Lone Star, advocates incest as “just another alternative life style choice.” While Chavez derides the film as a “boring, politically correct saga about prejudice and murder in a small Texas town,” her critique of Sayles's narrative neglects the tremendous import of incest as a metaphor for the history of ethnic struggle...