John Sayles's Lone Star, released in 1996, repeatedly depicts the border between the United States and Mexico only to then reveal its essential porosity.Footnote ¹ The film's title suggests such permeability from the start, reminding the spectator that the “Lone Star State” of Texas once belonged to Mexico; the name of the US town in which the film is set, Frontera, further announces the porous nature of borders in the film. As Lone Star spins its tale of decades-old murder and rekindled desire, the lines nominally dividing Mexico from the United States continue to be destabilized: individuals of both nationalities drive, wade, and wander north and south; speak a mix of English and Spanish; and consistently breach the ranks of race and ethnicity in their relationships. Summing up the message the film appears to send about the need to reimagine the (global) nation, Mexico's self-proclaimed “Rey de las llantas” (or “King of Tires”) pointedly draws a line on the ground with a Coke bottle, then states, “A bird flying south: you think he sees this line? Rattlesnake, javelina, whatever you got, you think halfway across that line they start thinking different? Why should a man?”Footnote ²

Due to the challenges that the film undeniably presents to traditional definitions of the nation as a coherent entity existing within fixed borders, Lone Star is often noted for its depiction of life in the area that Américo Paredes described as “Greater Mexico,” and Gloria Anzaldúa more recently referred to as the Borderlands: “The U.S.–Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture.”Footnote ³ Mary Helen Washington, for example, lauded the film in her 1997 presidential address to the American Studies Association as a “prophetic allegory” in which “ ‘differences of language, politics, historical vision’ were not allowed ‘to dissolve in a soothing movement toward consensus’ ”; and the film has been productively analyzed as border cinema, third cinema, and “representative transamericanism.”Footnote ⁴ In this article, however, I would like to suggest that while Lone Star does underscore the fragility of the nation in an era of global trade and travel, it also suggests that men – unlike rattlesnakes and javelinas – often remain limited in their ability to escape the confines of nation-based ideologies and interests. Offering a new focus on ideology in Lone Star, I will argue here that Sayles's film highlights the ongoing importance of the nation-state through its attention to the institutions and individuals charged with upholding national ideology, and that it ultimately suggests the difficulties of escaping the influence of the nation as a construct.

In chronicling life in the Borderlands, Lone Star offers the spectator a series of interrelated storylines that foreground the relationships between parents and children, and, as such, between past and present. As US Army Colonel Delmore Payne (Joe Morton) struggles to understand his father, the “Mayor of Darktown” Otis Payne (Ron Canada), high-school history teacher Pilar Cruz (Elizabeth Peña) butts heads with her mother, Councilwoman Mercedes Cruz (Miriam Colón); and, in what might be characterized as the film's central storyline, Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) attempts to determine if his now-deceased father, the former sheriff Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), is somehow implicated in the murder of Buddy's predecessor, Sheriff Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson).Footnote ⁵ Sam and the spectator alike are surprised, however, to discover evidence of another sort of transgression: Buddy has fathered a daughter out of wedlock, and this daughter, Pilar, is Sam's high-school sweetheart and the woman with whom he has recently restarted a relationship.

Incest, of course, is generally considered to lurk at the border of not only past and present, but also civilization and savagery. As such, texts that portray incestuous relationships frequently end in disaster or death, as occurs, for instance, in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), to which Kim Magowan cogently compares the film.Footnote ⁶ In marked contrast to such texts, Lone Star's half-siblings opt to continue their relationship without evident tragedy: sitting together in Frontera's now-abandoned drive-in, as we will see, Sam and Pilar hold hands and decide to remain a couple. Thereby making incest potentially “desirable” in a world in which “borders cannot be properly policed, since they are already transgressed,” Sayles's film calls into question the rules and regulations that govern society, and that most individuals accept without thinking.Footnote ⁷ For, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari contend, challenges to the general prohibition of incest (and, one might add, other taboo sexual acts as well) reveal and challenge the ways in which society imposes control on its subjects.Footnote ⁸ As Deleuze and Guattari state, “The law tells us: You will not marry your mother, and you will not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so that's what I wanted!”Footnote ⁹ Once “we docile subjects” believe that we harbor unrecognized desires, we are willing to relinquish our right to what Deleuze and Guattari characterize as unbridled desire, settling for restricted and regulated pleasure instead. Questioning the incest prohibition and embracing desire, Sam and Pilar thus engage in a concomitant questioning of the very foundations of capitalist society:

Yet even as Lone Star critiques the notion of a strictly bordered nation-state, and indeed capitalist society itself, it repeatedly references the individuals and organizations charged with maintaining the status quo and patrolling the borders of the nation – individuals and organizations that Louis Althusser associates with “state apparatuses.”Footnote ¹¹ In Althusser's well-known formulation, “ideological state apparatuses” (e.g. schools, churches, families, culture) function to achieve the continuation of the hegemonic order without recourse to violence, whereas the “repressive state apparatus” (e.g. the police, the government, the army) works toward the same goal but relies on force. Lone Star, as we have seen, is replete with protagonists who uphold state ideology: Sam, Buddy, and Charley Wade are sheriffs; Delmore is a colonel; Pilar is a schoolteacher; and Mercedes and Otis are, respectively, town council member and unofficial mayor of “Darktown.” Moreover, if Sam and Pilar's incestuous relationship is key to reading the film as “revolutionary,” it is of note that each of the couple's encounters in the filmic present occurs within a space linked to a state apparatus. As the couple chat in the sheriff 's office, meet up outside the courthouse and the school, and sit in a now-abandoned drive-in, the spectator is encouraged to recognize the ongoing importance of established ideology, and the potential difficulties inherent in challenging it through even such an act as controversial as rejecting the incest prohibition.

Sam and Pilar's first encounter in the film occurs in the sheriff's office, where the star-crossed lovers meet by chance after a prolonged separation. The camera shows Pilar talking to a receptionist through a smudged window, then cuts to show Sam looking at Pilar through a security-grade window. The wire-covered panes serve as a tangible representation of a repressive state apparatus, and foreshadow the flashbacks that reveal Buddy's forcible separation of the pair as teens; the smudge on the glass hints at the couple's obscured knowledge of their origins, an open secret for Frontera residents. Reinforcing the characterization of the office as a repressive space, the spectator knows that Pilar has come to the office to find her son, Amado (Gonzalo Castillo), who has been taken in for questioning about stolen electronics; the spectator also knows that Sam is the sheriff who is in charge of the office overseeing his case. Yet as Magowan notes, the use of a largely transparent, albeit barred, window signals the porous nature of the boundary separating the two: “The ‘invisible line’ of glass, introduced here, is repeatedly erected between these lovers as a border whose transparency indicates a potential for crossing.”Footnote ¹² Sam soon enters the reception area to talk to Pilar, and, after learning of her predicament, arranges for Amado (whose name means “beloved”) to be released. Thus implying that borders can be breached, the scene nonetheless hints at the difficulty of overcoming them completely in its final shot: as Pilar and Amado leave for home, Sam stands to the left of a row of sheriffs' portraits, reinforcing his position as representative and enforcer of the law.

Sam and Pilar next meet at the dedication of the Buddy Deeds Memorial Courthouse, in a scene that again signals the important place occupied by the institutions that promote and protect the public order. In his comments during the dedication ceremony, Sam reminds viewers of the law's omnipresence, stating, “I used to think there wasn't a place in this town you could hide from my old man, and now I'm sure of it.” Sam's characterization of the law as inescapable is reinforced in the writing on the plaque honoring his father: “Buddy Deeds 1930–1991, Beloved Sheriff and Community Leader, The eyes of Texas are upon you.” Revealing that the maintenance of the public facade requires an erasure of undesirable elements, or at the very least a strategic ignorance, the plaque features an image of Buddy resting his arm protectively around an androgynous child, described as a “Mexican kid” by an onlooker, and a “Chicano-looking boy” in the movie script.Footnote ¹³ Yet Buddy looks not toward the child, but away. He thereby establishes a physical connection with the unnamed child, at the same time as he turns his gaze elsewhere. As Pilar's mother, introduced as council member “Mrs. Mercedes Cruz,” first holds a smile for the cameras, then cuts the ribbon releasing the fabric that has covered the plaque, many of Frontera's residents are likely to contemplate the rich, polyvalent possibilities of the scene unfolding before them. Had a Y been substituted for an X in the genetic code of Mercedes's progeny, the child pictured could be Pilar, whom Buddy similarly embraced (paying the hospital bills when she was born, reading of her progress in letters penned by Mercedes) even as his circumstances compelled him to turn his public gaze elsewhere, in the direction of his wife and son.

Sam and Pilar's third meeting, in the parking lot of the school where Pilar works as a history teacher, occurs in the space of the ideological state apparatus (ISA) – a space in which Pilar, for one, hopes that tradition and history might be reworked to foreground what she describes as the “complexity of our situation down here.” Sam sits in his car and watches Pilar longingly through dual (and once again transparent) barriers: his car windshield and the windows of the school. As occurred in the sheriff's office, such divisions are overcome as Pilar exits the building, sees Sam, and tells him, “follow me.” After leading Sam to her mother's restaurant, the Santa Barbara Café (now closed for the night), Pilar puts on the jukebox music that she remembers from her childhood. Explicitly linking past to present, Chicano country and western singer Freddy Fender croons “Desde que conosco [sic]” (Since I Know) as the couple dance together. In this Spanish-language remake of Ivory Joe Hunter's “Since I Met You Baby,” featured earlier in the film, Fender both voices Sam's “knowledge” that his life has changed since discovering that his beloved is true to him, and hints at the difficulties of accurate translations: not only does Fender's version differ from the English original in key respects, the couple also lack the knowledge (of their origins) that they need most, as they inaccurately interpret their parents’ earlier decision to prohibit their relationship.Footnote ¹⁴ Pointing once more to the intersection of past and present, the camera travels back in the scene's final shot to show the couple through the café's front window, which is emblazoned with “Santa Barbara.” The café's name reminds the spectator that Pilar was sent away to Catholic school to prevent her from continuing her relationship with Sam, as the café's patron Santa Barbara was said to have been imprisoned by her father for disobedience.Footnote ¹⁵

In an explicit challenge to the racial prejudice that the protagonists believe motivated their parents’ decision to forbid their relationship, the shot of the couple dancing in the Santa Barbara Café dissolves into a shot of the two in bed together, discovering that sex “feels the same,” “good,” after their long separation. In the private space of his apartment, Sam is for the first time shown without his sheriff 's uniform, momentarily liberated from his official role as guarantor of order. Pilar comments on the blankness of the walls of the apartment, where Sam has lived since separating from his wife, Bunny (Frances McDormand), and Sam replies, “Don't have kids. The other pictures – I don't know – it's nothing that I want to look back on.” Pilar comments, “Like your story is over,” then hastens to reassure Sam, “It isn't. Uh-uh. Not by a long shot.” In her remarks, Pilar both references and refutes Sam's lack of the traditional, family-based narrative of identity in which the future is encapsulated in the offspring borne. While blank walls could signal loss, Pilar's statement, in conjunction with the scene's apparent lack of an institutional framework, suggests that they also indicate the possibility of a blank slate on which the two might write a new and more compelling “story.”

Lone Star's final scene, in which Sam sits with Pilar on the hood of his car in Frontera's abandoned drive-in, cements the importance of cinema as an ISA in the film and suggests both loss and potential gain. As Sam tells Pilar of their shared blood, knowledge he has stumbled across during his investigation into Charley Wade's death, the photograph that Sam offers Pilar as proof of Mercedes's liaison with Buddy rectifies Sam's lack of a pictorial genealogical narrative; on the other hand, however, the photographic evidence he presents threatens to undermine the future vision of his life with Pilar that he wishes to project on the walls of his house and, by extension, on the blank drive-in screen facing him.Footnote ¹⁶ Sam, who has forsaken his uniform in favor of more casual attire, indicates the possibility of rejecting societal bias against incest in a measured statement that nonetheless reveals the ongoing influence of prevailing ideology: “If I met you for the first time today, I'd still want to be with you.” Pilar then offers a more decisive declaration of her desire to continue their relationship, establishing an explicit break with past history in the film's final lines: “We start from scratch … all that other stuff, and all that history – the hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo.”

In telling Sam to forget the Alamo, Pilar offers the possibility of starting anew in response to Sam's revelation of shared genes. As she jettisons an emblematic moment in regional history and its contemporary influence on local identities, she “rejects not the past per se but what the Alamo represents: artificial and reinforced lines drawn between official histories, each contending for the right to establish exclusive rootedness in the land.”Footnote ¹⁷ Indicating her refusal to be limited by a highly symbolic and divisive clash in which individuals must adjust their identities to rigidly fixed, nationally based constraints, she expands upon her earlier comments, delivered during a contentious school meeting, in which she argues for the need to portray “part of the complexity of our situation down here: cultures coming together in both positive and negative ways.”Footnote ¹⁸ Pilar's comments in public and private fora alike point to the nuances of nation and identity in the present moment, while her revisionist approach to history also signals the productive and labile power of individuals living in the Borderlands, and their ability to choose their personal and national histories. For if Homi Bhabha correctly asserts that the colonial subject is asked to mimic his master in full knowledge of his necessary failure to do so, and is thus relegated to a perpetual state of “not quite/not white,”Footnote ¹⁹ Pilar demonstrates a subversive ability to employ her “not quite”-ness to achieve her own ends, turning such formulations on their head. In offering to “start from scratch,” presumably in a new place, she implicitly affirms the advantages of metaphorically darkening her skin, foregoing her claim to Anglo paternity and thus whitewashing the historical record, with the specific goal of permitting an incestuous relationship.

Inserting her comments within a specifically national framework (“Forget the Alamo”) and recasting incest as potentially unproblematic, Pilar seeks to articulate not only a personal, but also a (post-)national modus operandi. Speaking to Sam in front of one screen, even as her words are carried through time and space to the spectator who watches her on another, Pilar hints at the possibility of using culture to encourage change. Advocating the unregulated desire that Deleuze and Guattari maintain can cause capitalist society's “fundamental strictures [to] explode,”Footnote ²⁰ Pilar (and Lone Star more generally) thereby offers viewers what Alison Landsberg has termed a “prosthetic memory”:

From this vantage point, the blank movie screen represents the possibility of a new narrative for siblings and spectator alike. When Sam finds out the true history of his family, a past prosthetic memory is seemingly displaced, potentially permitting a rewriting of the narratives foisted upon the siblings in their youth, as well as the traditional incest narrative in which the sin of sex between brother and sister is best punished by death.

ISAs such as cinema, however, only allow for the possibility of limited contestation and change within the prevailing ideological system, and Lone Star in fact establishes an explicit connection between cinema, ideology, and the repressive state apparatus that uses force to uphold the status quo. For one, many of Lone Star's multiple cinematic intertexts foreground the law:Footnote ²² Sayles himself cites as influences Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), Robert M. Young's The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982) (and the song of the same title), and Américo Paredes's With a Pistol in His Hand.Footnote ²³Lone Star again foregrounds the connection between ISA and repressive state apparatus in a flashback in which Sam remembers making out with Pilar at the drive-in as a teenager. The scene begins with a shot of the drive-in screen, which shows two women who are running through a field, their progress slowed by the fact that they are chained together. Linking ideology to repression, the women are in fact attempting to escape the law in Eddie Romero's Black Mama, White Mama (1972).Footnote ²⁴ Further tracing a line between the ideological power of cinema and the repressive force of the law, Sheriff Buddy Deeds soon arrives to separate the young lovers. The camera pans down to show Buddy's silhouette against the screen: as Buddy shines his flashlight into the parked cars in search of his son, he embodies ideology's repressive counterpart, mimicking the mechanical projector that passes light through film to put larger-than-life images (and ideology) on the screen.

Once more highlighting cinema's links to state ideology, Lone Star also employs its signature pans to erase the distinction between one moment in time and another, amplifying what Jean-Louis Baudry characterizes as the rendering of cinema's ideological effects through its sequential integration of still shots into time:

In Hollywood cinema, cuts mark the transition between one scene and the next, even as they more generally promote an “illusion of continuity.” Lone Star furthers this illusion – and highlights cinema's ideological effects – through pans that remove the distinction between past and present, moving effortlessly from one moment in time to another and back again through flashbacks.Footnote ²⁶

As Sayles asserts of scenes that might begin in the present, then, via a pan over a tabletop, or a river, move neatly to the past,

Preparing to eat lunch with friends, for example, Mayor Hollis Pogue (Clifton James) finds himself interrupted by Sam, who encourages him to tell how then-deputy Buddy displaced his boss to become sheriff. Hollis begins his story by linking his present location to that of the night in question: “It was in here … Started over a basket of tortillas.” The camera pans slowly from the mayor's hand to the basket of tortillas on the table in front of him. Another hand reaches into the basket from the opposite side of the table and lifts up a tortilla to uncover a folded ten-dollar bill. Tracking up, the camera reveals then-Sheriff Wade, moving the spectator into the past and allowing him to see (rather than hear, in Hollis's voice) how Buddy confronts his boss the night before Wade mysteriously disappears, telling him that he refuses to participate in various bribery and extortion schemes. Panning from Buddy's satisfied face to Sam's frowning countenance after Wade leaves the restaurant, the film then brings the viewer back to the filmic present, as Hollis echoes Buddy in requesting more beer: “Más cerveza, por favor.” In this way, the film highlights cinema's ability to “efface” the difference between one moment (or shot) and another, pointing to cinema's ideological effects.

Underscoring cinema's links to nation-based ideologies through pans and plot, Lone Star reifies the very borders it challenges, demonstrating, as George B. Handley writes, that a transnational paradigm does not mean the end of nation-based interests and limitations: “The desire to resituate ‘America’ in a broader and more plural hemispheric context has much to recommend it, but such generosity of vision is no guarantee that we can avoid replicating a U.S. entrapment within itself.”Footnote ²⁸ While I agree with Handley on this point, I do not concur with his argument in its entirety, questioning in particular his assertion that Lone Star nonetheless signals a certain hope:

As in the tragedies to which Handley and others compare the film, I would suggest instead that Lone Star might more accurately be considered to reveal such claims as among what Gabriela Basterra terms the “necessary” fictions that we assume to justify our ability to exert the power of choice and retain our subjectivity:

Paradoxically, then, Lone Star supports prevailing ideology even as it unmasks it, holding out the quintessential “American” dream of imagining new histories and living (a)lone at the same time as it unravels the possibility of doing so. In suggesting that she and Sam, for example, “Forget the Alamo,” and in advocating an alternate rendering of history, Pilar proves one of “those teachers who … attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against the ideology, the system, and the practices in which they are trapped,” but whose “own devotion contributes to the maintenance and nourishment of this ideological representation of the School.”Footnote ³¹ In much the same way, while Pilar attempts to operate outside the confines of established ideology in advocating a relationship with Sam, the couple will in all likelihood only pass for solitary: it is probable that they will leave Frontera, where their parents' affair is well known by the community, to maintain a facade of exogamic normality. The couple's decision to pursue a relationship that will never lead to reproduction also provides a convenient escape from the incest taboo, even as it also signals a rejection of the societal value placed on this outcome. For, pointing to what Sayles describes as an “individual accommodation” and Magowan characterizes as a “loophole,” Pilar indicates, “I can't get pregnant any more, if that's what the rule is about.”Footnote ³²

Again suggesting the difficulties of escaping the nation as a lived construct, shared genealogies may not be recognized even when they are made explicit. In an interview, for instance, Sayles differentiates his ending from that of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, referencing Pilar's aforementioned comment in stating that “their children won't be born with a pig's tail because, as Pilar says, ‘I can't get pregnant again.’ ”Footnote ³³ As is well known, One Hundred Years of Solitude provides a magically real account of Latin American history through a narrative of the events surrounding the incestuously inclined Buendía family; when family members at last succumb, unaware, to their endogamous desire, the birth of their monstrous, pig-tailed child marks the end of the family and its narrative. In his disavowal of the connection between his film and García Márquez's novel, Sayles belies a connection between north and south, failing to recognize the similarity of the tension operative in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Lone Star between the protagonists' incestuous, retrograde desire and time's forward thrust. In García Márquez's novel, Buendía family members seek to decode the writings on the parchments left by Melquíades; in Lone Star, Sam works to unearth the answer to a forty-year-old murder mystery. In both cases, the narratives imply an orderly sequence of events, either through the arrangement of words (and thereby occurrences) on the page, or by the cause-and-effect relationship between events in the distant past and the present. In both cases as well, the linear narrative, braced by time's intransigent nature, is undermined by incest or its threat, both of which imply a doubling back on time itself, a return to the past (and one's origins), rather than movement forward toward the future. Indeed, the image of Sam to the left of the row of sheriffs' portraits early in the film signals his unstable, contradictory position at the beginning and the end of the temporal progression of which he forms part. Too, the loss of the written word at the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude is echoed in Lone Star's closing image of a blank, torn movie screen.

Calling attention to the act of interpretation through its focus on permeable borders between past and present, Mexico and the United States, and one family and another, Lone Star demonstrates the existence of institutions and ideologies that complicate the chances of success: while murderers may be discovered, bloodlines and genealogies are not so easily deciphered, and all bedfellows are potentially familiar. In this regard, it is telling that the incest at the film's end comes as a surprise, even though the writing is (quite literally) on the wall. In a pointed mixed metaphor, for instance, local bartender Cody (Leo Burmester) reminisces to Sam about how Buddy as sheriff served as “referee in this damn menudo we got down here. He understood how most folk don't want their salt and sugar in the same jar.” While Cody intends to speak of “salt and pepper,” or black and white – as he makes clear in indicating the interracial couple across the bar that has motivated his remarks – “salt and sugar” accurately sums up the supposed danger of miscegenation, signaling the crippling inability to accurately and appropriately distinguish between difference and sameness.Footnote ³⁴ Additionally, in the flashback in which Sam remembers being with Pilar at the drive-in the night that Buddy discovers them, it is, as we have seen, the presciently titled Black Mama, White Mama that plays in the background, a coy reference to the two mothers of Buddy Deed's children.

The most salient example of the film's foreshadowing, however, occurs as Sam leaves the drive-in movie theater, now abandoned, where he has been reminiscing about the long-ago night that his father forcibly separated him from Pilar. Sam believes that his father's actions are motivated by racial prejudice. The camera, however, pans to the sign where upcoming features were once announced. Dilapidated, the sign features a jumble of letters, some of which spell “I-N-C-E-S” when rearranged.Footnote ³⁵ Leaving off the final letter as if to allude to the taboo nature of the referenced act – the indiscretion of which the community may whisper but does not speak aloud – the camera pans to show Sam's car driving away, then pans back to the image of the sign, underscoring its importance as a (barely) scrambled message offered for the viewer to decode. Once again, the pans in this scene underscore the importance of the past in the present; moreover, the series of individual letters that the spectator must combine to restore meaning to an otherwise random mix of images mimics the way in which cinema pieces together individual shots to promote an illusion of continuity.

While clues such as these could serve to alert the perspicacious viewer to the I-N-C-E-S-t-uous nature of Sam and Pilar's relationship, viewers are unlikely to ascertain the blood ties that join the couple in advance of the film's final revelation of this fact. As Felleman states, the viewer suspects that he should have known that Sam and Pilar were siblings all along:

Emphasizing connections and questioning borders, Lone Star nonetheless encourages the spectator to disregard any “disturbing suspicions” related to Sam and Pilar, spinning a set of parallel, genealogically based narratives that seem to separate black, white, and Hispanic. Pilar may laugh at her mother's “Spanish” pretensions, and Otis Payne, “Mayor of Darktown,” may insinuate that blood “only means what you let it,” but such assertions function and achieve their subversive power only within the well-established parameters of US racial categorizations. Buddy, for instance, was known for maintaining divisions between individuals of different races for, as sheriff, he never would have tolerated the presence of an interracial couple in a public space; Sam may thus consider him a likely suspect in the murder of Sheriff Charley Wade, but does not entertain the possibility that he is guilty of miscegenation instead.

Implicitly accepting Buddy's paradigm in the film, we, as ideologically influenced viewers, believe until the end that Sam and Pilar represent, in Anzaldua's terms, “the lifeblood of two worlds,” worlds that may come together but that begin as separate spheres. The film encourages this tendency even as it debunks the pretensions on which it is based, mirroring Buddy's paradigm both visually and thematically. In a simulation of politically correct inclusiveness, for example, Mercedes and Pilar look Hispanic; Otis and his son Delmore, black; and Buddy and Sam, white.Footnote ³⁷ Pilar, in particular, is strongly identified as the Chicana daughter of first-generation Mexican immigrants, both through the revisionist history she promotes in the classroom and through the more palatable “food and music and all” that her mother offers diners in her restaurant.Footnote ³⁸ In much the same way, at the same time that the US–Mexico border is actively deconstructed by the “King of Tires,” as we have seen, there is a nonetheless a marked contrast in Lone Star's depiction of Mexico and the United States.Footnote ³⁹ As Sam crosses the bridge to Mexico, a commercial for the “Rey de las llantas” plays in the background, announcing “un surtido gigantesco de gomas de todas marcas” (“a huge assortment of tires of all brands”) and the camera cuts from a sign for “lonches y tacos,” to a gold bust in front of palm trees, to a street sign for “Matamoros.” These images, in conjunction with scenes demonstrating the tide of illegal immigrants crossing to Frontera, contradict the king's statement, and encourage the viewer to recognize the existence of national entities, even in a globalized era.

Demonstrating the limitations of the “necessary fictions” that tell us otherwise, Lone Star reveals the interconnectedness of modern life, which is always already led in the Borderlands. Limning the national as necessarily transnational, Lone Star thereby reveals the fragmentation of modern media and their inability to construct an image of the nation as a modern whole, demonstrating that, as Deleuze and Guattari state, “We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers.”Footnote ⁴⁰ At the same time, Lone Star demonstrates the ongoing importance and influence of the ideology that informs our perspective, as we continue to believe in the separation of nations, states, and individuals from different cultures and races alike. If Frontera's drive-in once featured mamas from different races, yoked together to accomplish common goals, the screen in the filmic present gazes vacantly at its lovelorn protagonists, tattered and battered by the passage of the years – and the coming, and going, of its audiences. With the drive-in largely empty, as spectators watch their films on television screens, in multiplexes, or on their laptops, Lone Star offers the spectator a tale of a series of fragmentary remains, demonstrating both the possibilities and the limitations of the global imagination.