What is Post-Western?

The 1996 film Lone Star directed by John Sayles tells the tale of  Sheriff Sam Deeds and his search for the truth into a decades-old murder case. Sam must find the truth for himself, which comes with its own personal disappointments and complexities. Sam must both accept and reject the mythology of his father the great Buddy Deeds, defining the film as ‘post-Western,” in which traditional conventions of the Western genre are complicated and challenged.

Throughout of the majority of the film, Sam Deeds rejects the idea of his father as a legendary hero, but once he finally learns the circumstances of Wade’s death, he realizes that upsetting the entire town’s conception of the legend Buddy Deeds legend is more trouble than it’s worth. This shows that Sam Deeds must both work with and against regional ideology in order to make personal and public sense of his father’s legacy.  Critic Neal Campbell defines ‘post-Western’ as “working both with and against the mythic frame of the genre, deliberately invoking and critiquing many of its guiding values while pointing the audience beyond classic Western ideologies” (Campbell 206). Thus, while Sam initially rejects the town’s celebration of his father, Sam later learns that the Buddy Deeds myth serves a purpose in uniting townspeople of different backgrounds and classes, such as Otis and Hollis, Mercedes and the town’s business sector, for example. After their final confrontation, during which Hollis reminds Sam that if the identity of the skeletal remains gets out, people might figure Buddy Deeds as the killer. But Sam has learned, and responds,” Buddy is a god-damned legend. He can handle it.” This shows that Sam has both personally rejected but also accepted his father’s public fame, therefore, illuminating the complexity of which the past can affect characters but not dictate their actions and future.

The final scene of the film also serves to complicate the traditional Western cross-racial love-interest trope, exposing another post-Western twist. Pilar learns from Sam that they share a father, Buddy Deeds, making the lovers half-siblings. The scene is tense and viewers worry. But as Pilar can no longer have children, the couple decides they can “Start from scratch,” and not let the past, or their shared biological bloodline, interfere.  The line “Start from scratch” acts as a motif in the film, also explored by the Colonel, his son Chet, and Chet’s grandfather Otis, to express  the idea that such traditional “borders” obstructing racial, familial, and intimate relationships can be reexamined, especially as a way to rewrite hurtful assumptions made in the past.

For Westerns, the past is significant and plays an important role in understanding the relationships between people and the land; however, the post-Western encourages its audience to go one step farther and call the past into question, just as Pilar signs off, “All that other stuff, all that history? To hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo.”

Works Cited

Lone Star. Dir. John Sayles. A Sony Pictures Classics Release of a Castle Rock Entertainment         Presentation, 1996.

Neil Campbell. "From Story to Film: Brokeback Mountain's "In-Between" Spaces." Canadian         Review of American Studies 39.2 (2009): 205-220. Project MUSE. Web. 21 Feb. 2016.        <https://muse.jhu.edu/>.