“Not by a Long Shot”: John Sayles’sLone Star, the Future, and theBildungsroman

Abstract

In Lone Star, John Sayles connects free agency with the power to imagine a future life for oneself in a story, drawing on the metaphor of composing a life as if it were a story. Sam and Pilar, as lovers who discover they are half-siblings, embrace that power when they resolve to “start from scratch” and thereby reject the counter-narrative that holds that their future lives are already authored by history and culture. Critics hold that the film settles on this dichotomy: either we are sovereign self-authors or our destinies are already scripted. However, the film discovers a middle way that reconciles history and freedom, which resonates with Bakhtin’s analysis of the relationship between free agency and social change as it is understood in the Bildungsroman.