John Sayles, Filmmaker: A Critical Study and Filmography, 2d ed

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John Sayles, Filmmaker

John Sayles, Filmmaker A Critical Study and Filmography Second Edition

Jack Ryan

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

FRONTISPIECE: John Sayles, 2002

LIBRARY

OF

CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Ryan, Jack. John Sayles, ﬁlmmaker : a critical study and ﬁlmography / Jack Ryan—2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-3551-7 softcover : 50# alkaline paper 1. Sayles, John, 1950 – —Criticism and interpretation. PN1998.3.S3R93 2010 791.4302' 33092—dc22

I. Title. 2010010877

British Library cataloguing data are available ©2010 Jack Ryan. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Front cover: Director John Sayles on the set of Passion Fish, 1992 (Miramax/Photofest) Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

For my father, John E. Ryan, an old union man who enjoyed Matewan, the last movie he ever saw

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Table of Contents viii

Acknowledgments Preface to the Second Edition

ix

Introduction

1

1. A Storyteller: From Literature to Film

5

2. Outside and Inside the Production System

38

3. An Escaped Slave, the Boss, and Union History

76

4. Cityscapes: Baseball’s Lost Souls and Urban Renewal

113

5. The Power of the Physical World: From Soap Opera Diva to Celtic Myth

144

6. Borders: Texas, the Academy, and Mexico

175

7. Commodities: Real Estate and Babies

214

8. Human Geography: Business-as-Usual Politics, Stagolee’s Blues Redux, and a Commitment to Independence

258

Filmography

297

Bibliography

303

Index

311

vii

Acknowledgments Like me, this book found a life in Cleveland, Ohio, and I owe thanks to many ﬁne people from that wonderful place: Judy Oster, who taught me more than I thought possible; Bill Siebenschuh, whose insouciant wit and appreciation for life’s pratfalls helped me more than once; Roger Salomon, who gave me a start and stuck with me as I learned the ropes; Mayo Bulloch, who offered her ﬁnely tuned sense of humor and generous support. My appreciation also goes to Mary Grimm, Park Goist, and Lila Hanft for reading the original manuscript of this book and offering constructive suggestions toward its reﬁnement. I’d also like to thank Doug Clarke, Tony Whitehouse, Steve Bulloch, Ruth Walter, Peter Royston, Jean Ryan, John Vourlis, and all of my English Department colleagues at Gettysburg College for their generosity and encouragement. My children, Nicholas, Emily, and Gabriel, deserve credit for being extremely delightful people. Thanks to Camille Spaccazento, Karyn Kusama, and Dan Rybicky, all once members of John Sayles’s production ofﬁce staff in New York, who answered my questions, and thanks to John Sayles for the concise notes and the “Twilight Zone” challenge. Finally, I’d like to thank Gettysburg College’s Provost’s Ofﬁce for generous assistance in the form of two research and professional development grants, which allowed me to complete both editions of this project and for making me part of the team. And I have to thank everyone who works for the Ofﬁce of the Provost—you make all that we do worthwhile. Without the backing of three special people this book would not exist. My mother, Elizabeth Ryan, gave her support, love, and ceaseless encouragement. Louis Giannetti supported my initial idea for this book, then read, criticized, and helped edit my original manuscript. Elizabeth I. Walter, Ph.D., is my wife, my ﬁrst reader, and my best critic. Nobody has lived through the oscillations of this book more than she—and she has done it twice. She boosted my sagging spirits, challenged my quick drafts, demanded my best labors, and reminded me that this remains a worthwhile project. I only hope this book once again justiﬁes her faith and her love.

viii

Preface to the Second Edition After McFarland & Company invited me to create a second edition of John Sayles, Filmmaker, I realized that staying up with Sayles’s staggering productivity by watching his movies and reading his books and screenplays was much different from the challenge of writing a completely updated and revised version of my ﬁrst edition. Scholarship on Sayles’s work exploded after McFarland released the ﬁrst edition in 1998. Diane Carson’s John Sayles: Interviews, published by University of Mississippi Press, and her edited volume with Heidi Kenaga, Sayles Talk, are two signiﬁcant examples of recent work done on Sayles. Gerry Molyneaux’s John Sayles: An Unauthorized Biography contains an abundant amount of information derived from interviews with his colleagues and family. These three texts and the wealth of other new sources on Sayles have been extremely helpful as I conducted research for the second edition. While some of the scholars now working on Sayles, particularly Mark Bould, do not agree with my ideas concerning Sayles’s work, I believe that their input has elevated the discussion about Sayles’s oeuvre and has drawn more attention to this major American ﬁlmmaker. My goals in the second edition remain the same as those that drove the ﬁrst edition: to examine a fascinating ﬁlmmaker and writer, to suggest that Sayles is more than a writer who makes movies, and to celebrate a socially conscious, independent writer, director, and editor. For me, going back to compress and cut portions of the ﬁrst edition and to look closely at the ﬁlms Sayles has completed since 1998 has been restorative. While I did not ignore Sayles’s work since Men with Guns (Hombres Armados), I was involved with other projects and other academic duties. Accepting McFarland’s generous offer for a second edition reminded me what I always knew: John Sayles continues to demonstrate his uncanny ability to make original and intelligent American ﬁlms. I sincerely hope that this new edition will encourage another wave of Sayles scholarship and that it will encourage new scholars to dig deeper into the work of this exceptional and creative ﬁlmmaker.

ix

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Introduction Mr. Shine, the protagonist of John Sayles’s short story “Children of the Silver Screen,” manages a neighborhood movie theater that is about to drop showing classic Hollywood pictures in favor of Russ Meyer–type skin ﬂicks. At the conclusion of the story, Mr. Shine commits an act of material and cultural subversion: He shows On the Town, featuring Gene Kelly, free of charge to his matinee regulars, a diverse collection of urbanites. Shine deliberately ignores his distributor’s extra-screening royalties policy because he knows his regulars will lose the singular experience that brings them together: watching good movies, on a big screen, in a real theater. Sayles’s ﬁnal image is of Mr. Shine lost in the inﬁnite light on screen, being caressed by the “pulse and ﬂicker of life” (Anarchists’ Convention 291). Movies are mostly about money—how much the ﬁlm cost, how much the star made, how much the box ofﬁce took in on the opening weekend. Instead of intelligent reviews, ﬁlmgoers are pounded with accounting numbers, which, it is assumed, means something about the quality of a particular ﬁlm. The market dictates success. Box ofﬁce hits tend to be multimillion-dollar productions with superstar actors and simple, generic plots. Glitz and glamour attract audiences, not solid stories. Like Mr. Shine, John Sayles seeks something different from the cinema, something more substantive. Sayles is America’s most well known independent ﬁlmmaker, and he remains willing to sacriﬁce large proﬁts for creative freedom. He writes, directs, edits, and sometimes acts in his own low-budget ﬁlms. The production company he shares with Maggie Renzi, his life partner, Anarchists’ Convention Inc., has been producing his work since the release of Men with Guns (1997); their last three productions, Sunshine State (2002), Casa de los Babys (2003) and Honeydripper (2007), have all been produced by their company. For an independent ﬁlmmaker, Sayles’s proliﬁc cinematic output is unequaled in the history of the commercial American ﬁlm. Though Sayles’s own pictures have not been box ofﬁce hits, they have generally made money and generated favorable reviews. A Sayles picture is skillfully structured, well acted, morally complex, and full of complicated characters. Typically, Sayles focuses on people and places confronting change or transformation. He does not shun Hollywood, however; he has been writing screenplays and working as a script doctor for various production companies since 1978 when his ﬁrst script, Piranha, was produced by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Hollywood money, in fact, is fundamental to Sayles’s success, for he uses the proﬁts he makes from his lucrative screenwriter-for-hire career to ﬁnance his independent projects. But unlike the Hollywood 1

2

Introduction

productions he is involved with, a John Sayles picture captures the poetry of ordinary people. To date Sayles has completed sixteen feature-length movies, published ﬁve works of ﬁction (three novels and two short story collections); one work of nonﬁction, Thinking in Pictures; edited a collection of his interviews; and published two collections of his screenplays; worked in the theater and television; acted; and contributed both short ﬁction and journalism to major periodicals. He has served as executive producer for three ﬁlms: Santitos (1999), Girlﬁght (2000), and My Mexican Shivah (2007). His list of Hollywood screenwriting projects is long and impressive, including uncredited rewrites for Apollo 13, The Fugitive, and Mimic, among other ﬁlms. Two of Sayles’s original screenplays, Passion Fish and Lone Star, have been nominated for Academy Awards. Remarkably, despite enormous difﬁculty in securing ﬁnancing, Sayles has remained independent, making the ﬁlms he wants to make, telling stories that appeal to him rather than to a room full of Hollywood producers. After the success of Lone Star, Sayles could have worked on a commercial, studio-backed production, the traditional goal for most independent ﬁlmmakers. However, he decided to make a ﬁlm about political malfeasance. Set in a nameless Latin American country, Men with Guns (Hombres Armados) is presented in Spanish with English subtitles. Combining contemporary politics with a foreign language may seem quixotic, but Sayles’s production company and Sony Pictures Classics brought this challenging drama to American audiences. There are not many ﬁlmmakers working today who would take on such unlikely material, especially after being recognized by the Hollywood ﬁlm establishment. However, Men with Guns (Hombres Armados) extended Sayles’s track record for producing quality ﬁlms without commercial potential. Sayles’s story topics change from picture to picture, jumping from the insecurity of the sixties generation to a lesbian coming-out story, from baseball’s most famous corruption scandal to a children’s tale, from an examination of U.S. border culture to a ﬁlm in multiple languages, and from a linguistically challenged political candidate to the transition from acoustic blues to electric rock’n’roll. He deﬁes popular critical labels; stylistically, he is a social realist concerned with quotidian lives. Yet some of his ﬁlms display the inﬂuence of magic realism, albeit in an unassuming manner. Sayles makes conscious choices to represent, through a variety of ﬁlmmaking techniques, speciﬁc aspects of American life seldom reﬂected in contemporary ﬁlms. He fuses dialogue, editing, camera angles, sound, and mise-en-scène, among other cinematic devices, to make the world of his ﬁlms appear real. His own theories on ﬁlmmaking reﬂect a populist sensibility, and he seems to enjoy the collaborative process of making a movie, even as it gets more difﬁcult to secure ﬁnancing. Sayles’s superior storytelling does demand audience involvement. A Sayles ﬁlm is not entertaining eyewash. Sayles’s independent projects resonate with cultural issues, both social and personal. In almost all of his ﬁlms individual will and consciousness are locked in a battle with ideological forces. In Matewan, City of Hope, Eight Men Out, and Silver City this struggle is easily recognizable because of obvious separations in class and power. In these ﬁlms, Sayles’s own politics stand out, even though none of his characters actually transcend the economic conﬂict in which they are engaged. That is, Sayles is not pejorative in his cinematic offerings. His ﬁlms are unsentimental. The Secret of Roan Inish might seem the exception to this rule, yet even his Irish characters opt for the hardworking life of the sea. For the most part, Sayles’s ﬁlms examine communities and the multitude of problems that arise when a variety of people interact. An uncommon decency marks all of Sayles’s work, making him anathema to the current hedonistic world of popular ﬁlm, where B movies are now A movies. Without apology, Sayles offers a cinema inﬂuenced by his progressive

Introduction

3

politics; he is, moreover, a humanist. As the ﬁlm scholar Gerald Mast observed, Sayles confronts the ﬁgures and forces that often make the United States a difﬁcult place to live. Simply put, Sayles cares about people. Even his repellent characters have reasons for being who they are. Thematically, his ﬁlms revolve around justice, responsibility, and integrity; he is against prejudice, injustice, and the abuse of power. In his work, Sayles examines people and how their lives are inﬂuenced by the world around them, which can take so much and give back so little. Sayles is skeptical of palliative rhetoric, especially from politicians or intellectuals. He keeps his stories at ground level, focusing on ordinary people and their communities. He is open-minded, compassionate, and quietly emotional in his observations. Yet he is far from solemn. Sayles appreciates humor, and his best work is full of it. His democratic idealism resonates through his ensemble casts—and his characters drive his stories. His stories are smart and complicated, never relying on simple answers. Sayles’s ﬁlms do come with ﬂaws. His early work suffers technically, but his growth as a ﬁlmmaker has been exceptional. The integrity of Sayles’s collected work far outweighs its defects. By reviewing Sayles’s ﬁlm work since 1980, the growth of an extraordinary ﬁlmmaker cannot be ignored. His ﬁlms are visually sophisticated, although most critics zero in on his lack of visual sophistication when reviewing his ﬁlms; as his expertise increases, so do his budgets, and now he is able to work within modest budgets and deliver ﬁlms that are rich in cinematic texture. Still, numerous critics have found Sayles’s work lacking, especially visually. The standard critical line on Sayles is that what he says is more impressive than how he says it. He is a writer-director—emphasis on the former. Pauline Kael, never one for ﬁlms of social relevance, started the trend by calling Sayles the thinking man’s shallow ﬁlmmaker. Michael Sragow followed up by claiming that Sayles is an uninspiring ﬁlm director whose work lacks kinetic talent. Stuart Klawans ﬁnally admitted to readers of The Nation that he ﬁnds Sayles’s work pedestrian to the point of indifference. Even Andrew Sarris (who would later retract this assessment) observed that Sayles’s emphatic integrity and his moral sensibility overwhelmed both his visual style and his dramatic instinct. Sayles readily admits that he is not interested in style for its own sake. Rather, he is interested in the materials he has to tell a story; therefore, he avoids a signature visual style, removing himself from the world of rapidly moving cameras and jackrabbit cuts. Sayles has worked with a variety of recognized cinematographers in order to ensure that the look of each ﬁlm reﬂects the story being told. Still, as Sayles’s screenplays become more complex, so too do his mise-en-scène and the choreography of his camera movements. Indeed, City of Hope, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, and Honeydripper were praised by a handful of popular ﬁlm critics for their visual content. Long shots, camera movement, unobtrusive edits, and well constructed scenes have become essential parts of Sayles’s cinematic vocabulary. In order to maintain artistic integrity, Sayles runs his own ﬁlm company on a shoestring budget, albeit with considerable help from a loosely afﬁliated group of regular collaborators, particularly Maggie Renzi. Quietly, he has accomplished the dream of ﬁlmmakers from Charlie Chaplin to Francis Ford Coppola: Creative control rests in his head, hands, and eyes. Of course, Sayles’s collective is extremely talented. Starting with Renzi and spreading outward to include actors, technicians, and production people, Sayles’s collaborators know their business and seem to enjoy the process of making remarkably unassuming ﬁlms. The release of Honeydripper displayed a creative approach to distribution, a new tool for Sayles/Renzi production team. Maggie Renzi has been Sayles’s partner and collaborator since before Return of the Secaucus Seven became an unlikely hit. Renzi anchors Sayles’s productions, handling all the

4

Introduction

unexpected problems, keeping the crew focused, and making sure every ﬁlm progresses as planned. She is experienced in all areas of producing, from fund-raising to public relations. Renzi can make a production look far more expensive than a typical Sayles budget allows. Millimeter magazine once named Renzi one of America’s “50 Top Producers.” In addition to working with Sayles, Renzi has produced a dance ﬁlm, Mountain View, for public television’s Alive—From Off-Center and three videos for Bruce Springsteen, one of which, “Glory Days,” won an American Video Award. Renzi also acted in Jonathan Demme’s Swing Shift (1984). Actors who have regularly worked with Sayles include David Strathairn, Joe Morton, Chris Cooper, Mary McDonnell, Vincent Spano, Stephen Mendillo, Nancy Mette, Kevin Tighe, Josh Mostel, Tom Wright, Michael Mantell, Elizabeth Peña, Gordon Clapp, Angela Bassett, Daryl Hannah, Miguel Ferrer, Kris Kristofferson, and Ralph Waite. Several well-known actors have worked with Sayles because they believe in his projects, including Christopher Lloyd, Rosanna Arquette, and James Earl Jones. However, because he is a naturalistic ﬁlmmaker, Sayles prefers not to distract audience attention and expectations by using well-known actors. On the technical and ﬁnancial sides of the ﬁlmmaking process, Sayles has collaborated with Haskell Wexler (cinematography), Sarah Green (production), Barbara Hewson Shapiro (casting), Cynthia Flynt (costume design), Peggy Rajski (production), Nora Chavooshian (production design), Dan Bishop (art design), R. Paul Miller (production), Mason Daring (music), and John Sloss (executive production). Because he is familiar with them, their speciﬁc talents and their strengths, Sayles can relax on the set and concentrate on his duties as the director. They know and support each other, and they work well together. Sayles takes pleasure in the collaboration of ﬁlmmaking, auteur theory notwithstanding. Sayles describes himself as a conduit for people’s voices, a handy metaphor for the script rewrites he does for other productions. Getting those voices into movie theaters invites more people to experience his ideas. Sayles ﬁnances his movies independently, guaranteeing him artistic control, and he knows how to balance commerce and art. By paying the bills and producing ﬁlms himself, studio interference becomes a moot point. Although he willingly takes studio script work, Sayles’s real desire is to make movies that audiences would not normally see. As John Berra observes in Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Partiality of Independent Production, “Sayles regularly puts his money where his mouth is and invests his own earnings to bring his stories to the screen, while most other directors would prefer to have the comparative security of being a ‘director-for-hire’ and signing a development deal with a major studio that would guarantee them work for many years to come” (128). John Sayles is willing to wait until the time is right for him to tell his cinematic stories. Ten years ago, Sayles began to write a movie about the Spanish-American War; he has also always wanted to make a ﬁlm about the port of New Orleans in the last gasp of reconstruction. The story lines became part of Some Time in the Sun, Sayles’s ﬁrst novel since Los Gusanos. At a reading at City University of New York’s Gotham Center, Sayles admitted that the sprawling novel cannot ﬁnd a publisher. Sayles’s books have received good reviews, but the dollar return is minimal. “There’s no way a publisher is going to be inﬂuenced just by someone mentioning my name,” Sayles told Josh Getlin of The Los Angeles Times. “They’ll check out the numbers of the latest title” (latimes.com). Retitled A Moment in the Sun, the novel will be released by McSweeney’s Publishing in 2011. Sayles and Maggie Renzi know they have more control over their ﬁlm productions, and American cinema is richer because of their dedicated work.

1

A Storyteller: From Literature to Film “I always wanted to write, not to be a writer.” —John Sayles, American Prose Library

John Sayles takes pleasure in telling a good story his way. Flashy style, abstract language, and narrative experimentation are not his concerns. As a writer, Sayles is a social realist, traditional and unabashed, combing, as the novelist Vance Bourjaily observed in a review, Jack London’s “reportorial vigor” and Stephen Crane’s “sweet impressionism” (33). In all of his writing—short stories, novels, journalistic pieces, screenplays— Sayles empathizes with a variety of character types and displays an unerring ear for American speech: male and female, gay and straight, black and white, jocks and intellectuals, old and young. These people cover all walks of life—dishwashers, dog breeders, cowboys, truck drivers, anthropologists, college professors, football coaches, temporary workers, builders, coal miners, baseball players, cops, musicians, and Cuban expatriates. Sayles turned to feature ﬁlmmaking just as his second novel, Union Dues (1977), received nominations for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and while he was establishing himself as an extremely competent Hollywood rewrite man. Sayles invested his own money in Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), his ﬁrst independent ﬁlm. Sayles saw the movie as an audition piece, a Hollywood calling card, never expecting a broad theatrical release. The ﬁlm, however, became a grassroots success story, spreading across the country thanks to solid word-of-mouth, strong critical support from Vincent Canby of The New York Times, good reviews and, eventually, smart marketing. Return of the Secaucus Seven features all the hallmarks of Sayles’s later, more assured work. History is part of the story—a post–Vietnam ennui hangs over his characters, but they are not devoid of hope. His people are smart and funny, and they speak with colloquial vigor, whether they work for a Washington politician or at the local gasoline station. Return of the Secaucus Seven focuses on a group rather than on a single character and women are as important to the story as men. The ﬁlm is also politically perceptive, revealing an understated social relevance and a serious intent. Sayles shows disagreements among members of the group, yet he does not come down on one side or the other; he is not doctrinaire in his political 5

6

John Sayles, Filmmaker

leanings, allowing his audience to come to its own conclusions. Maggie Renzi, Sayles’s partner in life and business, starred in and worked as the ﬁlm’s production manager. On a limited budget, using a plain visual style, Sayles establishes a sense of community, friendship, and honest reality in this rueful, winning ﬁrst effort. At the core of Return of the Secaucus Seven lies a sense of mutual responsibility, a theme found in all of Sayles’s ﬁction and ﬁlms, including Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), City of Hope (1990), Lone Star (1997), Limbo (1999), Sunshine State (2002), and Casa de los Babys (2003). Return of the Secaucus Seven captured a $2-million dollar gross, and Sayles became one of the country’s best-known independent ﬁlmmakers, striking a course outside studio dependence or interference. As Sayles told George Hickenlooper in 1991, “I always say, ‘Fuck the studio, don’t let them make your movie. Do Sayles on the set of Unnatural Causes, an something else. Make a cheaper movie’ ” (309). NBC-TV production (1986). Sayles wrote the teleplay and acted in the His ﬁlms are individual, off beat, quiet, and gener- drama, which won a Writers Guild of ally noncommercial. “What keeps [Sayles] out of America award for Best Original Long the mainstream,” notes George Packer, “is his seri- Form. ousness, his cinematic plainness, his sense of political responsibility, and moral decency” (106)—odd traits for a working American ﬁlmmaker. Because he has remained almost completely independent from Hollywood production money and because of his strong literary background, John Sayles is an unusual contemporary ﬁlmmaker. Many American movie directors begin as marginal players, scraping, borrowing, and begging for money to produce small ﬁlms. Few successful ﬁlmmakers remain independent. With luck, they graduate to big-budget studio assignments. John Sayles, however, is different. Before making his ﬁrst feature, Sayles had been on one movie-set but never looked through a movie camera. Working with Renzi, Sayles taught himself how to make a motion picture—learning how to write screenplays, shoot and edit ﬁlm, run a ﬁlm crew, and how to direct—all in a remarkably short time. Sayles’s command of the medium has steadily strengthened. Now he is an assured ﬁlmmaker, whose style remains low-key and unobtrusive because his budgets remain low. As his ﬁlm narratives have grown in complexity, though, so too have his visual compositions. Sayles stands practically alone as a commercially recognized ﬁlmmaker—one whose perceptive, thoughtful, unerring stories explore how ordinary people live—who makes personal, challenging ﬁlms free from industry dominance in a social realistic style. Return of the Secaucus Seven remains a remarkable achievement, for it established Sayles’s singular cinematic vision, Renzi’s uncanny abilities as a producer, and exempliﬁes their willingness to make their own ﬁlms no matter what. Sayles’s path to ﬁlmmaking, though, is unique. Few would-be-independents cite Sayles as an example when counting off their career goals. Most lack Sayles’s integrity, purity of vision, and storytelling dedication.

1. A Storyteller

7

Fiction Writing: From Cross-Dressing Farce to Sprawling Social Realism The great thing about ﬁction, as I’ve often said, is that you can be God. If you want the sun to shine or three thousand troops in full combat gear to materialize, you just describe them (and do not have to worry about when they eat lunch). On the other hand, you’re on your own—no composers, production designers, costumers, cinematographers, or actors to give you ideas and throw their talents into the project.2 —John Sayles, Dillinger in Hollywood

Because he was uninterested in traditional career goals, Sayles’s work background was eclectic, including stints as a hospital orderly, plastic molder, meat cutter, and day laborer. His association with people from all classes, races, ethnicities, and cultures comes through in his ﬁction and in his ﬁlms. Since the publication of his ﬁrst novel and the success of his ﬁrst ﬁlm, Sayles has also written for television and theater, and worked as a journalist and an actor. Sayles was born on September 28, 1950, in Schenectady, New York, an upstate industrial town once dominated by General Electric. His parents, Donald and Mary Sayles, were both educators, one generation removed from their working-class roots. They were not movie buffs. They encouraged Sayles to read, which he did, when not watching television dramas or playing sports. Recalling this period in his history, Sayles often calls himself a sub-verbal jock. Sayles’s parents also fostered an incredibly strong sense of independence in Sayles because they wanted him to avoid the trap of dispiriting work, which permeates old industrial towns. “They didn’t lay any big trips about, ‘This is what you are supposed to do,’ ” he explains. “Enough people in my family did things they didn’t like, and they didn’t want us to do that. I wanted to be a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates” (Dreifus 33). Sayles never pitched professionally; he went his own way instead, avoiding GE, the Vietnam draft, and a traditional career path. In 1968, he landed at Williams College, an upscale liberal arts college comfortably hidden away in the Berkshire Mountains, a move that does not match Sayles’s workingclass sympathies and progressive politics. Typically, Sayles offers little explanation: “I had a guidance counselor say to me, ‘Here’s two places I want you to apply—Williams and Colgate.’ I ended up feeling like, if I went to Colgate, they’d make me play serious football, and I played too much serious football in high school already” (Dreifus 32). When Sayles entered as a freshman, Williams was all male; in 1970, the College admitted women for the ﬁrst time. Maggie Renzi was among the ﬁrst wave of female students. Sayles majored in psychology, but he did take a few creative writing courses because “they graded on poundage, and I wrote long stories, so I got A’s in that, which brought my average up to C for my other courses, which I mostly didn’t go to” (Chute 57). What Sayles did do in college was read: “I’d never read Faulkner or Hemingway or any of these American guys, so even though I took almost no English classes, I just started reading everybody—James Baldwin, Mark Twain” (Davis 23). Sayles took a ﬁlm classes from Charles Thomas Samuels, an English professor, who, according to Gerry Molyneaux, introduced Sayles to international cinema and directors like Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and François Truffaut. Sayles attended antiwar rallies, found an interest in acting—playing “large, brain-damaged people” (Zucker 329)—and established some important friendships with Jeffery Nelson, Bruce MacDonald, Adam LeFevre, David Strathairn, Gordon Clapp, and Renzi, among others. Sayles makes his time at Williams sound unremarkable, even though he personally made the most of his time, albeit in an unconventional way if grades are the sole measure of achievement.

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John Sayles, Filmmaker

After graduation in 1972, Sayles had a massive unpublished novel and no prospects. He traveled and wrote, blindly sending stories out to any magazine he could. He worked as a day laborer, meat cutter, and hospital orderly; he worked in factories and nursing homes, and lived in group-homes—all jobs and settings that would reappear in his ﬁction and ﬁlms. While working, Sayles continued sending out his stories. Unlike many writers, he simply enjoyed writing. He suffered from no romantic illusions about the job—there were no long, smoke-ﬁlled nights in a garret sweating and scribbling. Sayles wrote and mailed the stuff out. Rejection slips piled up. In 1974, Sayles mailed a long story titled Men to The Atlantic Monthly. Someone turned the story over to the Atlantic Monthly Press and editor Peggy Yntema, who suggested Sayles expand the manuscript into a novel. As he tells it, the story was originally a movie idea: “I started with a couple scenes that I saw dramatically, saw the setting, imagined a certain graininess to the image, heard a country–Western soundtrack compressed through a tinny box speaker” (Thinking in Pictures 4). Published as Pride of the Bimbos in 1975, it generated a $2,500 advance on royalties check, but more importantly it provided Sayles with career boosting conﬁdence: “Something I’d made was being mass-produced, and if that isn’t the American Dream, I don’t know what is” (New York Times Book Review 7). “It was a real jeu d’esprit,” observed Upton Brady, Sayles’s original editor at Atlantic Monthly Press. “There aren’t many books you read about a dwarf private detective in drag playing baseball” (Osborne 33). Although he was still working odd jobs or collecting unemployment, Sayles had arrived. His short story, published in The Atlantic Monthly, “I-80 Nebraska, m.490 –m.205” (1975), won an O. Henry Award for short ﬁction; his 1977 story “Golden State,” also published in The Atlantic Monthly, garnered an O. Henry Award. His second novel, Union Dues, published in 1977 by Little, Brown and Company, a division of the Atlantic Monthly Press, drew serious critical praise. “He comes on like the village idiot,” said Brady, “but behind that is one of the great storytellers—and a very, very sensible character” (Osborne 32). Sayles has made a name for himself as a ﬁlmmaker, but his ﬁction, often ignored, remains impressive. Like his movies, Sayles’s ﬁction writing covers a lot of ground, revealing his eclectic interests. Pride of the Bimbos is a comic novella with a dark side about a ﬁve-man softball team that barnstorms the South. Calling themselves the Brooklyn Bimbos, they play in drag. Anchoring the team is star shortstop Pogo Burns, a midget who was a big-city detective and is now on the lam running from a six-foot-eight black pimp named Dred. At its core Pride of the Bimbos investigates manhood—speciﬁcally masculinity and maturity. The book satirizes American machismo and explores the cultural transition from Old to New occurring in the American South. Sayles’s writing is rich and controlled, showing an original talent for articulating place and dialect. Sayles’s early ﬁction stands apart from his ﬁlm work. Once asked to describe his books as movies, Sayles said, “Pride of the Bimbos is a Fellini and Union Dues is a De Sica and Zavattini” (Sayles on Sayles 17). Sayles’s second book, Union Dues, tells the story of the death of sixties radicalism by dividing its attention between a seventeen-year-old runaway from rural West Virginia, Hobie McNatt, and his father, Hunter, who leaves his mining job to ﬁnd his youngest son. Hobie ﬂees to Boston looking for his older brother, Darwin, a Vietnam veteran, now disenfranchised and a member of The Third Way, an armed radical, revolutionary group. Set in 1969, the novel examines the social and political climate in the United States in the late 1960s. In Union Dues, Sayles displays empathy for all sorts of political afﬁliations

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while keeping some critical distance. Union Dues establishes Sayles as a social realist, a “form of representation,” Alex Woloch writes, “that has come to be seen as outmoded” (Sayles Talk 54). Sayles told Gavin Smith that the novel was “like a documentary: if it rains on a Thursday in Boston, it rained on that Thursday. I would read the Boston Globe and the alternative papers for every day I was writing about” (Sayles on Sayles 20). Through Sarah, one of his characters, Sayles quotes directly from the “Port Huron Statement” in the novel: “Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal—not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority” (373). In the context of the novel, this sentiment countervails the indulgent radicalism of The Third Way; it also sounds like Sayles’s personal philosophy toward ﬁction writing and ﬁlmmaking. With the publication of Union Dues, history and realism emerge as key thematic and stylistic elements in Sayles’s work. The Anarchists’ Convention (1979), a collection of short stories Sayles sold to help raise money for the production of Return of the Secaucus Seven, once again displays his extraordinary ability to capture American speech. This book contains a series of Brian McNeil stories, part of an abandoned novel. In picaresque fashion, McNeil, a high-school basketball player and dropout, hitchhikes from place to place as did Sayles. “At the Anarchists’ Convention,” from which Sayles draws the title of the collection, displays Sayles’s lowkeyed humor, as a group of old-age radicals prepare for their annual reunion, carrying resentments and political feuds into one of their ﬁnal gatherings. Sayles’s work as an independent ﬁlmmaker interrupted his early steady ﬂow of literary ﬁction, although he did not stop writing. Ever pragmatic, Sayles realized writing for the movies paid better and required less time than novel writing: Piranha, his ﬁrst ﬁlm script, generated $10,000 “for a full draft and a couple of rewrites. I probably spent six weeks on it. I’d spent a year writing Union Dues, so in terms of me making a living it was, ‘Jesus Christ, I worked for a month and a half, I’ll do more of these’ ” (Sayles on Sayles 34). Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan (1987), Sayles’s only nonﬁction book, recalls every aspect of the ﬁlm’s production and details how he makes ﬁlms beyond Hollywood’s reach—everything from ﬁnancing to distribution. Throughout the 1980s, in addition to his other work, Sayles found time for smaller writing projects, contributing stories to The Atlantic Monthly and Esquire, reviewing William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade for Film Comment, and covering the Republican National Convention for The New Republic. His dispatch from the Convention is a collage of revealing voices and telling descriptions, displaying Sayles’s ability to capture speciﬁc American oddities: “Detroit is like a theme park open just one week. Everything—the friendly cops, the ethnic food festival, the sunny weather and clean streets—is a special little time and reality warp, untouched by the world. It is the perfect environment for the Republican convention” (20). Usually self-effacing, Sayles exposes his political leanings in this essay. Los Gusanos (1991), Sayles’s last novel, explores the Cuban exile community in Miami—the people Castro called “worms” upon their exodus—and their lost homeland. The novel is, among other things, highly political. As Randall Kenan noted in his book review, “Sayles points an angry ﬁnger at the machinations of the FBI/CIA/Tio Sam, which we are led to believe still persist, a sinister ballet of entrapment that is one of the mainsprings of this novel, as people are deceived, manipulated, and eliminated” (858). Los Gusanos contains numerous passages in Spanish, a reminder that America is a multilingual country, especially in its large urban areas. The structure of Los Gusanos parallels the

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structure of ﬁlms City of Hope and Lone Star—a large cast of people comprises a community that is divisive, supportive, and corrupt. In an unusual move, Sayles skipped over his literary agent and offered the novel to competitive bidding. Sayles wanted to know how many copies would be printed, what kind of budget the novel would receive, what marketing the book would receive, and what the cover art would look like. HarperCollins won the auction, giving Sayles a six-ﬁgure advance and agreeing to most of his demands. Los Gusanos received mixed reviews, and the novel landed in remainder bins rather quickly. Terry Karten, Sayles’s last editor at HarperCollins, compares him to Don DeLillo because of his politics and to Gabriel García Márquez because he weaves multiple individual stories on a single narrative thread. Sayles has expressed great admiration for the Nobel Prize winner’s ﬁction. Márquez indulges in the supernatural or magic realism, which Sayles used to varying degrees in two ﬁlms, The Secret of Roan Inish and Men with Guns (Hombres Armados). The writer Thulani Davis compares Sayles to Robert Stone, for they are both concerned with the “idea that the ordinary individuals, with their dreams and hopes, play their parts but are damaged by the ‘big picture’ of powerful international forces” (21). Sayles credits Nelson Algren’s hobo novel Somebody in Boots, about a poor white Texas boy’s itinerant life and criminal behavior during the Depression, as the book that planted the germ of writing in his mind. “Algren wrote from neck-deep in the trash of American culture, the only place I was ever likely to be” (Simpson 64). In addition to his ﬁction and ﬁlm work, Sayles has also involved himself in theater and television. Sayles’s two one-act plays, New Hope for the Dead (1981), about menial boxing match employees, and Turnbuckle (1981), about low-level professional wrestling, opened ﬁrst at The Manhattan Theater Club and were then restaged at the Boat Basin Theater, a converted fountain shell on the Hudson River at 79th street. Writing for the stage would seem a natural ﬁt for Sayles, for he made money as a stage actor before he received any money as a ﬁction writer or a ﬁlm director. Frank Rich’s New York Times review, however, illuminated a number of ﬂaws in both plays: “It’s hard to believe that the author of the fresh-spirited ‘Secaucus Seven’ could create characters that, at best, seem like warmed-over versions of the sentimental losers who populated television dramas of the 1950’s.” Sayles certainly found Hollywood more welcoming, especially for a writer of his talents, because he had no trouble giving studios exactly what they wanted: “Depending on the mandate from the producers hiring me, I either forget about the previous drafts and go back to scratch with the original concept, as in Piranha or Alligator or The Howling, or I try to improve the existing script in the direction they want to take it.... I was asked to come on to Apollo 13 fairly late in their production—they had already cast the lead and had started building spaceship sets. The process was not so much damage control as bringing the story back toward the source material” (Mary Johnson 6 –7). Sayles is a swift, efﬁcient, and practical rewrite man. “Sometimes I’ve written a script and just not sent it in for another week,” Sayles revealed to David Kipen, “just so people won’t feel like, ho, this guy just dashed this thing off. If you just hand it in two weeks, [Hollywood producers] feel like they didn’t get their money’s worth” (Kipen 6). Sayles wrote a draft of John Frankenheimer’s The Challenge, a modern-day samurai picture, over a long weekend, and dashed off Alligator, a Spielberg send-up, while waiting for the New Jersey Transit bus in the harmonious New York Port Authority bus terminal (Kipen 6). Sayles’s early successes allowed him entry into the world of commercial television. He feels that the ﬁlm world has “ceded the real-life-problem drama to TV” (Davis 50), a con-

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dition reﬂected in programs such as Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Homicide, ER, NYPD Blue, Chicago Hope, and most HBO productions. It is only natural, then, that Sayles would try his hand at television. His teleplays A Perfect Match (1980), an adaptation of Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1983), and Unnatural Causes (1986) revolve around left-leaning subjects and regular people. His short-lived weekly series Shannon’s Deal (1989; series run, 1989–90) provides a good example of Sayles’s varied talents. The protagonist, Jack Shannon, is a washed-up corporate lawyer trying to shake a gambling habit and a failed marriage. He is unorthodox in his approach to the law, an outsider trying to regain his bearings. Shannon lacked glitz; in fact, the protagonist seldom saw the inside of a courtroom, settling his cases out of court, a bit of realism that probably cut into the show’s ratings. It died quietly. Drawing on the work of David Meyer and William Hoynes, Cynthia Baron explains why Shannon’s Deal failed to generate commercial interest: Like all of Sayles’s work, the television series presents audiences with a vision of social reality that is more critical of bankers, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians than industry policy would allow precisely because Sayles examines systemic problems and institutional problems rather than isolated, individual problems that can be solved by punishing the particular individual [Sayles Talk 32].

As is his fashion, Sayles had some key collaborators working with him on this television program, including musician Wynton Marsalis. He also had a solid team of writers and directors—John Byrum, Tom Rickman, Lewis Teague—and an excellent supporting cast, including Elizabeth Peña, Richard Edson, and Jennifer Lewis. What stands out in Shannon’s Deal is the storytelling, especially in Sayles’s pilot episode. The characters are idiosyncratic and their speech ﬂavors their individuality; yet, their individual needs or institutional interests never trump “the life-sustaining effects of rational, social cooperation in the interest of the common good (Sayles Talk 32). Sayles’s narrative sense and philosophy is the foundation of all of his projects. The three Bruce Springsteen videos he directed—“Born in the U.S.A.,” “I’m on Fire,” and “Glory Days”—proﬁt from the visual story Sayles created to go along with Springsteen’s lyrics. In each case, Sayles was able to produce a sense of character, even within the limited space of a rock-TV video. Although not a musician himself, Sayles has composed songs and lyrics for some of his own ﬁlms: “Homeboy” and “Promised Land,” for The Brother from Another Planet; “I Be Blue,” for Eight Men Out; “Calle Loca,” for City of Hope; “Loving You Is Hell Enough for Me,” for Limbo; “Skeeter Pie” and “Buccaner Daze,” for Sunshine State; and, in 1998, “Guide Us to Thy Side,” for ﬁlmmaker Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys. Sayles also works as an actor, popping up a few of his own ﬁlms, usually playing an unctuous jerk, which frees him from any emotional investment in his character. Sayles has appeared as Howie in Return of the Secaucus Seven; Jerry in Lianna; an intergalactic bounty hunter in The Brother from Another Planet; the hardshell preacher in Matewan; Ring Lardner in Eight Men Out; and Carl in City of Hope, and as Zeke in Honeydripper (2008). Sayles has acted in ﬁlm and television. He appeared brieﬂy in Piranha (1978); played the dopey morgue attendant in The Howling (1981); ﬁlled out the role of Don, an intellectual, philosophical drug dealer in Hard Choices (1986); exchanged sexually provocative lines with Melanie Grifﬁth in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986); entered the foreign language market in David Ferrario’s La ﬁne de la notte (1988); showed up in Little Vegas (1990); took on the role of the military high commissioner, who rides around in a chauffeured limousine accompanied by a large fat pig, in Go Takemine’s Untamagiru (1990);

12

John Sayles, Filmmaker

Matinee (1992): Sayles often acts in his own ﬁlms, usually playing an unsavory or stupid character incapable of emotional or intellectual change, which, according to the actor, limits his preparation time. Matinee reunited Sayles with Dick Miller, a New World actor and a Roger Corman favorite, and Joe Dante, who directed two of Sayles’s screenplays. Sayles (left) and Miller (center) portray Bob and Herb, members of a right-wing Christian organization protesting the opening of the latest horror-fest presented by Lawrence Woolsey ( John Goodman, right) in Key West, Florida. In reality, Bob and Herb are two blacklisted screenwriters Woolsey, a.k.a. the “Master of Movie Horror,” hired to help him promote the movie (photograph by Dean Williams, Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive).

was Guy Girardi in Straight Talk (1992); worked as an FBI agent for Spike Lee in Malcolm X (1992); showed us what marginal producers are really like in My Life’s in Turnaround (1993); and returned to work for his old colleague Joe Dante in Matinee (1993). Sayles appeared in Vondie Curtis-Hall’s Gridlock’d (1997), which, as he told Leonard Maltin, made Sayles “the only actor who ever worked with Tupac Shakur and Dolly Parton.” Ken Burns asked Sayles to comment on baseball history for the PBS miniseries Baseball (1994). Perhaps Burns contacted Sayles because of Eight Men Out; more likely, Burns saw Sayles play Roy “Lefty” Cobbs, an unusual pitcher, on Mathnet (1992), public television’s mathematics show for children. Recently, Sayles has appeared in Girlﬁght (2000), The Toe Tactic (2007), and In the Electric Mist (2008). Sayles started his career as an actor, working summer stock throughout New England, and all his ﬁlm work reﬂects the appreciation he has for the actor’s craft. In 1983 Sayles received a MacArthur Foundation grant, the so-called genius award given to selected Americans in diverse ﬁelds for innovative work. Sayles won for artistic achievement in ﬁlm. The award provided him with a tax-free $32,000 grant every year for ﬁve years. Since he was always walking a ﬁnancial tightrope during his early ﬁlmmaking career, the grant allowed Sayles to work with a net. Since then Sayles’s movies have been recognized at a variety of ﬁlm festivals, on commercial Ten-Best lists, at the Independent Spirit Awards, and, ﬁnally, by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which nominated Passion Fish and Lone Star for Best Original Screenplay awards.

1. A Storyteller

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Sayles’s primary relationship with Hollywood remains as a writer. Screenwriting pays well especially when you are in demand. Sayles’s status as an outsider has shifted. He joined the Directors Guild of America because the DGA’s Terry Casaletta adjusted the organization’s rules and regulations to help independent ﬁlm directors (Asinof On Line. Internet 4). In November 1997, the Library of Congress added Return of the Secaucus Seven to the National Film Registry. Sayles has worked as an advisor for Next Wave Films, the ﬁnishing fund company for emerging ﬁlmmakers formed by the Independent Film Channel, and for the Austin Film Festival. Sayles and Renzi run Anarchists’ Convention Film Company, which has provided ﬁnancial backing for writer-director Alejandro Springall’s Santitos (Traveling Saints; 1999), a tale of a woman’s journey from rural Mexico to Los Angeles; Morirse está en Hebreo (My Mexican Shivah; 2006), about the passing of seventy-ﬁve-year-old Moishe and what happens while his family sits shivah in Mexico City; and Karyn Kusama’s Girlﬁght (2000). Sayles’s list of awards continues to grow. In April 1997, he received an Imagen Award, which recognizes ﬁlm and television programming portraying Latinos in a positive light, for Lone Star. One year later, the University of San Jose presented Sayles with the second John Steinbeck Award (Sayles’s friend Bruce Springsteen received the ﬁrst award). The Writers Guild Foundation, an afﬁliate of the writers’ union, recognized Sayles with its 1998 lifetime achievement award. Sayles tempered his acceptance of the award: “It’s great to be honored by other writers, but I honestly don’t feel like I’ve been out there long enough to get that, and I have things I’m still doing” (Sterngold 6). In April 2007 at the Atlanta Film Festival, Sayles and Renzi received the Ossie Davis Award, dedicated to “creative excellence and dynamic contributions to the art of cinema,” particularly those who uphold “human dignity and social justice.” The Writers Guild of America recently presented Sayles with the Ian McLellan Hunter Award for lifetime achievement. Sayles continues to publish short stories, including “Peeling,” a rollicking piece revolving around a group of Louisiana crawﬁsh workers, for The Atlantic Monthly in 1993, and “Keeping Time,” a rock ’n’ roll story published the same year in Rolling Stone Magazine. In 2003, Da Capo Press reissued Thinking in Pictures, the best how-to-manual for young, serious ﬁlmmakers. In 2004, Nation Books published Dillinger in Hollywood, Sayles’s second collection of short ﬁction, which includes two stories Sayles adapted for the screen: “Casa de los Babys,” made into the 2003 ﬁlm of the same name, and “Keeping Time,” the basis for Honeydripper (2008). In his introduction to the collection, Sayles attempts to deﬁne what intrigues him as a writer: “These stories, like the movies I’ve been involved with, cover a great range of locales and situations, and are written in styles and rhythms dictated by subject matter. If there is a progression within them, it is one I’ve been unable to discover.... What uniﬁes these stories then is their origin—my constant question: If they act that way, what can possibly be going through their heads?” (xi–xii). Since 2004, Nation Books has reissued all of Sayles’s ﬁction; in addition, 2004 saw the release of the ﬁrst volume of Sayles’s screenplays, Silver City and Other Screenplays, also from Nation Books, which includes the title ﬁlm, Sunshine State and Passion Fish. Movies, though, take up most of Sayles’s writing life. As a ﬁlmmaker, Sayles is difﬁcult to categorize, although popular critics attempt to do so with the release of each new ﬁlm. Uncomfortable with the word artist, Sayles calls himself a storyteller, plain and simple. In a stunning reappraisal of Sayles’s ﬁlm work in Film Comment, Andrew Sarris positioned Sayles in his taxonomy of American ﬁlm directors: “In an age of cynicism and derision, John Sayles emerges ... as a cinematic poet of consonance and goodwill, and heaven knows we need him” (30). Such high praise ignores Sayles’s early screenwriting he did for Roger Corman, the

14

John Sayles, Filmmaker

proliﬁc producer and director of low-budget exploitation ﬁlms and founder of New World Pictures. Churning out drive-in schlock, a deliberate choice designed to immerse Sayles in ﬁlmmaking, seemed intriguing: “I wasn’t interested in getting a big house. All I was interested in was, I think it would be really great to make movies. This is the kind of storytelling that I really like. How do I get to do that and do that on my terms?” (Dreifus 33). Sayles learned how to make movies cheaply, efﬁciently, and independently.

New World Pictures: Training, Fun, Proﬁt The transition I was able to make from writing ﬁction to making movies was a case not of graduating from one to the other, of moving up or down, but of eventually having the practical means to do another kind of storytelling I’d always been interested in. —John Sayles, Thinking in Pictures

Union Dues, published in 1977, was the only novel selected for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel contains the germ of what would become Matewan, and Sayles acquired a second literary agent, someone who would sell Union Dues as a movie property and Sayles as a screenwriter. Because he was always interested in ﬁlm, Sayles sent his agent’s contacts on the West Coast a letter of inquiry and a sample screenplay, his treatment of Eliot Asinof ’s Eight Men Out, the story behind the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919. The heady script, however, only worked as a Hollywood introduction because the ﬁlm rights to Asinof ’s book were already under contract and unavailable to Sayles. Still, the agency, Robinson, Weintraub, Gross and Associates, Inc., decided to represent Sayles, provided he move to the West Coast, which he and Maggie Renzi did, settling in Santa Barbara, in 1977. Before leaving for California, Sayles and Renzi had started their careers as independent ﬁlmmakers—he by talking about what would become Return of the Secaucus Seven; she by managing production chores. Sayles’s agent told him Roger Corman, who directed Edgar Allan Poe tales for American International Pictures before founding his own company, New World Pictures—the renowned B picture training ground for countless moviemaking personnel during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, including Monte Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, Paul Bartel, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, and Ron Howard. Notoriously non-union and a self-described rock-ribbed republican, Corman wanted someone from outside the Writers Guild. Lacking a Guild card, Sayles matched Corman’s needs, and he would go on to write three low-budget ﬁlms for New World. “The ﬁrst decent offer I got,” Sayles recalls, “was the rewrite on Piranha” (Chute 57). Sayles credits Frances Doel, Corman’s story editor, for helping him secure the job because “she read ﬁction for pleasure (a rarity in Hollywood)” and was familiar with his work (Thinking in Pictures 5). Originally, Piranha (1978) was a Jaws parody, a monster movie chock-full of B genre conventions, including nudity, bloody deaths, and seat-grabbing thrills. Until he went to work for New World, Sayles had no formal screenwriting training, although his ﬁction resonates with crisp dialogue, the bedrock, according to most critics, of any good screenplay. “Basically,” Sayles notes, “I was self-taught. I had seen a lot of movies—that was my ﬁlm school” (Schlesinger 2). Corman told Sayles, “Forget this script, keep the name Piranha, we’ve test marketed it, it tested very high, and keep the idea of piranhas in North American waters. Make it something like Jaws” (Auster and Quart 330). Like most of the New World library, Piranha fulﬁlls genre expectations, yet

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with a sociopolitical twist, the Sayles touch. As ﬁlm historian Gerald Mast suggests, the movie takes a “violent nibble at the military, the Vietnam War, Bob Hope, and capitalist priorities” (Short History 547). Piranha is drive-in fare with a purpose. Corman provided an end-point for Sayles: the carnivorous ﬁsh would descend on a summer camp, where children would be happily frolicking in the water. Corman wanted the thrills packaged into a 90- to 100-minute block. Sayles designed a ﬁsh attack or the threat of a ﬁsh attack for every ten minutes of screen time. Yet the movie idea that Sayles inherited from Richard Robinson, who wrote the original story, had one logical ﬂaw: “If you know there are piranha in the water, why not stay out of the river?” (Thinking in Pictures 6). This formal problem supplied Sayles with Piranha’s central image: people poling down a piranha-infested river to warn others about the ﬂesh-eating ﬁsh. Sayles contrived a schematic to ﬂesh out the ﬁlm’s narrative: I drew a picture of a river and a lake ... but there’s no point where the people are going to have a rest. So I drew a dam in the middle of it: the ﬁrst half of the movie is getting to this dam; the second half of this movie is the piranhas getting around this dam, and then it started taking shape before I had any characters [Schlesinger 3].

Initially, Sayles kept the script “actor proof,” and, because no director had been chosen while he was writing drafts, he wrote the script as if he were going to direct the ﬁlm himself, “a full shooting script with each cut away detailed and nothing left for a director to ﬁll in” (Thinking in Pictures 6). Sayles’s earliest screenplay underscores his cinematic sensibility: Most critics ﬁgure that the dialogue is the screenplay, but I write shooting scripts, I write images. I always try to do things with as little dialogue as possible. Especially on an action thing, like Piranha ... I think about how I would tell the story if it was a silent movie, so that Japanese people could understand it without subtitles. I have a lot of pictures in my head, and I reinforce them with dialogue [Chute 59].

Joe Dante eventually directed Piranha, and, as Sayles notes, he “did more than ﬁll in the action described in the screenplay, taking it as suggestions he was free to use or not use as he saw ﬁt” (Thinking in Pictures 6). With little money and uncompromising logistical problems, part of life at New World where ﬁlms were made quickly and cheaply, Sayles and Dante debuted with a solid piece of ﬁlmmaking, which made money for Corman and guaranteed both the writer and the director more ﬁlm work. Piranha put people in the river and they were eaten, and that, as Sayles recalls, was his job: “That’s basically what they paid me ten thousand dollars for. The ﬁlm came out well and made lots of money for them” (Auster and Quart 330). Sayles’s characters are noteworthy because while they do things normally associated with B genre schlock—die shocking deaths, occasionally remove their clothes, utter saucy double entendres—they are also witty people with identities and histories, as Sayles pointed out to Tom Schlesinger: I’m very concerned with what people do for a living. So in Piranha, I had a guy who used to work in the mill that had been ﬂooded in order to make a resort. He had a grudge against this lake. He almost hated the river and hated the lake because it had taken his job away from him. The girl was a skip tracer, and it was her job to ﬁnd people as it was his job to hate the lake and sort of drink. So immediately, when they were on this river, there was something about it—she was always looking for someone and he was always grumbling [4].

Moreover, Sayles’s B ﬁlm work contains political and philosophical slants that stretch generic convention. Writing in Film Comment, Andrew Sarris acknowledged Sayles’s early

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John Sayles, Filmmaker

screenwriting, which “lifted the horror genre to a level of wit and humor and irony that startled mainstream critics” (29). Not only did Sayles learn about moviemaking at New World, he enjoyed an appealing freedom: “Once you agree on a premise—like, this is about piranhas eating people in North American waters—you could pretty much do anything you wanted” (Chute 57). And Sayles did just that, even though he toed the line in order to appease Corman, who, Joe Dante believes, “is not interested in character,” at least not when it comes to his exploitation ﬁlms (Chute 58). Piranha’s opening sequence straddles the line between B-ﬁlm conventions and cinematic homage, often part of the New World look. The ﬁlm starts like Citizen Kane: We see a no trespassing sign, and then the camera rises up and over a fence. We have entered secret territory, but not the baroque, psychological world of Charles Foster Kane. Rather, we stumble into the libidinous world of teen horror pictures. It is midnight, and two characters, a man and a woman on a backpacking trip, venture into the no trespassing zone, where they ﬁnd an inviting swimming pool. The young woman entices her partner into taking a swim by removing her clothes and jumping in. Her partner follows without hesitation. From below, we see a point-of-view shot. Before the credits appear on the screen we have witnessed two deaths connected to the promise of sex, a timehonored monster ﬁlm tradition. Juxtaposing the screams of the dying couple is a shot of the moon, recalling the midnight swim sequence that opens Jaws. This shot, however, also recalls Luis Buñuel’s surreal Un Chien andalou—or just about any horror ﬁlm made between 1940 and the present where sexual imagery takes on absurd connotations. As Piranha makes abundantly clear, not only do Sayles and Dante know movies, they also know how to appeal to a diverse audience. In fact, most Roger Corman B productions pop with outrageous narrative and insider ﬁlm jokes, making for deliciously decadent viewing. B-Films came of age in the mid–1930s with the invention of the double bill, an audience magnet, particularly during the Depression, because the double feature appeared to give ticket buyers a good deal. The B movie, made at a much lower cost than the A ﬁlm, was never intended to do anything except economically ﬁll up screen time. Corman learned how to make these low-end ﬁlms at American International. More appropriately called exploitation ﬁlms, pictures like Piranha are not secondary ﬁllers. Corman’s ﬁlms appealed to the drive-in crowd, young thrill seekers, and ﬁlm-savvy folks seeking subversive pleasures. As critic David Thompson attests in The Biographical Dictionary of Film, “in 1970, the enterprising Edinburgh Film Festival ran a program of Corman ﬁlms to crystallize the growing interest in his work among avant-garde critics” (149). Even intellectual exploitation ﬁlms demand certain elements, like the sexual invitation that opens Piranha. The liberating quality of exploitation ﬁlms, of course, lies just below the image we see on the screen, beyond what Stephen King calls “oogah-boogah,” the moment when viewers or readers climb the stairs an enter the forbidden room where they are scared to death (37). This shock, as James Twitchell observes, must be “short-lived and cannot be stretched out or the effect will be lost” (45). Piranha’s thrills come with deadly efﬁciency. Everyone, it seems, experiences a ﬁsh bite, even if they do not die. More often than not these attacks are played for comic effect, not dreadful pleasure. What makes Piranha fun is its leftist politics, as Sayles willingly points out: “In Piranha the horror is caused by the military, and I hope that there’s some kind of awareness, from the characters themselves, that we’ve been down this river before” (Chute 58). One sequence stands out. Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman), the unemployed, heartbroken sodden mill worker, Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies), the skip chaser, and

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Dr. Robert Hoak (Kevin McCarthy), the academic research scientist now working for the military, ﬁnd themselves together on Sayles’s centerpiece, a wooden raft. Sayles’s dialogue illustrates his humor, politics, and ability to link a disparate group of people. MAGGIE: The government paid you? HOAK: Of course they paid. Whether it’s germ warfare, the bomb, chemical warfare, there’s plenty of money. Special agencies. They pay. They pay a lot better than they do in private research. GROGAN: For raisin’ ﬁsh. HOAK: No. It’s a matter of genetics. Radiation. Selective breeding. They called it Operation Razor Teeth. MAGGIE: What was it for? HOAK: To destroy the river systems of the North Vietnamese. Our goal was to develop a strain of this killer ﬁsh that could survive in cold water, and then breed at an accelerated rate. We had everything. Blank check. And then the war ended.

Maggie’s character ﬁlls a role common in most of Sayles’s scripts: she is our guide, asking the questions needed to make sense of the bizarre situation in which these characters ﬁnd themselves, because she, like us, is new to the territory. Grogan, the laconic, dissolute mountain man who seeks a mission to revive his life, adds sardonic humor to the mix, complaining in a voice often heard in working-class bars. Dr. Hoak, a twisted, misunderstood research scientist right out of central casting, supplies comic, politically telling dialogue. Hoak’s experiments should raise questions about morality, government, and the very nature of human life. Yet Hoak considers himself free from all blame because of his profession, a form of work taken for granted even by his employer: GROGAN: You sound disappointed. HOAK: They poisoned the water. After all that work. Poisoned the water. MAGGIE: But some survived. HOAK: We developed a lot of mutants, and a few of them were able to resist the poison. They ate their own. Their own dead. And then they began to breed like some wild species. Suddenly there were hundreds, maybe thousands.

Cleverly, Sayles has established the invisible threat from within, a condition created by the military-industrial complex. What Hoak does not realize, however, is that a disgruntled military ofﬁcial, passed over for a higher rank, who oversees the doctor’s experiments, has hooked up with Buck Gardner (Dick Miller), a Bob Hope–like glad-handing real estate investor, to create an adult getaway on the river, and nothing, not even the threat of man-eating ﬁsh, can interfere with the resort’s grand opening. Once the presence of the mutant ﬁsh has been logically established, we follow a bloody, watery trail to the ﬁlm’s conclusion, underwater carnage at the resort. But, as this early scene demonstrates, Sayles gets his digs in whenever and wherever he can: GROGAN: Our tax dollars at work, huh? HOAK: Well, that’s science in the service of the defense effort. GROGAN: Sure. Spreadin’ strains of bacteria in the subway system. MAGGIE: You put them in the river where they could kill people, including civilians and little kids swimming in the rivers. HOAK: I never killed anybody. If you want to talk about killing you talk to your politicians, the military people. Oh, no! I’m a scientist.

Rather than editorialize scenes, in the manner of Sam Fuller or Larry Cohen, or completely give in to indulgent ideas, Sayles returns to his primary plot by introducing fresh drama, refocusing our attention on the river.

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John Sayles, Filmmaker GROGAN: Kids in the water. MAGGIE: What? GROGAN: The dam. They let the water through every couple of days, you know, to keep the level steady on the new lake. The resort’s down there, summer camp. All those kids. Come on!

Through dialogue, Sayles pumps tension back into the scene, which has provided a bit of relief after two unexpected killings. Sayles understands that the pace of any ﬁlm is an important script ingredient: It’s more important how you handle the time period as far as the audience’s relief and tension is concerned. I think that people like Hitchcock are the best at that because they’ll have some stupid little scene and if you looked at it on paper you’d ask, What is this scene for? But he put it there because he’s sort of lulling people so that he can shock them or give them a break after a big suspense sequence [Schlesinger 3–4].

Even in an early script like that of Piranha, Sayles’s expertise in creating a narrative rhythm is unmistakable. The piranha attacks are ﬁerce and shocking, a pattern reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), the standard for nature’s revenge, monsters gobbling their way through the 1960s and 1970s. Sayles’s Piranha was a shooting script, indicating shot numbers and editorial transitions, a paint-by-numbers design for the director-less ﬁlm. Therefore, after making his audience aware of the ﬁshy threat that the military bankrolled and science created, Sayles’s script indicates a cut to a long shot of children splashing in the water at the Lost River Summer Camp, a place to keep the kiddies while their parents frolic at the new resort development. The piranha will not go hungry. The setup is predictable, a bit of guilty fun designed to keep the audience waiting for the big feed. Sayles returns to the raft, where Dr. Hoak begins to come to terms with his own culpability: HOAK: I was pure research. No scrounging for grant money. No academic politics. You don’t know what that means to a scientist! MAGGIE: You fed them! You kept them alive! HOAK: I continued the experiment. There was so much more I could do with the species. So much further I could take them ... [pause]. You’re not holding me responsible? [Cut to individual reaction shots.] HOAK: I think you are. You pulled the plug and you’re holding me responsible. You’re blaming me. Incredible!

Hoak’s moral detachment will be short lived; he has provided the audience all the information he can—now he is piranha chum. Hoak has reminded Maggie that she too must share some of the responsibility for releasing the deadly ﬁsh into the river. What is telling here, however, is the amount of information Sayles packs into a small space. Onscreen the lines are funny, emotional, and, for a horror ﬁlm, almost believable. In many ways, Piranha is a better ﬁlm than Jaws just because of its unrelenting political assault and the giddy conﬁdence of Sayles’s script. Sayles, of course, does not take his exploitation work too seriously, as he remarked to an interviewer: Somebody from one of the more “intellectual” ﬁlm journals was talking to me about Piranha and how horror movies are always an allegory for something and I was trying to convince him that Piranha was actually an allegory to the cultural revolution in China and the piranhas were the Red Guard, and the four bad guys were the Gang of Four, and the heroes were actually Mao having let these things out accidentally and trying to get them back in. It works, but almost anything works when you look at it that way [Schlesinger 3].

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Piranha’s politics are unmistakable, though. At the conclusion of the ﬁlm, we witness a scene that recalls the evacuation of Saigon more than the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The super-ﬁsh bring tumultuous havoc to the Lost River Resort, ruining its kitschy opening, much to the displeasure of its investors and promoters. When Buck Gardner hears from his right-hand man that the ﬁsh are causing a problem, he snaps, “What about the goddamn piranha?” His lackey responds, “They are eating the guests, sir.” Because there is a great deal of money involved in the Lost River Resort, Gardner elects to go on with the program, conveniently ignoring the fact that renegade ﬁsh are devouring his guests. The Colonel, Gardner’s partner, ﬁnds himself on a houseboat in the middle of the manmade lake surrounded by happy customers ﬂoating, swimming, and paddling. When the ﬁsh attack, people frantically try to climb on board the houseboat, much the way South Vietnamese refugees attempted to board American helicopters leaving the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. The military man pushes people off the houseboat, back toward certain death in the bloody, churning water. The Colonel, however, is outnumbered, and soon he ﬁnds himself overboard, where a uniform offers little protection against hundreds of razor-sharp teeth. He falls prey to his own military operation. Sayles also slips in a wry bit of environmental criticism here. The real estate speculators have redesigned the river for proﬁt. The river, in turn, exacts its revenge as the conduit for the man-eating ﬁsh. The ﬁsh, of course, are also the result of tampering with the natural order, a classic literary theme that Sayles blends with popular horror. Sayles’s script upholds the tradition established in American science ﬁction ﬁlms of the 1950s, such as Them! (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), or The Blob (1958), which, as Gerald Mast notes, “surveyed a universe with no limits whatever on our knowledge or potential for either creation or destruction” (299). Piranha is about the creation of monsters, human and marine, and the gruesome destruction they cause. Sayles’s script does not end with the death of the bad guy, however. The frantic action, generated by surreal military thinking fused to real estate ﬂimﬂam, continues unabated. Our hero, Grogan, a victim of the real estate marketplace when the smelter where he used to work closed and then submerged under Lost River Lake, contrives a suitable death for the unstoppable ﬁsh. Because this mutant strain of piranha can survive in salt water and because the Lost River empties into the ocean, the marauding ﬁsh pose a threat to the entire planet, not just to the bucolic river community they are chomping through. Grogan’s solution is to “pollute the bastards to death” by opening the underwater tanks ﬁlled with toxic residue from the smelter. To that end, Grogan ties himself to a length of rope strapped to the bow of a boat, dives into the river, swims into the submerged smelting plant, and opens the chemical tanks, even though he is under constant assault by the piranha. Maggie remains in the boat counting to 100, per Grogan’s instructions. When she reaches her goal, Maggie opens the boat’s throttle and zooms away, pulling Grogan away from both the toxic release and the munching ﬁsh. Sayles’s comic deus ex machina is so bizarre it works. Of course, as James Twitchell correctly points out, this type of ending “may make an interesting social exemplar,” but it provides little in the way of fright (47). It is difﬁcult to believe that Corman, Dante, and Sayles actually set out to scare people; rather, they made a smart, funny ﬁlm that some members of the audience might mistake for serious horror. New World never camouﬂages its mixture of vulgarity, humor, and chronic lack of detail. In fact, Sayles, upholding a valuable exploitation tradition, opens the gates for a return of the ﬁshy man-eaters, matching the regenerative power of the shark from Jaws.

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John Sayles, Filmmaker

Sayles, however, sends his mutants into roman-numeral life with a horriﬁc twist featuring the horror ﬁlm scream queen, Barbara Steele. Steele plays Dr. Mengers, a scientist tied to the military operation and cover-up. Standing on a beach for a news interview by a news crew, Mengers responds when asked if there is any chance the ﬁsh could survive the toxic release and actually make it to the ocean. She looks directly into the camera and says, “There is nothing left to fear.” Horror ﬁlm aﬁcionados know better. Steele’s presence adds ﬁendish delight to Piranha. Her remark deliberately recalls the apocalyptic undercurrent in most horror ﬁlms, especially those that recycled monsters for more box ofﬁce returns. Sayles makes a brief, uncredited appearance in Piranha, playing an MP guarding a tent holding Grogan and Maggie, incarcerated because they know the Brazilian river munchers are heading toward the Lost River Resort. Grogan tells Maggie to “seduce” the guard, so they can get on with the business of saving innocent lives, a difﬁcult task as they always arrive after a piranha repast. The stalwart Maggie agrees, but pauses to ask a question seldom considered when movie women seduce movie men: “What if he’s gay?” “Then I’ll seduce him,” Grogan replies, hardly appropriate for an American action hero. Outside the tent Maggie confronts the half-wit MP. Maggie blurts out, “Are you gay?” Flummoxed the MP, asks what she means. Maggie moves around the guard, forcing him to turn his back to the tent, then tears open her shirt. The MP stands stunned, gazing like a teenager at a nudie magazine. Grogan throws a bag over the MP’s head and ties him up. The scene presents an ironic movie in-joke: the screenwriter, usually a marginal player after shooting begins, gets an intimate view of the leading lady. Piranha subverts convention with giddy conﬁdence. We never actually see the piranha; instead, it is red dye in the water, some Maytag agitation, and a sound effect resembling an overworked circular saw. These low-rent special effects add a sneaky charm to the ﬁlm, making it parodic, more than a routine gore-fest, a ﬁlm with tongue-in-cheek pride and ambition. The Lady in Red (1979), Sayles’s second New World script, strives for more realism, at least on paper: “The Lady in Red didn’t turn out the way I wanted because they just didn’t have the budget to make the movie right. I wanted that to be a real breathless, 30s, Jimmy Cagney everybody talking-fast type movie. It turned out a little more like Louis Malle” (Schlesinger 3). Lewis Teague, a Corman director, did not allow caution and good taste to smother Sayles’s depiction of Prohibition-era Chicago completely. If Piranha displayed Sayles’s appreciation for B-monster ﬁlms, The Lady in Red displayed the inﬂuence of The Untouchables, an old television program Sayles’s used to watch and mimic on paper. The Lady in Red tells the story of Polly Franklin (Pamela Sue Martin), the woman who, according to folklore, betrayed John Dillinger, one of America’s most famous criminals. Her heart set on a singing and dancing career, Polly sets out for Chicago, ﬂeeing her strict father. She progresses through a series of jobs that describe her character and the social conditions limiting a young woman without money or education. Sayles sees the story in terms of work: “She started out as this farm kid who worked for her father, who was an asshole. She ends up working in a sweat-shop, being a dime-adance girl, being in prison and doing work there, then becoming a prostitute and then becoming a bank robber” (Schlesinger 4). Polly’s progression forms the narrative’s backbone. Branded by the press as the infamous “lady in red,” Polly turns to crime, and as the movie ends, she heads toward the California dream coast with a bag of money and a bit of hope.

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Sayles remarked to David Chute that after extensive period research, with the help of the Chicago Historical Society, the script became one that “he might have enjoyed directing himself ” (58). What remains of the rich social observation that still ﬁlters through on the screen illustrates Sayles’s social and political sensibility. Polly, a woman mythologized by the media, only sought legitimate, steady work, and she lived with the choices that she had to make. Sayles, however, suggests that his script went even deeper: Lady in Red, which did not turn out very well, and probably will not be seen unless it’s on Home Box Ofﬁce, was a revisionist gangster ﬁlm. It was basically a very political ﬁlm about why the FBI was chasing after this hick bank robber, John Dillinger, instead of looking into Lucky Luciano, who was taking over prostitution in Chicago. However, by the time the ﬁlm was made, some performances weren’t what they could be; most of the scenes that explained why things happened were gone, and so what was left were scenes where people shot each other [Auster and Quart 331].

Clearly, Sayles loathed the ﬁnal version of The Lady in Red. Although an ambitious company, New World always kept an eye trained on the bottom line. The Lady in Red reveals New World’s production limits. Still, The Lady in Red marks a somewhat ambitious turn for New World, considering the ﬁlm’s feminist perspective and sociopolitical commentary and cost. Bloody shootouts punctuate the ﬁlm from beginning to end, so the ﬁlm satisﬁes generic requirements. Polly Franklin’s character makes it intriguing, for she is a true antihero. Polly is full of desire and imagination, and Sayles’s script exposes her private life: She dances and sings while tending to her chickens, and she steals photo stills from the local movie marquee. She is a rebellious youth, cut from the same cloth as Marlon Brando’s character in The Wild One (1953) or James Dean’s in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Polly rejects rural conformity and takes to the road, the rebel’s standard choice. In Chicago, Polly is initiated into the world of politics, economics, and sex. Befriended by Rose Shimkus (Laurie Heineman), a character loosely based on Emma Goldman, who is politically committed to unionism, Polly begins to realize the collective power of women. She and Rose are sent to prison for trying to unionize a sweatshop. In order to gain her own release and to protect Rose, whose health is poor, Polly agrees to work as a prostitute for the prison matron, Tiny Alice (Nancy Anne Parsons). The Chicago bordello, run by the classy, connected Anna Sage (Louis Fletcher), is upscale, serving politicians, gangsters, and assorted swells. Though muted and truncated by New World, Sayles’s script featured a generous helping of unionism, economic oppression, and corrosive political power, plus a large cast of characters. The narrative linkage between characters, which Sayles uses in most of his work, is evident in these early screenplays. Sayles described the connective technique to Tom Schlesinger in 1981 in response to a question about emotional bonds between characters: “This is actually one thing I leaned from a book about screenwriting. There was an interview that Peter Bogdanovich did with Allan Dwan (Sands of Iwo Jima), who started screenwriting years after he had been directing in silent movies. He had this rule, which I also use in my ﬁction writing, that if you drew lines of emotional connection between the characters, you would have at least two coming from every person” (Interviews 21). Connections in The Lady in Red are rather overt. Tiny Alice (Anne Parsons), for example, exerts power inside the women’s prison in the same fashion the Mob and politicians do on the outside. She, in fact, has Mob and political connections, so she has connections both inside the jail and on the outside, and in each case she has inﬂuence over Polly. Sayles

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John Sayles, Filmmaker

allows the women inmates to challenge and tip the social order inside prison when Tiny Alice kills Rose; the other female inmates in a show of solidarity, in turn, kill her. Every character in the ﬁlm, even minor ﬁgures, has signiﬁcance, a structural element that has become Sayles’s screenwriting signature. Usually, peripheral characters stand only in service to plot, stage extras subservient to the protagonists. Sayles attempts to add some level of meaning to all of his characters, even minor ones. As an illustration, Sayles explains the function of a minor character from The Lady in Red: “There was a cop named Hennessey who at ﬁrst we see as a bag man for the mob, and then he had another line, sleeping with the Madam, and then he also had a connection to the FBI” (Schlesinger 5). Although seemingly insigniﬁcant, playing just another corrupt Chicago cop, he is indeed well connected. He is, in fact, “the spider in the middle of the web,” according to Sayles (Schlesinger 5). Sayles’s script focuses on people and images, tempering New World’s frantic visual momentum, a stylistic common in most Corman ﬁlms. Characters such as Pinetop (Rod Gist) and Pops Geissler (Peter Hobbs), two honorable men who work for Anna Sage, are drawn with emotion. They make decisions that ring true to character. Even Christopher Lloyd’s Frognose, a murderous deviate, makes sense. Still, The Lady in Red is an exploitation picture meant to entertain. And Sayles knows how to appeal to a popular audience, even when he injects scenes with his own rueful awareness. “Steven Spielberg and George Lucas do not sit around wondering, ‘What’s good product, what will those suckers go for?’ That’s what I respect about those guys,” says Sayles. “I have different taste, and maybe different values, but I never feel condescension there. The most successful movies, no matter how schlocky, have that quality. Like Russ Meyer, who said, ‘Americans like square chins and big tits, and so do I’ ” (Aufderheide Cineaste 15). Much like Meyer, the king of exploitation sex ﬁlms, Sayles produced work for New World that had the requisite number of breasts, but the ﬁlms also had an intellectual sense that extend formulaic demands. John Dillinger’s death sequence resonates on multiple levels. Dillinger (Robert Conrad) enters Polly’s life unexpectedly, and she believes he might be the man for her. Polly discovers Dillinger’s identity only after his brutal death outside the Biograph Theater. His grisly slaughter and not his companionship changes Polly again, making her a renowned ﬁgure, even though Anna Sage betrayed Dillinger. After Dillinger’s death, captured in bloody low-rent Sam Peckinpah slow motion, the press takes over. Captured in multiple camera ﬂashes, Polly stands powerless as word spreads—the dead man is John Dillinger. People begin to sop up his blood, which runs everywhere, with newspapers, handkerchiefs, and cups, anything to hold bloody proof that they attended a spectacular public death of a folk ﬁgure. Sayles suggest the press and the FBI had as much to do with Dillinger’s celebrity as did the bank robber’s own actions. Sayles tells a different version of Dillinger’s death, one from his notorious girlfriend’s perspective, which gives the ﬁlm a decidedly feminist perspective, for she is rather ordinary, a victim of America’s economic system. Sayles’s last New World script is another genre shift, moving from Chicago gangsters to outer space, where androids, humanoids, robots, and monsters lurk. “Corman is very frank with exactly what has to be in the movie, and basically, after that, he leaves you alone,” Sayles told Cineaste magazine. “In the case of Battle Beyond the Stars, all Corman did was come to me and say, ‘We want to write a science ﬁction picture that’s the Seven Samurai in space’ ” (Auster and Quart 330–31). Sayles neglects to mention that New World, a shrewd business operation, wanted to grab George Lucas’s coattails—Star Wars (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) were popular successes. Directed by Jimmy Teru

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Murakami, Battle Beyond the Stars merges a faux Star Wars look with Kurosawa’s plot device—how defenseless farmers cope with marauding barbarians. Sayles reduces the length of his version of the Seven Samurai, and he cuts out the social theme, allowing more time for fun and guns. Female actors in Battle Beyond the Stars keep their clothes on, injecting verbal sexual hijinks, not images. Sayles’s screenplay moves the samurai from sixteenth-century Japan to a space-age future but with his own special twist: “Even hack work is about something. Battle Beyond the Stars ... is about death, different life forms’ attitudes toward death. It’s no big heavy thing, it’s just something to base the characters around” (Chute 58). Sayles’s warriors willingly die for a cause that means little or nothing to them. Yet each gladiator has good reason to take up arms against an intractable foe. Perhaps the Nestors (Earl Boen and John McGowans), ﬁve clones who count as one mercenary, capture the warrior spirit when they reveal why they will join the group: “We are becoming bored to death.” No price is too large to pay. Sayles borrows from John Sturges’s American, testosterone-fueled version of Kurosawa’s ﬁlm, The Magniﬁcent Seven (1960), by echoing lines of speciﬁc characters, particularly those of Robert Vaughn’s eerie, cowardly gunﬁghter. Vaughn, in fact, pops up here as a tight-jawed killer who is a loner, as was his aging existential cowboy in Sturges’s ﬁlm. Sayles’s plot is familiar: A harmless planet is threatened by Sador ( John Saxon), a villain possessing the deadly stellar converter, a device capable of reducing an entire planet to cosmic dust, just like the Empire’s Death Star, and his vicious, genetically addled gang of interstellar bad guys. Sayles introduces Sador by having him to blow two smiling weathermen, sent aloft to ensure a good agricultural harvest, to bits. Their comrades send out an emissary, Shad (Richard Thomas), an untested soldier, to ﬁnd mercenaries. He succeeds. In the ultimate battle, the invaders are defeated, ﬁve mercenaries die, and balance returns to the universe. The script contains a love story, between Shad and Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel), derived from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a deliberate literary conceit Sayles uses to add gooey dialogue about birth, death, and the fun of procreation. Nanelia, who has grown up knowing nothing of the vast universe beyond her own planet, parallels Shakespeare’s Miranda. She works for her father, Dr. Hephaestus (Sam Jaffe), the cerebral presence in charge of an android repair operation. When Shad arrives, Nanelia tells him her father has changed a bit. And he has. Because his body has atrophied, Dr. Hephaestus’s head ﬂoats over a robotic platform, which keeps his brain alive. Since he lacks a heart, objective decisions come easy, so he immediately assigns Shad to impregnate his daughter and to settle in for an eternity at the android station. Shad, however, seeks a more abundant life, one that includes death. Like Miranda, Nanelia naively offers herself to Shad without hesitation—theirs will be a limitless, artiﬁcial existence marked by the pitter-patter of little feet and conversations with broken androids. Shad, however, displays a thirst for real life, and he tells Nanelia a story about a communal birth on another planet in which birth and death occur simultaneously. Against pleas from her android guard, Nanelia elects to travel back to Shad’s planet in order to discover the pleasures of a mortal life. Both Shad and Nanelia are pure, innocent characters. Nevertheless, like Shakespeare’s Ferdinand, Shad quickly evolves into a spirited ﬁghter capable of making serious decisions. Nanelia and Shad survive and continue a normal life together. Battle Beyond the Stars is not just a romance. The fun comes from the supporting characters, the marginal players, who add a zany multiculturalism to Sayles’s cosmic

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spoof. These characters are full of attitude, which allows Sayles to stretch his wiseacre sensibility. Robert Vaughn’s Gelt is a tough-as-plutonium hired gunman who is “looking for a place to hide and a meal,” but ends up dying for “a minor planet in a third rate galaxy.” Fittingly, Shad has Gelt buried with a ﬁve-course meal. Space Cowboy (George Peppard) carries scotch, soda, and ice in his space work-belt, and he plays Western music on the tape deck in his spacecraft. Cowboy, a space trucker, is a dissolute Han Solo. St. Exmin (Sybil Danning), a busty Valkyrie whose libido rises along with her battle lust, delivers Sayles’s line with gusto. Deﬁning her life philosophy to Shad, she recalls the famous line uttered by Nick “Pretty Boy” Romano in the 1940 ﬁlm noir picture Knock on Any Door: “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.” St. Exmin delivers a deliciously dirty double entendre as she explains her brand of sex to Nanelia. Gripping a long crystal shaft, St. Exmin describes how she would handle Shad: “I could do wonders for that boy. I would recharge his capacitors. Stimulate his solenoid. Tingle dingle, dangle his transistors. You know: Sex.” Shad would never last, for he is far too pure for the likes of the Valkyrie, who exits with a bang. Sayles throws in a good computer, NEL, the complete opposition of Stanley Kubrick’s malevolent HAL, the killer computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for good measure. NEL controls a true mother-ship, which, in fact, looks like a ﬂying uterus, and she wants nothing more than to see the all-male bad guys blown into stellar dust. NEL convinces Shad that the Varda, his planet’s bible, which declares, “That which is organic must not harm that which is also organic,” is full of “some damn stupid rules.” She preaches aggression, especially in the face of certain death. Like the rest of the ﬁlm’s gallant heroes, NEL too dies, although she is instrumental in Shad’s growth from a boy to a man. Battle Beyond the Stars plays for more laughs than Sayles’s other New World scripts. His writing, however, enlivens the science ﬁction genre. Sayles breathes comic optimism into a tired form. At this point in his screenwriting career, Sayles had mastered the slightly campy, slightly tongue-in-cheek genre script. Sayles would never stray too far from the pay associated with Hollywood productions. As Gavin Smith points out, Sayles created an “autonomous niche between the studio major leagues and the indie minors” (57). Sayles made a living out of rewriting scripts, writing scripts for hire, and polishing bits and pieces of scripts for large Hollywood studios. But his New World days were ﬁnished, even though Corman offered him a horror ﬁlm to direct. Sayles’s New World money, close to $40,000, covered the production costs for Return of the Secaucus Seven. With ﬁlm footage in the can, Sayles and Renzi needed money to complete the project—editing and the release of the ﬁlm were expensive. Joe Dante, now working for Avco Pictures, needed a rewrite man for The Howling, a werewolf picture, and he knew where to turn. Sayles, though, was already at work on Group One’s Alligator, another monster movie.

Screenwriter-for-Hire: Revisions, Additions, Originals In Alligator or The Howling I try to bring them into the twentieth century, to make them a little more consistent. The tension that is interesting to me is taking something totally fantastic and sticking it in a very real setting. I try to say, “OK, what would really happen if you walked outside, and there was this giant alligator there? Who would try to catch it, who would react with fear, who would just say, let’s go see the giant alligator?” —John Sayles, Chute Interview

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For New World, Sayles displayed a comic wit, scripts full of interconnected characters, knowledge of ﬁlm history, and a literary ﬂair. In 1979, Sayles really branched out, moving away from Corman’s ﬁlm factory and into more lucrative screenwriting work. Two genre pictures, Lewis Teague’s Alligator and Joe Dante’s The Howling, both released in 1980, feature Sayles’s perceptive screenwriting touch. These exploitation pictures feature black comedic moments, cult ﬁlm allusions, and the Corman aesthetic. If exploitation ﬁlms are necessarily rigged, required to appease audience expectations, then Sayles’s scripts bend convention, offering rich, illuminating subtexts that make what he calls his “hack work” exceptional. Of the two ﬁlms, The Howling displays unusual ambition, exploring contemporary issues such as media power and New Age groups, while wrapping the narrative with the ageless terror of lycanthropy, the supernatural ability to transform into a wolf, a horror genre staple. Writing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby recognized the ﬁlm’s schizophrenic potential: The Howling is ridiculous but it’s not stupid” (Lycanthropophilia 10). Sayles revised an original script, written by Terrance H. Wrinkles, and has justly received credit helping to make The Howling a unique exploitation ﬁlm. As Sayles told Gavin Smith, the form held appeal for him: “They were movies I grew up seeing, and all I had to do when I got offered one was to ask myself, Can I think of movies like this one that I liked? Could this be a movie I would have fun going to? “ (Sayles on Sayles 41). The Howling offers something for everyone, as it reaches high-brow, mid-brow, and low-brow audiences without condescension. Sayles learned a great deal working for Corman. The Howling acknowledges Corman early on; he appears as a dapper fellow who patiently waits outside a telephone booth as Karen White (Dee Wallace), a member of the Update News team and the ﬁlm’s heroine, receives a call from a man possibly responsible for a recent series of grisly murders. Corman says nothing; his presence frightens the reporter, and he provides insider laughs for B-ﬁlm fans, especially when he reaches into the coin return slot looking for spare change—homage to his low-budget attitude. Sayles and Dante establish their low-budget signposts quickly. Together they amplify an old story by adding both spoken and visual puns to their story of werewolves, media power, and redemptive therapy. The Howling is Sayles’s script, but Dante and the special effects people brought the ﬁlm to life, which Sayles acknowledged: “And Joe manages to make it funny without getting too campy so that it can still be scary when it’s got to be scary. The problem is that I can write the stuff, but someone has got to be able pull it off.... Joe pulled off the direction and Rob Bottin pulled off the transformations, which nobody had seen before. Werewolf movies had not done well for a long time” (Sayles on Sayles 41). Comments like this one indicate Sayles’s appreciation for the collaborative nature of ﬁlmmaking, an attitude stressed at New World. Sayles’s opening for The Howling is ambitious and a personal favorite of his: “What you try to do is tell the people what world they are entering. Because a movie is a world, and it should live and die by its own rules.... Yes, it is the world of werewolves, but it’s not Transylvania, folks. These guys are hip to the media” (Smith 68). The opening credit sequence runs close to ten minutes, crosscuts between three distinct planes of action, and provides large chunks of exposition, including informational and emotional set-ups. Viewers are made aware they are watching a werewolf movie, that it’s a contemporary setting, and that there is a psychological element at the core of the ﬁlm. The Howling closes with a quote from The Wolf Man (1941)—“Go now, and heaven help you!—and a scrambled bit of video.

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The scrambled, fuzzy television set, emitting static and full of horizontal and vertical lines, symbolically representing failed communication, appears on screen. A quick cut provides a glimpse of a television studio, establishing setting. People on set discuss an upcoming program promising to examine the mind of a psychotic killer. “But,” someone says, “you know, it focuses on the beast in us all.” Dr. George Waggner (Patrick Macnee), a psychologist, appears on the blurry television screen, speaking with an unseen talk-show host. As the television image pops in and out of focus, snatches of their conversation come through. “Repression,” Waggner says, “is the father of neurosis. We should never try to deny the beast—the animal within us.” Cleverly, Sayles establishes the two tracks his script will follow, weaving the primal world of the man-beast, represented and defended by Waggner, with the civilized world, the television crew and the studio. Horror ﬁlm fans will recognize the name Sayles uses for Macnee’s character: George Waggner directed The Wolf Man, a classic picture Dante references twice in The Howling. Dr. Waggner is a fake, an articulate husker who manipulates television viewers into accepting man’s atavistic side while attempting to integrate a group of werewolves into the civilized world in order to keep the once ancient race alive—he attempts to mediate both worlds, one extremely dangerous and the other completely desensitized. James B. Twitchell, author of Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror, contends that ﬁlms like The Howling, though ﬂawed, are as representative as traditional horror ﬁlms, pictures that cleave to genre expectations because they speak to a particular generation, an audience weaned on old genres yet craves images that relate to their reality. Therefore, in The Howling “the chief werewolf [is] a Dr. Get-in-Touch-with-Yourself from Esalen Institute,” a well-known New Age Spa still in operation in Big Sur, California (Twitchell 54). Twitchell suggests topical characterizations are ﬂawed by their immediacy: “You run the risk of losing the next generation of audience in a much more abrupt way than with other [ﬁlm] forms because objects of contemporary obsessions, especially political ones, have a half-life of about ﬁve years” (54). Waggner sounds like poet Robert Bly, but lacks lyrical insight. Commercial self-help therapies like EST and Primal Scream, both parodied in the ﬁlm, have only become more common, and therefore it is impossible to escape their inﬂuence and images. Sayles’s ideas hold up because he blends real-world concerns into his screenplay. Bruce Kawin argues that The Howling “real-world horrors are pornography, irresponsible journalism, and the neurasthenic impact of the media in general as they make money out of presenting atrocities, encouraging their audience to take only the merchandizing angle seriously, and to disregard—or not adequately confront—the suffering they report” (105). At the start of the ﬁlm Karen White, who represents the media and believes in its power, searches for Eddie “The Mangler” Quist (Richard Picardo), a werewolf sex murderer who sardonically uses yellow smiling-face stickers like business cards. Eddie has no desire to understand himself; instead, he uses his lycanthropic strength to satisfy his abundant sex drive and his urge to kill. Eddie directs her to an adult bookstore. There Karen enters a tiny, pitch-black peep show booth. Concealed in the shadows, Eddie stands behind her. A pornographic movie begins to run, and we see a group of men sexually assaulting a woman. Eddie assures Karen that the woman is enjoying herself. Then he says, “I’m going to light up your whole body, Karen.” He orders her to turn around. Karen obeys, an indication of the beast’s power. In a point-of-view shot, Eddie’s blurred image, obscured by the ﬂickering light from the projection booth, is a mass of long, course hair. Dante cuts to a reaction shot of Karen’s face. A police ofﬁcer appears, and he shoots

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Eddie. Covered in blood, Karen succumbs to the trauma of witnessing Eddie’s transformation and death. Sayles’s screenplay then branches off into multiple directions. Two of Karen’s coworkers, Chris (Dennis Dugan) and Terry (Belinda Balaski), arrive at Eddie’s apartment, which is grotesquely decorated with newspaper accounts of the Mangler’s murder spree and self-portraits of an animal angry Eddie. Terry says, “He could design the Marquis de Sade coloring book.” The reporters are not sure what to make of Eddie’s room, so they leave for the city morgue, where the Mangler’s body rests in cold storage. Meanwhile, Karen’s boss, Fred Francis (Kevin McCarty), cannot wait to get her in front of the cameras. “We’ll make ratings history,” Francis declares, sounding like a Paddy Chayefsky character from Network (1976). Karen has suffered nightmares. On camera, she blacks out. She speaks with Dr. Waggner, and he suggests a weekend at his northern California retreat, The Colony, for psychiatric therapy. In Piranha, Sayles had to get everyone into the deadly river; here it is The Colony, the center-point of his script. Karen and her husband Bill (Christopher Stone), a former athlete, a vegetarian, and a health spa businessman, embark for a restful weekend. Karen tells Bill, “I hope these people aren’t too weird.” Dante cuts to a shot featuring Erle Kenton ( John Carradine; named after the director of The Ghost of Frankenstein) howling as other Colony guests try to prevent him from wailing at the moon. Waggner intends to help these people to learn to channel their atavistic impulses into more socially acceptable actions. His clients, though, are far more interested in sex and death than they are self-help. While Karen and Bill attempt to understand the inhabitants of The Colony, Chris and Terry make a startling discover at the city morgue. A strange attendant ( John Sayles) tells the couple about his job, recalling a conversation he had at a shift change, only to see the man to whom he was speaking return in an hour dead “with water pouring out of both his ears.” Sayles’s morgue veteran has seen it all, until he opens the freezer holding Eddie’s corpse. Dents and scratches cover the stainless steel body drawer, and Eddie is gone. Karen and Bill, now more confused, visit an occult bookstore in order to discover more about supernatural events. The conversation turns to werewolves. The store’s owner (Dick Miller) tells them “silver bullets or ﬁre” can kill werewolves. That’s the only way to get rid of the damned things. They’re worse than cock-a-roaches.” At The Colony, Karen sits in on a group therapy session. A young female participant says, “EST, Scientology, T.M., primal screaming, I did it all. I ﬁgure another ﬁve years of hard work and maybe I’ll be a regular person.” Bill meets Marsha (Elisabeth Brooks), an erotically charged member of The Colony who favors leather clothing and animal teeth jewelry. Every expression she uses suggests sex. Marsha throws herself on Bill, but he rejects her. A mysterious creature attacks and bites Bill as he returns home. Karen tends to the bite. Soon, though, Bill’s darker impulses emerge. Meat returns to Bill’s diet; he starts reading Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again; and Marsha captures his attention. Like Young Goodman Brown, Bill enters the woods at night where a raging ﬁre and an unrestrained Marsha await. Marsha, a Barbara Steele look-alike, and Bill strip, embrace, and roll on the ground in front of the ﬁre. Bill’s furious arousal features hair exploring across his body; guttural sounds emerge from his throat. As the feral loves reach climax, Bill sprouts fangs and salivates uncontrollably. Bill and Marsha are now wolves rutting in the dirt, howling at the moon. Scenes like this one, according to Twitchell, expose horror’s true intent: “Horror monsters may frighten, but that is because they are acting out those desires we most fear. When they come out in the nighttime, as monsters always do,

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they must move around using a body that has become a sexual weapon, the body full of power but so lacking in control” (68–69). Back in the city, Chris and Terry rest in bed watching The Wolf Man on television. Gypsy Queen Malvena (Madame Maria Ouspenskaya) conﬁrms Larry Talbot’s (Lon Chaney, Jr.) worst fear: “Whosoever is bitten by a werewolf and lives becomes a werewolf himself.” Karen calls to talk about Bill’s strange behavior, a result, she believes, of the bite he sustained. Now convinced werewolves exist, Terry drives to The Colony to support her friend and to look into what is really going on there. Upon arrival, she locates Eddie’s room. Eddie discovers her, transforms into a werewolf, and in a bloody, bone-crunching sequence rips Terry apart. Meanwhile, Chris returns to the occult bookstore seeking the silver bullets. Karen discovers Terry’s mangled body in Dr. Waggner’s ofﬁce, where Eddie waits for her. Sayles’s macabre humor punctuates the scene. Eddie, angry with Karen over her earlier dismissal, says, “I want to give you a piece of my mind.” Sayles’s dialogue anticipates a spectacular transformation. Eddie’s words have a literal meaning: he reaches into his forehead, still marked with bullet holes, pushing in through his skull. Eddie extracts a handful of slushy grey matter and hands it to Karen, a prime example of Rob Bottin and Rick Barker’s special effects wizardry: Eddie bursts through his clothes and human skin and becomes a huge, two-legged wolf. The monster advances toward Karen who throws a vial of acid into his face, which allows her to escape. Sayles draws his storylines together by getting his characters back to the television studio. Chris arrives armed with a riﬂe full of silver bullets. The Colony’s patients, rising in mutiny against Waggner’s humanity program, assemble at the compound’s barn, where they confront Dr. Waggner. Chris shoots Waggner, who thanks Chris as he drops dead. The pack begins a uniﬁed chant—“Humans are our prey.” Chris shoots a few of them and forces the rest into the barn. Karen sets the barn on ﬁre. In a well-constructed montage, Dante underscores the wolves’ relentless desire to live, but the ﬂames consume the creatures. After escaping The Colony’s grounds, Chris and Karen run into a roadblock manned by Sheriff Sam Newﬁeld (Slim Pickens), who enjoys a can of Wolf Chili. Chris had called the Sheriff about Terry, so we know he is one of them. The Sheriff bites Karen. In a nod toward Invasion of the Body Snatchers, an uneasy feeling lingers suggesting some werewolves remain at-large. Back at the television studio, Fred Francis anticipates big ratings numbers because Karen is about to give a ﬁrst-hand account of the events at The Colony. Live on camera, Karen veers away from her prepared script; she talks instead about a plague from which there is no escape. Pleading for compassion and understanding, Karen begins her transformation in front of her crew and her audience. Unlike Eddie’s metamorphosis, which underlines his lack of control, Karen’s change is painful and sad. Her snout quivers slightly as a tear runs down her cheek. Chris stands off-camera aiming his riﬂe directly at his friend and colleague. When Karen ﬁnishes her speech, he executes her. Karen’s call for understanding is lost, however, as the set erupts in chaos. The script calls for reaction shots from her television audience. Some children squeal with delight, “Wow, the news lady is turning into a werewolf !” A couch potato channel surfs right through the bizarre scene. A bar patron exclaims, “The things they do with special effects these days!” Another patron says the anchor did indeed turn into a werewolf. The bartender, cooking a hamburger for a customer, glances at the TV, then yells over his shoulder, “How do you want that burger cooked?” Dante’s camera glides over to Marsha, who sits next to a male patron, her breasts heaving in anticipation, “Rare,” she says. As the closing credits roll, the hamburger con-

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tinues to cook on the grill. None of the viewers seems to retain the real human drama witnessed live on television, an indication they have lost the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Made for $1.5 million, The Howling reached a signiﬁcant audience, grossing more than $18 million in North America. Genre, ﬁlm history, and humor are mainstays of Sayles’s scripts-for-hire. The Howling is a prime example. While writing The Howling, Sayles juggled two other projects: Group One’s Alligator, and editing the raw footage of Return of the Secaucus Seven. According to Gerry Molyneaux, Avco wanted to release The Howling for Halloween 1980, but the picture needed more special effects work, and therefore its release was delayed until spring 1981 (94). Originally released in 1980, Alligator was quickly pulled back; its broad commercial release occurred in 1981. Alligator (1981), a monster ﬁlm in the Piranha vein, was also a New World Pictures reunion. Lewis Teague, who directed The Lady in Red, directed Alligator, and it is as relent-

Alligator (1978): Like many well-known contemporary ﬁlmmakers, Sayles started his career working on B movies, particularly for Roger Corman at New World Pictures. Quickly, Sayles established a name for himself and started working for other studios. Even then, Sayles attempted to create scripts that worked on as many levels as possible. Alligator, directed by former New World colleague Lewis Teague, starts with a baby alligator being ﬂushed down a toilet; in the city’s sewer system, the creature locates an unexpected food source. Sayles uses the giant alligator for social satire: “I started to think of it as a social ill. And like most social ills, nobody pays attention until they reach the upper middle class. So, while the alligator’s eating poor people, it’s like ‘Isn’t that too bad, your cousin got eaten,’ but when it ﬁnally gets to the suburbs, that’s when the SWAT team arrives” (Ferrante 8 –9). Here, Sayles’s protagonist interrupts an upscale wedding, the last stop on his journey through the socio-economic food chain (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive).

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less and comical as Piranha. Alligator parodies Jaws, Them!, and Piranha, too. Alligator picks up where the man-hungry ﬁsh left off. As in Piranha and Jaws, the horror comes from below; in this case, from the sewer. Sayles uses an urban myth as his starting point: the sewers of large cities contain alligators that were once cute pets, grew too large, and then ﬂushed down toilets, ultimately ﬁnding a home in the dark, wet subterranean space. Sayles, of course, puts a fresh twist on this bit of folklore. What if, Sayles asks, the alligator had a food supply pumped up by a chemical company experimenting with growthinducing hormones? The answer is a 32-foot, one-ton, mean-tempered creature named Ramon. The renegade alligator starts out in Florida and ends up in Chicago. Conceptually, Sayles’s plot called for Ramon to eat his way through an American socioeconomic food chain: “It comes out of the sewer in the ghetto, then goes to a middle-class neighborhood, then out to the suburbs, and then to a real kind of high-rent area” (Chute 58). Unfortunately, budget limitations forced the removal of a number of scenes, so Ramon’s progression is somewhat truncated. Sayles’s intent remains on screen, however. The alligator smashes through the sidewalk in the inner city, and by the end of the ﬁlm, he is munching his way through an upscale wedding on a large, rural estate. Sayles wrote four endings for Alligator eventually settling for a Jaws-like explosion to kill the beast. Alligator lacks New World’s panache, but it is a competent piece of generic ﬁlmmaking. The ﬁlm is reminiscent of Them!, in which mutant ants, the result of military nuclear testing, threaten Los Angeles. Speaking with Gavin Smith about the exploitation form, Sayles admitted an appreciation for large monsters: “I haven’t written a slasher movie or a serial killer movie. I have not written many movies that have to do with random violence ... whereas giant cockroaches eating people, like, Yeah!” (Sayles on Sayles 41–42). Giant monsters populated science ﬁction ﬁlms from the 1950s, ﬁlms Sayles saw. Most of these pictures, including Them! and The Thing, feature a dysfunctional collection of combatants and scientists who must collectively ﬁgure out a way to defeat their monstrous foes. Alligator uses shots from the creature’s point-of-view as it races toward its victims. We see reaction shots, the shock a victim feels just as the alligator’s massive teeth begin to pierce the skin. These attacks are the cinematic descendents of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds; in fact, Sayles includes a malicious pet store owner in his screenplay, an obvious nod toward Hitchcock’s ﬁlm about nature’s revenge, who unknowingly feeds Ramon dead carcasses pumped-up with growth hormones. In his laudatory New York Times review, Vincent Canby suggested Alligator “simultaneously demonstrates the speciﬁc requirements of the formula while sending them up with good humor” (12). Alligator does not threaten Ray Harryhausen’s legacy. As Canby notes, “Alligator is sort of an underprivileged Jaws, made by people who clearly don’t have the ﬁnical resources to spend half a million dollars fabricating a life-like, machine operated, 32-foot Ramon, about people who cannot afford to vacation on Long Island, Cape Cod, Nantucket, or Martha’s Vineyard” (12). Alligator is a blue-collar horror ﬂick, comfortable territory for Sayles and his burgeoning career as a script doctor. On vacation in 1968, the Kendall family—Mom, Dad, and young Marisa—visit an alligator farm in Florida where an alligator severely mauls a wrestler. Most of the witnesses assume they are watching a prank, a carny sideshow stunt, except Marisa who responds to the animal’s bestial power. She buys a ten-inch baby alligator for a pet. At home, her father becomes fed-up with Marisa’s attachment to the reptile, which she named

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Ramon. Dad announces, “We’ll tell her we found it dead, just like the hamster,” and he ﬂushes Ramon down the toilet. Sayles’s script calls for a point-of-view shot from the toilet, taking us along to share Ramon’s plight. With a gentle “plunk,” Ramon lands in a dark, cavernous, wet sewer, then scurries away. Twelve years later, body parts turn up in the city’s water system—arms, legs, even a thumb. The National Probe, the local paper, begins running a page-one body count. The police chief (Michael Grazzo) assigns the case to David Madison (Robert Forster), a recent transfer to the department who suffered trouble on his old assignment; wrongly accused of his former partner’s death, he is trying to restart his career. After the alligator eats the unsavory pet store owner, Madison begins to investigate Slade Laboratories. Slade (Dean Jagger), the company’s owner, is old, rich, powerful, and nasty; he has the city’s mayor ( Jack Carter) in his pocket. Keeping city ofﬁcials away from the lab and its secrets will not be difﬁcult. Slade tells his future son-in-law: “It’s not the police we have to worry about; it’s the damn yellow journalists.” At Slade’s request, the mayor tells the police chief to stay away from Slade Labs. Madison ignores his boss. Madison is an old-fashioned grunt, a blue-collar protagonist, so full of Philip Marlow–like integrity he will do whatever it takes to solve the murders. After a sewer worker goes missing, Madison and a rookie cop investigate the city’s underground. Ramon eats the rookie, and Madison sees the beast face-to-face. The response is standard issue: No one believes Madison. Why should they? A reporter in pursuit of the story falls prey to Ramon, but he photographs the beast as it eats him alive. Enter Dr. Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker), a beautiful, world-famous herpetologist. Soon Ramon surfaces and starts eating his way toward Slade like Shelley’s Frankenstein monster. The mayor turns the hunt over to a Hemingwayesque big game hunter, Colonel Brock (Henry Silva), a sexist and racist foul-mouth whose screen time is short. Ramon bursts through a sewer in front of Slade’s mansion while Slade’s daughter’s wedding is in progress. Ramon takes vengeance swiftly: he eats the mayor alive and crushes Slade inside his own limousine. Finally, Madison lures Ramon back into the sewer where he has set a trap. Before things end, Sayles pokes fun at the monumental coincidences he employed throughout Alligator. Madison, who has set explosive charges in the sewer, plans to escape through a manhole, but a little old lady parks her car on the cover. Our hero is locked in the sewer with a ticking bomb and a giant alligator snapping at his feet. In the nick of time, the car moves. As he did with Piranha and The Howling, Sayles crafts an ending inviting a sequel— another baby alligator ﬂops into the sewer as the credits appear. Alligator is parodic, almost an outright mockery of genre conventions, a picture with a sense of humor. Alligator lacks the visual ﬂare evident in The Howling. Although both The Howling and Alligator were rewrites, Sayles received credit for restructuring, deepening, and polishing the material. At this point in his career, Sayles had rapidly built a reputation as a fast and talented rewrite man, someone with real ideas who enjoyed working on all types of ﬁlms. His next major assignment ﬁlm came from John Frankenheimer. The Challenge (1982), a contemporary samurai picture, required marathon writing sessions. Sayles completed the ﬁrst rewrite in ﬁve days. More revisions and additions followed. Sayles continued to work on dialogue as Frankenheimer cast new actors: “Frankenheimer would call up every few hours and say, ‘Here’s another idea.’ Including, ‘You know, Toshiro’s [Mifune] a little shaky with his R’s and L’s, could we get rid of the R’s and L’s?’ So I had to go through his dialogue and take out as many words beginning with R’s and L’s as I could—which is an interesting way to write, kind of like iambic pentameter” (Sayles

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on Sayles 43). The narrative revolves around the clash between modernity and tradition; in this case, living as a Ronin, a masterless samurai, adopting a way of living, a way of seeing, a way of meditation, and a way of organizing your life within a corrupt culture. Set in Kyoto, The Challenge follows a somewhat dull-witted sparring boxer, Rick Murphy (Scott Glenn), as he is drawn into a private clash between two brothers, Toru Yoshida (Toshiro Mifune), the traditional older sibling, and Hideo Yoshida (Atsuo Nakamura), the industrialist who places machines before ritual. The Yoshida brothers ﬁght over an ancient sword. In order to get the sword into Japan, Toru hires Murphy for the job. Once he enters the country, Murphy ﬁnds himself trapped between the two camps. After some indecision, Murphy becomes Toru’s disciple. The Ronin believes a tough, grueling path leads to enlightenment, and Murphy is willing to follow him. Old Japan faces new Japan. Toru prevails, but not without help from the converted sybaritic Westerner. Sayles’s dialogue adds a spiritual element, a philosophical perspective on how to lead a proper life in a cynical time. Ando (Calvin Jung), for instance, delivers snappy, attention grabbing lines. An Americanized bad guy working for Hideo, Ando talks like someone reared on movies. His most savage moment recalls Richard Widmark’s Tommy Udo, the psychopath from Harry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947). After pushing Toshio (Sab Shimono), his boss’s wheelchairbound nephew and excess baggage, out the back of a moving van, he explains the signiﬁcance of the sword to Murphy: “You mess with someone’s blade, you mess with his soul.” Ando delivers Murphy to an ultramodern industrial complex where Hideo waits. “So what does the man do for a living when he’s not waiting for the sword?” Murphy asks Ando. The ruthless killer responds: He’s Chairman of the Board here. That’s no ordinary board. No. That board runs the length of the building and out the far end. Who’s sitting on either side of that board waiting for the good word from him? The Presidents of the next ﬁfty biggest companies in Japan. When you go below them, into the ﬁne print, you’re looking for General Motors.

Hideo is modern Japan, and he is Machiavellian in the extreme, someone whose code begins and ends with money and deceit. The Challenge closes with a stunning visual sequence ripe with special effects and full of blood. A ﬁlm that should have been more than it became, The Challenge did not fare well at the box ofﬁce. CBS Theatrical Films, the production company for the ﬁlm, interfered with the editing process, which resulted in unevenness in the 112 minute version of the picture. For television, The Challenge was cut to 97 minutes and retitled Sword of the Ninja. Working with a name director like Frankenheimer, however, elevated Sayles’s name and prestige in Hollywood. His next screenwriting assignment would be closer in sensibility to his personal work. Sayles and Susan Rice adapted Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1982), a set of three interconnected short ﬁlms gleaned from Grace Paley’s story collection of the same name, for the screen. Aesthetically, the ﬁlm looks like a real independent project: the production values are low, the episodes uneven, and some of the acting amateurish. Still, the project contains redeeming moments, especially its literary narrative construction: the stories cross-reference each other. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute suffered a rocky production history, and it shows in the ﬁnal product, now titled Trumps, its PBS and video title. The ﬁlm revolves around three New York City women, all divorced, and all coping with their shifting lives: Virginia (Ellen Barkin), Faith (Lynn Milgrim), and Alexandra

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(Susan Tucci). These three have little in common. On occasion, master shots capture all three principles. In the ﬁrst and strongest segment, Virginia struggles to cope after her husband Jerry (David Strathairn) leaves her and her three children. John (Ron McLarty), the son of Virginia’s landlady, appears, and he is ready to help in any way he can. Virginia wants nothing to do with an overweight, balding guy who lives with his wife and children in New Jersey. John, who has been in love with Virginia since high school, is undeterred. Out of loneliness, Virginia reluctantly allows him into her life. Thursday night becomes John’s night. He comes with gifts and entertains Virginia’s children. Eventually, they make love. Virginia tells him that “for a guy who sends out the Ten Commandments for a Christmas card, [he’s] pretty quick getting those pants off.” Virginia accepts John’s presence, even though the arrangement is not ideal, for otherwise her life would be empty and humorless. Faith’s story, the second installment, centers around a trip she makes with her children to a Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, nursing home where her parents are residents. Faith, too, is alone. Her father (Zvees Schooler) reveals that he and Faith’s mother (Eda Reiss Merin) were never married, that they were committed idealists and much different in sensibility. Faith confronts her mundane existence. Later, she runs along the beach and then asks her children to bury her in the sand, an act inviting emotional release, albeit in an overt, rather clichéd fashion. Finally, Alexandra, a divorced yet ﬁnancially secure social worker, has an affair with a young cab driver, Dennis (Kevin Bacon), a would-be musician. After picking Alexandra as a fare, Dennis immediately falls for the older women. Dennis is off-beat, naively charming. He asks Alexandra if she has heard of “The Atomic Pile,” his rock band. When she says no, Dennis understands why: “They are into anonymity; that’s what they are known for.” Alexandra ﬁnds Dennis attractive, but she does not understand why—he is young, he is poor, and he is immature. Like John in the opening episode, Dennis ﬁlls an emotional void. Alexandra becomes pregnant. Her father demeans her; Dennis, on the other hand, is overjoyed. Alexandra is confused. By the conclusion of the episode, Alexandra, who has explained to Dennis why he cannot be a permanent part of her life, opens up her home to a group of unwed mothers, providing emotional support for the other mothers, while she willingly anticipates the arrival of her own child. Rough and ragged, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute compares well to Sayles’s early ﬁlms, but it lacks his narrative cohesion. He creates a collection of multiethnic and multiracial urban personalities, voices of highly educated women, teenaged mothers, street kids, a blue-collar Romeo, and two radicals living in assisted housing. Sayles understands Paley’s characters and their words, and he uses them well in his adaptation. They are ordinary people pursuing ordinary lives. Co-directed by Mirra Bank, Ellen Hovde, and Mufﬁe Meyer, the ﬁlm took a few years to complete—once Faith’s segment was complete, the directors screened it for prospective investors; only with additional ﬁnancing in place could the production continue. Begun in 1978 and released in 1982, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute was a labor of love, and it failed to ﬁnd an audience, but the project helped launch the careers of its three directors. Clan of the Cave Bear (1986) did not suffer from a lack of production money, but it did suffer because of its producers, Jon Peters and Peter Guber. Their meddling make Clan of the Cave Bear the low-point of Sayles’s screenwriting career. Sayles’s adapted the script from Jean Auel’s popular novel of the same name, which revolves around Ayla, an orphaned Magon girl, who is adopted by a Neanderthal tribe. Like The Challenge, Clan of

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the Cave Bear examines a signiﬁcant cultural change; in this case, Stone Age history and the dawning of civilization. Daryl Hannah plays Ayla, a female warrior who, after a rape, becomes a mother. Tall, blonde, athletic, and young, Hannah exempliﬁes a Hollywood casting ideal. Her use of weapons and physical intelligence make her believable as a challenge to the male dominated tribe. Directed by Michael Chapman, the noted cinematographer of Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), among other ﬁlms, Clan of the Cave Bear contains a feminist slant lost in a torrent of grunts and groans that stand in for the tribe’s language. In Auel’s novel, the characters speak English. Peters and Guber worried about the veracity of language for two years. Originally slated for television, Clan of the Cave Bear became a ﬁlm during its pre-production stage. Sayles appeased the producers and kept dialogue to a minimum, choosing instead to employ gesture and voice-over. On location in Canada, Peters and Guber invented the ﬁlm’s language. Grunts and hand gestures, enhanced by subtitles, became the ﬁnal choice. According to Molyneaux, Sayles referred to the linguistic invention as “ugga, bugga bear” (123). The sophistication of Auel’s text makes the physical gesticulations unintentionally comic: “The Mogurs say you are the Others. You will anger the spirits”—which sounds part literary theory, part New Age revival—becomes absurd when delivered with apoplectic gestures. Warner Brothers had hired Sayles to adapt The Valley of Horses (1982), the second in Auel’s trilogy, but quickly scotched the idea after the swift box ofﬁce death of Clan of the Cave Bear. Jean Auel sued Peters and Guber over the damage done to her novel. Sayles’s name remains part of the ﬁlm’s credits. Wild Thing (1987) also contains a prehistoric conceit. Sayles knew he could improve the existing script, inherited from Larry Stamper. Sayles described his version as “an urban Tarzan story” (Aufderheide 15). After his parents die in a drug deal gone sour, Wild Thing (Rob Knepper) ﬁnds himself orphaned in the inner city. The child, who escapes death by diving into a sewer runoff, becomes the ward of a benevolent bag-lady, who introduces the youngster to savvy street people and the art of survival. As a teenager, Wild Thing becomes a type of urban legend, a ﬁgure who swoops down from abandoned buildings to save innocents from street thugs and to provide urchins and old drunks food. He lives in a part of the city called “The Zone,” a crime infested lost place. A social worker named Jane (Kathleen Quinlan)—an obvious and kitschy cliché—befriends Wild Thing after she is abandoned in The Zone, where she is accosted by two thugs who work for Chopper (Robert Davi), overlord of The Zone and the man who murdered Wild Thing’s parents. Critics familiar with Sayles’s burgeoning independent career, particularly Roger Ebert, wondered why he would bother with such hackneyed material, featuring conventional heroes and useless violence. As Molyneaux notes, by this time in his script-doctoring career, Sayles “was earning in the $75,000 to $150,000 range, money that would support” his work (157). More important, Sayles continued to display his ability to work with other ﬁlmmakers and to deliver exactly what the director or the producer needed. Some of Sayles’s humor and insider political jokes help characterize his protagonist. Wild Thing is a hippie kid; his parents drive a beat-up VW van and blast Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” until their trip comes to a bad end. Following his parents’ deaths, Wild Thing must live off the land, which is, of course, concrete and extremely dangerous. Wild Thing swings through the air like an illiterate Spiderman, albeit with the same vigor and moral intent. Max Reid’s ﬁlm, however, is standard action fare that once, perhaps, contained an intriguing message. Wild Thing, like Ayla, speaks in grunts and hisses, although he reveals his ability to speak on an elementary level at the ﬁlm’s midpoint. As

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always, Sayles infused the screenplay with bits of lively dialogue. For instance, a street kid who lives in a halfway house in The Zone explains his condition effectively: “My dad wanted me to play tackle for the Packers. I wanted to play keyboards for the Circle Jerks. The rest is history.” For the most part, though, Wild Thing is standard fare: bad guys control The Zone and the police, and Wild Thing saves the day. Braking In (1989) stands as a unique ﬁlm in Sayles’s screenplay canon, for he allowed someone else to direct an original screenplay of his. Sayles had broken off production negotiations for the script nine years earlier because of creative differences with a ﬁlm company. Later, working with the Samuel Goldwyn Company, Sayles agreed to let Bill Forsyth, a Scottish writer/director whose droll, dry sensibility can be both funny and melancholy, direct his ﬁlm. Sayles did not want to direct, but he did want to place the ﬁlm into proper hands. Forsyth, director of Gregory’s Girl (1981), Local Hero (1984), and Housekeeping (1989), matches Sayles’s sensibility. They created a small ﬁlm Apollo 13 (1995): “The worst case of anonymous work going unacknowledged is John of substance. Vincent Canby, always a Sayles Sayles on Apollo 13,” novelist and screensupporter, saw the ﬁlm as “an accumulation writer Richard Price told interviewer Steven of wonderfully buoyant, sometimes irrational Rea in 1995. “Ron Howard [the director] said details that would be throwaways in more this guy rewrote everything, and he didn’t get conventional comedies” (18). Pauline Kael a credit” (7). According to E. Deidre Pribram, an independent ﬁlmmaker and scholar, Sayles had a different opinion, calling Sayles “the included a short, bold note with his third thinking man’s shallow director” (191). Kael draft revision: “Please precede [sic] with your ridiculed Sayles for his narrative construc- preparation of the movie based on this draft tion, which she considered to be devoid of of Apollo 13. This is it. It really is. No kidreal drama and just an accumulation of ding. Good luck” (12). Sayles dramatized the screenplay and incorporated some of Tom notions. Social realism, for the most part, Hanks’s ideas, yet the Screenwriter’s Guild never appealed to Kael. denied him credit. Producer Brian Glazer Breaking In opens with two different gladly paid Sayles a screen-credit bonus. people illegally entering the same house in decidedly different ways. Ernie Mullins (Burt Reynolds) is a professional thief, and he knows what he is doing. Mike Lefebb (Casey Siemaszko), a local who works at a tire shop, breaks into houses to “eat, watch a little TV, and read the mail,” and he has no idea what he is doing. Ernie takes in the upstart to educate him in the trade. Scenes focusing on this teacher/apprentice relationship are par ticularly effective. Ernie lives quietly in a nondescript neighborhood on the edge of Portland, Oregon, where he teaches Mike how to work like a pro. He avoids attention, a condition he wants Mike to understand. Mike,

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though, is a slow learner. After a few successful thefts, Mike moves into a large, expensive apartment, buys an expensive car, and lavishes presents on a favorite prostitute, Carrie (Sheila Kelly). The police locate Mike with no trouble. Ever loyal, Mike takes credit for all of Ernie’s jobs, receives a well-deserved conviction and time in prison, where Ernie pays for his apprentice’s protection. At its core, Breaking In is about generational differences: how an older professional operates, how a neophyte stumbles. Ernie tells Mike about his former partner, and why he broke their relationship: “He drank like a ﬁsh, smoked three packs a day, and he chased woman. He wasn’t a serious person.” Breaking In features Sayles’s low-key humor, solid acting, and a mature storyline. While not a major moneymaker and Pauline Kael’s comments notwithstanding, Breaking In exempliﬁes Sayles’s screenwriting skills, and a number of different and lucrative assignments followed: Men of War (1994), an action ﬁlm staring Dolph Lundgren; The Quick and the Dead (1994), and Apollo 13 (1995). Once titled A Safe Place, Men of War was an original screenplay about a mercenary who bumps into a Stone Age tribe that seems paciﬁstic. The warrior rethinks his life, and, as Sayles glibly remarked to Pat Aufderheide, “there’s a big ﬁght at the end” (15). Two other writers received screenwriting credit: Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris. Sayles’s storyline remains, but the ﬁlm is a weak copy of John Irvin’s Dogs of War (1980). Many of the actors in the ﬁlm are Sayles regulars, including Don Harvey, Anthony John Denison, Tom Wright, and Kevin Tighe. The ﬁlm lacks Saylesian humor. Sayles ﬂeshed out Gene Hackman’s dialogue in The Quick and the Dead. Apollo 13, though, stands as the most well known ﬁlm he worked on in the mid–1990s, even though he did not receive screenwriting credit. By this point in his career, Sayles’s script repair had become steady work. “The way I make my living, basically, is by writing screenplays for other people, which usually means rewriting screenplays someone else tried,” Sayles told an audience at the Independent Feature Film Marketplace, “and so I read a lot of screenplays, and I’d say the biggest fault that I ﬁnd with them is that that they are not dramatized” (Pribram 13). What Sayles did for Apollo 13, written originally by William Broyles, Jr., and Al Reinhart, and based on James Lovell’s Lost Moon, was make it more personal by enhancing the moon mission’s history, a story familiar to many viewers, by centering the screenplay on Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), and by putting some science back into the script, albeit for laymen. Brian Grazer, director Ron Howard’s production partner, appreciated Sayles’s work so much he paid Sayles generously and added his name to the screen credits. The Screenwriters Guild rejected the addition of Sayles’s name, however. A companion book published at the release of the ﬁlm does acknowledge his script work. According to Sayles, the producers of Apollo 13 “were every, very technically accurate. I got to talk to astronauts, and my job was to translate what they were saying into language nonscientists could understand” (Past Imperfect 19). Sayles’s “translation” highlights the difﬁculty of the rescue effort. Using common objects to help deﬁne technical problems, Sayles’s unadorned language helped make Apollo 13 a mass success. As always, Sayles moved on to other projects, including a rewrite of The Mummy, the 1999 Universal hit, a script for Rob Reiner observing the 1960s. He adapted a Doris Lessing novel, The Fifth Child, for the screen. Sayles worked on a science ﬁction ﬁlm with James Cameron, who worked on Battle Beyond the Stars and then directed The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1989), and, most famously, Titanic (1997), titled Brother Termite. Sayles work on Brother Termite sums up his attitude about Hollywood assignments and his own work:

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With my own stuff, it’s “This is the story I want to tell.” And that’s the line I always use when one of my ﬁlms is test-marketed, and it tests lower than they wanted it: “But it’s the story I wanted to tell.” Whereas, when you’re working for other people, it’s a different ballgame. I was just working on a giant cockroach movie, and the assistant to the public health guy transformed from a pudgy Jason Alexander type to being a black street kid who happens to like bugs, only because this or that producer was telling me what to do. It doesn’t matter to me; I can make them both work. It’s their story [Lippy 196].

Sayles’s comments underscore his ﬂexibility with studio work. Moreover, he highlights his ability to create voices of any type and his conﬁdence as a writer, which he continues to do for Hollywood pay, having worked on an early version of The Alamo remake Ron Howard was set to direct, I Kill (2007), A Cold Case (2008), The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008), and Jurassic Park IV (2008), among other recent ﬁlms. Sayles understands the ﬁlmmaking process well, especially writing, directing, editing, and acting in his own material, tasks he has engaged since Return of the Secaucus Seven.

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Outside and Inside the Production System Return of the Secaucus Seven Work with What You Have If I’m going to make something outside the industry, it might as well be something the industry isn’t going to make. —John Sayles, Cineaste

In the fall of 1978, after writing screenplays for others and being around the movie business, albeit on the margins, Sayles decided he wanted to write, direct, and edit his own project, an audition piece meant to capture some Hollywood interest. Sayles had $40,000 in start-up money, gained from his three New World Pictures screenplays and the sale of The Anarchist’s Convention, his collected short stories. Making a 16-millimeter feature seemed possible, especially with the help and support of friends and colleagues. Braced by his fundamental pragmatism, a trait that has ensured his longevity in the expensive, tumultuous culture of ﬁlmmaking, Sayles understood exactly what he wanted to accomplish and how he and his crew would pull it off. Because the initial ﬁnancing for Return of the Secaucus Seven was out-of-pocket, Sayles understood that he “had to back up a bit and stop thinking in pictures,” part of his job description as a screenwriter-for-hire, and “start thinking in budget” (Thinking in Pictures 5). After ﬁnishing the screenplay, Sayles completed principal photography in ﬁve weeks. Because he was working with an inexperienced crew, he exceeded his own expectations: Return of the Secaucus Seven was a success, albeit a slow-moving one, reaching a niche audience of ﬁlmgoers looking for real people and recognizable human behavior on-screen. Return of the Secaucus Seven established Sayles politically, thematically, and aesthetically. This seminal ﬁlm introduces Sayles’s realistic style, generally a low-key approach marked by economical camera work that is subservient to the story and the interplay of an ensemble collection of characters. Before considering Return of the Secaucus Seven, Sayles understood that access to the director’s chair would be difﬁcult, especially for someone with no formal training: “I realized that it was going to take me a long time to break into directing by the usual route, 38

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which is to write a hit for a studio and then say, ‘I want to direct the next one’ ” (Chute 54). Sayles saw “a good ﬁve years of writing screenplay” ahead of him before he might be considered as a director; he wanted to speed up the process (Auster and Quart 326). So he set out to teach himself how to make a movie—one he would want to see: “I ﬁgured whatever I did or learned about directing I would have to ﬁnance myself ” (Chute 54). Although a do-it-yourself ﬁlmmaking education seems an expensive and foolhardy endeavor, for Sayles the choice worked. While Return of the Secaucus Seven opened and closed in New York in the fall of 1980 to little fanfare, in Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., it drew sizeable art-house audiences. Soon the Secaucus Seven was generating critical praise. The ﬁlm won the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Screenplay,

Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), John Sayles’s ﬁrst ﬁlm, displays his screenwriting talent, his pragmatic, realistic ﬁlmmaking style, and his interest in telling ensemble stories. Secaucus became an independent benchmark. According to Tom Stempel, the children of The Secaucus Seven are everywhere: “Sayles’s emphasis on dialogue showed young writer-directors the way to make a major impact on a low budget ﬁlm was through great, dramatic, funny, often raunchy dialogue. Without Secaucus Seven, would we have had ‘Please, baby, please’ and the sequence of pick-up lines in She’s Gotta Have It, the explanation of ‘snowballing’ in Clerks, the discussion of the meaning of Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ in Reservoir Dogs, or, speaking of Madonna, the sales pitch for her pap smear in Slacker?” (Creative Screenwriting 98). This group photograph was taken on location in North Conway, New Hampshire (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives).

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found its way onto numerous “top ten” lists, and introduced John Sayles as a formidable new ﬁlmmaker, one who could write and a direct. Produced, in the end, for $60,000 of his own money with $125,000 covered by deferrals, a ludicrously small amount by ﬁlm industry standards, Return of the Secaucus Seven caught the attention of ﬁlm aﬁcionados, critics, and studio executives because, according to critic David Osborne, it “tapped a warm vein of nostalgia among Sayles’s contemporaries, longing for some public conﬁrmation of their strange journey through the seventies” (31). The ﬁlm, however, hardly wallows in nostalgia. Return of the Secaucus Seven contains shrewd observations about human nature, reveals conﬂicting class and gender viewpoints, and is full of sly humor. Like all of Sayles’s earlier screenwork, Return of the Secaucus Seven appeals to the ear rather than the eye—speech governs image. Sayles’s choices were deliberate: “I wanted to walk a tightrope between making something they’d never make, but having production, writing, and directing values that they would recognize as good for their purposes, too” (Chute 54). Sayles’s literary elements, particularly story and character, attracted an audience. Still, Sayles’s ability to think in pictures is evident even in his ﬁrst feature— framing, camera movement, mixing shots, sound, and editing are all managed with care. Return of the Secaucus Seven is a direct piece of ﬁlmmaking, a picture in which nothing much happens—a slice-of-life story. Seven college friends, 1960s leftists and antiwar activists, all approximately thirty years of age, gather at a New England summer home for an annual reunion weekend, where they eat, drink, smoke, talk, and look toward the future with adjusted ideals. For the most part, the ﬁlm lacks dramatic action, eschewing traditional plot dynamics—the story is not chock-full of tension leading to a climax and deﬁnitive resolution. Instead, the ﬁlm unfolds episodically—a trip to a summer playhouse, a volleyball game, a basketball game, a cookout, a swim in an old quarry, a boozy night in a local tavern, a group arrest, and a hung-over Sunday morning—events that combine to give the ﬁlm a lived-in quality, a look Sayles does nothing to disguise: “Sometimes a line of dialogue can save you a lot of shots that look great but don’t tell you much” (Auster and Quart 330). Unlike the work of his contemporaries, Oliver Stone, David Lynch, and Spike Lee, memorable, elaborate imagery does not dominate Sayles’s early ﬁlm work, especially Return of the Secaucus Seven. Since the beginning of his ﬁlm career, Sayles has never been seduced by style for style’s sake. Film’s broad canvas can be manipulated with a visual élan almost unattainable in other art forms. But when style smothers substance, ﬁlmgoers are left with little after a trip to the theater except the fading memory of an attractive eyewash rich in light and color. Sayles’ ﬁlm stories grow from his populist conviction that a ﬁlmmaker should not become “either a caterer to the elite or a panderer to the masses,” but should attempt to “pick and build” his or her “images so that anybody can get into the story on some level, so that maybe people are drawn in deeper than they thought they could or would want to go” (Thinking in Pictures 8). Strong realistic narratives create an awareness of everyday possibilities, bringing into focus recognizable characters people often overlook or ignore. Realism matches Sayles’s stylistic sensibility. When done well, realism can illuminate the mundane details of the dayto-day existence, communicating the experiences of ordinary people. In Return of the Secaucus Seven Sayles presents characters who participated in a volatile period of American history in order to demythologize or debunk clichéd notions about those involved in the sixties movement. He creates people who believe in the possibility of community effort.

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In doing so, Sayles provides a view from ground level, free from the glitz and the glitter of ostentatious stylization and heroic posturing. None of his characters are larger than life. Sayles dredges common experience out of the extraordinary sixties. In response to a question that described the characters in Return of the Secaucus Seven as less ideological and sectarian than many of the people connected to the sixties movement, Sayles deﬁned his approach to his characters and to his audience: They are people who went to marches, not those who planned them. They’re people who did not go just to see what the action was, but who really felt strongly about their commitments. They were just issue oriented and very concrete in their goals, not hard-liners or Marxist-Leninists who had a perspective that colored all their thinking. But I didn’t want this to be an in-group ﬁlm. I wanted my characters to be more accessible to an audience that did not participate in the “movement,” and which might not like the characters if they met them in real life. I want the audience to come see the ﬁlm, and possibly reconsider their won perspective on these people and the “movement” [Auster and Quart 327].

By constructing an unglamorous group of people who actually participated in the counterculture movement, Sayles offers an alternative portrait of a community of friends who share a political and social linkage without sentimentality or apology, even while some of their lives are becoming more middle class, more stable, more mainstream and status quo. Of course not everyone afﬁliated with the Secaucus Seven sees the future with clarity. Although Sayles deals with it in a low-key manner, history plays a dominate role in how these characters relate to each other and how they see themselves moving forward. Return of the Secaucus Seven divides its attention among seven old friends (four women and three men), one invited guest, and two working-class “townies,” over a three-day weekend. The Secaucus Seven are Mike (Bruce MacDonald) and Katie (Maggie Renzi), high school teachers who rent the summer home located in Mike’s hometown; Jeff (Mark Arnott) and Maura (Karen Trott), an estranged married couple whose split adds a trace of drama to the reunion; Francis (Maggie Cousineau-Arndt), a medical school student; J.T. (Adam LeFevre), a down-on-his-luck folk singer; and Irene ( Jean Passanante), a speech writer for a Democratic senator. Into this mix Sayles blends Irene’s companion, Chip (Gordon Clapp), Ron (David Strathairn), an ex-jock gasoline attendant, and Howie (Sayles himself ), the perplexed father of three who works two jobs to keep his family aﬂoat. All the actors, people Sayles “knew from having worked in summer stock as an actor and director” (Rosen 183), look like regular people. Many ﬁlm critics celebrated the actors for their improvisational spontaneity, which missed the mark but stood as a testament to their ability to carry off Sayles’s lines. Return of the Secaucus Seven revolves around the lives of these people and their relationships. The Secaucus Seven earned their name on a trip to Washington, D.C., for an antiwar rally. The group was arrested at the Secaucus, New Jersey, turnpike exit and spent the night in jail for possession of marijuana, a charge dropped the next day because of police bungling. Over the course of the weekend, the group breaks up into twos and threes, and they recall their past, talk about turning 30, and discuss fresh possibilities for the future. These sequences serve as opportunities for sizing each other up, for sharing conﬁdences, for brief love affairs, and for ending a marriage. Sayles’s multi-character, episodic format interconnects these people like characters in interconnected short stories, such as those found in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but without its dark rumblings. People talk about their friends with humor, warmth, and rueful understanding, providing the ﬁlm with an authenticity not usually associated

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with American cinema. Sayles’s ﬁlm recalls the Swiss director Alain Tanner’s Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), a ﬁlm that examines a diverse group of French and Swiss friends while commenting on the cultural and political changes after the revolutionary events of 1968 in France. Both Tanner and Sayles present committed people with a shared history attempting to make their way in a society that provides few leads. As in Jonah, the vitality of Return of the Secaucus Seven comes from Sayles’s people. For Sayles, John Cassavetes, the late American actor and maverick director, provided the creative impetus for him to move beyond the limitations of his paycheck screenplays and to set out on his own. In describing Cassavetes’s work for the New York Times, Sayles notes an awareness shared by many would-be ﬁlmmakers who saw Shadows (1962), Faces (1968), or A Woman Under the Inﬂuence (1974) for the ﬁrst time: This is an American movie, but I know these people. It isn’t a Technicolor dream or a cartoon with live actors; it doesn’t drip with studio mood music or theatrical problemdrama dialogue. There is recognizable human behavior, adult human behavior, happening up on a movie screen [“Cassavetes’s Sources,” 17].

Cassavetes’s work remains emotionally honest and risky. Like Sayles, Cassavetes ignored heroic endeavor and melodramatic longings, which lie at the core of many American ﬁlms. Cassavetes, however, also sacriﬁced consistent, planned narrative development, which is anathema to a Sayles ﬁlm. Although his plots drifted, Cassavetes’s ﬁlms focus on realistic characters. Indeed, the often unpleasant honesty with which Cassavetes explored the reality of people’s daily lives, reminiscent of neorealist ﬁlms of the 1940s, puts to shame most mainstream American ﬁlms dealing with similar domestic traumas. In addition to the honest subjects Cassavetes explored, Sayles also points out that Cassavetes’s “other legacy lies not in the content or style of his ﬁlms, but in the mere fact of them” (“Cassavetes’s Sources” 21). Cassavetes was a prototypical independent ﬁlmmaker who told the stories he wanted to tell outside the mainstream industry. “His career as a director,” Sayles writes, “was a great, subversive act, and you never got the feeling watching his movies that he expected any thanks for it” (21). Cassavetes’s brand of cinema dealt with the private domain, examining themes of a more personal nature: emotions, relationships, and family structures. He did not create tight commercial packages. Cassavetes brought his own particular point of view to the screen, and in doing so asked his audience to re-examine the conventions of traditional American ﬁlmmaking. According to Sayles, it was Cassavetes who showed aspiring ﬁlmmakers that the “natural movement” was not the property of the Europeans. Cassavetes and Sayles share a common desire to capture what André Bazin described as “a fragment of concrete reality” that in itself is “multiple and full of ambiguity” (37). Sayles’s characters spring from the same unadorned reality, but they are buffered by his humanism and the wry, ironic wit of his pen. Return of the Secaucus Seven captures characters living their lives—the camera simply documents their actions, for the most part. Sayles used a 16-millimeter camera to photograph Secaucus Seven, resulting in a grainy image when the release print of the ﬁlm was blown up to 35-millimeter, adding an unpolished, gritty authenticity to the images. It was Sayles’s intention to ensure that the characters “come across very real, that you don’t feel you are watching actors” (Chute 56). By using unknowns, actors free from critical typecasting, Sayles had an advantage that allowed him to be more natural in his approach, an impossibility with recognizable performers. According to Sayles, he wanted to create a

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verisimilitude that would make audiences think the actors “must all be playing themselves, even though none of them are” (Chute 55). Sayles’s cast members were non–Screen Actors Guild actors, all around 30 years old, people he knew from working in a summer stock company called the Eastern Slope Playhouse in New Hampshire, which is where Secaucus Seven was shot, and from college. According to David Rosen and Peter Hamilton, authors of Off-Hollywood, “The project grew out of [Sayles’s] experience working with Jeff Nelson” (182). Nelson produced Return of the Secaucus Seven. Not only do these unknowns look right for their roles, but as professional actors they understood how to make their characters believable and, more important, how to deliver their lines as written. Overall, the acting in Return of the Secaucus Seven features an ease usually realized by seasoned professionals. Each performer accentuates his or her written role with nonchalance. Their acting is natural, seemingly effortless. Much of the credit for this successful transference from script to screen must go to Sayles for his writing and his belief in actors: “Even though there is no ad-libbing in the picture, it still is not a living thing until actors come there and make something out of these characters. Each actor is a star of their own movie” (Schlesinger 7). As Nelson observes, the ﬁlm proﬁted from the script and past experience: “The improvisational tone achieved is the result of John’s approach as a director, and of the actors, including John, having worked together for years in summer stock” (Rosen and Hamilton 184). Return of the Secaucus Seven depends primarily on talk. As Sayles notes, the ﬁlm “is a story about complex relationships of human beings,” and “human beings do most of their communicating verbally” (Thinking in Pictures 6). Yet for an independent ﬁlmmaker, deciding to make a ﬁlm with such a large cast is unusual. Usually, ﬁrst features focus on one or two characters, because production costs limit the scope of the script. With an expanded number of characters, Sayles explores many themes in the ﬁlm: friendship, love, political commitment, and the malaise of middle-class reality. This reunion of old friends allows Sayles to deal with all these issues and more, and the event has a natural beginning and ending. But the ﬁlm does not seem overly schematic or structured. “I did,” Sayles says, “what I knew I could do best”—which is write (Auster and Quart 330). In the opening sequence, the camera captures Mike as he performs toilet maintenance, muted music can be heard, and then Katie’s voice: “We should put Irene and this guy in here.” Mike responds, “Yeah, we probably should. You know where the dustpan is?” Sayles cuts to Katie as she smoothes out a freshly made bed: “They just got together, they’ll be at it like rabbits. Behind the refrigerator.” Sayles cuts back to Mike as he whispers to himself, “No, it’s not,” while he gazes into the slow-running toilet. The he replies loudly, “Yeah, like when she and J.T. ﬁrst got it on, when we lived on Mass Ave.” A reestablishing shot of Katie, who is now testing the gauge and squeak of the box-spring mattress, returns to her assessment of the situation: “Or maybe out on the porch?” Talking while preparing the house for weekend guests is hardly ﬂashy; in fact, it is downright plain and representative of Sayles’s low-key approach. The dialogue, however, has the mercurial quality of everyday speech, weaving carnal speculation with the mundane trivia of household chores. By splicing conversational topics and establishing crosscurrents, Sayles cleverly renders what lies at the heart of Return of the Secaucus Seven: how individuals intertwine through shared history and work to form a community. These characters overlap, connect, miss each other, yet they cleave to the group. As Katie and Mike continue to plan the sleeping arrangements for the weekend, the

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dialogue reveals this past and the ﬂuctuation that marks the lives of these old friends. They are still separated by their positions in the house. Katie stands framed by a doorway, clutching a pile of linen; Mike squats, peering into a vanity cabinet full of cleaning materials: KATIE: How did we ever ﬁt everybody when Jeff and Maura came? MIKE: Well, for a while Irene and J.T. were sleeping together, which made it more convenient. KATIE: Yeah, but that was when Frances was with what’s-his-name. MIKE: The one nobody could stand. KATIE: Jeff liked him. MIKE: No, no. Different guy. The one nobody liked was before the one that only Jeff liked.

Skillfully, Sayles introduces the “seven” through Katie and Mike’s dialogue. By discussing various partners, miniature case histories, Sayles establishes the old care-free lives of the “seven.” This interconnection reﬂects Sayles’s desire to move away from a single focal ﬁgure whose story commands point of view toward a more realistic examination of group interaction, which involves multiple perspectives. Sayles’s written depiction of his female characters illustrates their political coming of age. The women are conﬁdent, educated, and independent, people who work and think for themselves. Feminism is ﬁrmly established as part of their lives. In Sayles’s words, “These are women who have gone through ‘the movement’ (feminism) and come out the other end, and, now it’s part of everything they do” (Auster and Quart 328–29). They talk about their problems, their work, sex, birth control, and the possibility of having children, and offer solutions with informed intelligence. For example, when Katie and Frances discuss the negative aspects of “the pill” early on in the ﬁlm, the scene is, in typical Sayles fashion, both funny and serious: KATIE: I saw you came prepared. FRANCES: Huh? KATIE: The old plastic clam in the overnight bag. FRANCES: Oh, yeah. I decided to get off the pill. KATIE: What was it doing to you?

Frances’s response is couched in medical school terminology, describing the possible side effects of oral birth control on women. As the list of adverse reactions grows—nausea, vomiting, bloating, bleeding, suppressed lactation, hirsutism, nervousness, fatigue, mental depression—Katie and Frances roll their eyes and smile. The list is enough to cause depression. But Katie ends things on an upbeat note when she reminds Frances that she brought her diaphragm for a purpose. Times, of course, have changed. Taken in the cultural context of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sayles’s female characters are the sort Molly Haskell lamented not seeing on the Hollywood screen in the 1970s when she noted that “nothing in movies came close to conveying the special quality of women’s relationships on a day-to-day working, or living, basis” (377). Sayles, unlike most of his contemporaries, does not ignore or subjugate women; rather, he endorses feminism, albeit naturally, free from shrill hectoring. His female characters are their own people: Katie is a teacher, Frances is completing medical school, Irene is a speechwriter, and Maura, who is breaking away from a suffocating marriage, directs inner-city children’s theater groups. They understand they can make choices with their lives. Still, Sayles’s dialogue would never have made it into a more commercial script.

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Therefore, his female characters countervail ﬁlm images of inferior women, a staple of most contemporary American ﬁlmmakers even today, which Molly Haskell describes as the “big lie perpetuated on Western Society.” Like Cassavetes before him and Ken Loach today, Sayles strives to create characters who not only look real, they sound real. There is nothing theatrical or melodramatic about the characters in Return of the Secaucus Seven. Capturing the texture, pitch, and sound of everyday speech, covering a wide spectrum of voices, is an uncanny gift Sayles possesses, and one he downplays, calling it a trick akin to “being able to bend your ﬁngers back” (Chute 56). Sayles does not suffer from the endless introspection that dominates much of contemporary literature, but instead keenly observes the world and reports on it both literally and ﬁguratively. Return of the Secaucus Seven offers believable people talking. The pace of the ﬁlm is structured around cuts between dialogue-rich scenes, and the characters move the narrative. At the core of the narrative, though, is a fractured marriage, one Jeff and Laura cannot repair. In both his ﬁction and his screenplays, Sayles’s writing reveals his wry, natural sense of humor. His characters are funny without sounding contrived. For instance, Katie lies wide-eyed in bed analyzing relationships as Mike, who is trying to sleep, groggily responds: KATIE: Everybody breaking up. It makes me nervous. MIKE: Who’s everybody? Just Maura and Jeff. KATIE: Maura and Jeff, and J.T. and Irene, and Irene and Dwight, and Frances and Phil. And my parents. MIKE: I don’t think your parents are good examples of anything. KATIE: How many people do we know who have been together for any length of time? MIKE: Lots. Look at the people we know at school—the Whites.... KATIE: The Whites are born-again—they don’t count. MIKE: Karen and Dick. KATIE: I mean people we like. MIKE: That must be it—everybody we like is hard to live with.

Katie compares her situation to people around; Mike wants sleep. Katie’s concern is valid. Working to maintain long-term relationships is an essential part of the screenplay, for it fuses the past, the present, and the future. Still, Sayles’s approach is nonchalant— this is late night bedroom talk, not melodrama. On one side, Katie sees the world as threatening, unstable, on the verge of chaos; on the other, Mike accepts the day as it comes, and he tries to get by with wit and, as he sees it, critical intelligence. Because the dialogue is humorous, it is entirely possible to miss the underlying point of the conversation, which is Katie’s unstated desire for more security in her relationship with Mike, a symptom of turning thirty. This, however, is Sayles’s method: only upon reﬂection do the ﬁlm’s seemingly miscellaneous, talk-ﬁlled events take on larger meaning. Sayles’s realistic style is vividly represented in these seemingly random moments, these slices of life. But Return of the Secaucus Seven is more than a pastiche of episodes; plain does not mean simple, and Sayles’s screenplay involves history, psychology, and sociology. Sayles’s subtle veracity makes his writing concrete and compelling; he presents, in the words of Erich Auerbach, an “unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation” (552). The relationship Sayles describes between Ron, the gas-pumping mechanic, Howie, the child-burdened family man, and Mike, the one member of this high school basketball playing trio who got away from their hometown, illustrates an economic, cultural, and class awareness that is fundamental to all of Sayles’s work. Their relationship illustrates

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Sayles’s primary theme: once friends with a common culture, they have moved in distinct directions, and now they are reunited for a brief weekend. Mike, however, knows why he left friends like Ron behind. Crisscrossing and examining class restrictions is a common trope for many realist writers and ﬁlmmakers. Moreover, a writer’s ideological afﬁliation is usually made plain when examining class systems of any type. Sayles’s progressive political bent is evident not only in his early screenplays, but it is clearer in Return of the Secaucus Seven. Early in the ﬁlm, members of the reunion party sit in the backyard, soaking up sun, preparing food for a cookout, and gossiping about people who are not there. Inside the house the phone rings. Katie elects to answer it. Mike says, “If it’s Ron, tell him I’m out shopping.” J.T. asks, “Why? What’s wrong with Ron?” Irene chimes in with a smile and a fast laugh: “I saw Ron in town. He tried to wipe my windshield with his body.” Mike responds: “That’s Ron. I like Ron. We just don’t have much in common anymore. High school was ten years ago. I teach high school now.” Mike sees himself as the de facto leader of the group, and his take on his former teammate and friend indicates the intellectual divide between the pair. Ron speaks in a clichéd, provincial argot, the often sexist, often funny speech of working people—free from sophistication and irony. Ron avoids expressing his emotional thoughts and feelings, at least at the beginning of the narrative; rather, he relies on brash witticisms, goofy mugging, and small physical feats to express himself. Mike, his counterpoint, likes to display his education and intelligence through language. At one point he performs a mock scene playing himself as high school teacher, using the Socratic Method on his audience of friends to explore and evaluate the Boston Police strike of 1919, an event steeped in class antagonisms. Yet Mike sees no link between his leftist ideology and Ron’s position in their small, rural New England hometown; in fact, he sees Ron as a garage-bound yahoo. Mike tells the reunion crowd that the last time Ron traveled to Boston was to attend a snowmobile convention, a sure sign, in his view, of cultural impoverishment. Mike believes he shares nothing with Ron. Conveniently, Mike ignores their shared past, an odd choice for someone who teaches history from a working-class perspective. Like many realists, Sayles’s work avoids obvious irony, even though his characters speak with ironic intent. What Sayles does is reveal character through speech, peeling back layers in order to make sense of who these people are, why they make the choices they make, and how they inﬂuence the shared culture of the small community to which they belong. Therefore, Ron and Mike’s relationship matches a pattern running through Sayles’s work—people whose lives, while connected, are also disparate. Sayles makes few critical judgments about his characters, another aspect of realistic storytelling. Instead he allows them to speak for themselves, and thus invites his audience to make their own judgments. Sayles has commented on numerous occasions that he saw high school as the last place where a democratic mixture of people interact. Once people pass from high school that democratic impulse is negated. Sayles explores this thesis through Mike and Ron. Each character possesses equal credibility. Ron is appealing, even with what some might consider intellectual shortcomings. As played by David Strathairn, Ron is funny and charming, a delightful garage-jockey completely aware of himself. He understands why he stayed in his hometown pumping gas and working on cars. Unlike many of the Secaucus Seven, Ron is comfortable with where he is as he turns thirty. Mike, on the other hand, while seemingly sure of himself, is perplexed by the goings on around him, for the weekend provides only a temporary, imperfect connection to his old friends. During the bar sequence, Ron explains his choices to Frances, who is about to embark

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on a medical career. She asks Ron why he does not move away, and his response highlights his self-awareness: “I ﬁx cars; that’s what I do. In town here, if somebody’s car is running a little rough, brakes are shot, thing won’t start, they say, “Take it to Ron.” Frances says he could be the family doctor. Ron likes the analogy: “But if I move, say, somewhere else, the City or something, I’d be just another guy in a grease monkey suit.” Ron understands his skills and the respect they bring. Beneath his jocular workingman’s exterior, Ron displays integrity and decency. Howie, a minor character, plays a different role. He has children. Mike wonders, with a slight whiff of envy, what life would be like if he, too, had a family. Katie, though, makes her attitude explicit when she sees Howie’s wife pass by with all the kids: “There but for the grace of Ovulin 21 go I.” None of the Secaucus Seven has children, a fairly typical choice for these baby boomers; only Irene ﬁnds the idea of children appealing. Howie functions as a conduit into a world none of the Seven know. When he deﬁnes his life with children, Sayles has his character use two small-town passions to create an understandable analogy: cars and Main Street. In the bar, Howie recalls a former high school classmate, “Ace” Campana, who while in eleventh grade bought an old Thunderbird automobile with a lightning bolt emblazoned on the side. “Everyday after school,” Howie says, “he was down at the Texaco Station pumping gas to pay for insurance, and every minute of every weekend he’s under the fuckin’ thing.” Sacriﬁces aside, Howie illustrates the pride “Ace” felt when “he bombed down Main Street.” Momentarily, “Ace” was “king.” “You thought of ‘Ace,’ Howie says, “you thought of that old T-Bird. Like one of those Greek things—Horse ones. “Centaurs, Mike interjects. “Centaurs,” Howie repeats. “Half man, half T-Bird. Anyway, that’s what it’s like having kids.” Mike claims having children cannot be as bad as Howie’s strained comparison suggests. In truth, Howie is proud of his family, even though he complains about them, no matter what sacriﬁces he has to make, no matter how many jobs he has to work to keep his family functioning. He feels good when he takes his wife and children out, showing them off, as “Ace” did with his car. Howie holds two jobs and still just gets by, which is not uncommon for someone living in such a rural place. Unlike some of the Secaucus Seven, though, Howie has something concrete— his family. Intellectually, Mike and Howie are further apart than he and Ron, but Mike questions what his life would be like with children. Howie decided to have kids when he was nineteen. Mike, it would seem, made the smart choice. Every decision, though, comes with unintended ramiﬁcations. Both Ron and Howie have come to terms with their lives. Mike, in contrast, deals with the vicissitudes of his existence. For a Hollywood calling card, Sayles’s narrative strategy represents a break from convention. Even ambitious independent ﬁlms avoid ensemble representations. Audiences seek one or two characters, not eight or nine. Sayles, however, challenges traditional narrative practice. While it is easy to classify Sayles’s visual style in Return of the Secaucus Seven as realistic or neo-realistic, the written narrative operates unconventionally when placed against most Hollywood constructions. As E. Deidre Pribram suggests when arguing for an expanded understanding to the “canon” of avant-garde cinema, Sayles should be credited with operating in a fresh narrative style: The concept of an alternative narrative practice might open up a space for as ﬁlmmaker such as John Sayles, who is determinedly independent in his method of working but who is difﬁcult to classify as such because his work is not formally experimental. Yet he has made a career-long commitment to exploring narratives of multiple, and shifting, perspectives [51].

Indeed, Return of the Secaucus Seven is about transitions. These old friends have their val-

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ues tested and challenged as they move away from the idealism they once shared in school and as part of a generation coming of age in the 1960s. Alex Woloch underscores the shift at the center of Return of the Secaucus Seven: The ﬁlm brings together the seven friends only to focus on the way that two of them [Maura and Jeff ] are leaving each other. This nesting of a breakup within a reunion thematically underscores the way that throughout the weekend all the characters confront the distance of the past and, more speciﬁcally, the distance of the political idealism and conﬁdence of the 1960s [Sayles Talk 65].

Like Mike, Jeff is smart and committed; they both worked for VISTA. These traits, however, are not keys to a successful shared existence. Jeff remains the most radically committed of the Seven; he is also the most confused character in the ﬁlm, and therefore representative of the loss of idealism and self-assurance that marked him during college. As written, Jeff is an upper-middle-class man captivated by social activism. Even though Jeff ’s parents can “cater the entire state of Delaware,” according to one of his friends, he strives to break free from his privileged background by seeking politically progressive work. As a counselor in a detox-rehabilitation center, Jeff can display his social values for all to see. Much can be gained from examining what Sayles’s characters do for a living. Sayles himself spent time working numerous jobs, including as a hospital orderly, where he dealt with detox-patients. Sayles recognizes detox centers as the frontline, high stress coupled with low reward, and “one of the best burnout places you can be in” (Auster and Quart 328). He suggests people who choose this line of work are asking for trouble. Maura says practically the same thing when she describes Jeff ’s crumbling psyche as a “sympathetic withdrawal.” Jeff carries baggage, a point signiﬁed by a small bag of heroin he carries for the entire ﬁlm. He is unsure whether the narcotic is a gift or an acknowledgment indicating one of his clients has kicked his habit. Metaphorically, the heroin represents the ruinous effects of Jeff ’s 1960s involvement. Jeff is drunk on what he considers to be high proﬁle activism; likewise, he cannot let go of the drug because its potential is too great. Jeff, according to Sayles, “is somebody who got hooked on activism, rather than on the spirit and ideas behind it, and he misses the limelight of activism” (Auster and Quart 328). The heroin itself suggests corrupted idealism. The Secaucus Seven are mild marijuana smokers, nothing more. Heroin represents a shift into harder, more potent, and lethal drugs—the Haight Asbury hippie movement in symbolic microcosm. For Jeff, though, the detox center provides no satisfaction; it is a burden like the package in his pocket. Jeff has lost his way and through work has anesthetized himself against the realities of the present. He neglects his own history, failing to utilize it for his own growth. Jeff used activism as a narcotic release, like his clients use heroin. Because he fails to reﬂect on his choices, he is unable to restore his marriage and he distances himself from his friends. He therefore represents fragmentation or splintering on many levels—leaving his social class, holding a job for little pay, sacriﬁcing his marriage for his political beliefs, and seeing himself as the last true believer in the group. During the course of the ﬁlm, Jeff reveals nothing about himself, nothing personal. The rest of the Seven discuss their work, their ambitions, and their feelings, which, from a dramatic perspective, adds depth to their personalities as they share various concerns and bits of history with their peers, often learning something in the process. Jeff confronts people and dominates conversations with clever rhetorical moves or shouts; he is, then, the supreme antagonist within the group, a fractious ﬁgure. In the bar sequence, for instance, he mystiﬁes a pretentious female “rock critic” with his analysis of progressive

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rock, telling her “even the back-beat is full of nuances,” which makes no sense but certainly sounds authentic. Later, he yells at Maura, silencing the entire bar with his rage. Sayles also presents a single, fast, telling insert of Jeff in the bar as he stands alone, looking confused, framed in black. Jeff manifests an internal psychological struggle—the promise of change brieﬂy presented in the 1960s has faded; he alone, unlike his peers, refuses to accept the cultural shift. At the ﬁlm’s conclusion, Mike ﬁnds a note Jeff left. “I’m sorry” is all it says. On the surface, Jeff apologizes for his disruptive behavior, but on another level he admits his ideas have been challenged and trumped by reality. Jeff cannot separate himself from the past, and he suffers because he cannot release himself. Still, Sayles treats the character sympathetically. After the group arrest, a portion of the ﬁlm recalling the birth of the Secaucus Seven, Jeff lists his arrest record for an attending ofﬁce—an arm-long collection that proves his left-wing bona ﬁdes. While the bored ofﬁce collects the information, Jeff gazes longingly at Maura. He realizes the list, a bulleted version of his history and turbulent commitment to the cause, was shared with her and that without her, his seemingly heroic achievements would lack meaning. As Sayles observers, “The problem was not that he was radical, it’s just that he was hooked on the wrong part of it [the movement] to be happy now” (Auster and Quart 328). This reaction shot supplies a touching visual moment and perfectly captures what these two people shared, and why they now have to move on alone. Yet the critical observation that has trailed Sayles for his career was established by his early critics—deft with a pen, perfunctory with a camera. Return of the Secaucus Seven, which was completed on a shoestring, works because of Sayles’s pragmatic approach, which Gerry Molyneaux makes clear: Prior to writing the script, Sayles made two key production decisions that distanced the movie farther from the studio system. First, the hero of the ﬁlm would be the entire ensemble of characters who comprise the Secaucus Seven. (Secaucus is the New Jersey town where the seven characters were arrested while traveling to an antiwar rally.) Second, he would shoot the movie in 16mm, which, in pre-digital video camera days, was the cheapest way to make a professional ﬁlm [21–22].

Roger Corman offered Sayles production money and equipment if he shot the ﬁlm in 35mm. Sayles rejected Corman’s generosity. Return of the Secaucus Seven would be a grassroots project, something Public Television might pick-up or something a producer might screen in the future. All visual choices were based on economics, starting with his $40,000 budget. Still, Sayles understood the importance of a ﬁlm’s visual design, even if he did not have the money for a more inventive mise-en-scène. He also understood how images can dictate the possible success of any ﬁlm. Money, of course, is the primary issue. The reason Sayles turned down Corman’s offer was to ensure he remained free from any external inﬂuences, even benevolent ones. Starting with Return of the Secaucus Seven, Sayles learned how to tailor his projects to match the resources at hand, a pragmatic choice for any sober, independent ﬁlmmaker, albeit one seldom followed. The ﬁlm’s credit sequence presents a masterful example of working on the cheap while contributing to a complex storyline. Images of the Seven ﬁll the screen, but they are mug shots, from the front and the side, pictures from the Secaucus bust seen in ﬂashback, as if they had just been pulled from a police ﬁle or as they might appear on wanted posters; the images are spiced with the heroic ﬂavor of dramatic, guitar-driven malaguena music, forcefully building to an energetic climax. The ﬁlm’s title suggests an outlaw fringe; the black-and-white head shots capture

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the band of outsiders. The ﬁlm’s title recalls famous protestors from the 1960s, and Mason Daring’s music echoes the theme from John Sturges’s The Magniﬁcent Seven (1960), a Sayles favorite. As Sayles told Gavin Smith, “It could be a movie about terrorists. And it could be a thriller” (68). This snappy, charged mixture of photography and score is undercut by the less than heroic shot of a toilet plunger about to drop into use, the ﬁrst real image witnessed. Juxtaposing the outlaw images of the credit sequence with an innocuous, sometimes necessary household chore is deliberate; it countervails the heroic outlaw imagery, establishes a humorous tone and announces the world of Sayles’s cinema—ordinary life often at its most mundane. Sayles reminds his audience that real life is not glossy or grandiose: “These kids had this inﬂated expectation of how they were going to change the world” (Smith 68). Yet the mugs shots and the household chore are interrelated. Each shot represents a portion of the lives of the people whose stories are about to unfold— their past and their present, more toilets than mono-mythic heroes. “They had their moment in the sun,” Sayles remarks, “and their publicity, it turns out, was a mug shot. Not the cover of Time magazine—a mug shot in Secaucus, New Jersey” (Smith 68). From its opening shots, Return of the Secaucus Seven signals an independent, unromantic sensibility at work. Plunging a toilet is hardly an enticing image with which to begin a ﬁlm, especially one meant to appeal to Hollywood executives, but that is what Sayles selects to open his ﬁrst feature ﬁlm: a plunger at the ready, about to be used on a rust stained toilet-bowl. Nothing could be more pedestrian—or, in a slyly ironic way, more comic. Any expectations that the Secaucus Seven were a magniﬁcent but overlooked bunch from the fringes of the countercultural movement are immediately dashed. With alacrity, Sayles has communicated via images that this ﬁlm deals with the diurnal, prosaic affairs of regular people and not a bunch whose collective title suggests great daring. That they are a collective, of course, is fundamental to Sayles’s project. Sayles defends his visual scheme by reminding critics what his work is about: “My main emphasis is making ﬁlms about people. I’m not interested in cinematic art” (Auster and Quart 330). This statement sounds like a neo-realist declaration, and it could not have arrived at a more signiﬁcant time. Sayles’s ﬁlm career launched as Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1980, which, as Cynthia Baron notes, “signaled neoconservative’ success in transforming civil-rights demands—for individuals’ equal protection under the law— into property owners’ right to private, unfettered economic enterprise” (Sayles Talk 17). Sayles’s neo-realistic style challenged the conservative Hollywood norm, albeit in a quiet un-stylized manner. The bathroom shot is plain, and nothing in it is pretty or distracting. Nor is it meant to be. Yet, as Sayles dismisses cinematic art, the reality he captures is his aesthetic choice, his style. The visual narrative elements Sayles captures are as ordinary as the people described by his screenplay. Sayles’s seven are ordinary people, and the visual scheme reinforces their everydayness. When dialogue blends with his visuals, however, Sayles’s fascination with people and their interrelationships becomes concrete. Because Sayles’s writing is so strong, the insistence that his visuals are crude has become constant. Circumstances, of course, explain what makes it to the screen. On a limited budget, a tight shooting schedule, poor equipment, and lacking experience, Sayles did not dilute Return of the Secaucus Seven’s mise-en-scène. While his visual composition is lowkey and unobtrusive, Sayles shows concern for his visual set-ups. In his ﬁrst ﬁlm, Sayles’s steady, formal approach to composition is refreshing, for it avoids seductive, ﬂashy visual techniques, the norm in most contemporary domestic ﬁlms, even among independents. Sayles understands the distinction between visual and verbal communication, but

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he is skeptical of pure cinema or visual pyrotechnics for the sake of style. In Thinking in Pictures, he defends Return of the Secaucus Seven as a ﬁlm that could not have been told in visual terms because of how the characters look on the screen: “to make these characters mute would be to reduce them to stereotypes” (6). While his defense stretches credulity (no critic demanded a silent feature), he does illustrate the type of movies he wants to make and his desire to reach a general, literate audience: This goes against most concepts of “pure cinema,” but pure cinema is at its weakest when trying to deal with human beings in narrative form. Stories become limited to fairly broad strokes, like cartoons and even the best of the silent comedies and dramas, or the visual metaphors become so complex in themselves that you have to do an incredible amount of mental translating into highly literary language to understand what is going on. The dead sheep on the radiator may indeed represent man’s descent from communal to popular culture, but you probably have to go back to something you read in a book to ﬁgure it out. Probably the most vital examples we have today are TV commercials and rock videos. Although some of these are real knockouts viscerally and can be lots of fun, the stories they tell are pretty simple, usually variations on “Buy this stuff, it’ll help you get your shit together,” or “Be a rock star, look at how many models dressed in underwear you’ll meet” [Thinking in Pictures 6 –7].

On the surface, Sayles’s examples might be more stimulating than the mise-en-scène of Return of the Secaucus Seven, but their messages are easily forgotten once the glare and the ﬂash fade. Sayles sees ﬁlm as a multifaceted process, a truly collaborative art form, and one that can reach a large audience. Writing, cinematography, sound, and editing combine to tell a complete cinematic story. When J.T., the struggling folk singer, is introduced, Sayles establishes a master shot with considerable awareness, combining multiple elements to describe this character. A long shot reveals J.T.’s physical appearance and his personality. He wears the uniform of the trade: vest, denim shirt, blue jeans, rucksack, and guitar case. Sayles’s shot, however, goes beyond stereotyping. J.T. stands in the foreground, and the open road, his place both metaphorically and literally, is at his back. When he spots an oncoming car, he raises his thumb with hopeful anticipation. Sayles mixes in an upbeat acoustic guitar track, commenting on J.T. and the image he projects. As the car approaches, the bouncy music matches the look on J.T.’s face; when the car passes, the music stops, and J.T.’s grin fades. This shot captures the hitchhikers’ lament (part of Sayles’s own experience during his hitchhiking days), something designed to draw an audience response. Certainly this was the case at the Orson Welles Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the venues Libra Films, the distributor, selected for the East Coast distribution. J.T.’s life has been a series of missed rides, inﬂation and deﬂation, since he dropped out of college. It is clear he missed more rides than he caught. Sayles’s naturalistic mise-en-scène communicates much about J.T. He is, for example, the only member of the Secaucus Seven without roots; he continues to answer the call of the open road, the dream of something better down the line—in his case, Los Angeles. Sayles illustrates his knowledge of visual metaphor here, even though the image is not complex, abstract to a fault; rather, it is approachable, easily consumed, and does not require a professorial translation to understand its meaning. Sayles’s mise-en-scène is straightforward, deliberately elevating the ordinary. J.T. appears as he is, alone, hoping for a ride, seeking open space. The sequence critics tend to dwell on is the basketball game, a scene created to show on-screen action and editing technique. Before the game begins, J.T. admits to Jeff, an unex-

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pected arrival, that he slept with Maura the night before. Jeff expresses his sexual jealousy on the court, while poor Chip proves inept when it comes to physical activity, adding comic relief to the tense situation that develops between J.T. and Jeff as the game progresses. The game goes on too long before any real payoff emerges. Sayles’s editing can be easily faulted— the pace of the sequence lacks rhythm. Incredibly, Sayles had no experience editing before Return of the Secaucus Seven: “I learned how to work the editing machine by reading the manual they gave me when I rented it” (Osborne 32). In order to subvert the testosterone running over the basketball court, Sayles cuts to shots of Frances, Irene, Maura, and Katie while they talk about their relationships, jobs, children, and J.T.’s plight. Juxtaposing men at aggressive play and the women discussing real issues points out the gender balance Sayles strives for in the ﬁlm. Cutting back and forth enhances the content of the action sequence, making it more than a bruising jealous encounter. One glaring problem with the basketball game is the stunts. The actors have a difﬁcult time presenting believable stunts. When Jeff pushes J.T. into the backboard support pole, J.T. never hits the pole, yet he suffers a blow to the head. Sayles’s actors were all summer stock performers, and the type of physical stunts ﬁlm demands were clearly new to them. Sayles elected to enhance the on-court action with a pulsing beat, like a heart increasing in cadence. At times, its purpose is annoyingly obvious. Everything Sayles needed to make the basketball better would have cost money, which he lacked. The swimming-hole sequence offers a different perspective from the ﬁrst-time ﬁlmmaker, and it demonstrates considerable visual ﬂair. In the hands of a commercial director, this portion of the story would have featured the women nude. Sayles turns the tables and features the males nude. Almost everything shot here is from a woman’s perspective. Katie delivers explicit, comic comments about the portions of male anatomy on display. Shots of the men diving into the cool blue-green water are more appealing, and the odd alpine yodel as background sound works better than the electronic beat used for the basketball game. Both the physical setting and the soundtrack combine to enhance this straightforward sequence. Here less is more. Sayles presents a more sophisticated mise-en-scène example at the conclusion of the ﬁlm. As the Seven break-up and depart for various destinations, Jeff removes himself to the rear of the house, where he is out of sight. Sayles intercuts fast shots of Jeff furiously chopping wood with long and medium shots of the others saying good-bye and leaving. The group is breaking up while Jeff relentlessly chops, splinting every piece of wood he can. The governing metaphor of fracturing, breaking apart is now complete. Finally, Jeff is framed in a full shot, his back to the camera and his head leaning toward the ground. He sits on the chopping block, the detritus of his labor spread before him. The fractured wood seems to represent the nature of his existence. Jeff is trapped, a victim of his own inability to deal with people and events on an everyday level without the charged feeling of a grand cause. The open sky dominates this ﬁnal shot, but Jeff is anchored by his pain, the loss of Maura, and his own unhappiness. Return of the Secaucus Seven became a success, but it took its time gaining the recognition it deserved. More important, it was a home-made, hand-made project, and the ﬁngerprints on the ﬁnal cut belong to Sayles and his collaborators. His methodological, formal approach to ﬁlmmaking, which started with a sound script, and the fresh look he brought to the screen placed Sayles in the spotlight, especially when the ﬁlm won the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Screenplay. Sayles acknowledges a generic link between Return of the Secaucus Seven and “movies they made during World War II about

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a bunch of guys going into the army” (Schlesinger 7). The buddy ﬁlm structure helped Sayles keep costs down, a priority for any ﬁlmmaker. Such ﬁlms tend to be dialogue bound and contain multiple perspectives. In addition, using an ensemble cast allowed for numerous rational edits, cutting from collections within the large cast, a technique Robert Altman used with success in Nashville (1975). For Sayles, though, the cuts were not about style but rather efﬁciency. Knowing his budget limit, Sayles elected to “cut a lot,” which keeps the audiences’’ eyes moving and compensates for the lack of intense action. Metaphorically, the ensemble cast offers more than one reason to keep the ﬁlm ﬂowing: it helps reveal Sayles’s democratic philosophy, the multiple voices suggesting a pluralistic vision instead of the single individual going alone, and, in this case, more sources of separation. Sayles’s script features a distinct understanding of the limitations he faced before he embarked on his ﬁrst ﬁlm project—a ﬁnite location in New England, where his theater friends were performing in summer stock; a reunion weekend populated by friends who were all facing thirty at the same time; and the talent to give each of them something to say, the language friends share. Formally, Return of the Secaucus Seven has what Sayles labels “a sort of molecular structure” (Schlesinger 5), a system in which characters have multiple connections to the other players—these people know each other on emotional, physical, and intellectual levels. As Timothy Johnson observes, “Each individual compares himself or herself with the others and thus comprehends the choices he or she has made and the consequences of those choices” (486). Sayles presents nine fully realized characters, people who talk with candor, wit, and intelligence in recognizable voices. His use of language is, in fact, so subtle that, because this is a ﬁlm, the nuances he achieves can be easily overlooked. Sayles’s story introduces a group of friends who exist in a non-heroic world where slightly disillusioned yet non-cynical adulthood has replaced the melancholy hangover left from the end of the 1960s. Before Sayles made Return of the Secaucus Seven, there was no such thing as the reunion ﬁlm, an approach that explored the interaction of a group of old friends, once young together, who reveal their histories as they revert to youthful behavior to make sense of their present. Now it’s a genre, almost a cottage industry. Sayles’s depiction of people who were involved in the sixties movement and who now have their own problems was immediately picked up by Hollywood. Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983) was the result, followed by Peter’s Friends (1992) and Indian Summer (1993). Television jumped in with Thirtysomething. Even with its low production values, Return of the Secaucus Seven compares more than favorably with its offspring because of the creative forces behind the ﬁlm but more importantly because of the mark it left on American Independent Cinema. The ﬁlm set a new standard for possibility. Sayles’s characters are not Hollywood “types.” Moreover, the Seven display what was worthwhile about the sixties movement—his characters remain personally and professionally idealistic—without indulging in sentimental nostalgia or caving into cynicism. Return of the Secaucus Seven remains a contemporary independent classic. It has received numerous citations in books, articles, and in interviews with ﬁlmmakers; the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry, in 1998, for preservation as a part of American ﬁlm history. Return marks the ﬁrst feature Sayles made with people who would become his regular contributors, and in some cases recognized talents in their own right: actors Gordon Clapp and David Strathairn; composer Mason Daring; and pro-

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ducer and actor Maggie Renzi. As David Rosen points out, “By all accounts, the making and marketing of Return of the Secaucus Seven was a successful venture. Not only did it launch John Sayles’s directorial career, but it helped create an innovative marketing approach for independent ﬁlms” (Rosen and Hamilton 195). Sayles’s pragmatic, unconventional approach to feature ﬁlmmaking captured an unintended audience response, as well as a look from Hollywood producers. Sayles likes to recall Secaucus Seven as the ﬁlm that catapulted him from “total obscurity to relative obscurity” (Smith 68). The ﬁlm illustrated how an independent ﬁlm made with integrity could achieve some ﬁnancial success— made for $60,000, the box ofﬁce grosses are more than $2 million; some Secaucus actors who took “points” are still reaping income. During the 1980s, a decade dominated by Reagan’s conservative agenda, which stressed a return to traditional values, Sayles would commit his own brand of Cassavetes-like subversion by making ﬁlms about lesbianism, unionism, political corruption, and racism. Sayles could not have picked a less opportune time to begin a ﬁlm career propelled by the progressive desire to make ﬁlms about serious, adult issues. Rather than follow the typical career arc, turning to Hollywood and big budgets while claiming independence, Sayles and Renzi marked their own path. He worked as a studio rewrite whiz; she learned how to produce and promote their politically astute ﬁlms. His next two features—Lianna (1983) and Baby, It’s You (1983), stand as bookends to a productive year—one made completely with independent ﬁnancing; the other, a Hollywood system ﬁlm, but one with some bite. Both ﬁlms continue the Sayles aesthetic, moving examples of how he involves his audience with solid, intriguing characters and their concerns while remaining even-tempered in tone and stylistically realistic.

Lianna Making Movies at Home Once again, the ﬁlm is called Lianna and not An Unmarried Gay Woman. She’s got things wrong with her, but she’s not made to represent all gay women. —John Sayles, Cineaste

Return of the Secaucus Seven and its unanticipated commercial success increased Sayles’s notoriety, but it did not guarantee complete creative control over new ﬁlm projects. In 1989, Sayles completed two signiﬁcant ﬁlms, Lianna, a low-budget indie production, and Baby, It’s You, a Paramount Pictures property. Typically, aspiring ﬁlmmakers begin with a low budget, independent effort and then, with luck, move on to a big-budget Hollywood studio assignment. Roger Corman offered Sayles, a screenwriter he trusted and appreciated, writing and directing work, which the young ﬁlmmaker declined. Instead, Sayles signed on to direct Baby, It’s You, but he took the advance money and used it to ﬁnance a feature of his own. Having written a number of screenplays, including Matewan and Eight Men Out, Sayles and Renzi made a pragmatic choice by pulling Lianna from his ﬁles. A small ﬁlm set in the present, Lianna made sound economic sense. After the success of Return of the Secaucus Seven, Sayles assumed investment in a ﬁlm the size of Lianna would not be difﬁcult. Sayles wrote Lianna, a feminist coming-to-consciousness story with a lesbian love affair at its center, four years before Return of the Secaucus Seven; however, after offering the script to various Hollywood studios, he realized a story about a woman who leaves her husband and children for another woman was not commercial material.

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Oddly, the ﬁlm’s subject matter made raising independent production money difﬁcult because, as Vito Russo observes in The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, even the “smallest step toward positive depiction of lesbians and gay men on the screen is cause for alarm” (295). To illustrate this claim, Russo quotes Sayles mimicking potential investors reacting when they learned that Lianna concerned lesbianism: “Oh, no! Not another one of those!” (296). Traditional investors would not sink their money into a ﬁlm dealing with homosexuality. Sayles’s imaginative and creative production team, Jeffrey Nelson and Maggie Renzi, took over. Although not acknowledged in Return of the Secaucus Seven credits, Renzi helped produce that ﬁlm, and now she was Sayles’s primary ﬁnancial advisor, a position she has never relinquished. Originally slated as an $800,000 project, Lianna, proposed as a 35mm color feature, was slashed to 16mm and half the cost. Sayles contributed about $30,000 of his own money to start the ﬁlm. Nelson and Renzi raised some money through a public offering, a unique, grassroots approach. About 30 nontraditional investors—people who had never backed a ﬁlm before—ﬁnanced the picture. Family and friends also contributed to the ﬁlm’s budget, as did two young want-to-be ﬁlmmakers who decided investing in Sayles would be better than attempting their own production. Lianna cost $340,000 to make, with deferments to cast and crew members. Filmed in 36 days in and around Hoboken, New Jersey, the professional looking ﬁlm Sayles had hoped to make quickly became a John Cassavetes look-alike. Despite the difﬁculties in ﬁnancing his second independent production, the period between the successful release of Return of the Secaucus Seven and the ﬁlming of Lianna, roughly 1981 to 1983, was fruitful for Sayles. Hollywood’s doors opened for him. He signed two studio contracts, one to write a science-ﬁction script, Night Skies, for Steven Spielberg at Columbia, the other to write and direct Blood of the Lamb, a contemporary take on The Man Who Would Be King, for the Ladd Company. Sayles used some of this Hollywood income to make Lianna. At this time, however, Sayles ran into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service for deductions he ﬁled on his 1978 tax return. Writing in American Film, David Osborne detailed Sayles’s tax problems: “Independent ﬁlmmakers cannot deduct their expenses on a ﬁlm until it is released, a fact [Sayles] was blissfully ignorant of when he did Secaucus and ﬁled his tax returns. As a result, he had to pay $12,500 in back taxes for 1978” (Interviews 35). Further, Sayles explained his view on the tax system: “Even if you’re lucky and every picture you make makes money ... the way the IRS is set up, it’s just totally against small pictures being made. Without some kind of ﬂow of big money behind you, any gain you make is eaten in taxes” (35). Sayles invested what he could in Lianna, but he made sure he had some “big money” as a fallback. Lianna tells features a naturalistic narrative design, which places it outside the boundaries of mainstream commercial cinema, a comfortable ﬁt for Sayles, but, as Emmanuel Levy notes, “Sayles is one of the few ﬁlmmakers, indie and Hollywood, who is concerned with the diverse and complex structure of American society” (110). Lianna is a “small” ﬁlm when compared to Sayles’s projects since 1983; yet it shows characters shaped and molded by an accumulation of powerful social forces, and therefore it is an essential part of the Sayles canon, even though it is one of his least seen ﬁlms. He wrote, directed, edited, and acted in the ﬁlm. Sayles’s cast is small, including friends and family members, but it is an ensemble arrangement, and all the principals deliver believable performances. Filmed mostly with a handheld camera, Lianna’s look is grainy and bumpy, accenting the ﬁlm’s realism and complementing Sayles’s screenplay. While production values are necessarily low, the ﬁlm’s

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wit and drama are topical and realistic. Speaking with Gavin Smith, Sayles explained the inspiration for the script: “It was not originally about gay women or that world.... It was the women’s movement and seeing an awful lot of marriages and relationships break up.... And I was trying to think, ‘Well, what’s a situation where the woman would be the one left on the outside looking in?’ ” (Sayles on Sayles 68–69). Lianna illuminates another example of America’s disparate subcultures, and further established Sayles’s reputation as a true ﬁlmmaking maverick. Lianna continues and expands the feminist impulse evidenced in Return of the Secaucus Seven. The ﬁlm tells the story of Lianna (Linda Grifﬁths), an academic’s wife with two young children, Spencer ( Jesse Solomon), age twelve, and Theda ( Jessica Wright MacDonald), age eight. Her husband, Dick ( Jon DeVries), is a professor seeking tenure at an unnamed Eastern liberal arts college, a cynic comfortable with the student-teacher relationship he maintains with his wife. As the ﬁlm opens, Lianna stands at a crossroads in her life without realizing where she is. Her marriage does not satisfy her because Dick offers little emotional support, communication, or encouragement. Her primary source of emotional ballast is her friend, Sandy ( Jo Henderson), whose husband coaches football at the college. Although Sandy’s marriage seems intact, she too suffers from intellectual boredom, but she is more mature than her younger friend is. For Sayles character is interaction—how people relate to each other and a larger group. Lianna is trapped, an therefore not mature enough to respond to what is going on in her life: “One of the reasons Lianna is a frustrating character is she is not a very well-formed person. She is not complete. She is a very weak character” (Sayles on Sayles 74). Both women strive to enhance their lives. Together they take a college night class, an attempt to counterbalance their dull domesticity. Lianna immediately feels attracted to the female professor who leads the night class, Ruth Brennan ( Jane Hallaren), and their affair sets her new life in motion. Although many ﬁlms show people who make changes in their lives, Lianna is among the few that show us the consequences of those changes. To his credit, Sayles avoids the simple, melodramatic story of a woman who comes out of the closet with a grand, liberated ﬂourish, showing instead what happens after Lianna comes to a deeper awareness of her own sexuality and social position, and her efforts to face responsibly the consequences of her choice. What makes Lianna so speciﬁc and compelling are the regular people at its core. Sayles, however, took a great deal of criticism precisely because of the ﬁlm’s ordinariness, and for the fact that he is a male director dealing with women’s issues and issues of lesbianism. In Jump Cut Lisa di Caprio wrote of the ﬁlm’s “absence of any real passion” (45). In Off Our Backs Angela Marney suggested that Lianna is about “how homosexuals aren’t really all that different ... about and not for lesbians” (18). The same review found Sayles’s bar and street sequences, which involve the exchange of evocative glances, to be “lecherous” and worried that such scenes might keep some lesbians in the closet. However, Lianna is not simply about the physical or cultural components of lesbianism; rather, it is the story of a life reshaped outside the constraints of socially acceptable sexual behavior and prescribed domestic roles. Furthermore, Sayles does not suggest that Lianna tells every lesbian’s story. The ﬁlm is a complex piece of domestic realism with a controversial subject as its dramatic impetus. In “A State of Being,” Vito Russo argues, “gay visibility has never been an issue in the movies. Gays have always been visible. It’s how they have been visible which has remained offensive for almost a century” (32). Indeed, many critics of Lianna address

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The story of a married woman’s coming out as a lesbian, Lianna (1983), a ﬁlm Sayles selfﬁnanced, generated controversy and praise. In the ﬁlm, Sayles’s protagonist (Linda Grifﬁths, in pool) is surrounded by an assortment of people, which allows him to present a variety of reactions to Lianna’s affair with Ruth ( Jane Hallaren, right), an older, sophisticated woman who teaches at the same college as Lianna’s husband (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives).

Sayles’s depiction of lesbian life. In fact, Sayles acknowledges that making a ﬁlm about a woman’s sexual choice is presumptuous: “You’re presuming you know something that other people should hear. There is more pressure, more public eye on it, because it’s a ﬁlm, and so few ﬁlms get made about anything that’s vaguely controversial” (Osborne 32). In 1983, Making Love, Personal Best, Tootsie, and Victor/Victoria, all commercial properties with homosexual content, characters, or themes, garnered mass recognition as breakthrough ﬁlms. Yet these Hollywood ﬁlms tell little about the reality of the homosexual experience in America. Lianna, on the other hand, does not acquiesce to commercial standards of acceptable taste. Like Return of the Secaucus Seven, Lianna concentrates on interpersonal dynamics. Time, money, and experience once again held Sayles back from visually invigorating his ﬁlm. Mainstream critics again complained about his plain visual style. In his negative review of Lianna in The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann suggested that the most “disturbing element in Sayles’s critical reception is the suspicion that he is being hailed as a ﬁlmmaker because he has shown gifts outside ﬁlm” (24)—the implication being, of course,

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that Sayles displays little visual talent; his strength is writing, not ﬁlmmaking. As Sayles acknowledges, however, he tried “to keep the technical end simple and competent” (Thinking in Pictures 4), budget limitations being his foremost concern. In fact, the ﬁlm’s grainy, soft look gives Lianna a credibility that more production money might have obscured. Sayles follows his characters through a series of episodes, using music, dialogue, and cutting to ﬁll in for camera movement. The opening sequence is emblematic of the ﬁlm’s approach to its subject matter. Lianna just begins. Without any introduction, we see and hear two women—Lianna and Sandy—discussing the condition of their lives. Lianna sits on a child’s swing, listening to and commiserating with Sandy, who is standing. These visual signs indicate a distinction between Lianna, who is still unsure of herself, and Sandy, who is fully aware of herself and her position in the world. Speaking of her husband, Sandy says, “I’ve gone places since I have married him. He’s, you know, still Bobby-Ballgame.” Immediately, Sayles establishes two important themes: one, the adolescent approach toward life that many men in this picture will take; and two, Lianna’s search for a mentor, indicated by her position on the child’s swing as she listens to Sandy’s opinion on husbands and marriage. By the end of the ﬁlm, these two women will return to the same setting, but Lianna will have grown and Sandy will have come to terms with her friend’s sexuality. Lianna inhabits the circumscribed world of a homemaker, which, as Molly Haskell points out, “corresponds to the state of women in general, confronted by a range of options so limited she might as well inhabit a cell” (159). Claustrophobia inhabits almost every shot in the ﬁlm, a symbolic mise-en-scène describing Lianna’s existence. Early on being a mother and a housewife deﬁnes Lianna as a person, one who adheres to prescribed codes of conduct that provide her husband room to navigate both his intellectual, academic pursuits, and his affairs with female students, a regular pursuit. Dick’s job at the college is the focus of his life. Everything else revolves around his position there, including dinner conversations, usually a sounding board for his troubles. In one witty scene, Dick explains to Lianna how he knows he will be denied tenure: he is slated to teach an entire course on William Dean Howells, the neglected American realist whose characters grappled with ethical problems, an ironic twist the boorish Dick ignores, in naturalistic ﬁctional settings—not unlike Sayles’s own characters. He then quickly leaves the table to watch the movie Battleground, a ﬁlm by William “Wild Bill” Wellman (a director who looked down on women) on television because, he says, “I have to teach it next week.” Left alone, Lianna cleans up while caring for Theda, an exile in her own home. Sayles’s talent for creating realistic dialogue and situations is evident here: an unvarnished, unromantic look at a crumbling marriage. Without verbal histrionics or ﬂashy formalistic techniques, Sayles’s presents a permanent condition. Lianna herself exists in an enclosure, a condition Sayles reinforces by framing her within a variety of constraints—a swing set, a car, a classroom, a kitchen, a bedroom, a checkout counter—that visually deﬁne the limits of her world. After Lianna begins to acknowledge her sexuality, however, Sayles does not wipe away aspects of closure in his mise-en-scène, because she is still a woman faced with real economic and social restrictions. The emotional pain of Lianna’s domestic situation resonates in her interaction with Dick. From the back of his classroom, Lianna watches as Dick demonstrates Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to debunk the “purity” of documentary ﬁlm for his class, which consists mainly of women. He concludes his lecture by saying, “Anything that doesn’t ﬁt with

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our idea of what the story should be ends up on the cutting-room ﬂoor.” In other words, truth is how you construct it. Dick dismisses the class, avoiding eye contact with Lianna as his students ﬁle out. No form of recognition crosses his face; he does not even greet her. In the shot, Sayles establishes the oppressive tension between these two characters by shooting Dick in a full-front medium shot, as he gazes into the foreground, his face registering anger and disgust. Lianna appears in proﬁle, a position carrying less emotional weight. Spatially, distance separates them, just as they appeared in the kitchen sequence. Here, however, Lianna waits for Dick to make eye contact, highlighting her emotional struggle, and her presence establishes a palpable tension within the shot. Dick would prefer to edit his wife out of his life, especially on campus, his free-range. Lianna caustically responds to his emotional detachment and anger by asking, “What’s the matter, afraid to let them see you playing husband?” Dick turns his back to her and walks away. Although Lianna knows her marriage is falling apart, she tries to keep her domestic life in order by fulﬁlling the role of dutiful housewife. When we ﬁrst encounter Lianna, her options have stalled, and she has mutely accepted her subordinate position and Dick’s philandering. She cares deeply for her children and takes care of Dick, providing him with comfort both in the kitchen and the bedroom, albeit without much enthusiasm, until she witnesses him having sex with one of his students at a faculty party. Lianna is at her most animated, however, in Professor Brennan’s child psychology class. There Lianna is attentive, asks questions, and even quotes her professor in conversations with both Sandy and Dick. In fact, Sandy actually declares that Lianna has “a crush” on Ruth. To be sure, Brennan’s class causes Lianna to re-evaluate her life. The academic settings of Lianna—classrooms, campus, athletic ﬁelds, faculty parties—symbolically support Lianna’s process of self-discovery. Sayles links Lianna’s messy journey toward personal truth to teaching throughout the ﬁrst half of the ﬁlm. Ruth, for instance, is a childless child psychologist whose area of expertise suggests her role in Lianna’s maturation. Lianna is her student, her would-be research assistant, and ﬁnally her lover. As Lianna tells Ruth, she started out as an English major and ended up a wife, for Dick attracted her and she dedicated herself to his success, the ﬁrst of the two student-teacher relationships involved Lianna. Deﬁning her own undeveloped personality, Lianna jokingly tells Ruth she was once and now is again a student listening to lectures. Each of her teacher lovers are emotionally dominant. This time, however, Lianna must apply her new knowledge to her own life. Lianna presents lesbianism as a simple love story, and in doing so illuminates the world we all share. Sayles portrays lesbian relationships as typical, part of life, without the titillation commercial ﬁlms demand. Christine Holmlund criticizes Robert Towne’s Personal Best for its lecherous voyeurism: “The constant close-ups of women’s crotches, asses, thighs, legs, and breasts led many critics in both the mainstream and the alternative press to comment on the ﬁlm as voyeuristic, even to label it soft core pornography” (155). Though the female gaze is an essential part of Sayles’s ﬁlm, it indicates a point-of-view shot, a part of normal sexuality, not a third person perspective. The sex scenes in Lianna, for example, indicate an evolution of her character, moving from an awkward beginning, to a one night stand with a female army ofﬁcer, something Lianna needs for herself, and then an emotional farewell involving one last night with Ruth. The primary love scene between Lianna and Ruth begins with Lianna trying to get her daughter off to the baby sitter’s house while deciding what to wear for a working din-

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ner at Ruth’s apartment, where they will discuss Ruth’s next research project and Lianna’s role as her assistant. When she meets Ruth, the atmosphere is at ﬁrst awkward, then becomes relaxed as the two women chat over dinner. The discussion is typical—the children, the past, married life. The conversation moves to the couch, and a series of close shots showing the women drinking wine and talking. At Ruth’s request, Lianna describes her ﬁrst crush—a female camp counselor. Soon they begin to kiss, and the scene shifts to the bedroom, the traditional location for cinematic sexual exploitation. Sayles, however, represents lesbian sexuality gracefully. The bedroom, bathed in blue light, which seems to come through an open window in the background, suggesting a release from the enclosed space that has described Lianna until this point in the ﬁlm, offers an ethereal image, an atmosphere missing from other shots in the ﬁlm, to underscore Lianna’s new awareness. Sayles ﬁlms their lovemaking with close-ups of various body parts and heightened physical reactions to demonstrate tenderness and charged sensuality. The blue ﬁlter accentuates the fragmented body parts, adding mysterious, soothing eroticism to the scene as the women become acquainted with each other’s body. Sayles uses a soundtrack of soft bedroom whispers in French, extracted from Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1961)—a ﬁlm about how memory affects the consciousness of lovers living in the present—to heighten the exotic nature of this sexual encounter and to indicate Lianna’s submerged sexuality. This scene stands in stark contrast to a heterosexual love scene that precedes it. Dick uses Lianna’s enthusiasm for her psychology course as an impetus for sex. “How about working some of that energy off with your old man?” he asks. Diffused high-key lighting washes out all erotic possibility. Dick’s tired come-on is routine, a cliché. Lianna, whose face registers annoyance with Dick’s desire, replies without any trace of interest, “Let me go put the thing in,” leaving for the bathroom and her diaphragm. In the end, we do not see them make love, nor do we have to because Sayles has effectively communicated the dull, pedestrian nature of their physical relationship. Were Sayles a less complex ﬁlmmaker and writer, he would structure his ﬁctional universe so fresh fulﬁllment would provide happiness and contentment for his characters, a traditional Hollywood trope. While Lianna’s homosexual awakening provides brief liberation, Sayles suggests escape from the ordinary should be viewed for what it is: a heightened moment in an otherwise bland, confusing world. While Sayles provides a broader context for Lianna’s lesbianism—that it is a state of being, not simply a chosen activity— and records the unrestrained pleasure she takes in her recovered sexuality, the rest of the ﬁlm explores the repercussion of her choice on not only herself but on those around her. As a coda to Lianna and Ruth’s lovemaking scene, Sayles shoots the women in bed talking. Lianna admits to Ruth that this experience was her ﬁrst sex with another woman. Ruth’s responds with a happy, yet slightly shocked “No!” Ruth embraces Lianna and asks how she is feeling. Lianna, obviously still enjoying the restorative pleasure of their encounter, casually asks the time. Ruth says, “3:30 a.m.” Lianna sits bolt upright, rapidly assessing all the things that might have gone wrong at home. Sayles uses a close-up to intensify her worries: Lianna is in the foreground, the enveloping erotic blue light no longer illuminating her. Her face registers fear. Ruth appears in proﬁle behind her, half hidden by vestigial blue shadows, a bit of memory rather than present reality. Domestic responsibility extinguishes the erotic blue of Ruth’s bed. Lianna, therefore, has only escaped from her domestic enclosure for a moment. When Lianna returns home, she ﬁnds Spencer, who has spent his free evening inves-

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tigating Hustler Magazine, still awake. He defends himself by telling her that he was watching late night movies on television, while reminding Lianna of the time. She responds, “These research projects get pretty complicated sometimes. Professor Brennan had a lot of details to explain to me. We got pretty wrapped up in it.” Here both Lianna and Spencer lie to cover up their sexual explorations. Lianna’s words, however, actually deﬁne the structure of the rest of the ﬁlm, because she has indeed entered into a research project, one that will deﬁne the rest of her life. Yet Lianna functions as a surrogate who makes it easier for Sayles’s audience to spend time with people and in places they ordinarily would not experience—she functions as the guide ﬁgure, a constant presence in most of Sayles’s ﬁlms. As writer Cindy Rizzo points out in the Gay Community News, Lianna represents a “perfect collage of coming out scenes” (7). Of course coming out differs from individual to individual, and nowhere in the ﬁlm does Sayles suggest that Lianna’s self-awareness is meant to be a catch-all depiction of lesbian life; it is, simply, Lianna’s story. Yet some critics found Lianna to be pallid, precisely because the ﬁlm lacks unrestrained lesbian love: “Several alternative reviewers faulted Sayles for his choice of situations like falling in love, loneliness, and boredom to which anyone, gay or straight, could relate” (Holmlund 162). But Sayles’s depiction of lesbianism comes close to meeting Richard Dyer’s call for the development of positively valued gay types: This is the representation of gay people which, on the one hand, functions against stereotypes, for it does not deny individual differences from the broad category to which the individual belongs. But it also does not function just like “rounded” [i.e., E.M. Forster’s literary deﬁnition] characterizations; it does not diminish our sense of a character’s belonging to and acting in solidarity with his or her social group [293].

Unlike the gay and lesbian characters found in commercial productions of the early 1980s, Lianna and Ruth interact within the context of a lesbian community. In Lianna, lesbianism neither is an aberration nor is it silenced. We witness Lianna’s ﬁrst steps into a new community. Again, Sayles’s approach met with criticism. Writing in Film Comment, Marcia Pally suggested that “Lianna is the most popular of the welcome-wagon ﬁlms— those that try to persuade audiences it’s okay to have lesbians on the block” (37). Such glib criticism misses Sayles’s central point: While Lianna does feature a lesbian affair at its center, it does not subvert the larger concerns of the ﬁlm. Lianna is not so much about homosexuality as it is about the life of someone who happens to be gay. According to Vito Russo, “The few times gay characters have worked on-screen have been when ﬁlmmakers have had the courage to make no big deal out of them” (“A State of Being” 33). Sayles makes “no big deal” out of Lianna’s homosexuality, except to show how her revived sexuality challenges her old, more “traditional” existence. Consequences lie at the heart of the ﬁlm, and because of Lianna’s coming out, the attendant struggles and responsibilities accompanying any major life decision. Sayles mixes humor and irony, and avoids melodramatic proclamations to show Lianna’s acceptance of her homosexuality. For example, we see her in the library looking for books on lesbianism. Lianna mutters to herself as her ﬁngers travel through the Ls in the card catalog. When she locates “Lesbian,” Lianna practically shouts the word, much to the embarrassment of an older woman who shares the frame with her. Jerry Carlson (Sayles himself ), ﬁlm professor and department wolf, arrives at Lianna’s new apartment, after she has left Dick, ostensibly to see how she is doing. His intention, of course, is obvious: He wants to get Lianna into bed. Jerry asks Lianna what she is reading. She replies, “The Well of

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Loneliness,” Radclyffe Hall’s well-known lesbian novel. Jerry, who does not recognize the title, immediately asks her to go to sleep with him. Lianna also recalls erotic moments from her past involving other women, checks out the bar scene, stares at women, and ﬁnally stands facing her own reﬂection and declares, “Lianna Massey eats pussy,” almost paraphrasing her son’s response to his mother’s sexual transformation. Lianna needs to do these things to convince herself of who she is, but she also needs to gain her own footing, to grow up quickly. Sayles’s ﬁlms introduce audiences to people and situations commercial ﬁlms tend to ignore. Sayles’s realist aesthetic, though, lacks mainstream appeal because of where he takes audiences. Witness Lianna’s introduction to the heretofore-invisible gay community, depicted in the My Way Tavern sequence. Lianna is, naturally, nervous, even shy about being in a gay bar. She tells Ruth that women are staring at her. Several women do look at her, but looking is part of any bar scene, straight or gay. Soon, Lianna relaxes. She dances with other women, drinks with Ruth, and changes from shy and private to happy and public. The bar protects Lianna from the external world, and she clearly feels less constrained in this place. Sayles heightens the pace of the sequence through rapid editing and a pulsating, upbeat disco tune whose feminist lyrics—“Women of the world, at last you know that you are free”—celebrate the exhilaration Lianna experiences as she enjoys herself in the company of other gay women. Medium two-shots and rapid long shots of women laughing, dancing, drinking, smoking, talking, and hugging punctuate Lianna’s frenzied dance. Inserted into the montage are an unidentiﬁed pair of eyes gazing at the bar scene— or, perhaps, Lianna herself. Sayles’s shots form a collage of bar activity. The mise-en-scène, camera work, editing, and soundtrack effectively indicate Lianna’s exploration of a new community, one in which she can act like herself. The next sequence shows Lianna walking down a street, obviously happy. The security and camaraderie she discovered inside the My Way Tavern now extends outdoors, away from the protective, closed space of the bar. Everywhere she looks, she sees women: women alone, women with other women, women with babies, women getting out of cars, women who acknowledge Lianna’s gaze with a smile or a nod; the whole world, it seems, teems with women. Sayles uses open forms here to celebrate Lianna’s freedom, her escape from a life that was not her own, and to register unlimited sexual possibilities from Lianna’s point of view. Sayles builds a sobering transition into this sequence, however, which illustrates his lack of sentimentality as a realistic ﬁlmmaker. In a medium shot, Sayles photographs an elated Lianna running up to Ruth, who is exiting her apartment. Lianna hugs Ruth from behind, telling her how happy she is to see her. Ruth reminds Lianna to take it easy because “It’s the real world out here.” Lianna’s joy fades. Breaking off her embrace, Lianna looks toward the ground. Sayles establishes a generational and a professional distinction between Ruth and Lianna. Lianna feels elated about her choice. Ruth, both older and established, is more circumspect, especially in public, a hint that Lianna’s new life will not be as liberating as she had imagined. The inviting subculture Sayles captured in his bar montage in closed form fades in public, where, ironically, an open form mise-en-scène suggests possibility. This brief sequence supports Alex Woloch’s notion of “critical realism,” which he derives from George Lukács, in Sayles’s work. Lianna presents a “direct representation of social reality” that challenges other cinematic forms that misrepresent reality. Sayles’s ﬁlm deals with the diurnal consequences of Lianna’s choice, not just the nocturnal bliss. Decidedly, there are endless social consequences involved in Lianna’s sexual coming-

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of-age. Sayles depicts reactions from Lianna’s old friends to her lesbianism. For the most part, their views on homosexuality are stereotypical. Sayles, however, leavens the drama by slipping some humor into the dramatic situation: “I don’t believe that people,” Sayles remarked to Daniel Popkin of Cineaste, “no matter how bad their straits are, are totally humorless” (39). Sandy, struggling to understand Lianna’s choice, cannot image how two women can have sex. After being told by Lianna that she and Ruth had had an affair, Sandy quizzically asks, “What did you do?” Jerry Carlson declares, “I’m from California. That sort of thing doesn’t faze me.” Lianna’s precocious ﬁfteen-year-old son says, “So my old lady’s a dyke. Big deal!” Sandy’s husband, Bob, recalls one of his own football recruits who was gay: “He was a black kid. I didn’t even know they had ’em that way.” And Dick belittles Lianna by asking, “How was it? Like a drugstore paperback?” Lianna’s choice creates problems she could not anticipate, and at ﬁrst her old friends offer her little support. In an interview with the Gay Community News, Sayles calls Lianna a lesbian ﬁlm that is also “about divorce, about growing up” (Rizzo 8). For a woman who previously accepted the vacuum of a common domestic existence ﬁnding a job or a place to live is a devastating experience especially when cut off from her home, her children, her friends, and her ﬁnancial source. Lianna is an outsider in many ways, not just sexually. Although Lianna is about sexual choice, the homosexuality issue does not obscure Sayles’s own observations, which stem from shared human concerns. By creating a multifaceted ﬁlm about a lesbian, Sayles undermines Hollywood’s willingness to create acceptable illusions of people. Vito Russo noted that these illusions are detrimental to common understanding and acceptance: Hollywood is yesterday, forever catching up with what is happening today. This will change only when it becomes ﬁnancially proﬁtable, and reality will never be proﬁtable until society overcomes its fear and hatred of difference and begins to see that we’re all in this together [Celluloid Closet 323].

Russo underscores the commercial truth with social realism—its proﬁt margin is low. As Sayles’s work indicates, his essential philosophy is egalitarian, pluralistic, and not divisive—he attempts to capture an honest picture of contemporary life. Visually Sayles communicates Lianna’s transitions in plain cinematic language. The enclosures that trap Lianna early on in the ﬁlm are all domestic, representing both her lack of freedom and her unappreciated social position as homemaker and mother. For the most part, these interior shots emphasize the discord between Lianna and Dick: the passionless request for sex, Dick packing for a ﬁlm festival, and Lianna confronting him over his latest inﬁdelity. Each of these shots occurs in their bedroom, where open space within the frame separates Lianna and Dick. Dick, however, always assumes a dominant position, looming over Lianna in either the background or the foreground. These scenes lead to their ﬁnal, violent argument, the precursor to Lianna’s domestic exile. Sayles used a hand-held camera to reinforce Lianna’s domestic problems with documentary-like precision, the camera recording the event in jerky, claustrophobic detail, and Dick and Lianna hit each other, break objects, and scream without remorse. This scene comes as close to the raw passion of Cassavetes as Sayles will get, and the two actors capture all the angry pain of a serious domestic dispute. When Lianna leaves Dick, she faces a series of fresh difﬁculties: locating an apartment, hooking up utilities, and ﬁnding a job. Without a husband, she has no money and no social status. Paradoxically, Lianna only becomes aware of her diminished position

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after she assumes responsibility for herself. Sayles’s visual setup at Lianna’s new apartment effectively illustrates this point. Framed by a long ﬂoor-to-ceiling shot, Lianna walks toward the rear of the white, empty apartment into a space ﬂooded with light. She turns, walks back toward the landlady, who stands ﬁxed at the front door, reminding Lianna that “there are no men allowed here.” Leaning against a colonnade, staring into a small, unadorned living room, Lianna mutters, “No, no men.” The shot represents Sayles’s take on Lianna’s condition: The apartment is at once open and fresh, and tubular and conﬁning. The sound of the landlady’s voice and Lianna’s shoes bounce off the walls producing a cave-like echo; this is a new place, yet it is empty, devoid of life. In contrast, the kinetic mise-en-scène of Dick and Lianna’s ﬁnal bedroom confrontation is overly dark, the walls almost enveloping the couple, bringing them closer than they want to be. While the latter scene illustrates a repressive, violent situation, the apartment sequence does not celebrate Lianna’s new existence. Instead, it depicts alienation and emptiness. Visually, Sayles communicates the truth Lianna faces that formidable obstacles stand in the way of her new life. Separation from her husband forces Lianna to participate in her own growth and development, which stands in contrast to the pupil-teacher relationship developed early in the ﬁlm. Therefore, Sayles adjusts the mise-en-scène as well. In a seemingly insigniﬁcant scene, Lianna, in a medium shot, stands at a pay phone on a dirty, noisy, busy innercity street corner. She shouts into the receiver, battling the din of a jackhammer and other street sounds, requesting a gas connection for her apartment. Told no record of her past usage exists, a bit of information that leaves Lianna bafﬂed, she begins to understand part of the social cost of being Mrs. Richard Massey for years—she has no credit record, no history. The chaotic world around her signiﬁes Lianna’s transformation, her new world. At times, Lianna resonates with romance, but the ﬁlm casts a skeptical eye on the restorative power of love and demonstrates the inability of the human heart to fulﬁll its desires. After Lianna tells Dick about her affair with Ruth and her willingness to leave their home, her world shifts, becoming noisy, confusing, and far from liberated. Seeking solace from Ruth, Lianna approaches her teacher near the college. Lianna tells Ruth she has revealed their physical relationship to Dick. Ruth glances about furtively, clearly troubled by Lianna’s action; moreover, she expresses concern about Lianna’s unrestrained speech in a public place. Ruth says, “Right now I want to put my arms around you. If we were straight friends, I would have. But that’s not the way the world works.” Lianna is perplexed, having believed a new love and a new identity would alleviate her emotional pain. “I thought when I found somebody, everything would be all right.” Passion is not a tonic. Lianna is free, but she is also lonely, afraid, and ﬁlled with guilt. As a gay woman, Lianna faces a double set of difﬁculties: alienation, and coping with her sexual identity. In Return of the Secaucus Seven, Sayles explored the limits of individual personal freedom. Most of the characters in the ﬁlm search for meaningful existence, an identity in synch with their social and political ideals. In Lianna, Sayles confronts the theme again, albeit in character study form ground by social responses to Lianna’s transformation. Lianna herself must decide where her personal freedom ends and her responsibilities begin. Cuddling with Ruth while watching television and eating Chinese take-out food in her empty apartment, Lianna says she always wanted a room of her own, a desire that is now an ironic reality. Echoing Virginia Woolf should be a bright moment, but in Lianna’s case, having a room of one’s own means exile. She has lost her family, her life, her identity—everything. Dick threatens to expose her and Ruth if Lianna tries to take the children. The

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children become pawns in a vicious struggle Lianna is bound to lose. Lianna, however, continues with her new life, knowing she cannot support two children as a grocery clerk, her new economic identity. In the end, Ruth returns to her female lover of many years, and Lianna seeks comfort from Sandy, who still does not understand her sexual choice. Using a hand-held camera to pan between these friends, Sayles underscores the emotional bond that still links Lianna and Sandy. Sexual choice cannot disrupt their history. Sayles cuts to a close-up of Lianna, reinforcing what the emotional difﬁculty that sexual choice and a ﬁrst love lost mean. He also suggests that Lianna is still a member of her old community, that she has friends who love and care for her, and that she has come to terms with the loss of her lover and grown because of it. Yet she is still a lesbian, still herself. Lianna does not focus on the physical aspects of sexuality or celebrate liberation to the exclusion of economic and social realities—Sayles is too smart, too honest for that sort of pandering. Lianna tells one woman’s story with perception, tenderness, and sober vision. It typiﬁes Sayles’s desire to examine how people accept social inﬂuence, how choices reveal psychology, and how stories ignored by Hollywood need telling. Lianna was too controversial to generate studio interest. Sayles made the ﬁlm his way: He used his own production crew and musical consultant, and he cast unknown actors to ﬂesh out his characters. The naturalness of the ﬁlm works well—he captures Lianna’s position in an insular academic environment, her friend’s bewilderment and support, and Lianna’s experience with a gay subculture. Sayles shows he is an actor’s director, a compassionate ﬁlmmaker, and a man with an open mind. It is unreasonable to expect aspiring ﬁlmmakers to sacriﬁce the excessive rewards offered by Hollywood for the risky path of independent productions. Filmmaking requires money, a resource studios have in abundance. Still, the industry is too often unwilling to take risks for business reasons. Sayles had already accepted an offer to direct for Paramount, an opportunity he sought since before the success of Return of the Secaucus Seven. With studio money come a studio ideas—scripting, casting, and ﬁnal cut control, for example. The production history of Baby, It’s You, Sayles’s third ﬁlm, explains why Sayles subsequently resolved to avoid Hollywood, except for lucrative screenwriting jobs—creative independence.

Baby, It’s You Inside Hollywood There are things in Baby, It’s You that I regret having cut, but I was trying to run some kind of middle ground between making a commercially viable movie and making the movie I had written ... there was a richness in the peripheral characters that just didn’t make it to the screen. About forty minutes of really good stuff.... With a different system or different movie going habits, we could have stuck with a two-hour-and-ten-minute movie.... So of all the movies I’ve made, that’s the one that is least about a group of people. —John Sayles, American Film

Both Return of the Secaucus Seven and Lianna utilize class distinctions to inform story content and develop characters. In Sayles’s ﬁrst ﬁlm, he and David Strathairn play “townies” who did not attend college and work at menial jobs, having stayed behind while their high school classmates left for school and careers. When Lianna gives up her conventional social position for a new life, she must earn an income, locate an apartment, and establish herself

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with utility companies. Baby, It’s You is about class division; thematically, class drives the narrative. Unlike too many contemporary writers, Sayles understands and does not ignore social stratiﬁcation: “America doesn’t like to think it has class, and it does” (Sayles on Sayles 79). Like Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, and Nelson Algren, Sayles is skeptical of power, privilege, and the myth of a classless America. Sheik and Jill, a high school Romeo and Juliet, signify the class schism—she has the opportunity to locate an authentic identity; he is powerless, doomed to a life he cannot control. After seeing Return of the Secaucus Seven, Amy Robinson, an actress and producer, brought a semiautobiographical coming-of-age story to Sayles’s attention. The project included a writing-directing deal from Twentieth Century–Fox. Robinson’s story, Baby, It’s You, intrigued Sayles; it examined a wrong-side-of-the-tracks high school love story with class and gender conﬂicts, while magnifying the often strained transition between high school and college. Set in the late sixties, a period in which Sayles formed his own ideals, Baby, It’s You connected to Sayles’s own experience: “Baby, It’s You and City of Hope are the movies I’ve made that are closest to my own experience of growing up” (Sayles on Sayles 79). Twentieth Century–Fox parted ways with Sayles over the structure of the story, however. Robinson and her co-producer Grifﬁn Dunne believed they had a solid commercial property, and Sayles agreed with them. Robinson and Dunne, whose production company, Triple Play, produced Ann Beattie’s Chilly Scenes of Winter for the screen, raised $2.9 million from independent ﬁlm investors, and interested Paramount Pictures in distribution of the ﬁnished picture. A rough cut of the ﬁlm convinced Paramount executives Jeff Katzenburg and Michael Eisner that changes were necessary, especially in the second half of the picture, the portion Sayles felt worked against the grain of most high school nostalgia pictures. According to Sayles, the ﬁlm “gets interesting and complex in the second half, which is why Paramount [did not] like it” (Osborne 36). In an interview with Eric Foner, De Witt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, Sayles recalled the incident: “I made Baby, It’s You for Paramount, which was a bad situation at the end of the day. I ﬁnally got the cut I wanted, but there was a lot of me getting kicked out of the editing room, put back in, and all that kind of thing” (Past Imperfect 14). Grudgingly, Paramount bought the distribution rights to the ﬁlm but then inexplicably withheld Baby, It’s You from commercial distribution. Sayles described the situation as a creative disagreement: Paramount “wanted it to be only about high school ... but it was a much more serious ﬁlm than they had planned on. They wanted to cut down on the college part ... I wanted a very balanced ﬁlm” (Valen 11). Paramount called the whole affair “a tempest in a teapot” (Osborne 36). Even though Sayles said at the time that the ﬁnal cut of the ﬁlm was deﬁnitely his, in Thinking in Pictures he writes: “Only on Baby, It’s You, the studio picture, did I not have complete cutting control and that turned into a major ﬁght” (39). Early in post-production, Sayles worked with editor Sonya Polonsky, who apprenticed with Thelma Schoomaker and Susan Morse and who would cut Matewan. Paramount brought Jerry Greenberg in as their editor, and Sayles took a month-long furlough. After test screening proved abysmal, Paramount invited Sayles back. He retained some of Greenberg’s work, and he worked to maintain the integrity of the ﬁlm’s second half. Baby, It’s You solidiﬁed Sayles’s desire to tell his own cinematic stories. In 1983, after the ﬁlm was completed, an interviewer from Newsweek magazine asked Sayles if he could ever return to low-budget ﬁlmmaking again. Sayles replied, “I’m willing to trade having a lot of money to have total creative control” (Ansen 78). Of course, practically

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every independent ﬁlmmaker has uttered some form of this clichéd declaration. Sayles, however, stuck by his words. After ﬁnishing Baby, It’s You, he tore up his Screen Writers Guild card (Laermer 105). Because of its increased budget, Baby, It’s You looks better than Lianna; yet neither ﬁlm features a Hollywood patina. Commercial movies are a marriage of commerce and art, a glamorous experience designed to remove the audience from its everyday existence. In this context, Sayles’s approach to ﬁlmmaking is unorthodox both technically and in terms of narrative content. Like the social realists of the 1950s, Sayles shows a strong interest in the complexities of character within his realistic milieu. Characters display all their contradictions, without the idealization that marked so many Hollywood characters in the 1980s: I’m more interested in people than literature. I didn’t major in English. I don’t want people to leave my movies thinking of another movie, but of people they know. Technically, I’m not good at anything. I’m primitive. But I have a good ear for dialogue and can empathize [Ansen 79].

Technically and visually, Baby, It’s You is superior to Lianna, but Sayles is still angry at the Hollywood system for reducing the human scope of his third ﬁlm. Class issues are subtly woven into Lianna; Baby, It’s You demands that we look at class as fundamental to the American experience. For Sayles, high school represents “the last bastion of true democracy in our society, where you have classes and eat lunch with the guy who’s going to be picking up your garbage later in life” (Osborne 36). Baby, It’s You presents the love between two young people just as they prepare to leave high school, and how youthful possibility fades after high school when class position separates people. The ﬁlm traces the emotional development of Jill Rosen (Rosanna Arquette), an ambitious upper-middle-class young woman who wants to be an actress and who sees high school as a place to get good grades, where being straight makes you popular. At college, however, just the opposite holds true, especially at Sarah Lawrence in the late 1960s. Albert Capadilupo, a.k.a. Sheik (Vincent Spano), the son of uneducated, working-class parents, who gets kicked out of high school just as Jill gets accepted to Sarah Lawrence lives in the 1950s—sharkskin suits and Frank Sinatra lyrics; he is buoyed by the exotic lure of Miami Beach. They are a mismatched couple, their union doomed to fail. Made immediately after the completion of Lianna, in 1983, Baby, It’s You begins inside high school’s polyglot culture, where two disparate people like Jill and Sheik could meet and fall in love, and it ends in the cultural confusion of the late 1960s on a tony college campus, where an other-side-of-the-tracks romance cannot survive. Structurally, the ﬁlm is divided into two distinct parts following the impossible arc of Jill and Sheik’s romance: senior year of high school in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1966, and the year following graduation. “One of the interesting things about Baby, It’s You,” says Sayles, “is that it’s a plot you’ve seen before with this sort of upper middle class girl having a relationship with this working class guy, but usually the class has been erased so that it’s just June Allyson and Cary Grant and although he may be her chauffeur, he’s just, as witty and educated and, in fact, smarter in some ways” (Popkin 39). In Baby, It’s You, Sheik is not smart; he has no idea what to do with his life, and his background makes his position even worse. Because public high school resembles a classic melting pot, their early relationship seems possible. Later, Sayles shows how class differences make a lasting relationship between Jill and Sheik impossible.

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The $2.9 million budget for Baby, It’s You, well below Hollywood standards, meant a huge jump for Sayles, allowing him unaccustomed indulgences. Sayles used some of the money to cast young, up-and-coming actors in the ﬁlm: Vincent Spano, Rosanna Arquette, Robert Downey, Jr., and Matthew Modine. Sayles’s ﬁrst priority was “with the acting and the believability of the characters” (American Cinematographer 86). In his previous ﬁlms Sayles cast friends or local stage actors, all competent people but not recognizable screen faces. Sayles haggled with Paramount over Spano and Arquette, however. In Baby, It’s You, Arquette plays a young high school senior who enjoys the stage. Beyond the high drama club performances, she gets to tries on a variety of personalities— she looks for new experiences and new identities, making her romance with Sheik plausible. Arquette shifts between the plain, unsure, real Jill Rosen to an imitation of a gum-snapping working-class high school dropout she meets in a bar with Sheik to a potfogged college freshman. Arquette makes Jill’s tentative search for assimilation believable, especially during the second half of the ﬁlm when her behavior becomes erratic, unsure. Spano’s Sheik does not seek acceptance; he imagines a position outside social restraint, like his hero, Frank Sinatra. Sheik, a nickname that recalls Rudolf Valentino for one generation or a condom for another, manufactures his own “style,” a romanticized version of freedom beyond the conﬁnements of home, school, authority, and Trenton, New Jersey, the ﬁlm’s ﬁrst-half setting. Paramount wanted John Travolta cast as Sheik, a role meant to recall his Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977). Sayles disagreed because of Travolta’s age and the baggage his star power would bring to the role. Spano’s sharp features make him stand out from the rest of the cast, an asset that adds to Sheik’s personality. Sheik constantly calls attention to himself, effectively lifting himself above his environment. His glossy suits alone make him an unlikely looking high school student—at least on the surface. In truth, Sheik is as vulnerable and as confused as Jill, and he lacks her economic advantages. When the ﬁlm opens Sayles’s captures Sheik in a long shot as the camera moves away from him, leaving him alone, abandoned in a high school hallway. He looks great, but as the camera moves away from Sheik, he loses power and position within the frame. Sheik has a look and a swagger, but he also generates emotion, especially by the end of the ﬁlm, when his frustration reveals how he has become aware of his hollow life lip-synching jukebox songs in a backwater bar in Miami Beach. When Sheik reaches his crisis point, Spano allows his pain to surface, creating a visible empathy for a loser who is, in the end, a likable character. Studio money allowed Sayles to increase his production budget, enhancing the sound, editing, and cinematography for the picture. According to Wayne Wadhams, Sayles’s sound technician for both Return of the Secaucus Seven and Lianna, working on a limited budget means leaving the boom microphone in the truck: “the wireless mic ... insures the cleanest, most crisp dialogue obtainable” (82). Wireless equipment inﬂates the production budget. Return of the Secaucus Seven and Lianna rely on an authentic documentary-like treatment of characters, so the boom mic satisﬁed Sayles’s realistic style. Baby, It’s You, with its studio budget, uses more locations and master shots, making boom recording almost impossible. Wireless sound pickup enhances the overall ﬁlm quality. Music is important to Sayles, and he spends time selecting the soundtrack for his ﬁlms. Working with a restricted budget does not allow access to a wide variety of music. Both Return of the Secaucus Seven and Lianna relied on music composed speciﬁcally for the ﬁlms. Sayles employed his friend Mason Daring as a composer and a consultant. Working with Daring’s own material and some inexpensive, unknown folk songs, they created

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admirable musical soundtracks. Music, however, plays a dominant role in Baby, It’s You. The music selected to accent the ﬁrst half of the ﬁlm is vintage: “Woolly Bully,” “Cherish,” “Shout,” “Chapel of Love,” “Stand by Me.” Golden oldies help deﬁne Jill’s high school persona in the opening section of the ﬁlm. Light and innocuous, these recordings add a dash of nostalgia to the ﬁlm without suffocating its narrative content. When lipsynching “Stop! In the Name of Love,” a Supremes hit, Jill is every high school teenager, living an imaginary life through the sounds from her phonograph, trying to escape the world of her parents. Later in the ﬁlm, however, while smoking pot in her college dorm room, the pessimistic lyrics and angry guitar work of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground performing “Venus in Furs” describe Jill’s transition, indicating not only a change in historical time and culture but also a change in her character. An angry, confused, alone, and frightened woman replaces the straight, popular high school girl from the ﬁrst half of the ﬁlm. Sheik’s goals are, according to him, deﬁned by the music of Frank Sinatra. Sheik imagines he belongs to the elegant world of big bands and lush orchestration, not girlgroup vocals and snarling electric guitars. A quixotic desire to be the new Sinatra consumes Sheik, and he ends up in Miami Beach, mouthing Sinatra songs for aged customers when not washing dishes. He is Jill in reverse. In Sheik, Sayles created a character out of time, an inauthentic piece of history neglecting the present. His Sinatra ﬁxation would seem plausible in the 1940s or 1950s, but it is wildly out of touch with the youth culture of the late 1960s. Sheik’s lack of awareness makes his semi-greaser characteristics believ-

Sheik (Vincent Spano) performs his lip-syncing act in Baby, It’s You (1983) (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives).

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able; it also preﬁgures his downward spiral: he has no options, he cannot escape his roots, and his fantasy gives way to hard reality, like a Jersey character from a Bruce Springsteen song. Sayles selected music to deﬁne his main characters, spending $300,000—10 percent of his budget—for music rights. For Baby, It’s You Sayles wanted music to punctuate his storytelling: “I’m not musical at all, but it’s very important to me. When I wrote the script, I inserted lines from songs so people could visualize the scenes better” (Lawson 118). Too many vintage pop songs would imbue the ﬁlm with sock-hop nostalgia, contradicting Sayles’s realist aesthetic. As anodyne to sentimental high school ﬁlms, Sayles selected tunes by Bruce Springsteen, rock ’n’ roll’s working-class Steinbeck. Sayles selected Springsteen because his work “was so perfect for New Jersey, cars, kids, that kind of thing” (Valen 12). In contrast to Sheik’s vision of himself, Sayles uses Springsteen songs to describe Sheik, the outsider who ﬁnally comes to angry awareness with Springsteen’s “Adam Raised a Cain” pounding in the background. Sheik imagines an elegant Rat-Pack world; what he gets is Bruce Springsteen’s unromanticized New Jersey. Sayles also uses music as a device to describe his characters’ internal conditions. Returning home from school one afternoon, Jill delivers perfunctory hellos to her parents, then climbs the stairs to her room. In her room, she drops Dusty Springﬁeld’s mawkish “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” onto her 45-rpm record player and lies on her bed to listen to the tale of love gone bad, obviously lamenting her own lack of companionship. Sayles cuts to a shot of Sheik staring at his own reﬂection in a window while combing his hair, teenage narcissism in full color. The soundtrack registers a faint acoustic guitar as Sheik practices his hard, tough look. With grand ﬂourish, Sheik bursts into the high school cafeteria, looking around with magisterial conﬁdence. Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” the story of a young man trying to achieve status through his clothes, walk, and appearance, ﬁlls the soundtrack. This driving rock song describes Sheik’s condition without sentimentality; it offers none of the hope that his favorite song, Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” does. Instead, it is an anthem for impossible teenage bravado, complete with references to a hard upbringing, mean streets, and Brando’s swagger. Trapped in an urban hell, the protagonist in the song poses in order to survive. Like Springsteen’s protagonist, Sheik stands out like a peacock in a ﬂock of pigeons. His appearance awes the other students—his snazzy, adult suit, his apparent self-conﬁdence, and his brazen strut all link him to Springsteen’s narrator. The lyrics, though, underscore the seductive deception in youthful, romantic images. As Sheik discovers, it’s hard to achieve fullﬁlment when you’re just a boy dressed in a man’s suit. Baby, It’s You uses music to complement its narrative structure and the passage of time. At the center of the ﬁlm—Jill’s high school prom night; Sheik’s reckless attempt to rob a tuxedo store—relies on music almost exclusively to propel the narrative. Springsteen’s insistent “She’s the One,” a rock ’n’ roll song emphasizing love’s frustration, anchors the sequence. Here Springsteen’s music blunts high school innocence. Sayles’s images underscore the fact that as some high school students prepare for college, class alignments prevail, and other students stay behind. In Thinking in Pictures Sayles points out how music works with ﬁlm’s edited images: Music added to the images can reinforce, underline, counterpoint or deny what is happening on the screen. Music can be treated as “source” or as “score,” as something that comes from the world on the screen or as something the movie-makers are adding from

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the outside, an editorial comment. When it works movie music is like a natural voice, like the only sound the picture up there could possibly make [109].

In the prom sequence, Jill engages a formal rite of passage, a traditional for many high school students. Sheik, expelled from high school and forbidden to attend the prom for challenging academic authority, acts with mock-heroic desperation. The soundtrack punches up this pivotal transition within the story: Jill and Sheik are breaking apart. Sayles begins the sequence with an interior shot of a profoundly bad prom band covering “Cherish,” which perfectly marks the corny scene. Cutting to an exterior shot, Jill enters the prom with her date. Standing on the street, Sheik announces himself, walks toward Jill, and kisses her on the cheek, saying, “You won’t be seeing me.” Jill yells Sheik’s name as the camera pulls away, visually establishing the growing distance between them. Sayles cuts to an interior shot of the prom where Jill dances lifelessly. In the background, Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” Sheik’s song, ﬁlls the room of shufﬂing couples. Jill’s date then asks for a return of all the money he has invested in the evening because, as he says, “You obviously don’t want to be here with me.” Jill would rather be with Sheik, even though she knows he cannot ﬁt into her future—he signiﬁes prohibited teenage love, something, Sayles suggests, that is only possible in public high school, where classes and races mix daily. Sayles cuts to a parallel interior shot, looking out on a dark street far removed from the prom scene. A muted sound of an electric guitar replaces Sinatra’s benign crooning. The ersatz elegance of prom dress gives way to the streets. Sayles’s musical selection changes the sequence’s tone. Music of an older, stodgy generation accents the prom ritual. The young people seem out of time scufﬁng around to their parents’ music. Conceptually, high school graduation marks the transition into their parents’ world. The electric guitar riffs announce change, a rupture in the Romeo and Juliet story. We are cast into the world of rock ’n’ roll culture, the outlaw’s domain, a street-level perspective that has nothing to do with propriety and everything to do with emotion, displaces the prom and its lifeless music. As the volume of the music increases, Sheik riﬂes a cash register, drama and anticipation replace the prom commonplace. The music builds, symbolically matching Sheik’s heart rate—tension builds. Suddenly, overhead lights come on, exposing the thieves. Sheik’s partner, Rat, spins around and assumes a shooting stance; his gun pointing directly at the storeowner. Sheik and Rat ﬂee the crime scene in a large roadster, complete with brilliant red ﬂames covering the quarter panels, as Springsteen’s “She’s the One” pours from the soundtrack. Darkness dominates this sequence’s mise-en-scène, reinforcing Sheik’s desperation. He cannot escape these city streets, nor, as Springsteen’s song about love’s tenacious grip indicates, can he escape his desire for Jill. The police pursue Sheik and Rat. As the percussion and guitar reach a crescendo, Sayles cuts to Jill laconically driving her prom crowd around the city. The desultory look on her face registers boredom, contradicting the driving soundtrack, an indication she is not from Springsteen’s hardscrabble New Jersey. A police cruiser passes, visually connecting her to Sheik, while Springsteen sings his protagonist’s lament: “I wish she’d just leave me alone.” Sayles photographs Sheik running into the night, money swirling around him as the musical vocals describe the pain of Sheik’s love and desire for Jill. Jill’s ennui and Sheik’s desperation act announce the end of their innocent lives. A clearly deﬁned distinction separates them. An extended fadeout concludes the ﬁrst half of the ﬁlm: Trenton fades to black and Sarah Lawrence College emerges in the light.

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Increased production values draw technical specialists to a ﬁlm that an independent ﬁlmmaker like Sayles could not afford in his ﬁrst two pictures. Sayles wrote, directed, edited, and acted in Return of the Secaucus Seven and Lianna. Although they display promise, these features lack signiﬁcant production values. In contrast, the addition of experienced professional personnel, such as Sonya Polonsky, makes Baby, It’s You a technically superior product. The ﬁnal cut is crisp, energetic, elements missing from his earlier ﬁlms. Sayles managed to use action sequences, which require enhanced editing and cinematography, to energize the ﬂow of the ﬁlm without sacriﬁcing verisimilitude or narrative content. Editing determines the visual syntax of any ﬁlm, but movies begin and end with pictures. For the ﬁrst time, Sayles employed a ﬁrst-rate cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, known for his work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Martin Scorsese, and his focuspuller, Hans Buching: “It was a pretty long shoot, maybe forty-three days altogether, and we actually got to go down to Miami to shoot the stuff of Sheik in Miami.... We had 35mm, which was pretty exciting for me. We had Teamsters. We were almost legitimate” (Sayles on Sayles 81). Filmed in 16mm and then blown up to 35mm, Return of the Secaucus Seven and Lianna look different than Baby, It’s You. From a narrative standpoint, the early ﬁlms reduce the need for elaborate visual techniques and rely on dialogue. Baby, It’s

The visual arrangement of Sheik’s efﬁciency apartment in Baby, It’s You (1983) describes the two loves of his life: Jill Rosen (Rosanna Arquette) and Frank Sinatra. The mise-en-scène also indicates an emptiness that suggests Sheik’s actual condition: he will never become the “Chairman of the Board.” True love will not bridge the class difference that separates Jill and Sheik (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives).

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You, on the other hand, is about high school kids, people, Sayles says, who are “not that articulate.” Therefore, the ﬁlm’s narrative required more visual expression. A number of shots stand out in Baby, It’s You, but they are not gratuitous and do not interfere with the ﬁlm narrative. Sheik and Jill say good-bye to each other at the Miami airport, and the shot captures their reﬂected images, suggesting the actual distance between them and their emotional state—a lyrical shot that matches perfectly with the theme of division that anchors the movie. Sheik, now a reﬂected image, fades from Jill’s life. Back on campus, she will use him and their history as fodder for acting exercises. Here Ballhaus’s inﬂuence is evident. Aware he would work with a ﬁrst-rate cinematographer, Sayles wrote an atypical setup into his screenplay. After leaving Miami, Jill’s separation required visual closure. A one-shot scene featuring Jill and a group of her friends smoking dope in her dorm uses a 360° pan, which Sayles planned: “There’s something very circular to me about your thinking when you’re smoking dope. I wanted the feeling of emotional time having passed” (Sayles on Sayles 97). The ﬁlm’s numerous night shots would not have registered with such clarity on 16 mm ﬁlm, but the fast 35 mm opens up the night scenes. By comparison, the night shot in Lianna in which she cuts through a neighbor’s backyard only to ﬁnd her husband with his pants off in a sandbox with one of his students is almost impossible to read. The night shots in Baby, It’s You are bright and well deﬁned, reﬂecting the eye of a skilled cinematographer. Ballhaus’s photography of Sheik, in particular, announces what increased production capital can do for a ﬁlm. Sheik provides an outsider’s point of view for Baby, It’s You, especially during the ﬁrst half of the picture. The cafeteria shot at the start of the picture, ﬁlmed with a hand-held camera to underscore Sheik’s swaggering conﬁdence, shows how Sheik imagines himself above his youthful peers. Far more telling, however, are the shots of Sheik alone—standing in a high school hallway, on a street, or on a playground. Sayles and Ballhaus shoot him from a distance or from a high angle, articulating his class position and pending insigniﬁcance. While the visual style of Baby, It’s You remains unobtrusive, cleaving to a realistic look, Sayles uses a variety of setups in this picture that prove his understanding of a complex mise-en-scène, visual images in service of his written story. A brief example from the scene in which Jill returns home from high school and goes directly to her room to listen to records, ignoring all her homework because she is nervous about not being cast as Kitty Duval in The Time of Your Life, serves as an indication of Sayles’s visual vocabulary. The setup is typical: Jill enters the house framed in a medium shot; the camera follows her through the dining room and up the stairs. Sayles’s ﬁlm language here is straightforward. A series of one-shots link the running conversation between Jill and her parents—visually pedestrian. It is evident that Jill is in no mood for pre-dinner chitchat. Jill begins to climb the stairs while her mother follows her. From the bottom of the stairs, Jill’s mother inquires about the audition, adding, “The object isn’t to have the biggest part.” Jill quietly responds, “Yes, it is.” Sayles’s shot selection here takes on fresh complexity, preﬁguring Jill’s confusion, an aspect of her personality she has concealed. Photographed from the bottom of the stairway, leaning over the second-ﬂoor banister as Jill replies to her mother, her face framed by lines running at different angles through the frame—the stairs, the banister, the spindles—that suggest both confusion and conﬁnement, common teenage feelings. In contrast, when Jill sees her name next to Kitty Duval on the casting sheet, she looks directly into the camera, and nothing encloses her; she exists in open space, full of possibility. Camera movement also plays a larger role in Baby, It’s You. Sheik tries to impress Jill with his driving skill by taking her on a roller-

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coaster–like ride down one-way streets, over bridges, under bridges, and around parking lots at breakneck speed. Designed with the élan of an action director, the sequence comes off as a personal challenge for Sayles. Like the basketball sequence in Return of the Secaucus Seven, here he takes a chance with spatical choreography and camera setups. His musical selection, “Surﬁn’ Bird,” with its silly, repetitive lyrics and speedy instrumentation, points up the absurdity of Sheik’s bravura performance. Toward the conclusion of the ﬁlm, when Sheik realizes Jill has abandoned him, and he realizes she is all he has left in what has become a life of imitation, Ballhaus photographs the Statue of Liberty from inside Sheik’s stolen car as it speeds through New Jersey. The industrial wasteland dominates the shot, signifying Sheik’s future. From inside the car, the dirty windshield blurs the statue. The shot captures Sheik’s reality, the glamour of Miami Beach having given way to the working-class world of post-industrial New Jersey, a zone he must pass through to reach the suburban grandeur of Bronxville, New York, and Sarah Lawrence College. These highly stylized shots seemed usual for Sayles, although their message is clear and direct, demonstrating how studio backing can affect the look of a ﬁlm and, more importantly, what Sayles can do visually when he has a serious budget. For Sayles cinematography “is a good model for the entire process of making a movie. It’s a constant barrage of choices to make, each choice creating and deﬁning the next” (Thinking in Pictures 71). In fact, one of the best sequences in Baby, It’s You contains little dialogue, in contrast to the common description of Sayles’s work. Sheik and Jill escape their high school conﬁnement and drive to the Jersey Shore, speciﬁcally Asbury Park. Closed for the winter and crumbling, the deserted boardwalk town offers a perfect setting for their impossible, ineffable love. Shots of the ocean surf seen from the deserted boardwalk are crisp and clean, the blue sky and white sea spray captured in painterly precision, establishing a lyrical, romantic quality to their day away from high school regimentation. Shots of red concession booths standing empty combine with the natural blue of the sky and the white breaking wave to blend nostalgia and pathos within sequence. Like the beach town, Sheik and Jill share bright moments always tempered by the knowledge that their relationship cannot last. Ballhaus uses a deep-focus shot of Jill and Sheik walking hand-in-hand along the empty boardwalk toward a large green building where fading letters announce Asbury Park’s amusements, rides guaranteed to provide thrills. Traditionally, amusement parks represent fantasy, escape, and equality—every class can share the universal need to escape into an unfettered world of the imagination. For an afternoon, class boundaries vanish. Jill and Sheik are, as their placement in the frame indicates, momentarily free. Sayles, however, is no romantic. Asbury Park represents a fading relic of the past, a physical space equal to Sheik’s position in Jill’s future. Later in the ﬁlm Ballhaus uses the same color scheme after Jill and Sheik have had sex for the ﬁrst time in Sheik’s cheap efﬁciency motel room, decorated with pictures of Jill and Sinatra, his obsessions. The red and blue colors of a neon sign ﬂicker on and off against Jill’s pale, tear-stained face. The gaudy red, white, and blue reality of Sheik’s low-rent Miami Beach negates the natural beauty of the seashore and the possibility offered by the amusement park. Sayles brings Baby, It’s You to a bittersweet conclusion, part romance, part reality. Sheik confronts Jill at Sarah Lawrence. The details of her new life send him into an apoplectic frenzy: birth control pills, posters of rock stars, books, clothes. Jill, however, is having just as much trouble as Sheik dealing with her post–high school life. Jill has restructured her personality, at least on the outside, to ﬁt into the culture she ﬁnds at college,

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a culture that has broadened her perception, but challenged her self-image. Sheik, who recognizes this change, understands that Jill and he will never “be married and have babies.” Jill wants something more, something undeﬁned but deﬁnitely not a hometown marriage. After a verbal battle where they make their positions known, Jill asks Sheik to take her to the college dance because none of her preppie college boyfriends will. The dance is, of course, the prom Jill and Sheik never had, but it is bittersweet. Sheik asks the longhaired guitarist in the rock ’n’ roll band to play “Strangers in the Night.” The with-it college students in the ballroom, decked out in red, white, and blue bunting, are nonplussed, and they begin to snicker. Quickly, however, all the students dance to an updated version of the antique music their parents enjoy, which recalls the fated high school prom scene. Sheik does not ﬁt into Jill’s future; he has nothing left to pin his hopes on. We watch their last dance. As the camera pulls away to an overhead position, the rock version of “Strangers” fades and Sinatra’s version emerges in its place. Sayles avoids the clichéd endings many teenage coming-of-age pictures trafﬁc in, choosing instead to close on a mature, adult note: She’s going to give him a little of his dignity back but not in a condescending way. And he is giving a little of herself back, in that she has the nerve to go out there in front of her friends ... as you go out, it’s just these two people who aren’t going to stay together, who are going to become strangers in some way [Sayles on Sayles 94 –95].

After Baby, It’s You, and all the battles he had with the studio over the second half of the ﬁlm, Sayles decided to direct projects he wanted to make and not be beholden to the whims and wishes of Hollywood studios. In January 1983 Sayles’s work received the added boost of a ﬁve-year tax-free “genius award” from the MacArthur Foundation, which guaranteed him $32,000 per year. His decision to focus on his own ﬁction writing and ﬁlmmaking freed him from, in his words from an American Film interview, having to “deal with those fuckers” (“Dialogue on Film” 15)—Hollywood producers. Sayles reconnected to his own production staff, technicians, actors, and material. Fully understanding the ﬁnancial sacriﬁce of his decision, Sayles simply felt more comfortable working with his own people, on his own terms. Still, his skills as a ﬁlmmaker continued to grow, and making Baby, It’s You, even with studio hassles, added to his knowledge. After three ﬁlms, Sayles had established a reputation as an idealistic, politically left-of-center ﬁlmmaker out of step with America’s burgeoning conservatism, a ﬁlmmaker unnoticed not by the critics but too often by the public, a ﬁlmmaker whose matter-of-fact approach and literary sensibility obscured his cinematic talents. Typically, he did not let the whims of the marketplace blockade his creative objectives. His next project would be more ambitious for an independent. Shifting to a different genre, the historical period piece, Sayles set out to ﬁlm Matewan, a story of a West Virginia coal miner’s strike and massacre, inspired by the research for his novel Union Dues. However, even with a relatively low starting budget of $4 million, the ﬁlm’s funding never came completely together, and he had to turn to another project. Once again, he invested his own money in a story that interested him about a runaway extraterrestrial slave. The Brother from Another Planet, scheduled for location shooting in New York’s Harlem with a small crew, little time, and a miniscule budget, offered a perspective on American society as seen through the eyes of a black intergalactic traveler.

3

An Escaped Slave, the Boss, and Union History The Brother from Another Planet Out in the Streets Brother from Another Planet, to me, is not so much a political statement, but about America and our life in this country and about waste. The waste of human potential caused by racism and classism. So, by the end of the movie, you’ve realized what an extraordinary guy this visitor from another planet is, but because of what he is he’s going to have to hide a lot of those talents. —John Sayles, Creative Screenwriting

The Brother from Another Planet (1984) is a social fable disguised as a science ﬁction comedy. Ignoring generic science ﬁction trappings—elaborate space vehicles, powerful technologies, monstrous aliens—The Brother revolves around a mute extraterrestrial ( Joe Morton) who is also a fugitive black slave. The Brother crash-lands into New York Bay, swims ashore on Ellis Island, and makes his way to Harlem, one of America’s largest and most famous black communities. Except for his odd feet and special powers, which few Earthlings see, the Brother acts like any other new immigrant to the city—lost. The ﬁlm follows this charmingly enigmatic ﬁgure as he wanders from one telling vignette to the next with the resilience of a Buster Keaton hero, learning as he goes, staying upright in a topsy-turvy new world. The Brother also parodies some well-known Hollywood ﬁlms, including E.T., Splash, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, among others, all on a skinﬂint budget. The Brother happened because ﬁnancing for Sayles’s ambitious period piece Matewan fell apart. Sayles produced The Brother from Another Planet out of pocket, at an initial cost of $350,000. He wrote the script, based on a dream, in six days, and shot on location in Harlem for 24 days with a completely integrated cast and crew—black and white, experienced and novice, women and men. In addition to his production team and musical composer, Sayles employed a group of lesser-known black actors from the local Frank Silvera Drama Workshop. He also hired a young black cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson, whose major credit was Spike Lee’s celebrated New York University thesis ﬁlm, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, as his director of photography: “We knew we had to make it 76

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with the people of Harlem, and we knew we wanted to work with a largely black crew. The only hard part so far has been that everyone wants to work on it, and you wish you could employ them all” (Aufderheide Film Comment 4). Sayles calls The Brother from Another Planet a “low budget–high concept movie” (Laermer 105). In order to help keep the budget low, Sayles surrendered his Directors Guild card, so he would not have to hire assistant directors and a production manager at guild rates, part of the Directors Guild of America’s by-laws (Molyneaux 127). The Brother from Another Planet grossed $4 million. Keeping the production in New York actually saved Sayles money: “You don’t have to pay for board, you don’t have to pay for dinner; they [the crew] just have to show up on the set, and then they go home” (“Dialogue on Film” 14). New York City also adds a gritty background to the visual design of the ﬁlm. Place is essential in The Brother. New York, of course, presented unique problems. “I actually had a pretty good time shooting,” says Sayles, “but the producers, Maggie Renzi and Peggy Rajski, said never again will they shoot a movie that fast in an urban area” (“Dialogue on Film” 15). Even with a relatively small crew, location shooting in New York posed logistical and security issues that could not be anticipated. On the ﬁrst day of shooting, the crew locked their keys inside their van. A Good Samaritan helped them break in, but his bag, which contained his methadone, vanished. Renzi spent the entire day ﬁling a police report so that the man would not be without his treatment (Aufderheide Film Comment 4). Writing in Film Comment, Pat Aufderheide described The Brother as “science ﬁction with a twist: this time, the alien comes home” (4). The Brother from Another Planet is an adult variation on E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, without the special effects. The Brother from Another Planet pokes fun at Steven Spielberg’s alien for good reason: Sayles worked on E.T., but, according to Gerald Mast, “he was dropped from the project because he disagreed with the direction it should take” (Short History 533). At the ﬁlm’s end, the Brother points skyward with his thumb, a gesture he uses throughout the ﬁlm to indicate his home, mimicking Spielberg’s creature. Another escaped slave from outer space, who helped rescue the Brother from two cosmic slave hunters, reverses the thumb gesture, indicating that a new start is possible on Earth: Harlem is home. According to Terry L. Andrews, [Sayles] often presents the view of Harlem that one would expect in a socially concerned ﬁlm: an image of a largely chaotic ghetto suffering from the social ills of poverty, crime, and drug addiction. Less predictably, however, Sayles also shows Harlem’s surprising neighborliness, protectiveness, and pride [119].

Even Sayles’s crew found the shoot to be an education. “I think coming up here [to Harlem] opened the eyes of some whites” (Aufderheide Film Comment 4), remarked script supervisor Marco Williams, whose autobiographical documentary From Harlem to Harvard chronicles his own cultural journey. The plot of The Brother from Another Planet is straightforward. After escaping from captivity, Sayles’s Brother arrives on Earth. At ﬁrst bafﬂed and terriﬁed by his new surroundings, the Brother slowly acclimates to the heterogeneous city. In New York, no one is completely out of place, even a man wearing torn and tattered space garments, who looks like a jester after a mugging. He wanders into Odell’s Bar, a Harlem neighborhood spot, where the regulars—Smokey (Leonard Jackson), Fly (Daryl Edwards), and Walter (Bill Cobbs)—adopt the Brother after he repairs a broken Space Invaders game by simply applying his palm to the exhausted machine. At the bar, he meets Sam (Tom Wright), a social worker, who locates a place for the Brother to stay and lands him a job as a machine

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technician in a Time Square video arcade, operated by Mr. Lowe (Michael Albert Mantel). His new world, however, remains nettlesome—everyone, it seems, wants to talk with the Brother because he cannot talk back, so people spill their own problems on him. Complicating matters, two robotic white alien slave hunters ( John Sayles and David Strathairn), posing as immigration agents, pursue the Brother. Eventually a community, both seen and unseen, builds around the escaped alien slave, and he ﬁnds a new home, albeit one ripe with faded history, devastating social ills, and tense race relations. Sayles’s episodic structure unrolls like an integrated collection of short stories. Seeds for The Brother from Another Planet came from a number of dreams Sayles experienced, two dealing with space visitors and the other a Bigfoot wandering wounded in Seattle (Sayles on Sayles 108). Aliens connected all three dreams. In the movies men from space equals money for special effects. On a strict budget, commercial special effects were impossible. Yet Sayles needed to establish the fact that his protagonist traveled an intergalactic underground railroad to this new world. Sayles opted for cheap parodic hi-jinks, drawing on both his background in B ﬁlms and his creativity. Most ﬁlms featuring space travelers ostentatiously display the complex, futuristic design of space vehicles, detailed mechanical contraptions that arrive with a large price

Since he started making ﬁlms, John Sayles has faced one constant piece of criticism: he is not a visual ﬁlmmaker. In fact, Sayles has worked with some of the best cinematographers in the business, including Ernest Dickerson, shown here setting up a shot for Brother from Another Planet (1984) while Sayles watches. As Sayles’s ﬁlmmaking skills have grown, so have his control of the camera and design of single shots and sequences. Sayles deliberately avoids leaving a unique visual stamp on his work, preferring instead to use all the language systems that make a movie work to enhance his narratives. Sayles still cleaves to a sensible principle: “Talk is cheap; action is expensive” (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives).

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tag. Nora Chavooshian, in her ﬁrst job as full production designer, created the ﬁlm’s sets to ﬁt the budget. In order to compensate for a lack of money, Sayles used an interior shot with no visible light source except the ship’s control panel to open the ﬁlm. Whirling, blinking red dots and bars, strange blue digital readouts, metallic sounds suggesting increasing speed, an image of Earth centered on a coordinate viewﬁnder, stand in as a Wal-Mart version of the interior of a spacecraft—this is not Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. A creature inside a spacesuit attempts to steady the craft, now shaking wildly out of control, an effect produced by rocking a hand-held camera from side to side. Background music builds to enhance the tension. Sayles cuts to a master shot of outer space—a dot of light ﬂies across the screen from right to left accompanied by a cartoonish whizzing sound and an abrupt, small splash. The Brother has landed. Sayles’s set design is patently cheap and fake; it is a comic put-on, a burlesque of Hollywood’s culture of special effects, done with bargain basement ﬂair. The Brother’s opening sequence recalls the worst 1950s science ﬁction ﬁlms, while celebrating its own low production values and needling Hollywood’s infatuation with toy technology: “The exterior of the spaceship cost twelve dollars, and outer space was created with black construction paper and a pin” (FrameWork 237). The Brother begins in a bargain basement spacecraft, but all Sayles wants to accomplish is depositing his mute alien into a far too realistic topsy-turvy world. As always, Sayles’s chief concern is with people and their struggles, not machinery or stylistic illusions. The Brother welds B-ﬁlmmaking with adult drama, Sayles’s preferred ﬁlm genre. Sayles acknowledges the connection: “It’s a very serious movie, it’s about racism and the economic system in America, and at the same time it’s a very low-budget science ﬁction movie” (Valen 12). Staging a high-tech opening in such a low-tech fashion appeals to Sayles’s wry sense humor. While The Brother addresses serious subjects—race, drugs, crime, poverty, work—it does so with Chaplinesque empathy, without rancor or pedantic ﬁnger wagging. Sayles’s opening is humorous and serious, the tone Sayles manages for the entire ﬁlm, the ﬁrst of Sayles’s pictures to feature a black actor and deal explicitly with black-white relations. Sayles’s mise-en-scène reveals a deﬁnite subtext, especially his use of color-coding. A red, white, and blue motif accents the frame during the opening shots—reﬂected off the Brother’s face shield, obscuring his face, making him unreadable, invisible. This color scheme appears throughout the ﬁlm In Odell’s bar, where the Brother feels at home, lights signifying America accent the walls and ceiling. Other markers adding visual narrative weight include a natty blue suit, red tie, and white beret the Brother wears in the ﬁnal quarter of the ﬁlm, and the large, street-level windows of the social services ofﬁce, which are an ostentatious red and blue and spackled with white handbills. With this tricolor motif, Sayles indicates the ﬁlm is about some of the social problems Americans and America face, not a fantastic world of make-believe. Race relations dominate the ﬁlm but not in a stridently confrontational manner. Sayles is too meticulous to indulge in simplistic dichotomies. White men, however, signify unthinking authority as cops, slave hunters, and drug suppliers. Therefore, in The Brother, white skin, for the most part, means trouble, defying traditional Hollywood stereotypes. As the slave hunters enter the Brother’s neighborhood bar, the frame ﬁlls with a harsh, grainy white light, washing out all other color. When the Brother punishes Mr. Vance, the businessman-drug dealer, he smothers him in a bag of white heroin as the screen fades to white, a horror echoing Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym vanishing into white-

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ness. White people cause the Brother anxiety early on in the ﬁlm. Still, Sayles portrays the harmful separation of blacks and whites with clarity and biting humor. The mute Brother’s facial expressions and body language indicate that whites have caused him much pain and suffering. Even in the ﬁlm’s antic scenes, such as the encounter between the Brother and a rapid-talking white card manipulator, the Brother’s discomfort is telling. The card trickster (Fisher Stevens), who is not a white authority ﬁgure, performs a bafﬂing card trick for the Brother, who is riding the subway home from work. Trapped underground, the Brother expresses fear and confusion. He moves away from the trickster, looking at him with disbelief, not understanding a thing he is doing. As the cardman cuts the deck for the terriﬁed Brother, his speech accelerates because he is under a time restraint. When he ﬁnishes the card trick, the train pulls into Fifty-Ninth Street and Columbus Circle. The trickster performs one more perplexing sleight-of-hand, one full of big-city truth: “Want to see me make all the white people disappear?” The train doors open and passengers exit and board. The brakeman’s voice announces, “Uptown A express; 125th Street next.” The camera pans the subway car interior—all the passengers are now black or Hispanic. The card trickster ﬂashes a knowing smile as he leaves. The Brother, who learns by observation, is often ﬂummoxed by his interaction with white people. When the ﬁlm opens, he is afraid of every white person he sees because of his past, but he grows to understand that white people are not all oppressors or out to get him. Not every white person is a slave master. The Brother does arrive on Earth with one important piece of knowledge: White men in uniform are trouble. The slave hunters, dressed in black uniforms, represent an alien police force. Sayles plays to this conceit when he places the Brother in a scene with a rookie cop who has drawn Harlem as his ﬁrst assignment. The Brother is visibly nervous because of the authority ﬁgure, one whose language is tinged with racist assumptions. The cop asks, “How long you been up here? You a native or what?” His partner, he relates, told him that in Harlem he was going to be cooked and eaten alive. The cop articulates small-minded attitudes toward blacks, yet he hears no irony in his words, nor does he mean any harm; this is, after all, normal speech for him. Sayles’s hero just gets up and walks away. He does not seem to understand the racist substance of the cop’s speech, but too much talk, especially from an authority ﬁgure, bothers him. The Brother recognizes the cop as a symbol of oppression. Still, the scene presents a typical Saylesian paradox: The cultural assumptions of both the rookie and the Brother make their characters unconventional, adding an increased level of understanding to the narrative. The Brother is an unfamiliar character, a wary innocent dropped into a chaotic, confusing place; yet he carries with him some of the traits that describe the traditional American hero, a ﬁgure that enjoyed a muscular rebirth during the Reagan years. Sayles does not miss the opportunity to mock the cultural return of the macho hero. On one hand, the Brother is a quintessential man alone, facing long odds, a typical American movie protagonist; on the other, he is gentle, mute, lost, a healer, not a destroyer, and a runaway slave free from violent impulses. Worse, the Brother is black, homeless, and an illegal alien, wandering the streets of America’s largest city, hardly representative of Reagan’s conservative agenda. The Brother from Another Planet is a covertly political ﬁlm, full of witty liberal conceits, for it displays a social concern decidedly lacking in most mainstream ﬁlms of the 1980s. More important, collective heroic action saves the Brother—a direct challenge to the image of a singular hero. Cliff Thompson sees the Brother as a signiﬁcant, idealized creation, which puts him at odds with most of the Earth-bound ﬁgures in the ﬁlm:

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Morally, the silent Brother can do no wrong, and, given his situation, he is extraordinarily good-natured. Even the frustration he experiences while trying to ﬁt in on Earth is not interpreted by Sayles as being simply the outgrowth of a cultural gap or as a sign of limited patience on the Brother’s part [32].

Thompson compares the Brother to other African American characters Sayles has created, what he calls “ﬂesh and blood people,” not the caricatures normally found in Hollywood ﬁlms. Thompson does acknowledge that the Brother is not a fully realized human being, because, as he points out, he “really does come from another planet.” Still, the Brother is signiﬁcant because he is Sayles’s ﬁrst major black character and because as he learns to navigate Harlem, where he is accepted, he presents an uncommon decency. Using a protagonist who cannot speak, Sayles relies on visual communication. Part of his rationale, of course, was economic: If the lead character “doesn’t talk you can shoot a lot of MOS [silent] footage, which is much cheaper, especially on New York streets, with the horns and the breaks and the airplanes overhead” (“Dialogue on Film” 15). Ernest Dickerson’s visual sensibility aided The Brother’s success. Like Michael Ballhaus, Dickerson has a ﬁne eye for realistic detail and an expressionistic pictorial skill, which combine to enhance Sayles’s narrative. Unlike Ballhaus, Dickerson did not arrive with much ﬁlmmaking experience. Sayles saw Lee’s thesis ﬁlm and hired Dickerson. As Dickerson tells it, things were not as straightforward as Sayles thought. “I lied when he asked me if I had ever shot 35-millimeter before,” said Dickerson. “I ﬁgured a camera is a camera. All the camera is is a recording device. You have got to see it ﬁrst in your mind’s eye, manipulate the image to make it look like it does in your head” (Ravo 19). Dickerson’s brassy conﬁdence paid off: The Brother’s poetic, realistic look matches its setting and adds visual signiﬁcance to Sayles’s narrative. Cities produce sensory overload, especially New York. Simultaneously liberating and intimidating—the romance of bright lights juxtaposed with the hard reality of neglect— New York’s cityscape is in constant opposition; it offers a ready-made metaphor for the Brother’s struggle. Dickerson’s imaginative eye captures the conﬂicting aspects of modern urban life. Many of the buildings and subway trains he shoots feature grafﬁti, which, according to some, suggests the decline of quality of life in the city. However, for the anonymous citizens of lost neighborhoods, grafﬁti is an announcement of self, a signature statement, the only means of recognition, no matter how limited, at their disposal. As the Brother passes grafﬁti-stained walls, he looks as if he is reading an impossibly obscure text, trying to break a code. Eventually he sees a recognizable sign, a speciﬁc grafﬁti mark, a sign indicating he is not alone on this planet; he leaves a reply written with his own blood. There are others like him here, but they, like grafﬁti artists, are invisible, anonymous. At the end of the ﬁlm, his ability to read grafﬁti ensures his salvation. Dickerson’s grafﬁti shots are not elaborate stylizations, the sort of stuff one might ﬁnd framed in a chic art gallery. They are plain tags, stuff urbanites see daily and ignore, which obscures the identity of hundreds of people. According to Carol Cooper, “Dickerson’s camera is acutely sensitive to the beauty beneath Harlem’s creeping squalor” (18). Dickerson’s shot selection keeps The Brother at street level. His imagery holds the ﬁlm in necessary balance: The shot selection intensiﬁes the obvious—the way things are—which, in turn, underlines the honest condition of the ﬁlm’s setting. Like Sayles, Dickerson uses his artistic talents to add dimension to our contemporary scene, to show us that the obscure names on the wall have meaning.

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Dickerson’s shots display his photographic talent throughout the ﬁlm. As the Brother climbs ashore on Ellis Island, black dominates the mise-en-scène. Only the Statue of Liberty stands out in the background, but it is out of focus. We see fear on the Brother’s face in the foreground, the dark waters of New York Bay in the middle ground, and the blurred statue in the background. This shot indicates the struggle ahead. Trapped by blackness with the symbolic possibility of liberty off in the dim indistinct distance, the silent Brother ﬁnds himself in a position he will maintain throughout the entire ﬁlm. The mise-en-scène suggests fear, mystery, and alienation. Next the Brother is photographed from a low angle, with the turret of the dilapidated, vaguely Byzantine, brick and limestone Immigration Hall at Ellis Island looming above him like a Gothic cathedral. History engulfs the Brother. As the Brother wanders through the immigration building, he is photographed against a harsh, black backdrop. The cavernous hallways and vaulted ceilings of the immigration center are conﬁning, tomblike. Sayles, however, lights the Brother from above, letting the audience know that this illegal alien has a unique sensitivity. When the Brother touches the pillars inside the echoing chambers of the deserted immigration hall, his body “feels” a cacophony of foreign words, cries, and shrieks. He understands the pain of other travelers to this new world. His empathy is overwhelming. A rapid montage of interior shots, all dimly lit, show the Brother’s internal fear and confusion as his face contorts into a scream before he passes out from psychic overload. Metaphorically, Sayles suggests that awareness of the past, of what America once stood for, is lost, and along with it the ability to empathize with the plight of new immigrants. Like many immigrants before him, the Brother will not be welcomed with open arms. The abandoned immigration hall, which resonates with echoes, visually represents our neglected past. Sayles concludes the opening sequence with the Brother catching a ride to Manhattan on a garbage barge—waste being a prime metaphor in the ﬁlm. Structurally, The Brother from Another Planet uses a dialectical approach to make its points. Sayles juxtaposes night and day in his script, and Dickerson balances his night imagery with an Edward Hopper–like appreciation for the city. After his horriﬁc introduction to New York, the Brother takes in the early morning splendor of the city. Dickerson’s deep focus pan of lower Manhattan captures quiet beauty. The tight, conﬁning shots that dominated the beginning of the ﬁlm give way to an airy openness as the Brother sets off with an inquiring gaze into Manhattan, landing at 125th Street, Harlem’s main artery. Here Dickerson’s camera captures the start of a new day—shops open, work starts, people begin ﬁlling the street. The camera registers the Brother’s point of view for us, capturing the small, overlooked activities that build a day. Sayles also juxtaposes noisy, empty speech with concrete imagery. For instance, the Brother is a silent observer. He does not need spoken language to survive. Until the Brother enters the immigration hall, the ﬁlm has been unnaturally quiet. Not only have we been seeing through the eyes of the Brother, but we have also been listening through his ears. As his self-assurance grows, the Brother comes to understand how language functions, especially when it is misused. After all, everyone the Brother meets wants to deﬁne him and tell him his or her story. Once the Brother enters his new world, he cannot escape sound. How noise is used, then, is important to an overall understanding of The Brother from Another Planet. At the end of the ﬁlm, Mr. Vance, the drug boss, babbles with unconvincing rhetoric, the sort of bombast one might hear from a politician, so the Brother puts his hand over the drug dealer’s mouth, restricting the deal-making talk. By silencing him,

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the Brother gives Vance the opportunity to see. Placing his recording eye, which the Brother can remove to record events and use as a playback unit, in Vance’s hand, the Brother forces the drug dealer makes him see and feel the destruction his heroin has caused by replaying for Vance the image of the overdosed junkie kid lying dead in a detritus-ﬁlled lot in Harlem. Dickerson’s camera brings volume to Sayles’s words. In the nightmarish journey through Harlem’s netherworld with a friendly, stoned Rastafarian named Virgil, Dickerson’s camera records bleak conditions without distancing the audience through preachy, traditional images of urban squalor. The most poetic shot in this sequence is of a black dancer whose kinetic struggle articulates the problems of the entire community. Lighted in lurid reds and blues with a yellowish backlight, the dancer throws himself against a corrugated metal storefront, trying without success to break free, the last symbol of the parallel universe Sayles metaphorically captures. Virgil’s speech accents the desperate image, a combination of Sayles’s ability to capture authentic voices and Dickerson’s eye exploring the horrors of neglect. Fire and smoke from a 55-gallon drum separate Virgil and the Brother. Virgil offers the Brother a spliff—a large marijuana cigarette, necessary to the Rastafarian belief system, for it represents a religious sacrament—telling him to “take the ship home to the promised land,” to escape the wickedness of “Babylon.” The Brother crosses over, taking the ship home, where he will connect with things he normally would miss. Dickerson presents desperate images of the disinherited of Harlem, a hellish nightmare lying just below the surface comes to full visual force in this sequence. Harlem’s night struggle countervails the freedom the Brother seeks, and it stands as a stark reminder of black history and struggle for the rest of the ﬁlm. Despair could erode the ﬁlm’s tone, but Sayles pulls back. The heavy bass beat of Jamaican music dominating the journey into the netherworld gives way ﬁrst to silence, and then to celestial steel drums that mark the presence of aliens on screen. It is daylight. A close-up of the Brother’s massive, clawed feet, his shoes gone, ﬁlls the frame. Like Aeneas, the Brother, following the paradigm describing a hero’s mythic journey, descends into the underworld, crosses the river of the dead, and returns to his work in the world. Even a hero returning from hell is not immune to the needs of the disenfranchised, a wry comment on urban realities. Harlem’s disrepair dominates the mise-en-scène as the Brother makes his way home, but the Brother’s missing shoes blunts some of the outrage generated by Virgil’s tour. Yet Sayles’s graphic mise-en-scène underlines the desperate environment the Brother now calls home. Visually, Dickerson captures both the possibility of America and the American nightmare; he captures the poetry of the city. We see it through our hero’s eyes, experiencing its foreignness and oppressiveness, its beauty and openness. In collaboration with Sayles, Dickerson makes everyday appearances extraordinary. He balances hope and despair with precision. Sayles uses a number of literary techniques in The Brother from Another Planet, putting his own spin on each, a trait witnessed in his early screenwriting. The hero descending and gaining insight via Rastafarian herb ritual is just one example. Structurally, the ﬁlm plays out like a series of connected short stories, each anchored by the silent Brother, what Gavin Smith calls cross sectioning, or shifting perspectives. The Brother is also a bildungsroman and a picaresque adventure. When the Brother ﬁrst arrives on Earth, he is terriﬁed, constantly fearful. After his baptism in New York harbor, the Brother emerges

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renewed, ready to seek a new life. Overwhelmed by the size of the raucous city, the Brother remains on the defensive. Walking down a street in silence, the Brother hears loud sounds from a boom box, a common urban prop, and he quickly runs for cover, freezing with fear in a doorway. Compassionate members of the Harlem community help him overcome his fears, although he never seems completely secure because no one can erase his memory, his lived history. The Brother experiences a number of people who think he is someone else, an old literary trope, but here something Sayles speciﬁcally borrowed from Ralph Ellison: That’s very much inspired by the Rinehart episode in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man where he puts those sunglasses on. And with the sunglasses everyone thinks he’s this guy Rinehart ... a Pentecostal preacher, a pimp, six different things ... they show him a whole different Harlem than he, as an outsider, ever saw before... [Sayles on Sayles 111].

Eventually, the Brother gains conﬁdence and grows. By the end of the ﬁlm, he chooses to walk into the skyscraper where Mr. Vance, the ﬁlm’s one real villain, keeps ofﬁces—he makes his own decision, takes responsibility for himself, and helps others. Morton’s precise acting style captures this growth with grace. Using only physical tools—face, gesture, body, eyes—shows the silent Brother’s metamorphosis from innocence to maturity. The Brother also satirizes American society. As the late Gerald Mast notes, the function of this type of character in ﬁlm or literature is to “bounce off the people and events around him, often, in the process, revealing the superiority of his comic bouncing to the social and human walls he hits” (The Comic Mind 7). Charlie Chaplin, of course, is America’s most famous ﬁlm picaro, and Sayles, it seems, is completely aware of his main character’s historical lineage. The Brother is a physical, comedic character for our modern age, forever bumping into strange people and strange events as he attempts to make sense of his new world. The Brother elicits Chaplinesque sympathy while displaying the resilience of a Buster Keaton ﬁgure trapped in a surreal, highly mechanized world. The Brother from Another Planet is full of solid acting performances. With a silent protagonist, everyone else in the cast must play off him, revealing more about their characters than they normally might. As always, Sayles provides solid, unadorned dialogue for his actors. His ability to capture the nuances of various voices stands out. Even though The Brother focuses on a single character, Sayles presents a large, varied supporting cast. From the stoned Rastafarian to the Korean grocery store owner, from muggers to grandmothers, from barﬂies to street hucksters, Sayles created realistic lines. Sayles’s actors breathe life into his writing, which is exactly what he wants. Joe Morton’s task was, perhaps, the most difﬁcult of the entire cast. Not only is he the focus of the ﬁlm, but he must remain mute. Without dialogue, Morton must convey all his feelings physically. In a way, The Brother from Another Planet is a return to the silent era, exploring the kinds of scenes that have not been possible since movies started to talk. Morton exhibits fear, concern, innocence, disbelief, anxiety, understanding, love, hate, and glee through gesture. One sequence in The Brother that displays Morton’s abilities is particularly Chaplinesque. It concerns, not surprisingly, money. Tired and hungry, the Brother looks longingly at some pears in bins outside a market. The camera lingers on the fruit, letting us know the Brother’s desire. A cut to the interior of the store frames the Korean grocer behind her store’s cash register as she makes change for a customer. In the background, the Brother picks up a pear and greedily bites into it, furtively glancing about. A close-

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up of his face shows both his need for food and his fear. The shopkeeper runs outside, grabs the half-eaten pear, and castigates the Brother in Korean for stealing her goods. The Brother is perplexed but undaunted. Still hungry, he watches as a customer completes a transaction—cash exchanged for product, the American economic system in microcosm. The camera records his observation: To acquire fruit you need money; money comes from cash registers. He can open these simple machines with a concentrated touch of his palm, and he does, snatching a handful of bills. As he turns to select another piece of fruit, the shop owner sees him gripping her money and the open cash register. Of course, our innocent hero only wants food. Outside, he extends the cash with one hand, while clutching the pear in the other, to the screaming shop owner. He uses multiple gestures to indicate his desire, growing more and more anxious with each shout for the “police.” The shop owner ignores his attempt at payment. Turning, the Brother sees a police ofﬁcer, a white man in uniform. The Brother’s fear is overwhelming. To reinforce the image of authority, Sayles quick-cuts to a pointof-view close-up of the cop’s hat and his badge, which causes the Brother to ﬂee dropping the money and the fruit as the ofﬁcer makes chase. The quick-shot that follows recalls Chaplin’s The Kid. With the cop in hot pursuit, the Brother escapes with a deft, athletic maneuver. The police here, as in the Chaplin classic, protect the interests of the status quo, the propertied shop owner. Like Chaplin, Morton does a masterful job registering a number of feelings and emotions in this short sequence: hunger, desire, thought, panic, fear. He embodies the distinctive Chaplin blend of spunk, poetry, and enigmatic presence—he must escape. Sayles uses the situation not only to tip his hat to Chaplin but also to reveal something about economics and attitudes. It is evident that the Brother does not intend to steal either money or food; rather, he is hungry and desperate. None of the other characters in the sequence attempt to communicate with him. After all, he is black, dressed in rags, and stealing—a criminal. Chaplin’s Little Tramp confronted similar difﬁculties. Both characters are preoccupied with survival, food, and shelter. Both face respectable citizens and cops. Like the Tramp, the Brother understands economic forces, and these comic characters create deeper signiﬁcance. While this sequence recalls Chaplin, Morton draws on many sources to create an aura of thought and free-ﬂoating emotion. The Brother recalls Keaton’s implacable resiliency. That is, he goes about his business by exercising his abilities and free will, confronting whatever comes his way. Integrity drives the Brother. Like many Keaton characters, the Brother gets into trouble because of his openness, his innate emotional and intellectual curiosity. The scene with the Korean store owner is a funny bit, even though its underlying meaning is serious. What gives this scene its comic lift is Morton’s gestures and facial expressions; after all, he did what he was supposed to do, so why call the cops? The Brother approaches his journey with the unblinking, knowing engagement of a Keaton hero. He understands that this new world is full of impediments, but he will continue undaunted. Like many of Sayles’s actors, Morton is experienced in both stage and television. Like many of Sayles’s actors, Morton wanted the work because of Sayles’s reputation as an intelligent ﬁlmmaker and because of the limited number of good roles for black actors: “It’s almost impossible to ﬁnd roles in the movies for a black actor. And most science ﬁction is like what Richard Pryor said about 2001—they must think there won’t be any blacks by then” (Aufderheide Film Comment 6). In addition, playing the part of a mute intrigued Morton. The other characters in the ﬁlm create their own expectations of him—imagining who he really is and what he really wants. According to Morton, “The role makes the

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audience look at Harlem from both white and black perspectives. It’s Harlem seen not as a jungle but from the eyes of an innocent” (Aufderheide Film Comment 6). Morton’s talent and passion for acting are both evident. In a quick scene after the cop chase, Morton’s ability to communicate with his eyes and his face are beautifully illustrated. He reﬂects on a small statue of Christ nailed to the cross, blood dripping from his wounds. Across the street, he sees a cop place a young black kid up against a car in a similar position. His new world is steeped in violence, both symbolic and literal. Morton scores the Brother’s anxious fear by averting his eyes from each image and walking quickly away. When a Hispanic video-game wizard laments her desperate condition using space invaders as an analogy for her life, the Brother brings her orgasmic pleasure by speeding the game up. Morton plays this bit straight, underplaying the pleasure he takes in helping the young woman ﬁnd brief solace from the empty monotony of her life. Morton’s uniquely expressive face, body command, and self-deprecating gentleness infuse the role with believability. In The Brother from Another Planet, Sayles wrote parts for speciﬁc actors. For example, he created Randy Sue, a white woman from Alabama who lives in Harlem with her black mother-in-law and her young mixed-race son, expressly for Caroline Aaron. Sayles wanted “someone who was very strong and tough and from the South” (“Dialogue on Film” 14). It also helped that she worked for scale, which is essential to any low-budget ﬁlmmaking project. Writing for a speciﬁc actor rather would become a trait common to most of Sayles’s scripts as his career progressed. Joe Morton was not Sayles’s ideal choice to portray the Brother, however; he thought Morton was too young at thirty-ﬁve. Sayles’s attitude quickly shifted: Most of what you see in the ﬁlm is ﬁrst take. We mostly did about three of anything. Joe did a really good thing, which is he stayed away from the other actors. I did rehearsals where it was just about blocking, no acting. So once the actors got in a situation with him, because very often he was meeting people for the ﬁrst time, they would do what people usually do when there’s somebody who doesn’t speak their language or who is deaf—the talk a little louder and a little slower. So we really got better performances out of them on the ﬁrst take. Joe came up with the idea that he had to see their eyes to understand what they were saying. So if they would be talking to him and look away, he’d get over in their eyes—there was something a little weird about his body motions [Sayles on Sayles 115].

Sayles likes to say that Morton, his speechless wonder, is the only actor he allowed to ad-lib. Sayles’s casting director, Barbara Shapiro, assembled a solid cast, all willing to work for scale or deferred payments. Sayles and David Strathairn as the Brother’s intergalactic pursuers are particularly effective. This crackpot tag team has a much easier time getting to Earth than does the Brother; in fact, because we never actually see them land, it seems as if they come with the territory, which, in a manner of speaking, they do: Sayles, dressed in black, arises from below screen on an escalator like a commuter from hell, clutching an English as a Second Language textbook. Strathairn, dressed identically, meets him at the top of the moving stairs with a picture of the Brother, whom they call “Three Toe.” Even though these two have absorbed some American idioms, they wholly lack the escaped slave’s gift for communication and his ability to pass without regard among the citizens of New York. Sayles uses this daffy couple to parody television shows, Westerns, and kung fu movies. At times, the Sayles character sounds like Joe Friday from the old television series Dragnet, talking in a dull monotone, assured that his command, “Just the facts, ma’am,” will

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Sayles and David Strathairn (right foreground) were the original men in black. Here they confront the patrons of Odell’s Bar, where the Brother has found a home. Daryl Edwards (Yankees hat) confronts the alien bounty hunters while Leonard Jackson (seated) and Tom Wright watch the action. Edwards and Wright have been featured in other Sayles productions.

bring desired results. It never works. Their dress mocks bad guys from B Westerns—all they lack are black hats—and their mad karate kicks and punches might be the result of too many Bruce Lee movies. Their tough guy personas are hysterical; they are so odd, people watch every move they make. When they enter Odell’s Bar, obviously aware that they are on the right track but unaware how to follow their own leads, their entrance is announced with a bath of bright white light that engulfs Walter and half the interior of the bar. They order, “Beer ... Draft.... On the rocks.” When they ask for the Brother, Odell asks for an ID, because, as he says, “If you’re dicks ya got badges.” Strathairn’s man-inblack responds without irony, “What makes you think we are Dicks?” From off-screen Fly says, “I could answer that,” sending the regulars into hysterics. When they leave, Smokey notes, “White folks get stranger all the time.” The characters in Odell’s Bar, the Brother’s love interest, even the card shark add to the ensemble cast orbiting around the Brother. In the Sayles system, economics drives casting, but not at the expense of quality acting: “We always have so little time to shoot that I usually work with people who have worked in the theater because they can retain two pages of dialogue with no problem” (“Dialogue on Film” 14). Stage actors work cheaply, and they welcome the opportunity and exposure ﬁlm provides. Early in his career, Sayles avoided the star system. Actors, however, take priority in a Sayles ﬁlm. Because he is more concerned with the real world than with movies glamour, Sayles wants his cast to look and sound authentic—having a good casting director helps achieve that goal. Shapiro cast both Lianna and The Brother

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from Another Planet. According to Sayles, “She knew us well enough to be able to interpret our sometimes vague feelings and comments and we knew and trusted each other’s taste in acting” (Thinking in Pictures 48). The Brother’s bar family makes a good example. Odell, the owner and bartender; Smokey and Walter, two regular drinkers; and Fly (Darryl Edwards), a Space Invaders addict, are quality actors. They spice up the bar scenes. Their characters span generations and descriptions. Odell has no use for anything below 110th Street; he likes Harlem, and he enjoys running his tavern. Fly, the youngest member of the group, is the quickest with a line, which may or may not contain real thought. Smokey, as his name implies, is the serious drinker in the group, accounting for the ﬂuctuation in his awareness and for his willingness to believe in the supernatural. Walter is a world-weary philosopher, an existentialist who ruminates on space garbage, immigrants with exotic diseases, and the lamentable loss of community in Harlem. Their repartee is excellent, as they kid each other with the kind of cutting, sarcastic quips that only true friends can command. Sayles’s ear for dialogue and some sharp editing help to make these scenes funny and provocative, but the actors infuse the scenes with a sense of reality that makes their time on screen memorable. Odell’s makes the Brother comfortable. It ﬁts neatly into Gerald Carson’s deﬁnition of the American saloon as “a forum and a community center, a place for genial self-expression, and, for the traveler, a home away from home” (25). The Brother feels secure there because of the warmth, hospitality, and goodwill the bar patrons display toward him. For example, facing down the robotic slave chasers—the ersatz immigration agents—Fly uses his arms, hands, and ﬁngers to register his outrage when they ask him for his green card. “Green card! Man. What’s you talkin’, sucker?” he yells at these strange creatures. “Ever been to South Carolina? My people built that.” From off-screen Walter remarks, “Can’t build a state, man.” Fly becomes even more outraged and strives to prove his point: “All I knows, when they got off the boat weren’t nothin’ there. Now there’s shopping malls, and, what’s that shit, miniature golf.” Though comic, Fly’s outrage cuts to the bone of the racist mentality expressed by the alien creatures. To them, blacks are fodder used for proﬁt and then discarded. In the end, Odell’s patrons defend their silent Brother with all the force they can muster. Thompson touches upon the bar crew in his account of Sayles’s black characters: “Subtler elements are also at work in the ﬁlm. In Harlem, the community where the central character ﬁnds acceptance, if not exactly understanding, much of the action takes place in a bar, where the black owner, his wife, and their customers present a wonderful mix of humor, foibles, and essential decency” (32). Odell’s Bar becomes and essential place for the Brother because he can hide there, but it also provides him human connection. When two Midwestern graduate students looking for Columbia University and the “Self-Actualization Conference” realize they are in Harlem and now in the minority, they sheepishly enter Odell’s looking for directions. They sit next to the Brother, the only man in the bar who cannot speak. A few boozy hours pass. “I wanted to be Ernie Banks,” says one of the lost students. “Mr. Cub,” chimes the other, as if auditioning for a sports talk show. “And it never really dawned on me that he was black,” responds his friend. Talking to a black man who does not respond to their observations seems to abate their nervousness. This dialogue, albeit funny, serves to show the gulf between the white Midwesterners, who are not even sure if any blacks live in their hometown, and the urban world of the Brother. Ironically, the Brother is so fearful of them that he is afraid to get up to leave,

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even though he ﬁnds their talk nonsensical. Ernie Banks means nothing to him. None of the other people in the bar bother to look at this lost pair, let alone speak to them. The graduate students think that they have accomplished much by “communicating” with a black man who cannot respond and they stagger away happy. The music for The Brother further illustrates how Sayles produces quality ﬁlms without elaborate expenditures. When we ﬁrst see the Brother, Sayles uses steel drum music, the sound of the Caribbean, to announce his character. The drums are analogous to an operatic signature, marking the Brother and other aliens throughout the picture. When the Brother discovers the slave tag grafﬁti, the steel drums ﬁll the soundtrack with a shower of exuberance. Moreover, as the bounty hunters leave the welfare ofﬁce, we hear the melodic sound and see an African American man later revealed as a member of the underground alien community, physical proof that the Brother is not alone. At the end of the ﬁlm, as the Brother pursues Mr. Vance, the drums sound as the camera comes to rest on a member of the night clean-up crew running a ﬂoor buffer, indicating others want to witness the Brother’s singular quest for justice. Because the sound of the steel drums is so distinctive, Sayles’s choice to use the instrument has signiﬁcance. When he started making The Brother, the State Department had begun to crack down on illegal aliens arriving from the Caribbean, particularly Cuba and Haiti, a policy the Reagan administration toughened before the ﬁlm was completed for distribution. Constructed as a space alien, a runaway slave, and a Caribbean immigrant— he wears his hair in short dreadlocks, and experiences Rasta culture and ritual—the Brother is a multifaceted persona. Although the steel drums originated in Trinidad in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, their roots can be traced to the drum music of Africans imported into the West Indies as slaves. Therefore, Sayles’s inexpensive soundtrack enhances the ﬁlm both musically and thematically. Indeed, music punctuates Sayles’s narrative, accentuating the mood and spirit of the ﬁlm as a whole. In collaboration with Mason Daring, his musical composer, Sayles uses blues, jazz, soul, funk, and gospel to give the picture a distinctly urban, distinctly black sound. Daring and Sayles wrote two songs for the ﬁlm score. “Homeboy,” sung off-screen by Joe Morton; “Promised Land,” which concludes the ﬁlm, celebrates the Brother’s freedom, growth, and entrance into the community of runaway slaves. This concluding song, sung by The Labors in the Vineyard All Community Choir, reminds us that African Americans created beauty out of the ugliest of situations, human bondage. Dee Dee Bridgewater, the Brother’s love interest, Malverne Davis, performs two songs Daring composed for the ﬁlm, one of which, “Getaway,” anticipates the night she and the Brother will spend together. Sayles also uses a Little Anthony and the Imperials song, “Two People in the World,” during a montage of female images gleaned from a variety of sources—newspapers, billboards, magazines—to characterize the Brother’s need for a female companion. The jubilation with which Sayles ends the ﬁlm acknowledges the Brother’s presence in his new world. The trepidation and fear with which he once approached this new place seem to vanish with the knowledge that he is not alone, that others like him exist, albeit as invisible workers communicating on a different frequency. In the end, the silent Brother is conﬁdent, self-assured, and, it seems, free. In the words that begin Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, he is “a man of substance, of ﬂesh and bone, ﬁber and liquids” (3). The Brother shares much with Ellison’s invisible hero. Like Ellison’s protagonist, Sayles’s hero hides in plain sight, but he does not seek a single mentor; rather, he seeks community support. Only after the white slave hunters atomize themselves can he truly feel free. What

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Brother from Another Planet is an intergalactic immigration tale. Joe Morton, center, stars as the “Brother.” The “Brother” is pursued throughout the ﬁlm by an oddball pair of bounty hunters, played with robotic panache by John Sayles, left, and David Strathairn. Here the slave hunters are about to return the “Brother” to a life of bondage (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives).

he does not know, of course, is what he will be subject to as a black man in his new home. Although The Brother succeeded ﬁnancially, reviews for the ﬁlm were lukewarm. Donald Bogle, author of the seminal book on images of blacks in American cinema, offers one sentence about the ﬁlm: “Independent white ﬁlmmaker John Sayles came up with an interesting but overrated [off beat ﬁlm] The Brother from Another Planet” (290). Yet Sayles brought a ﬁlm about race issues—black, brown, yellow, and white—to the screen with depth, substance, and across-the-board accessibility. Because he is not an African American ﬁlmmaker, Sayles will never achieve Bogle’s deﬁnition of black sensibility. Ironically, a close appraisal of Sayles’s ﬁlm reveals the Brother passing through all of Bogle’s categorical descriptions that deﬁne the images of blacks in the American cinema. He begins as a “Tom”—enslaved, repressed, insulted—on a backward planet. He comes to Earth and assumes the guise of a jester in his torn and tattered spacesuit. For the bigoted arcade owner, Mr. Lowe, who lives up to his name, the Brother takes on the role of servant by replenishing his exhausted machines. The entire ﬁlm shows the Brother as a problem for the

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slave hunters. In the end, of course, he reaches a level of autonomy, and becomes a complex ﬁgure who is difﬁcult to categorize. Because Sayles is not an ostentatious ﬁlmmaker, critics often overlook the subtleties at play in his work. In The Brother Sayles brings a number of issues to bear in a comedy of contemporary manners told from the perspective of a black alien. For the most part, critics were put off by Sayles’s ﬁlmmaking style in The Brother from Another Planet—or what some considered his lack of style. “In New York City,” Sayles says, “Brother really got pretty bad reviews, but it still broke house records” (McGhee 46). Sayles’s low-key approach is unfashionable; it challenges pigeonhole labels, or a formalistic hook to entice viewers. The tone of The Brother stands in direct contrast to that of the hyperkinetic 1980s. In addition, the ﬁlm explores relevant social issues, but it does so without inﬂammatory rhetoric. Sayles’s taste for dry, throwaway humor with bite lacks aggression. The conservative mind-set of the Reagan administration and the mood of the country in general was about to catch up with Sayles. Even the word-of-mouth audience he had developed would ignore his next two ﬁlms, Matewan and Eight Men Out. Like most of Sayles’s other ﬁlm work, The Brother from Another Planet is about people interacting and reasonability. The ﬁlm shows how a small community reacts to an outsider, and how that outsider ﬁnds a home. At the end, when the slave hunters face the collective resistance of a dozen runaway slaves, Sayles inverts the premise of the 1950s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He reminds us that people are not the same, and difference has its rewards. As Ed Guerrero observes, “This resolution clearly privileges the value of collective organization and resistance to oppression, and it has an allusive validity of the collective resistance of African-Americans, abolitionists, and others to historical slavery” (49). Still, Sayles is no Pollyanna. The shot that concludes the ﬁlm seems hopeful: the Brother is happy, smiling as he never has before in the ﬁlm. He looks through a heavy-gauge wire-mesh fence at a Harlem high school, however. As with everything else in the ﬁlm, there is a contradictory impulse at work here, an ambiguity that blunts an upbeat, saccharin ending. It is a reminder that the Brother’s struggle never ends, for he remains a black man in America. Sayles leaves his story looking ahead toward freedom, but also backward toward the injustice of bondage—an ending that is both ambitious and necessary.

Bruce Springsteen Steinbeck with a Guitar He’s not called “the Boss” for nothing. He controls his life. So we were able to duck into that world and get all the cooperation we needed. But it’s a couple of weeks out of your life. It just didn’t seem like the way I wanted to make a living. —John Sayles, Sayles on Sayles

Cinecom, the American distribution group Sayles and Renzi selected for The Brother, managed the project well, and helped make a proﬁt for their production company. Before starting Matewan, Sayles starred in a Williamstown Theater Festival production of Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie opposite Joanne Woodward. That same year, 1995, Sayles and Renzi worked as production assistants for her sister, Marta, a dancer and choreographer. Marta Renzi’s PBS ﬁlm You Little Wildheart is set to music by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Sayles, Maggie Renzi, and Springsteen hit it off, and the

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Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt, and the E Street Band. Springsteen and Sayles have remained friends after the director ﬁlmed three videos for the bard of New Jersey. “‘Jungleland’ and ‘Meeting Across the River’ pack as much punch in a few minutes as I got into City of Hope, which is a whole movie,” Sayles told Nicholas Dawidoff (NYT 33). Springsteen has contributed songs to a few of Sayles’s ﬁlms, including the credit sequence of Limbo (1999). Singing in falsetto, Springsteen’s voice is almost unrecognizable. Fairness, opportunity, and community are themes weaving through Springsteen’s music and Sayles’s cinema.

rocker hired them to create what became a series of three videos: “Born in the U.S.A.,” “I’m on Fire,” and “Glory Days.” Shot in 16mm, “Born in the U.S.A.” consists of concert footage and documentary material ﬁlmed by Ernest Dickerson at various locations in New Jersey. Michael Ballhaus, who shot some of the “Born in the U.S.A.” footage, ﬁlmed “I’m on Fire” in 35mm, and Springsteen came up with the short ﬁlm’s narrative line: He said, “I’ve got an idea about a guy who’s on the outside looking in, and we may or may not see the woman. There’s something in between them and he’s not going to get her.” And we talked a little, and then he had this idea, “What if he’s a guy who works on her car?” And I really liked that. It was also the ﬁrst time he was going to be playing a character, and I wanted to give him an entrance—you know, like they did in old-fashioned movies. I thought, “Well, where should Bruce Springsteen come in? What’s his image?” And I thought he should slide out from under a car, with some grease on him. I mean, what a beautiful entrance for this guy [Sayles on Sayles 119].

“Glory Days” offers two looks at the Springsteen persona: one a family man who used to be a pitcher whose story bookends footage of Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band playing the raucous “Glory Days” inside Maxwell’s, a Hoboken, New Jersey, club.

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According to Sayles, “he’s telling a story as Bruce Springsteen, but in the story he’s playing a character” (Sayles on Sayles 120). Made with people he considers “reasonable,” Sayles’s three Bruce Springsteen videos represent his only attempts at the short rock ’n’ roll genre. Sayles and Springsteen share similar passions—primary among them is knowing what they want professionally and how to get it.

Matewan Life Down in the Hole A lot of what I try to do in Matewan ... is to have the audience spend time with people they ordinarily wouldn’t spend time with, with history they either forgot or never knew, and make it have some bearing on what’s going on today. —John Sayles, Cineaste

Matewan (1987) demonstrates everything John Sayles learned about ﬁlmmaking and knew about ﬁlmmaking. A period piece based upon the Matewan Massacre, the violent result of an attempt to unionize southern West Virginia coal miners in 1920, the ﬁlm displays what Sayles can do with a larger budget. Every cinematic element—screenwriting, production, cinematography, sound, editing, acting—is fully realized in this study of hardship, struggle, and violence. Matewan is more than a historical retelling of a neglected event. Examining restrictive labor relations in the 1920s allows Sayles to comment on the growing conservatism of the 1980s, a period dominated by the anti-labor ideals of Ronald Reagan and his neoconservative supporters. History is vital to Sayles: “I feel that history, especially the stories we like to believe or know about ourselves, is part of the ammunition we take with us into the everyday battle of how we deﬁne ourselves and how we act toward other people” (Past Imperfect 11). Like all of Sayles’s work, Matewan avoids easy categorization; it is a complex work technically, morally, and, for Sayles, aesthetically. In ﬁctionalizing the events that culminated in the Matewan Massacre, a bloody and historically accurate presentation, Sayles takes a politically unpopular stand by showing how West Virginian, black, and Italian immigrant coal miners overcome cultural differences in an attempt to form a union. The ﬁlm’s unabashed support for the workers in a labor-capital conﬂict contradicts the conservative agenda that dominated the 1980s, where dog-eat-dog was the norm and individual accomplishment was valued over collective organization. Indeed, as Sayles points out, “Think of the big stars of the Eighties, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. They played Ur characters—you know, mythic characters. It was this simplistic and even heightened good-guys and bad-guys thing” (Past Imperfect 24). Matewan refuses to present easy choices or romanticized solutions. One of Sayles’s central characters is a “red,” a union organizer whose job is to prevent the strike from becoming violent. In the end, after the strike spreads, after the owner-labor strife, after the killing, no workers’ utopia emerges. While researching his second novel, Union Dues (1977), which examines how the social and political climate of the United States in the late 1960s affects a West Virginia coal-mining family, Sayles discovered accounts of the Matewan Massacre. The bloody shoot-out pitted striking miners against Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency operatives, men hired by the Stone Mountain Coal Company to guard their mines, evict pro-labor min-

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ing families, and generally keep workers in line though physical intimidation and violence. This event catalyzed the 1920s coalﬁeld wars in West Virginia. Yet its history is invisible, details fuzzy. By most accounts, ten people lost their lives in the shoot-out—Matewan’s mayor, two miners, and seven Baldwin-Felts agents. As Sayles points out in Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan, his detailed description about creating an independent ﬁlm, “The rhetoric of both the company-controlled newspapers of the day and their counterparts on the political left was rich in metaphor but short on eyewitness testimony” (10). What intrigued Sayles were the characters involved: Sid Hatﬁeld, a name synonymous with American violence, the chief of police in Matewan; Cabell Testerman, the mayor of the town; Few Clothes, a giant black miner to whom poet Louis Untermyer dedicated his poem “Black Caliban of the Coal Miners”; and C.E. Lively, a company spy. Because these historical ﬁgures were not well documented, Sayles stayed close to the “veriﬁable accounts of their actions and shied away from their personal lives” (Thinking in Pictures 20). He personalized the story by creating ﬁctional characters who carry the ﬁlm’s emotional weight, particularly Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper) and Danny Radnor (Will Oldham). Historical accounts Sayles read recounted the use of imported scab labor, including blacks from Alabama and new European immigrants. Sayles was particularly interested in West Virginia’s immigration patterns: “In 1920, one-quarter of all coal miners in West Virginia were Black. The mines in Alabama were tapped out, so those men needed the work and were often offered jobs that they had no idea were scab jobs” (Moore 6). The Italians were a different story. Never having worked in a mine, they went from steerage to driftmouth. Segregated camps, ringed by armed guards, kept each group from intermingling. Pitting race against race, the company fueled cultural antagonisms to keep the workers divided. “That,” Sayles says, “was the company solution to what they saw as the cancer of unionism” (Moore 7). Moreover, as Jeanne Williams notes, violence was “an inevitable response for the strikers [because of ] the mine operators’ virtually complete control over their lives and communities” (51). Stone Mountain Coal Company at Matewan, West Virginia, operated on a feudal system, holding miners and their families in near slavery. As described in Thinking in Pictures, company-owned coal camps surrounded the town of Matewan. Owners told workers where to live, rented them housing at unreasonably high prices, rented them mining tools such as picks, shovels, and headlamps, and sold them clothing and food at inﬂated prices. Wages were company scrip, not U.S. currency. Children often worked in the mines alongside their fathers. Combined, these unfair measures kept workers in an economic vise, squeezing the entire family, preventing them from escaping the company. Sayles added a visual component missing from his previous ﬁlms—landscape. West Virginia is a land of fast-running rivers and steep rugged hills that create what the indigenous people call hollers, natural pockets cut off from neighboring communities: “The hills hug around you—stay inside of them for a while and a ﬂat horizon seems cold and unwelcoming” (Thinking in Pictures 9). West Virginia has little bottomland to farm, but it does have coal, which must be pulled from the ground, a land, as Sayles remarks, “that doesn’t yield anything easy” (Thinking in Pictures 9). There is nothing liberating about this landscape, nothing idyllic, nothing pastoral. Topography served the coal companies by naturally separating mining operations and miners from each other. Fusing coal-company oppression, historic characters, rich story elements, and a strong sense of place, Sayles addressed larger concerns:

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All the elements and principles involved seemed basic to the idea of what America has become and what it should be. Individualism versus collectivism, the personal and political legacy of racism, the immigrant dream and the reality that greeted it, monopoly capitalism at its most extreme versus American populism at its most violent, plus a lawman with two guns strapped on walking to the center of town to face a bunch of armed enforcers—what more could you ask for in a story? [Thinking in Pictures 10].

Traditional history ignores stories like Matewan, as historian Howard Zinn reminds us: “Most histories understate revolt, overemphasize statesmanship, and thus encourage impotency among citizens” (574). Uncovering such history, ﬁctionalizing it for the screen, and seeing the production through is a political act. Yet Sayles avoids the easy cynicism of the 1980s, which, in his words, sees “caring about someone you’ve never met ... as weakness or treachery” (Thinking in Pictures 38). Sayles tells Matewan’s story to resuscitate the idealism that once infused the labor movement in an attempt to make that idealism valid again, a unpopular sentiment in the 1980s, a period in which the once muscular house of labor completely collapsed. Sayles also confronts how people deal with change: “A lot of what Matewan’s about is that new people were coming in, blacks and immigrants ... and, along with new people, new ideas, and one of the new ideas was forming a union” (Aufderhide Cineaste 12). Matewan is not a historical documentary; it is not, for that matter, historically accurate, as Melvyn Dubofsky, a labor historian, has pointed out: One would think that ﬁlm critics and the highly educated people who have actually viewed Matewan ordinarily would prefer a more nuanced, complex, and sophisticated portrait of the past than Sayles presents. Instead his heroes and heroines, as well as their villainous adversaries, are as stereotypically deﬁned as the characters in traditional horse operas or contemporary soap operas [488].

Dubofsky misses Sayles’s intention. Kenehan talks about “the union,” a generic collective of workers. Sayles is not an advocate for a speciﬁc union; rather, he recalls a populist spirit that unions have lost over the past few decades. Moreover, as Jeanne Williams suggests, “Matewan is not so much a ﬁlm about miners organizing a union as it is about miners being organized into a union” (51). Sayles made his ﬁctional protagonist a former Wobbly to echo the grassroots, populist ideals embodied by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW; nicknamed Wobblies), a home-grown American workers’ organization. Sayles wanted to make Kenehan familiar by connecting him to the Wobbly spirit, which, as he notes, “remained alive in fact and ﬁction, in the Tom Joads and Woody Guthries of the Depression, in the rhetoric of Huey Long and the selling copy of the New Deal” (Thinking in Pictures 17). Although the American labor movement has changed since the Matewan strike, “the ﬁlm’s pleas,” according to Eric Foner, “for nonviolence, interracial harmony, and economic justice are hardly irrelevant today. It is sobering to reﬂect that these ideals seem as utopian to contemporary viewers as when they were propounded by the IWW and the United Mine Workers of America nearly a century ago” (Past Imperfect 207). Insistently, Sayles uses history as a foundation, adding reality to the picture, making his narrative a story about America. Not surprisingly, Matewan parallels the genre expectations of the classic American Western: the lone man rides into town, faces down the mob, and delivers justice. Yet Sayles, however, makes the ﬁctional protagonist of the story, union organizer Joe Kenehan, a paciﬁst, inverting tradition to question common violence. The Matewan Massacre temporarily put the coal company on the run, but the huge death

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toll of the coal wars of 1920 –21 underlines Kenehan’s philosophy, which echoes the precepts of Martin Luther King, Jr., who understood economic oppression and the need for nonviolent revolt. Ironically, Kenehan dies because of the violence he worked to prevent. Labor unions dramatically declined in membership and inﬂuence in the 1980s. Many Americans distrusted unions, siding, for example, with President Reagan when he broke the air trafﬁc controllers’ strike in 1981 by ﬁring all the workers involved in the job action. Unions, of course, must share in the blame for their poor public perception. As unions matured, the accompanying bureaucratization created a gulf between ofﬁcials and workers. Corruption and ties with organized crime in some unions have also affected the perception of unions as a whole. Historically, unions were never sacrosanct. According to historian Robert H. Zieger, the labor movement was “feared by the Right as un–American and radical, reviled by the revolutionary Left as reformist and opportunistic” (ix). Indeed, even one of Sayles’s characters voices suspicion about joining a political group: “I don’t need some hunkie in Pittsburgh to tell me what to do.” Still, unions, unlike any other institution in American life, speak for working people as a class. Sayles does not analyze a labor union per se, nor does he examine its leaders. Instead, he concentrates his efforts on the workers themselves, opening the ﬁlm to various interpretations. Matewan, for instance, functions as a morality play. It focuses on a fourteen-year-old miner and lay Baptist preacher, Danny Radnor, struggling to understand the cacophony of voices swirling around him. The voice-over narration that frames the ﬁlm is an elderly Danny, who folks call Pappy. He retells the story of the Matewan Massacre in his own words, a personal recollection. Sayles keeps Pappy’s identity secret not for the sake of an O. Henry ending but to show us Danny’s transformation from confused adolescent to a dedicated believer in his class, culture, and calling. When the ﬁlm opens, the miners, Mingo County, West Virginia, natives, strike because the Stone Mountain Coal Company dropped the price for a ton of coal. Joe Kenehan arrives in Matewan preaching the notion of “one big union.” His attempts to unite the fragmented workers both succeed and fail. He must contend with racial antagonisms, a company spy, a plot designed to question his own union loyalty, and the Baldwin-Felts agents. Sid Hatﬁeld (David Strathairn), the sheriff, a dark, violent presence, signiﬁes frontier justice, the antithesis of Kenehan’s philosophy. When a young striker’s throat is slit by a company man, and violence, the inevitable response, breaks loose, Kenehan is shot in the head and Danny comes to understand the meaning the unionist’s nonviolent philosophy: Violence plays into the owners’ hands because they have access to greater forms of violence—police, militia, federal troops—and can use them with impunity. Matewan’s plot line should be straightforward—all the events progress chronologically. Sayles subverts expectations. No single hero marches toward the inevitable climax with his antagonists. As John Alexander Williams explains, “The Gary Cooper character in this upside down High Noon is divided at least two ways, between Joe and Sid, with Danny, Few Clothes, and Fausto serving as secondary moral agents at critical junctures in the plot” (349). Sayles structures Matewan in four distinct blocks, each detailing a victory or a defeat for Joe, the outsider, in his struggle to unionize the coal miners. His hope for nonviolent solidarity and his integrity signify the moral conscience of the burgeoning community. The ﬁrst section examines Joe’s attempts to organize three groups—natives, blacks, and Italians—that make up the fragmented workers’ camp. The next section takes up the cycle of revenge, a theme running throughout the ﬁlm, as the strikers attempt to get back at the company, which culminates in an ambush in the woods. Then Sayles moves

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to C.E. Lively’s attempt to discredit Joe with the miners, which Danny thwarts with one of his sermons. In the fourth section, the strikers’ exhilaration over their organizing efforts ﬁzzles when Hillard Elkin ( Jace Alexander), another young miner, is murdered, and the revenge cycle returns, resulting in the ﬁnal shoot-out. If Sayles followed the classical paradigm—conﬂict, rising action, climax—we would have a generic Western. The four movements create a sense of reality by depicting life’s ﬁts and starts, not a sweeping heroic victory. When tensions ﬁnally erupt on Matewan’s main street, the gun battle is plain and graphic: Confusion reigns, people shoot wildly, and most of the deaths occur at close range. When the shooting stops, it is obvious neither side stands victorious. Sayles deliberately avoids pat conclusions. Matewan has nothing in common with High Noon—or with any other Hollywood production ending with a single hero as moral arbiter. Sayles’s four movements provide scope—Matewan spans a speciﬁc history—and psychological realism by detailing how a select group of people intertwine. By downplaying the gun battle, Sayles does not celebrate the myth of the American gunﬁghter. Instead, he calls into question American reliance on armed struggle to solve problems. Within each cycle, the relationship between Joe Kenehan and Danny Radnor deepens as the young miner considers Joe’s words and the possibility of union strength. On the other hand, as Sayles points out, the “character of violence” also escalates in each section (Thinking in Pictures 26). When the gun battle occurs, it countervails our expectations because everyone loses—the shoot-out solves nothing, proving Kenehan’s argument against violence while recalling American’s reliance on violence to suppress organized labor. The conﬂict never does end, of course, and Pappy says the miners took the worst of it because they lost their jobs, lives, and the chance to form a union, just as Joe predicted. Sayles indicates his thematic intent in his opening exposition, a visual representation of working life underground. Sephus (Ken Jenkins), a strike leader, lights his headlamp and goes to work on a coalface. Blackness dominates the mise-en-scène. We must concentrate on the image to record Sephus’s actions. Sayles back-lighted Jenkins with a diffuse spotlight, aimed past the actor, which had to be moved in synch with his head to imitate the light from the miner’s headlamp, so Sephus’s actions appear indistinct. The shot is tight, conﬁning, tomblike. Sephus works with a pick and a hand drill. The shots are non-dramatic, providing cinéma vérité coverage of the miner as he loads black powder into the hole he has cut into the coalface. Sayles wants to duplicate antique coal-mining methods and the conditions under which these men worked. Sound emphasizes oppression within the scene: the constant drip-drip of water, Sephus’s perpetual coughing, and the lamentations of a non-diagetic blues harmonica. Beginning a ﬁlm with a sequence of a man working, however, lacks the hook necessary to capture contemporary audience interest, so Sayles cross-cuts shots of Sephus with shots of Danny running through the mine as he stops to whisper something to other miners, thereby adding a sense of mystery and urgency to the sequence. As Danny runs from man to man, Sephus plants a fuse in the powder-ﬁlled hole. For the sake of expediency, Sayles placed the opening credits over these shots, but the titles are quiet and do not overwhelm the images. Sephus ignites the fuse, runs for cover, and crouches at the base of a pillar with his back to the coalface. Danny trots up and slides down next to him. Because both characters are covered with coal soot, only their teeth and eyes stand in sharp contrast to the darkness. Danny says, “They brung it [the tonnage rate] down to ninety cent a ton.... They got them dagoes holdin’ fast in Number Three.” He then asks the older

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miner what they are going to do. Sephus spits a stream of tobacco juice into a black puddle of water. Sayles quick-cuts to the sizzling fuse as it disappears inside the coal face. Next, we see the title Matewan on screen. We hear the explosion, and the image vanishes in a ﬂash frame like a well-delivered punch line Sam Peckinpah might admire. Immediately Sayles establishes the plight of these workers, internal conﬂict, and the potential for violence with a few deft strokes. By concluding this introductory sequence with an explosion, Sayles preﬁgures the explosion to come: “When you see the fuse burning down until it ﬁnally explodes. That was the image I had of what happened in Matewan” (Moore 5). As he did with Brother from Another Planet, Sayles establishes Matewan’s tone up front. Unlike the somewhat upbeat Brother, however, Matewan is deeply pessimistic. Tight medium shots dominate the opening sequence, denoting closure, conﬁnement, restriction. Even though the sequence ends with the miners leaving the driftmouth of the mine as a collective body, demanding union representation, Sayles’s visual composition shows the men locked in, fated to continue in their present condition—or worse. As the men leave the mine, Sayles cuts to a shot of the West Virginia hillside, a natural physical barrier, plunging down toward the men. Moreover, a crane shot Sayles uses (an example of a production budget increase) photographs the miners as they pass between railroad coal cars used by the company, depicting industrial entrapment. One theme Sayles explores in Matewan is invasion, the intrusion of external forces into the West Virginia hills. The crane shot visually illustrates the size and the power of the company. Here the camera movement splits the frame in half. The shot sequence opens with a picture of an inviting, deep blue sky. The camera lingers brieﬂy before descending. As the camera drops, we see a coal tower, the empty coal cars, and ﬁnally a medium shot of the men, dirty from work but obviously upbeat because of their decision to strike, passing between the cars. The mise-en-scène is unequivocal. Trapped and powerless, the miners squeeze through the tight space created by the coal cars, walking directly toward the camera; on the other end, they ﬂow toward the right and left of the frame, many of them move beyond the borders of the camera frame. In a single shot, Sayles moves from closed to open form, signifying this story is not limited to a narrow screen. Here, Pappy’s voiceover begins, describing the rock-ribbed miners, their desire for humane working conditions, and their insular cultural attitudes. Industrial mining symbols—power lines, steam engines, coal towers—dominate Sayles’s outdoor shots. This wilderness is falling to technological advancements, which, ironically, also makes the miners’ work possible. It is a time of change, even in West Virginia’s backcountry. Instead of examining the corruption of an American Eden, Sayles turns his sights on the corruption of the American ideal: Mechanical progress does not dovetail well with human progress. Industrial intrusion symbolizes disdain for the West Virginia hill culture. Every time a car appears, for example, trouble follows, because the car carries representatives of the progressive era—armed men used to getting what they want through force. Near the end of the ﬁlm, Sayles shoots an onrushing steam engine from ground level carrying the Baldwin-Felts agents, a visual sign of progress and relentless power. The train represents the complex, more sophisticated world beyond the holler, a world full of unimaginable mechanical marvels run by men willing to exploit workers for proﬁt. Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler photographed Matewan, the ﬁrst of four ﬁlms he would shoot for Sayles, both an indication of Sayles’s appreciation for Wexler’s artistry and his political sympathies: “Haskell has loads of experience, including work on

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period pieces like Bound for Glory and Days of Heaven, and has a long-standing knowledge of and involvement in the kind of politics Matewan is about” (Thinking in Pictures 71). Wexler’s own words underscore his personal commitment to the project: “My usual salary is four times what I’m making here. But I’m getting four times more in personal enjoyment. You seldom do something with your professional life that has character, dignity, and signiﬁcance” (McGhee 44). Still, Matewan’s miniscule budget made Wexler’s task difﬁcult. For the most part, the picture’s mise-en-scène is dark and foreboding. The most dramatic shots occur at night, with a minimal amount of artiﬁcial lighting. Sayles and Wexler decided on a “natural look” that would add “weight and tangibility to objects and people,” giving the ﬁlm “psychological realism,” the feeling that the image presented is as true to life as possible (Thinking in Pictures 72). The mining sequence that opens the ﬁlm looks authentic, especially when compared with period mine shots from other ﬁlms. The Molly Maguires (1970), for instance, used stagy, over-lit mine interiors, giving the mine sequences an artiﬁcial look. Of course, ﬁlm speeds and camera technology have advanced since then, but Sayles sought veracity for Matewan to enhance the ﬁlm’s verisimilitude. Sayles shot 70 percent of Matewan outdoors, much of that at night. Like the interior shots of the coal mine, additional supplemental light reveals the characters’ faces, but without sacriﬁcing the naturalistic look and psychological realism Sayles and Wexler felt the ﬁlm demanded. For instance, the light and dark tones created by both natural shadows and below-frame lighting of C.E. Lively (Bob Gunton) illustrates his Janus nature. Half his face is often lost in shadow, whether he is inside or outside, indicating duplicity. Sayles and Wexler work well together, matching their writing and visual talents— though Sayles is not the sidelines screenwriter he was when working for Corman. The ﬁreside scene between Few Clothes ( James Earl Jones) and Kenehan illustrates this fusion of writing and photography, the poetry of psychological realism. The strikers send Few Clothes to kill Joe, who they believe is a company spy. The miner ﬁnds Joe alone by a ﬁre at the strikers’ camp. Few Clothes, carrying an old pistol, sits facing the ﬁre in proﬁle; Joe, looking into the ﬁre, faces the camera. Joe subtly reacts to Few Clothes’s nervousness. Distracted, Few Clothes ponders his mission while staring into the ﬁre, for he is not convinced of the validity of his mission. Sayles and Wexler strive to capture the facial reactions of both characters, which is virtually impossible under normal lighting conditions because their physical responses accent Sayles’s dialogue and the scene’s dramatic tension. Artiﬁcial lighting from below or off to the sides of the frame would rob the scene of its authenticity. Morris Flam, the gaffer, “rigged up a ﬁrelight unit that threw ﬂame-like illumination on the actor’s faces from below the frame line, giving Haskell enough exposure to keep them in focus and read their expressions” (Thinking in Pictures 78). The ﬂickering ﬁrelight adds a shifting effect to each character’s face, highlighting the dramatic ﬂux that propels the scene. Joe’s face remains open, composed, lacking tension. Few Clothes is tense, the weight of his thoughts hanging on every breath. Every time Joe speaks to Few Clothes, he seems to startle the large miner out of deep thought. Joe asks about the gun Few Clothes carries, “You ever use one of those?” Although Joe does not know Few Clothes’s true purpose, his question rings with meaning. Challenged, Few Clothes clinches his jaw and answers, “Yeah. Tenth Cavalry, in Cuba, back in ninety-eight.” Separated by the ﬁre, the men occupy opposing sides of the frame, signifying their division—Kenehan is an outsider; Few Clothes is now part of the mining group. Sayles’s dialogue also underscores separation: Joe is a paciﬁst; Few Clothes, once a soldier, knows and understands violence.

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Sayles and Wexler further accent the gulf between the violent man and the peaceful man. Few Clothes tries to work up hatred for Joe, asking him if he is a “Red.” Wexler photographs Few Clothes in even less light; the shadows on his bulky face make him look ominous. Joe answers that he is, indeed, a “Red,” which, in the age of the Palmer raids, makes him anti–American. Few Clothes asks Joe why he is not armed. Joe, his face illuminated by the campﬁre, suggesting he has nothing to hide, says, “We carry little round bombs. Don’t you read the papers?” Joe smiles. Few Clothes laughs, but his contradictory emotions return quickly to his face. Because Joe is shot in revealing light, Wexler shoots Joe in revealing light, giving his character more credence, justiﬁable because Joe is committed to the commonweal. These small exchanges have not completely convinced Few Clothes that Joe is innocent of the charges leveled against him. Joe seems, because of his paciﬁsm, to be a walking contradiction. Sayles saves Joe’s dramatic explanation of his moral philosophy for this point in the ﬁlm. Shot in a tight close-up, Joe recalls his time at Fort Leavenworth, a disciplinary camp for World War I conscientious objectors. Martin Norden, writing about the ﬁlm’s theological underpinnings, describes “Few Clothes hanging on Joe’s every word” (Sayles Talk 106). Shadows from the ﬂickering ﬁre add to the seriousness of his beliefs. With compassion, he tells Few Clothes about the federal abuse inﬂicted on a group of Mennonites, a religious sect known for its anti-violent stance, and their conscientious objector position: “They were handcuffed to the bars of a cellhouse, eight hours a day for two full weeks. They were put with their arms up like this so’s they had to stand on their toes or those cuffs would cut into their wrists.” As Norden suggests in his essay, “Joe deﬁnes himself as a radical, if in an understated way” (106). Further, he points out Kenehan’s contradictory nature: “It would be difﬁcult to imagine two groups more different in their beliefs and strategies than 1920s-style union agitators and members of an organized religion, but Sayles succeeds in conﬂating qualities of both to create the character of Joe” (107). Matewan addresses the abuse of power and the limits of freedom; this soliloquy examines these themes in microcosm, with Wexler’s photography adding visual metaphoric energy to the scene. In the face of impossible odds, the Mennonites stood up for their beliefs. Joe’s passionate admiration of their civil disobedience and steadfast conviction is obvious. Few Clothes, recognizing Joe’s honesty, is nonplussed; he wants to serve the strikers, but he now knows killing Joe is wrong. Sayles and Wexler also juxtapose language and visual imagery to underline the pull violence has on the American imagination in an inventive scene involving Danny and Hillard. The boys are on their way to the coal yard to steal some coal for the strikers’ camp. As they near the top of the coal hill, they turn to look at the river valley as the sun sets. Wexler’s camera records the panoramic beauty of the West Virginia hills in autumn. Stretched out on a grassy slope, the boys take in the bucolic scene and talk. They could be Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn planning an adventure. Sayles, however, countervails idyllic imagery with hard dialogue. Danny points and says, “See there, right there by the railroad trestle? ‘At’s where Cap Hatﬁeld an’ his boy Joe Glenn kilt three men. Boy weren’t but thirteen.” Danny’s historic account changes the way we see the hollow. The boys see the bloody history of the landscape, not its natural beauty. Their dialogue indicates that they know the type of gun the father and son used to kill three men; moreover, the surname Hatﬁeld connects violence from the past with the present. Danny asks, “Think it hurts much, a bullet?” Hillard responds, “Beats dyin’ in a damn coal mine.” Violence is accepted, early death almost a

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certainty. Danny wonders how a boy of 13 could kill, but he also understands violence as elemental to the West Virginia landscape and its history. “Cinematography,” writes Sayles, “is a good model for the entire process of making a movie” (Thinking in Pictures 71). Balancing the technical elements—focal length, f-stop, depth-of-ﬁeld, focus, movement—with the artistic elements—light and shadow, contrast, color, diffusion—makes the job of a photographer difﬁcult. Not only do Sayles and Wexler share political values, championing progressive causes, but they also share aesthetic and artistic sensibilities. James Monaco sums up a Wexler ﬁlm well: It “has some guts to it, and a cinematic precision which heightens his basically naturalistic style” (119). Wexler is both a documentary ﬁlmmaker and a cinematographer, straddling the worlds of nonﬁction and art, a reporter and a designer. Sayles too brings a visceral attitude to his work, along with an artisan’s precision, and a desire to tell real stories. Stylistically, Wexler and Sayles communicate in an unadorned language, both driven by the need to tell stories of common people. In Matewan, Sayles and Wexler bring their shared concerns to the screen with strength and compassion. Sayles gives Wexler credit for taking the “story off the page” and putting it “back into pictures” that are “appropriately beautiful, never gratuitously drawing you away from the story with their look” (Thinking in Pictures 80). Wexler, however, is quick to point out what working with Sayles means: “This movie is thoroughly his picture. I’m thoroughly his servant. I’m not called on for creative input; he has it so completely in mind” (McGhee 46). Once again, selecting actors illustrates Sayles’s total involvement in the creation of his pictures. Matewan features unknown actors, usually stage trained, people with talent but not recognition, or people who have never acted before. Indeed, the actors in Matewan look and sound as if they belong to the West Virginia hills. Sayles feels that an audience will forgive both artistic and technical errors in a production if “there are strong, believable characters to get involved with, and this means getting the right people in front of the camera” (Thinking in Pictures 45). For example, when casting the role of Joe Kenehan, Sayles had deﬁnite physical and personal traits in mind: We were after someone in his late twenties or early thirties, someone who seemed very American in a Midwestern, Henry Fonda–Gary Cooper kind of way, somebody who could be smart and down to earth at the same time, someone the audience and the characters would take seriously but who has some sense of humor [Thinking in Pictures 47–48].

Sayles seeks actors audiences can identify with, not stars that change the impact of a ﬁlm with their mere presence. Now a regular, Barbara Shapiro handled casting for Sayles and his production team. They concentrated on the search for Joe, Elma, Danny, and Few Clothes. Chris Cooper was selected as Joe Kenehan early on because of the naturalism he brought to his casting performance, reading Sayles’s lines as if they were his, not merely typewriting on a page: Joe’s voice became Chris Cooper’s voice. Mary McDonnell (a relatively unknown stage actress at the time) secured the part of Elma because of her talent, experience, and the ability, Sayles notes, to “convey Elma’s hard past and knowledge of a hard future without ‘playing’ it” (Thinking in Pictures 50). Shapiro discovered Will Oldham through the Actor’s Theater of Louisville, which proved to be a lucky break for Sayles. “Writing a large, difﬁcult part for anyone under twenty is a self-destructive act and I consider myself lucky to have escaped so successfully this time around” (Thinking in Pictures 50). For Few Clothes, “the John Henry of the coal ﬁelds” (Thinking in Pictures 51), Sayles

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Matewan (1987): James Earl Jones unexpectedly accepted John Sayles’s invitation to perform the role of Few Clothes in this period piece based on the Matewan Massacre, even after Sayles warned the star about conditions on an independent ﬁlm set. Jones was the ﬁrst well-known actor to work with Sayles. Jones ﬁlls the role with energy, intelligence, and integrity (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives).

needed an actor with physical presence and fortitude, someone who could keep his head high in the racial climate of the rural South in 1920. Although James Earl Jones seemed ideal for the part, Sayles’s dealings with actors and their agents told him that the veteran actor was too expensive. Eventually, however, Sayles sent Jones a script with a preamble full of warnings about Matewan’s budget and his own brand of ﬁlmmaking. Jones returned a simple “yes” (Thinking in Pictures 51). Typically, casting Matewan was full of gambles, luck, and intuitive decisions. As Kenehan, Cooper delivers the two most political and powerful speeches in the ﬁlm. His rationale for nonviolent action must be believable because it is incongruous with labor history. During the 1980s, many top-grossing ﬁlms dealt with military subjects, a manifestation of Reaganism, increased military spending, and violence. Joe Kenehan countervails Hollywood’s hero worshiping trend. Joe is the mysterious stranger, a guy, according to Sayles, “trying to preach turning the other cheek in the land of an eye for an eye” (Thinking in Pictures 16). At the ﬁrst meeting of the West Virginia strikers, Joe listens as C.E. Lively exhorts the men to violence against the coal company scabs; it is not difﬁcult to sway the miners. In order to make Kenehan a believable character, Cooper must accomplish two things: He must convince his audience that he has the strength of conviction to lead a union strike, and he must rebut Lively’s knee-jerk endorsement of violence. He begins by telling

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the men that they are nothing more than equipment to a coal company that does not care whether they are white, black, or immigrants as long as they can dig coal, because if they cannot dig, there is always a replacement nearby. Cooper animates Kenehan’s indictment of the strikers by casting unblinking looks at the group, taking full control of the room by elevating his voice, which is spiked with anger and understanding. He then points to Few Clothes (who has sought out the strikers), to illustrate the results of both racial hatred and coal-company ruthlessness. Joe says: You think this man is your enemy? Huh? This is a worker! Any union keeps this man out ain’t a union, it’s a goddamn club! They got you ﬁghtin’ white against colored, native against foreign, hollow against hollow, when you know that there ain’t but two sides in this world—them that work and them that don’t. You work, they don’t. That’s all you get to know about the enemy.

Sayles’s language describes unionism as an ideal—unions mean sacriﬁce for something beyond individual well-being—and Cooper’s acting gives his words backbone. In order to drive home the problems with violence, Joe points out the fact that any armed resistance is bound to fail because not only does the coal company not want the union, neither does the state or the federal government. The use of violence will only give the opposition, which is larger and more powerful than a small band of West Virginia miners, the excuse they need to crush the strike and set an example across the country. Making his idea perfectly clear to these miners, Joe says, “You don’t go shooting the solid if you can undermine the face, do you?” The mining analogy, which means that trying to dynamite the strongest part of a coal vein is a foolish waste of time, makes the strikers think. Cooper’s delivery and Sayles’s dialogue make Joe Kenehan real. This is not a hightoned, ideological stump speech; this is plain language, charged with common sense. James Earl Jones carries the power of physical presence and vocal authority. Sayles notes that as an actor Jones understood the strength and intelligence Few Clothes needed in order to keep his men alive so far from Alabama. When Turley, the company man, recites the cost of housing, equipment, and food to the new black miners, Few Clothes asks, “What’s keeping y’all from jackin’ up them prices in your store?” Few Clothes also convinces the scab miners to join the strikers during the night scene at the driftmouth. Jones, however, did not “want his character to be a revisionist black man. ‘This is 1920 and he’s a black man from Alabama behind enemy lines. If he talks back, he knows that the next thing to happen may be a noose around his neck’ ” (Past Imperfect 26). Still, Jones’s weight and baritone voice make his scenes resonate. In addition, he brought recognizable star power to a Sayles production for the ﬁrst time in Sayles’s ﬁlmmaking career. Will Oldham’s Danny Radnor is a pastiche of youth and wisdom—still a boy yet committed to his community and its existence. As written, the character requires a versatile actor who is young, bright, articulate, able to work with adults, and, ideally, from the South. “Danny had to still be boy enough to make his preaching and organizing seem precious, had to be down to earth enough to make him believable as a coal miner,” writes Sayles, “country enough to place him in West Virginia in the twenties and a good enough actor to pull off long sermons, speeches and emotional scenes” (Thinking in Pictures 50). Until Will Oldham auditioned, Sayles considered cutting the part back to ﬁt the talents of another young actor. Thematically, Matewan turns on the question of violence. Because Danny is not as reactionary as Hillard, a fact that Sayles presents in the beginning of the ﬁlm when the West Virginia strikers confront the black scabs, the possibility exists that he might listen

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Will Oldham (now Bonnie Prince Billy) made his screen début in Matewan at age 17. As Danny Radnor, a miner and a preacher, Oldham displayed his acting talent, especially when he faces off against an anti-union hardshell preacher portrayed by John Sayles.

to the message Kenehan tries to sell the strikers. Joe struggles to change Danny’s point of view to his own; he wants Danny, in Sayles’s words, to “see beyond the cycle of blood feuds and meaningless revenge the company fosters among the miners” (Thinking in Pictures 19). Indeed, when Danny picks up a gun at the end of the ﬁlm to avenge Hillard’s murder, the kid with the gun in his hands must be the same kid who earlier played catch and talked about his favorite major leaguers. Oldham looks right, sounds right, and he can act. For example, he must show us that he can swing between the value systems of the local missionaries, the hardshell Baptists and the softshell Baptists. Essentially the groups represent Old Testament and New Testament teachings; that is, the hardshells value righteousness and retribution, the softshells value peace and justice. Two of Oldham’s major scenes revolve around the Church. In one, Danny contradicts an evangelical hardshell (Sayles, himself ), who equates the union movement with “Beelzebub,” Satan. Danny, who is waiting his turn to preach, looks upon the hardshell with disbelief and disgust, even though he takes pride in preaching to both softshell and hardshell Baptist congregations. He believes that people’s earthly task is to help one another. Preaching to the congregation, Danny tells a story of unfair wages for unequal work in a biblical vineyard—relating Jesus’ parable of the vineyard found in Matthew 20: 1–16. Clearly, Danny is a natural born storyteller who subscribes to a moral, just society. In “The Theo-Political Landscape of Matewan,” Martin F. Norden highlights Danny’s

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thematic signiﬁcance: “Embodying an almost perfect balance of secular and theological concerns, Danny serves as Sayles’s primary vehicle for expressing Matewan’s blend of religious and unionization issues” (107). Moral storytelling, the desire to improve life, not debase it, drives Danny’s character. In the central scene of Matewan’s third section, Danny preaches to his congregation to save Joe’s life after learning C.E. Lively has encouraged Bridey Mae (Nancy Mette), a young woman in love with Kenehan, to spread lies about his loyalty. Some of the mines plan to kill Kenehan because of his perceived betrayal. Oldham delivers this secular gospel with conviction, fear, and courage, for two Baldwin-Felts agents, Hickey and Griggs (Kevin Tighe; Gordon Clapp), have threatened to kill Danny and his mother if word leaks out. Faced with contradicting a striker’s order to kill Kenehan in front of the two drunken Baldwin-Felts thugs who sit cackling in a rear pew, Danny uses the Old Testament story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife to communicate Joe’s innocence to the softshell congregation. Oldham delivers Sayles’s speech with intensity, his voice cracking slightly when his emotions threaten his composure, but by the conclusion of the sermon, everyone except the secular, profane Baldwin-Felts agents understands Danny’s biblical analogy. Perhaps Danny’s most important speech and Oldham’s most important acting turn comes in a confrontation with Joe. Here he boldly states the economic and political machinations at work in Matewan: First people come in here to help us with some money, and next we know we got no land. Then they say they gonna help us with a job and a place to live. So they put us in some damn coal camp and let us dig out their mines. Now you come in and want to help us bring in the new day. But Hillard ain’t gonna see no new day. We had about as much help as we can stand. We got to take care of ourselves.

Oldham’s delivery makes each word sting. The Old Testament wins out. Revenge alone will relieve the pain of history Danny knows too well. Joe Kenehan, the idealist, has lost. But Danny’s change from moral storyteller to destroyer is not melodramatic; Sayles and Oldham record his ambivalence vividly. Even Joe understands why he is unable to stop Danny’s desire for revenge. The violent action also upends Danny’s mother, Elma Radnor (Mary McDonnell). McDonnell conveys Elma’s movement from exhaustion to retribution with nuance. In every scene in which she appears, Elma is working—cleaning, bandaging, feeding. Wexler’s photography and Nora Chavooshian’s set design accent Elma’s condition. Her home, a Stone Mountain Coal Company boardinghouse, is visually oppressive; the expository shots of its exterior are all low-angle shots, giving the building a dominant look, not unlike the coal tower, a sign of entrapment, conﬁnement. Indeed, Elma is surrounded by the building as the miners are by the coal mine, yet until she conﬁdes in Joe that she is exhausted, we take her work for granted. With skill, Sayles presents the condition of women in the coal camps though Elma. “I been workin’,” she says. “The day they buried my husband I started and I been workin’—it don’t never stop and I’m so tired sometimes and there ain’t nobody.” But there is no collective organizing to help Elma, or women like her. During the ﬁnal shoot-out Elma kills a Baldwin-Felts agent with a shotgun blast at close range. The years of work and anger reach a violent catharsis, denoting a complete turnaround for a woman striving to keep life under control to protect her son. Like Sayles’s male actors, McDonnell employs a “neonaturalistic style of performance,” which results in a realistic depiction in a “remarkable, honest, straightforward, and complex representation” (More Than a Method 173).

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David Strathairn brings a powerful sense of menace to Sid Hatﬁeld, who represents the ﬁlm’s sense of brooding violence. In the beginning of the ﬁlm, he looms over the other characters like a malevolent guardian angel. For example, on the ﬁrst night of the strike, he is photographed in a low-angle shot on the wooden walkway of Main Street, hovering over Few Clothes, who is walking along the dirt road looking for C.E. Lively’s restaurant, where the miners are meeting. Here, Hatﬁeld dominates the mise-en-scène. Later that night, Sid greets Joe as the organizer returns to Elma’s after the union meeting ends. In a reprise of the earlier shot, Sid dominates the upper half of the frame, hanging over Joe, full of vengeance. The lawman tells Kenehan, “I take care of my people. You bring ’em trouble and you’re a dead man.” Sid carries a sense of deep connection with the West Virginia miners, his people, whom he has sworn to protect by any means necessary. As Dianne Carson notes, Strathairn deﬁnes the “Sayles male.” Strathairn plays Sid Hatﬁeld in an understated manner, creating a loner, “detached but caring” (More Than a Method 185) who subscribes to the frontier code of violence. Sayles conveys Sid’s distrust of outsiders through his mise-en-scène we see. Sid detests the Baldwin-Felts agents because of who they are and because of what they are—desperate, violent men from cities and farms willing to take any job for money, including killing striking miners. At a company eviction, he single-handedly faces off with Hickey and Griggs and their lackeys. After telling Hickey that he knows his boss, Mr. Thomas Felts,

Sayles regulars Kevin Tighe, left front, and Gordon Clapp, right front, playing Baldwin-Felts agents Hickey and Griggs, and David Strathairn, as Sheriff Sid Hatﬁeld, appear in this eviction scene from Matewan. With a cigarette dangling from his lips, his gun exposed, and his badge in full view, Strathairn’s Sid Hatﬁeld is ready for trouble. Hatﬁeld dominates the shot; his control is never in doubt. Even the Baldwin-Felts agents fear him.

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Sid stares the agent dead in the eye and delivers the ﬁlm’s only humorous line: “I wouldn’t pee on him if his heart was on ﬁre.” His boldness shocks Joe, who says he never saw a lawman stand up to a company gun. Sid does not even acknowledge Joe’s presence. Hatﬁeld lives by his own code of honor, the knight-errant of the West Virginia coalﬁelds, and Sayles typically shoots him alone within the frame, using edits to link him to other characters, further deepening his singular status. As numerous critics pointed out, Hickey and Griggs seem too vile to be true. History, however, validates Sayles’s characterization. Baldwin-Felts agents relied on an image of invincibility to intimidate miners into submission. Historically, coalﬁeld violence was common, especially when strikes or labor organizing were involved. American classrooms neglect labor unrest, however. From Ludlow, Colorado, to Lattimer, Pennsylvania, to Matewan, West Virginia, American history is rife with stories of coal company terrorism. Formed to combat police controlled by mine owners, Pennsylvania’s Molly Maguires were, perhaps, the most well-know example of a collective response to coal company strongarming. “There were,” according to Sayles, “things that the Baldwin-Felts agents had done, things so Simon Legreeish that if I had put them into the screenplay for Matewan no one would have believed it” (Hodel 4). The examples Sayles cites include the lacing of a Red Cross shipment of milk for the striking miners’ children with kerosene and random shooting sprees through coal camps meant to remind the workers who possessed real control. Speaking with Gavin Smith, Sayles addresses his characters Hickey and Griggs and the claim that their critical reception: They were basically hired killers. But a lot of people have said the same thing, and my only reaction is that from what I was reading, these guys were basically hired to break heads and, if needed, kill people. It really was, “This guy is giving us trouble—he’s got to go,” and they’d disappear in the woods somewhere. Basically, they were the same as the regulators in the West that [Michael] Cimino tried to get into a little in Heaven’s Gate [Sayles on Sayles 127].

As a pair Hickey and Griggs function as a synecdoche for the entire Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Sayles’s script uses them as exact opposites from Danny and Joe. From a class perspective, they are no different from the people they terrorize for pay. They are working-class men who have taken on the air of urbanites. All the Baldwin-Felts agents wear suits, an incongruous mode of dress in rugged West Virginia, which sets them apart from the miners, who dress like laborers, not bankers; this costuming, while historically accurate, makes the labor/capital division obvious. Hickey conﬁrms his social position in a speech to Danny. After catching the boy in his room, where Danny heard about the plan to kill Kenehan, Hickey tells Danny about his experience in World War I. He recalls how he single-handedly killed a large number of German soldiers. As Tighe plays the scene, Hickey’s joy in killing and his willingness to use his combat training to kill again emerge. Having been honored by his country for killing people holds an ironic appeal for Hickey. For each character he created for Matewan, Sayles wrote up a short biographic sheet, a Stanislavsky-inspired rumination on a character’s life experience. Sayles describes Hickey as Joe’s foil: “In a way he has as much political analysis as Joe, it’s just that he has taken the cynical rather than idealistic path and has sided with who he thinks the winners will be” (Thinking in Pictures 94). Hickey is smart and calculating, and therefore, he contrasts Griggs, who is violent to the core, a one-dimensional, dim-witted killer. Sayles works against stereotypes in all his writing, both ﬁction and ﬁlm. In Matewan, with the exception of Griggs, he tried to give even the negative characters something else

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to play besides pure evil. For example, C.E. Lively, though a spy for the company, earns respect for his cold intelligence. Likewise, Bass, James, and Doolin, three Baldwin agents recruited through a newspaper ad for the ﬁnal confrontation, are introduced as a trio of working stiffs rather than, as Sayles says, as “poker-faced grim reapers bent on murder” (Thinking in Pictures 22). Indeed, Doolin is a feckless innocent who does not understand he is little more than cannon fodder for the agency. The information Sayles provides about Hickey is not an “excuse or a Freudian explanation for his actions,” but it is meant to give the character “room to breathe, to remind us that the man’s life is not contained by this one incident in it, as well as to establish him as a guy familiar with killing” (Thinking in Pictures 22). Sayles makes Griggs a sociopath so when he slits Hillard’s throat without remorse even Hickey expresses shock; he turns away, muttering “Jesus, Griggs,” as Hillard jerks spasmodically while his life leaks away near a railroad car. Although it may be difﬁcult for a sophisticated audience to accept absolute malevolence on the part of the Baldwin-Felt agents, it is necessary to keep in mind that the roots of coalﬁeld oppression were political and economic. Matewan shows us, as Denise Giardina points out, that the “methods of economic oppression used by the exploiters of foreign, supposedly less fortunate, regions have also been common” in America (445). People like Hickey and Griggs are required to carry out the ground-level portion of such oppression. Believability is essential to the illusion of a period piece. Without precise set design, a serious drama can become an unintended comedy. Matewan’s production design is impeccable, a remarkable achievement considering the $90,000 art department budget. Nora Chavooshian, who worked on Baby, It’s You and Brother from Another Planet, her ﬁrst ﬁlm as full production designer, made Matewan believable. Like most Sayles personnel, she is efﬁcient, creative, and quick. Matewan was a major undertaking, and Chavooshian’s work exceeded demands. Recreating a historical period on ﬁlm inﬂuences the narrative. Hollywood costume dramas, for example, often used the past for its value as spectacle. Or, as Sayles wryly points out, the past has been used to recall a simpler, more moral time period, which probably never existed except in private mythology. For Sayles, design is necessary for “what it evokes subjectively in the audience” (Thinking in Pictures 54). Images in Matewan show “the muscle and effort it took to build anything up in the wilderness of those hills, to feel like even the newest things were used and worn” (Thinking in Pictures 54). Elma’s home, for instance, underscores these values. The company’s overarching presence dominates Elma, yet she displays intelligence and understanding, and she is part of the mining community. Elma contrasts with Bridey Mae, whose lonely cabin sits outside of Matewan, suggesting her desperate desire to share her life with someone as well as her dislocation from the community. These structures indicate the psychological makeup of both women. In Elma’s case, the exterior and interior of her home, particularly her dining room, evidence a contrast fundamental to her character. The exterior of her home is worn white and green, a color scheme Chavooshian uses to indicate the company’s ownership of property and people. Elma’s dining room, on the other hand, is warm and civilized, standing in stark contrast to other interiors in the ﬁlm, an indication Elma wants a life beyond the coalﬁeld, beyond the holler—hope for something better. Hers is not an overtly elegant eating room, but it has patterned wallpaper, tablecloths, and soft light. When Hickey and Griggs enter the space, the lightening scheme darkens, blemishing the communal eating space. Chavooshian’s set design shapes Matewan’s mood: “The life these people led was incredibly hard,” she remarks, “so the look we were going for was extremely gritty”

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(Seidenberg 46). Accuracy counted. Chavooshian sought dilapidated structures, trying to avoid the mistake of so many period productions, which is to use buildings that have a newer look. Nothing in Matewan looks new. Most important to the story is the inescapable domination of the company, an essential part of Sayles’s psychological realism and the social realism contained within the narrative. Sayles deliberately divorced the company owners from the ﬁlm, suggesting they would not soil themselves among the rabble, the dirty work. However, their heavy presence needed stands out in Chavooshian’s color scheme, which demarcates the Matewan power brokers and the coal miners. She used large signs that read Property of Stone Mountain Coal Company or Owned by Stone Mountain Coal Company to dominate Main Street. All the company property is marked with the simple white and park-bench green, indicating Stone Mountain’s omnipresence. Working with her production team, Chavooshian laid down a quarter mile of dirt with a heavy clay content to make Matewan’s Main Street authentic. The original town of Matewan, West Virginia, proved to be too modern in appearance, so Thurmond, West Virginia, a ramshackle river town that needed minimal redesign work, stands in for Matewan. Thurmond, which sits on the ﬂoodplain of the New River, enveloped by steep hills, retained its pre–World War I brick buildings, its water tanks, its railroad yard, and its coal-dock tower. According to Sayles, it had the “blend of natural beauty and industrial function” the production team was looking for (Thinking in Pictures 57). Chavooshian agreed: “This town just looked so unusual. And even though there were additions and things we had to remove, the buildings are from the mid to late 1800s; they’re period-correct” (Seidenberg 45). Their Matewan does not ask viewers to step into a soft, sepiatinged photo; this town has witnessed hard times. Cynthia Flynt’s costumes, like the set design, accent the mood of the ﬁlm, the characters’ psychology, and propel Sayles’s story. Period ﬁlms like McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Godfather Part II used diffusion and ﬁlm-fogging techniques to mute natural color and create period imagery. Operating on a much smaller budget, Matewan’s production team could not use these techniques. Texture, color, and design establish its period look. The costumes in the ﬁlm are part of this scheme; they are old, worn, and utilitarian. Only the Baldwin-Felts agents and Sid Hatﬁeld wear clothes not meant for rugged work—they dress for the business of death. The palette for the costumes was limited—blacks, grays, browns, rugged blues, and deep greens, which complement the environment. In addition, a ﬁne mist of black paint covered the costumes and most of the buildings, giving the actors and the sets a weary, used-up appearance. Community, now a fundamental theme in all of Sayles’s ﬁlms, is established ﬁrst by sound and then by image. Each mining camp—those of West Virginian strikers, Alabama blacks, and Italian immigrants—is compartmentalized when the ﬁlm begins, separated by race, culture, and armed guards. Mason Daring’s musical score, however, recognizes no barriers: mountain ﬁddle and dobro mix with a blues harmonica; in turn, they mix with a mandolin. As Sayles explains, “This nonverbal musical fusion is the ﬁrst step in forming a union out of people initially suspicious of each other” (Thinking in Pictures 109). At the outset, these few instruments, as spare as the ﬁlm’s color scheme, seek each other out and begin to mesh. Finally, all three players come together in a single scene, playing with the intuitive understanding and awareness of musicians who know no abstract borders. This integration sequence shows how music crosses racial and cultural barriers, initiating the blending of these diverse people, illustrating the nascent power in their union movement.

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In the manner of John Ford, Sayles and Daring employ music to celebrate how people can connect in the creation of something humane, uplifting. Sayles uses music to boost some scenes, notably those of the men walking out of the mine, the construction of the tent camp, and the baseball and organizing montages. Each sequence is upbeat and positive, and Pappy Dan’s voice-over narration accent some of them. These examples all involve group activities leading to understanding, not division. His musical choices—a union marching song, a down-home instrumental of “Avanti Populo,” an old Italian workers’ song—have, in his words, “a feeling of communal energy and high spirits” (Thinking in Pictures 111). Because Sayles is dealing with racial and cultural issues in Matewan, some established, recognizable music was necessary. For example, when the scab miners turn their backs on the company and join the union during the driftmouth night sequence, Sayles and Daring wanted two versions of “Avanti Populo” to comment on each sequence and act as a transitional device. After Few Clothes and Fausto ( Joe Grifasi) throw down their company shovels, Fausto whistles and then begins to sing “Avanti Populo.” Joining in, the strikers, all tired and worn, begin to relax, even with the tension created by the possibility of violence, as the song spreads. Yet, because the song is not a rousing, foot-stomping version, there is also some apprehension in the voices of the miners, for nothing can blunt their reality. The strikers’ camp, however, announces the “new day” Joe Kenehan cleaves to so desperately—his “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” A country ﬁddle picks up the melody of “Avanti Populo,” bringing strength and hope to Sayles’s images. The miners’ prospects have changed. Using a country ﬁddle to play the traditional Italian tune, Sayles marks the integration of the competing ethnic groups. Visually we see the three disparate groups coalesce into a single unit. The ﬁddle reminds us that music was the ﬁrst step in this necessary fusion. More subtle musical comments appear throughout Matewan. For the most part, a harmonica and a dobro set the mood or announce a transition from one scene to another. Daring played the dobro. Sayles employed John Hammond, a noted Delta blues musician, to record the harmonica tracks. “Working with John,” Sayles writes, “was similar to working with an actor—our discussions were about feelings and colors of emotion rather than musical technicalities, and his playing ‘breathed’ with the movie rather than forcing itself upon it” (Thinking in Pictures 111). Music, then, bolsters Matewan, as it did Baby, It’s You. Sayles recounts that during the worst days of the drawn-out fund raising, he and his production team would listen to Hazel Dickens’s recording of “Beautiful Hills of Galilee,” a traditional ballad heard over the ﬁnal credits. Sayles also had actors listen to the ballad before they began character discussions (Thinking in Pictures 113). At Hillard’s funeral, the climactic emotional turning point in the ﬁlm, Dickens sings Daring’s “The Gathering Storm,” a ballad of Old Testament retribution, in an a cappella performance that is more than background music. Joe Kenehan listens as Danny delivers a rambling farewell to his friend, not the focused words of the young Baptist preacher heard previously. Sephus tells Joe that his idea of “one big union” no longer applies to people “who can’t see beyond this holler.” Sephus then walks toward Sid Hatﬁeld, now surrounded by a growing number of miners. Joe’s cause is lost. Dickens’s dirge becomes a lament for both Hillard and Joe. “There is a sense of tragic destiny in many hill ballads,” writes Sayles, “and the expression of that resignation to doom is as palpable an antagonist to Joe as the Baldwin-Felts agents are” (Thinking in Pictures 113). The funeral preﬁgures the violence to come. When the gun battle occurs, Dickens’s

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voice, which carries, as Sayles says, “all the mournfulness and strength of the hill tradition” (Thinking in Pictures 113), has prepared us for this last desperate act. With Joe Kenehan goes idealism and the possibility of human understanding—there will be no escape from the gathering storm. The gun battle points up Sayles’s development as an editor. On Matewan, he again worked with Sonya Polonsky. With each new ﬁlm, Sayles expands his editing techniques, which is, of course, a fundamental aspect of any cinematic narrative. For example, the opening sequence of the ﬁlm stands out; it communicates the isolation of the miners and their deﬁance. Leaving the mine, the strikers, who are obviously happy and united, pass by reminders of the mining company’s power—bookended by coal cars, shuttered company stores, armed guards. While the strike represents a positive gesture on the part of the miners, the system of oppression still surrounds them. Sayles lets this sequence unfold at a controlled pace, creating a realistic sense of camaraderie sobered by the presence of the company. His editing creates the sense of real time: “The way I work with an editor is the way I work with an actor—I’m very speciﬁc. I talk about it, they do it, and then it’s Take 2” (Sayles on Sayles 137). In editing the night sequence before the gun battle, Sayles selects shots long, with few cuts, underlining the feeling of impending violence, which the narrative has approached numerous times but never completely realized. Now, however, full-scale violence is inescapable. We see Elma walk into her dining room holding a lamp. Sleeping BaldwinFelts agents, most fresh hires, occupy the entire room—her place of civility now piled up with thugs. Elma’s lamp rests on Doolin, who stares at the camera, frozen with fear, still not sure what he must do to earn a few dollars. The scene is slow, deliberately drawn out. A cut to Sid Hatﬁeld shows him cleaning his gun with emotionless professionalism; this man knows he may die in the morning, but he goes about his task with precision and stoic determination. Sayles used a similar editing technique in the driftmouth night sequence. By reducing the time between cuts, Sayles creates immediate tension. The images are hand-held, giving the sequence an utterly realistic look, capturing the antagonism between scabs and strikers by cutting between close-ups of rocks and bludgeons held by burley, faceless men, to close-ups of the black and Italian scabs, sweating and scared. The blacks and Italians remain trapped between armed guards and strikers—they expect bullets from either side. Sayles cuts to a shot of Few Clothes, a shovel in his hand, moving toward Turley and the guards. This long take changes the rhythm of the sequence and releases the tension. Like Hatﬁeld, Few Clothes understands himself. Editing enhances narrative—it is one more draft. Danny’s sermons, for example, become stronger by cutting back in different camera angles. This technique strengthens these scenes, making Danny’s words resonate with more power than if Sayles used a common master shot: “For Matewan, we wanted the movie to reﬂect the pace of the time and the people” (Thinking in Pictures 117). Mining in 1920 was long, hard, slow work, punctuated only by an accident or worker unrest. By cleaving to this scheme and the natural cycle of day and night, Sayles achieved the “pace of a long, sad mountain ballad, a song of fate, revenge, and transcendence” (Thinking in Pictures 117). Matewan is, in the end, a story of profound loss. After the shoot-out is ends, Danny’s face appears as the camera tracks in on him. Only after seeing Joe dead does he understand the organizer’s ideals. Sayles suggests the struggle for equality is endless and seldom positive. Pappy Dan’s voice-over tells us that he “preached Union” from that point

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onward, and that Sid’s triumph was short-lived. The Baldwin-Felts agents took their revenge by shooting him 15 times as he walked unarmed into the Mingo County courthouse: “Then C.E. Lively stepped in and put one right through his skull.” The courts, Pappy says, ignored the murder. The Matewan Massacre and Sid’s death erupted into the Great Coalﬁeld War, which the miners lost after President Warren G. Harding brought in federal troops to break the strike. Pappy acknowledges that Joe was right: All workers can do is organize, because alone they do not stand a chance. Pappy says that he zealously promoted Joe’s philosophy after the Matewan Massacre: “That was my religion.” On screen, an old miner’s face appears—it is Pappy Dan. Like many before him, Danny returned to the mine with little to show for his struggles. His story stands in for many union stories. This history is personal, one posing hard questions about survival and fairness. Matewan stands unabashedly with the miners, focusing in on the moral ambiguity inherent in labor-owner conﬂicts. Matewan dramatizes real emotional lives, stories neglected and ignored. Workers, who in their isolation are vulnerable to the cruelest exploitation, are powerless, frightened, and victimized. Still, Matewan offers no easy answers. Pappy’s voice-over announces Danny’s struggle never ceased. Matewan deals with issues and people seldom seen on American screens—it remains noncommercial property. As Sayles says, Matewan has little to make it appealing: “The story [is] political, the hero an early socialist, the ending not upbeat and there is no room for a rock soundtrack” (Thinking in Pictures 41). In other words, it contains all the hallmarks of a John Sayles ﬁlm.

4

Cityscapes: Baseball’s Lost Souls and Urban Renewal Eight Men Out The American Game It was really the kickoff of the Roaring Twenties. A lot of cynicism that followed was certainly helped along by the idea that even America’s game, which was supposed to be pure and good—white ballplayers, green grass, and blue skies—could be corrupted. —John Sayles, Premiere

Like Matewan, Eight Men Out (1988), Sayles’s sixth feature ﬁlm, is a period piece, which details the 1919 World Series sellout by a group of Chicago White Sox ballplayers, who would become known as the Black Sox. The “Black Sox Scandal,” an inescapable part of American history, revolves around traditional American pastimes: baseball and corruption. But as Louis Giannetti and Scott Eyman point out, Sayles recalls a time when “Americans were genuinely shocked by corruption rather than subliminally expecting it, excusing it, and, by so doing, participating in it” (491–92). Eight Men Out tells an American story of greed and loss without cynical acceptance, the chic shoulder-shrugging common in many Hollywood productions. Moreover, the ﬁlm investigates complexities generally ignored or altogether forgotten. As he does in Matewan, Sayles explores the dynamics of a historical event with a contemporary eye adjusted to how the abuse of power ﬁlters down from the top. “The thing I like about [Eight Men Out] is that it attacks the sacred cows: the owners,” says Studs Terkel, the journalist and author who plays Hugh Fullerton in the ﬁlm. He continues: “We think of crooked players, but not of the role of the owners: double-crossing the players, paying them nothing.... Today we read of players making tremendous dough. But their careers are limited. And what about Sylvester Stallone, who hasn’t a ﬁnger of talent, making $12 million [for one ﬁlm]? Or Joan Collins? We never question that” (Linﬁeld 48). Sayles, however, does not draw such clear lines. In fact, he does not assign guilt to either the players or the owners; rather, Sayles, as always, allows his audience to decide for themselves. Terkel is not as sanguine: “We’re a society today that depends upon dough. I think that the players can be bought, here and there, today. But today a lot of fans are on the 113

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side of the owners. So this ﬁlm comes out at exactly the right time” (Linﬁeld 48). Indeed, the story of baseball’s best-known ﬁx still resonates, for economic exploitation and corruption are still part of the American story. The late Stephen Jay Gould, noted paleontologist and baseball fan, suggests that the Black Sox scandal has a continuing hold “upon the hearts and minds of baseball fans and, more widely, upon anyone fascinated with American history or human drama at its best” (xv). Among ﬁction writers, a cottage industry exists around the subject: The Seventh Babe, by Jerome Charyn, Harry Stein’s Hoopla, Charles Brady’s Seven Games in October, Brendan Boyd’s Blue Ruin, to name a few. F. Scott Fitzgerald even mentions the ﬁx in The Great Gatsby. American ﬁlm cannot escape the limitless possibilities the 1919 scandal offers. In The Godfather, Part II, mobster Hyman Roth casually sums up his appreciation for the game: “I loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein ﬁxed the World Series in 1919.” Rothstein, the gambler credited with organizing the ﬁx, manipulated both players and gamblers with an invisible grace that appealed to the unassuming yet powerful Roth, who, in his own way, sought to undermine the institutional strength of the Corleone family. In Field of Dreams (1989), Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of William Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe, Ray Kinsella, the heroic ﬂower child turned Iowa farmer, knows that if he builds a ballpark in his cornﬁeld, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, a 1919 White Sox player and one of the greatest hitters the game has ever known, will come there to play, an event that will at once recapture baseball’s past and relieve this romantic farmer’s guilt over his fractured relationship with his own father. Sayles’s ﬁrst screenplay was an adaptation of Eliot Asinof ’s Eight Men Out, the seminal book about the Black Sox and the 1919 World Series. Asinof, whom Sayles credits with doing the bulk of the research, came to recognize the players as workers, man caught in a labor trap. Such disparate writers and ﬁlmmakers, all attracted to the same material, illustrate Gould’s point. For Sayles, the story of the 1919 Black Sox allowed him to comment on the power structure that surrounds the playing ﬁeld and its far-reaching, insidious inﬂuence on the people who play the game. Baseball suffers from a public, intellectual, and artistic saccharine coating. In his famous quote about America, educator and historian Jacques Barzun observed, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game” (159). Barzun’s observation offers up baseball as a romantic pastoral, a game played on green grass, under clear blue skies, by fresh, clean, young athletes, with home as its focus. The late A. Bartlett Giamatti, Yale University scholar and administrator and commissioner of baseball, wrote with eloquence about the romantic, aesthetic purity of the national game: “Repetition within immutable lines and rules; baseball is counterpoint: stability vying with volatility, tradition with the quest for a new edge, ancient rhythms and ever-new blood—an oft-told tale, repeated in every game in every season, season after season” (95). Baseball is America’s romantic pasture, full of hope, celebration, and limitless possibility, enjoying an aura of innocence grounded by nostalgia. Giamatti’s words bury the game’s underbelly—its volatility; players seeking a fresh edge. The “Baseball Movie,” a genre incapable of meeting its advance billing, failing to recreate with ﬁdelity the game upon which it is based, suffers from romantic nostalgia, that desperate attempt to reclaim and recreate a dreamy past. According to Marvin Miller, the former executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, “Hollywood people know baseball from the sports press, and sportswriters are often like overgrown boys nostalgic for a past that never was” (Barra 21). Reiﬁcation is delightful, but truth is better. Sayles brings a hard-eyed, realistic approach to his vision of the game.

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Although Eight Men Out is not completely free of sentimentality and romantic appeal, Sayles deliberately grafts baseball to economic and class conﬂicts. Sayles’s game is about manipulation, big business, and cash, a perfect metaphor for the interaction between America’s social system and the lives of its workers. Average fans know the Black Sox as a group of players who betrayed their teammates, a nation of baseball fans, and the sacrosanct image of the game. Historic memory, however, reserves little space for Charles Albert Comiskey, owner of the White Sox, who, according to Gould, was “the meanest skinﬂint in baseball,” ﬂaunting his wealth while treating his players like peons (xvi). Arnold Rothstein, who “recognized the corruption in American society and made it his own” (Eight Men Out 24), remains shadowy, a ﬁgure known only to those who celebrate stealth and the unrestricted production of money. For Sayles, Comiskey (Clifton James) and Rothstein (Michael Lerner), two seemingly legitimate businessmen, are parasites who feed off the players. “The stuff that’s in the movie,” according to Sayles, “he [Comiskey] pulled all that and a lot worse” (Past Imperfect 16). Ironically, each man is historically celebrated for his own cunning brand of genius, while the players are remembered as pariahs, the men who corrupted the game. It was Rothstein and Comiskey, the power brokers, along with the players they bought and abused, who pulled the White Sox apart. Sayles based his picture on Eliot Asinof ’s Eight Men Out, ﬁrst published in 1963. Originally, David Susskind hired Asinof to write a script about the scandal for television’s Dupont Show of the Month. With help from James T. Farrell, the Chicago writer, Asinof completed his teleplay. However, Ford Frick, then Commissioner of Baseball, told the show’s sponsor that the Black Sox story was “not in the best interests of baseball,” and Asinof ’s work never made it to television. Instead, Asinof published Eight Men Out, and Sayles, introduced to the scandal by a Nelson Algren story, read the book. The book’s historical narrative intrigued Sayles, and he recognized its ﬁlm potential. In 1977 Sayles needed an audition piece for a Hollywood ﬁlm agency, so he wrote a screenplay, using Asinof ’s “leg-work,” only to ﬁnd out that the script was unusable. “When I went out to Los Angeles,” Sayles recalls, “they said, we love the screenplay, we want to represent you, but forget about the Black Sox Scandal because the rights have been in litigation for twenty years” (Schlesinger 2). In 1980, Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford production team acquired an option to the rights for Asinof ’s book. Still intrigued by the book’s complex cinematic potential, Sayles showed them his screenplay and expressed his desire to participate in the ﬁlm project. The producers agreed, and Sayles began what would become a long script-revision process. Sayles also invested $75,000 of his own money to secure the complete ﬁlm rights to the book. Both Sayles and Sanford-Pillsbury Productions were, relatively speaking, unknown at the time, even though Sayles had published novels and made ﬁlms, and Pillsbury had won an academy award for a short ﬁlm titled Board and Care (1979). By 1987, after a series of successes by both the producers and Sayles, Orion Pictures agreed to distribute the ﬁlm provided Sayles cast some young up-and-coming actors and that Sayles and the producers secure independent ﬁnancial backing. Once again, Sayles found himself working for a Hollywood studio. However, unlike Baby, It’s You, “Eight Men Out was interesting,” Sayles told historian Eric Foner, “in that all I had to pay—if you think you have to pay something for the price of admission to get the budget for the ﬁlm—was some casting” (Past Imperfect 15). Orion rejected Sayles’s script for Eight Men Out three times, and they were not wildly supportive of his ﬁnal screenplay. But because a baseball movie provides ample screen time

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for an ensemble cast, Sayles was able to cast the actors Orion wanted. “So,” Sayles notes, “I was happy and they were happy, and I didn’t have to sacriﬁce the story in order to—I didn’t have to burn the house down in order to save it” (Past Imperfect 15). Sayles’s screenplay tells the story from multiple points of view—fans, players, gamblers, owners, and sportswriters—which bothered many mainstream critics, notably Roger Ebert. Usually a Sayles supporter, Ebert wrote, “Perhaps the problem is that Sayles was so close to the material that he never decided what the focus of his story really was” (196). Roger Angell, ﬁction editor and baseball writer for The New Yorker, also found the narrative difﬁcult, acknowledging that “by the end of the picture we’re worn out, like Louvre visitors, because we’ve lost our concentration. The picture makes it tough for anybody to focus on a particular player, or even two or three among the famous eight” (51). Part of the deal with Orion included running time—the picture could not clock at more than two hours, a tight time frame for an ensemble picture with a complicated narrative design. The narrative strategy was now vintage Sayles. By this stage in his ﬁlm career, the multiple perspective script had become his stock-in-trade. Explaining the narrative logic of Eight Men Out, Sayles remarked, “I wanted to tell the whole story the way it was told in the book—as an ensemble piece rather than a star vehicle about one ball player” (Premiere 76). Baseball, a team game, ﬁts Sayles’s ensemble storytelling mode. By presenting this story from multiple perspectives, Sayles presents a more complete picture of the Black Sox scandal. Ring Lardner, Jr., saw this design as the ﬁlm’s strength: Sayles’s screenplay does not try to simplify the complicated structure of the corruption by concentrating on a few characters or choosing one point of view from which to tell the story. Instead, he shows us that greed, the main motivation for the ﬁx, was more or less equally distributed among gamblers, ball players, and baseball magnates, and that the consequences of their surrender to it were divided among wives, innocent players, newspapermen, and fans [48].

Shifting perspectives create a complexity that shows the players’ culpability and, in some cases, their introspective guilt, the relationship between capital and labor, and the scandal’s paradoxical outcome. Visually, Eight Men Out is alive with motion, a stylistic change for Sayles. Robert Richardson, the director of photography, like Haskell Wexler, had worked previously in both documentary ﬁlmmaking and the narrative cinema. Richardson, who has since shot a number of ﬁlms for Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese, often employs mobile camera techniques. He and Sayles experimented with a variety of handheld and tracking shots that add vigor to the images, capturing the intricate web of deception behind the ﬁxing scheme. Eight Men Out’s long expository opening points up Sayles’s ambitious desire to explore a different visual style. His elaborate beginning presents children, players, sportswriters, gamblers—an exposition fusing innocence, competition, and corruption; all the information the audience needs to follow the convoluted ﬁxing scheme. Sayles uses medium shots, close-ups, and fragments of dialogue to present his characters and themes. The kinetic camera, which was written into the script, clearly establishes the links within the murky ﬁxing scheme. As the ﬁlm opens, the 1919 Chicago White Sox ﬁnish their regular season. Sayles introduces all the players, both on and off the ﬁeld. For a variety of reasons, the most prominent being money, eight players conspire to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, a far less talented team. In doing so, they betray their owner, the tightﬁsted Charles Albert Comiskey; their fans, particularly two young boys; and a pair of watchful sportswriters, Ring Lardner ( John Sayles) and Hugh Fullerton (Studs Terkel). After sportswriters,

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In Eight Men Out (1988), David Strathairn’s performance as Eddie Cicotte, the most intellectually ambivalent of the Black Sox, is stark and compelling. Like most of Sayles’s conﬂicted characters, Cicotte is trapped in an untenable position. Although he has performed exceptionally well for Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox, the latter will not pay his pitcher the bonus he has earned. Cicotte knows his arm is going bad and that his years as a major league pitcher are numbered. Yet he has no legal means to challenge the parsimonious Comiskey. After receiving his share of the bribe money, Cicotte ponders what he has done. Eight Men Out remains the best example of what Andrew Sarris calls Sayles’s “muscular Marxism” (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives).

particularly Fullerton, publish the ﬁndings of their investigation into why the “best team ever” lost to a bunch of also-rans, a grand jury is called. Two players, Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson (D.B. Sweeney), confess and sign afﬁdavits of guilt. When the confessions mysteriously disappear, which beneﬁts the players, Comiskey, and the gamblers, a trial jury acquits the accused players. However, the newly appointed ﬁrst Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis ( John Anderson), suspends the eight players from baseball for life, negating their constitutional right to a trial by jury, and forever branding them the Black Sox. In many ways, Eight Men Out is a true baseball fan’s movie—it does not apotheosize the national game. Knowing something about the 1919 World Series ﬁx, its consequences, and baseball in general makes some details of the ﬁlm more revealing. Sayles works hard to present authentic play on the ﬁeld, a serious ﬂaw in most baseball ﬁlms. He visually describes how baseball’s team nature couples with individual play. For example, the ﬁrst game image witnessed is a stolen base, which pits a base runner against the pitcher and catcher. Stealing a base is an individual act, displaying scrappy, aggressive play. Following this shot is a smooth double play, a defensive maneuver that requires teamwork and

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precision. In 1919, the experience is baseball before Babe Ruth, the game’s immortal Sultan of Swat. The style of play was slow, one base at a time, and the game dominated by pitching. The “shine-ball” Eddie Cicotte throws throughout the ﬁlm was outlawed after the 1919 season, as were the spitball and other trick pitches, giving batters an advantage, and naturally increasing run-scoring potential. Unlike today’s game, home runs were not a large offensive component. Therefore, it took more than one swing of the bat, more than one person, to score a run in 1919. The dominant, muscular, offensive weapon in Sayles’s ﬁlm is the triple, seen at both the beginning and the end of the ﬁlm. As critic Tom O’Brien suggests, “Sayles presents a team game and team acting because he wants to represent a value beyond self ” (85). Sayles’s vision of the game is based on teamwork and cooperation, traits associated with any well-functioning group. Lack of baseball knowledge does not diminish Eight Men Out for the viewer, however. By paying close attention to the swirling chicanery of the players, the gamblers, and the owners and their lawyers, appreciation for Sayles’s subtext is possible without specialized knowledge. When teamwork breaks down, trouble begins. With the team gone, chaos, confusion, and despair become the rule. Only Arnold Rothstein remains in control, behind the scenes, far removed from the ﬁeld of play, beneﬁting ﬁnancially from every error the Sox commit. From its opening scene, Eight Men Out subverts romantic convention, signaling it is not a Hollywood baseball movie. The ﬁlm questions how popular culture is conﬁgured, what people are willing to accept, and why corruption remains an essential metaphor. Conversely, Field of Dreams (1989), a Hollywood baseball movie, also deals with the 1919 Black Sox scandal, but from a Capraesque perspective, dripping with nostalgia, a Hollywood cultural common, by creating an unpolluted paradise where “Shoeless” Joe Jackson heads a team of American Adams, the celestial team to beat all teams. Frank Ardolino calls Field of Dreams “New Age populism, the achievement of a personal vision that creates the miracle of restoring the guilty dead Black Sox to an innocent-playing in a pastoral wonderland” (45). Here, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) reconnects with his father, whom he had disavowed, by participating in the archetypical Hollywood baseball movie gesture, playing catch. Correctly, Pauline Kael saw this desire to reconstruct the past as parochial, a return to the values of the 1950s, a way of saying, “Don’t challenge your parents’ values, because if you do you’ll be sorry. It’s saying: Play Ball” (“Field of Dreams” 77). In its simplicity, Field of Dreams is far more accessible than Eight Men Out, which challenges viewers by exposing the complex underbelly of the game, the ﬁx, and history. Sayles shows us baseball as it is played on and off the ﬁeld, and there is nothing mystical or celebratory about this brand of hardball. The sections of games we do see are played on drab, dry ball ﬁelds, under summer’s hot midday glare, places where players get dirty and dusty, where they curse and complain—hardly anyone’s picture of paradise, unless, of course, their pleasure comes from playing the game. Moreover, reliable, consistent values do not exist, particularly among the people who ring the playing ﬁeld. Sayles brings the complete story to the surface, acknowledging that professional ball is more than a simple game of hit, catch, and throw: It is a business that supports the values of capital over labor. The true action in Eight Men Out occurs off the ﬁeld, where real power lies. David Scobey observes that “this is less a movie about playing games than about watching them, paying for them, and controlling them” (1143). Unlike Field of Dreams, baseball in Eight Men Out does not lead to puriﬁcation: Baseball is about business, not transcendence. The

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miserly Comiskey cheats Eddie Cicotte, his senior pitching ace, out of a $10,000 bonus, money delivered if he won 30 games; he won 29. Comiskey had Cicotte benched unnecessarily for ﬁve games near the end of the season. The pitcher confronts the owner, but Comiskey, the businessman, will not budge, and so in retaliation Cicotte becomes part of the ﬁxing scheme. Near the end of the ﬁlm, after he admits guilt, Cicotte, full of fear and confusion, attempts to put the reality of the ﬁx into perspective for his innocent wife (Maggie Renzi): I always ﬁgured it was talent made a man big, ya know? If I was the best at something. I mean we’re the guys they come to see. Without us, there ain’t a ballgame. Yeah, but look at who’s holdin’ the money and look at who’s a facin’ the jail cell. Talent don’t mean nothin’. And where’s Comiskey, Sullivan, Attell, Rothstein? Out in the back room cuttin’ up proﬁts, that’s where. That’s the damn conspiracy.

This passage describes Sayles’s vision of the ﬁx, because it underscores the basic contradiction between working and the harsh, brutal realities of a compassionless system that puts money and power ahead of people. During the opening credits, the camera glides upward following an arc across a blue sky full of puffy white nimbus clouds. The names of the actors drop from the top of the frame, falling toward earth, like angels descending—or perhaps falling from grace. This idyllic shot might suggest hope, a sacred look at the past, but mythic re-creation is not Sayles’s intent, and this unblemished blue sky comes off as an ironic comment rather than an image of regeneration or puriﬁcation. In Eight Men Out, ﬂawed human beings share culpability, but not proﬁt or public blame. Here, the ﬁeld of play adjoins the front ofﬁce, the saloon, the clubhouse, the pressbox, and the home, like any other slice of common life and labor. In an interview with Sayles, Cleveland, Ohio, sportswriter Doug Clarke summed up the contradiction of the Black Sox scandal: “It was, of course, Pandora’s box. Open it and baseball, the American order incarnate, would be in disorder. Touch it, and the taint would spoil our innocence, soiling something so intrinsically beautiful and symmetric that even the box scores become, and would remain, our article of faith. Best to leave the Black Sox Scandal musty and mythical—legend overshadowing fact” (18). Sayles, naturally, has not let the story go. He brings it back to earth, back to hard ground for all to see. After the credits, Sayles cuts to a street-level tracking shot of a 1919 Chicago neighborhood. A young boy runs along the street shouting, “Bucky! Bucky!” as the camera follows him. He ﬁnds his friend playing baseball on a sandlot ﬁeld between two tenement buildings, where laundry hangs over a ball diamond scratched in the dirt. Sayles’s miseen-scène captures the hold the game has on these city-kids, and it begins to establish the feel of pre–Prohibition Chicago. Their desire to play their heroes’ game goes without saying. The boy tells Bucky that he raised the cost of bleacher seats for the White Sox by hawking newspapers. Excitedly, they run to the park. The impossibly pure blue sky gives way to working-class street life, where everyone hustles, even children, which is, in fact, a more realistic analogy for American society than the game of baseball. Visually, Sayles and Richardson energize Eight Men Out. For Sayles, the camera’s movement parallels the energy of baseball, especially during a World Series. Sayles uses a moving camera to depict the tenor of the times, the frenetic Jazz Age popularized by F. Scott Fitzgerald. His camera sweeps among characters in the stadium, the saloon, and the clubhouse, indicating the byzantine connections between various ﬁgures. Rapid movement both establishes and obscures details of the ﬁx. The architecture of the ﬁx is evident, but it is difﬁcult to tell who makes the big money from the scheme. Technically, the ﬁlm recalls

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Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), in which 26 roughly equal characters randomly collide. These characters are all connected to each other, whether they know it or not. For example, in the White Sox’s hotel after their loss in the second game of the Series, Sayles presents a bit of visual bravura, a take he calls “the Marx Brothers sequence,” where “people pop in and out of doors” (Smith 67). When the shot begins, we see the back of a man’s head in close-up, moving away from us in the frame. Coming toward us is “Kid” Gleason ( John Mahoney), the manager of the White Sox; the men pass shoulder to shoulder. The camera picks up Gleason, and begins moving backward. Behind him the unknown man turns, pulls out a large envelope presumably stuffed with cash, and lightly taps on a hotel room door. Gleason, who is suspicious of his players’ performances, glances over his shoulder, catching a glimpse of the man slipping into the hotel room. From the audience’s perspective, this shot conﬁrms Gleason’s doubts, yet he is ironically unaware of the actions going on around him. Sayles keeps the shot going, uncut, as a number of players and gamblers and Comiskey cross paths, some aware, some not. This elaborate long-take is smooth and clean, an indication of Sayles’s increased budget and his growing visual awareness. The camera plays a more active role in Eight Men Out than in any of Sayles’s earlier ﬁlms; here, it is an indicting eye that connects various guilty parties. What the written dialogue does not spell out, the visual narrative does; it reveals the deep structure of the ﬁxing scheme. When “Sport” Sullivan (Kevin Tighe) enters Rothstein’s cavernous apartment to discuss the ﬁx, Sayles moves the camera from an establishing shot of Rothstein eating dinner to Sullivan with hat in hand, trying to act comfortable in the presence of this big-time gambler-businessman. The slow movement of the camera links the two men, and it articulates Rothstein’s intent: Sullivan, a trivial Boston gambler, will become Rothstein’s pawn. As the camera reveals, the savvy Rothstein shows more interest in his food than in Sullivan’s weak attempt at making a deal. Sayles also uses multiple crane shots in Eight Men Out. After the ﬁnal out of the third Series game, Sayles photographs Ray Schalk (Gordon Clapp), the hard-nosed White Sox catcher who was not involved in the ﬁx, from above. He rises from his squatting position as the camera rises, momentarily framing him alone. With the camera rising and moving backward, taking in more of the ﬁeld, Schalk runs to the pitcher’s mound and embraces Dickie Kerr ( Jace Alexander) as the rest of the team joins in the celebration. The master shot begins in open form, loosely framed, but evolves into a closed shot that shows us the spontaneous joy and camaraderie of the players in a brief moment of team unity on the ﬁeld of play. Sayles, however, uses another crane shot to echo and contradict this visual example of team unity. He places the crane in the center of the Chicago courtroom where the eight ballplayers are being tried for conspiracy. The people captured in the high shot are undifferentiated, like the crowd at a ball game. Sayles drops the camera to focus on Lardner and Fullerton, who discuss the mysterious nature of the trial, speculating on who has the most to gain. Then the camera rises and swings to the right, capturing the players, who enter the courtroom to a burst of applause. The players ﬁle in, looking more like criminals than a team, uncomfortable on an unfamiliar ﬁeld. The crane swoops down to capture Cicotte as he passes by Lardner; the pitcher does not want to make eye contact with the writer. Instead, he ends up facing Landis, who will, of course, hand down Cicotte’s ﬁnal judgment. Sayles’s shot choices in this extended, unedited sequence are dynamic and telling. These closed shots signify the players’ lack of freedom, a condition different from the ball ﬁeld, their source for work and pleasure. In court, they are regular citizens, reduced

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to common criminal status. Sayles’s shot selection also presents conﬂict on a societal level. The dialectical ﬂuctuation is unmistakable. He introduces tiers of people differentiated by their class, jobs, and skills, vividly articulating America’s social construction in microcosm. Because dialogue is Sayles’s narrative foundation, his images are enhanced by bits and pieces of conversation. Sayles captures their experiences, their perspectives. When the young boys enter the bleachers, the “best seats in the place,” a hand-held camera follows them right to their seats, adding real-life zest to the master shot. We feel as if we are sitting in the best seats. Two men in front of the boys bet on the outcome of a batter’s turn at the plate: “Two bills says he does,” says one. “Two bills says he don’t,” responds the other. The bet is small, revealing their social class, but the casual way the line is delivered indicates that gambling is an accepted activity, a cultural common. The boys hear, see, and understand what is going on around them, and they, in turn, feigning tears to hustle a man in front of them for the price of a box of Cracker Jacks. Yet the boys also represent a wisp of innocence in the period before baseball became a corporate game. They are breathless when Joe Jackson, their hero, comes to bat, because they want to see him hit. Their comments express their devotion to Jackson, an athlete whose skills are unmatched. Juxtaposed with their heedless adoration are comments by a

Sayles knows how to manage a frame, despite critical suggestions to the contrary. In this shot, the illiterate “Shoeless” Joe Jackson (D.B. Sweeney, center) is surrounded by a herd of journalists, all wanting to know the truth about the 1919 Series ﬁx. Jackson, who hardly speaks with his teammates because of his intellectual shortcomings, is trapped in a situation he does not comprehend. The tight framing Sayles uses in this shot indicates Jackson’s conﬁnement. The journalists, who never challenge the skinﬂint Comiskey, smell blood when dealing with the feeble-minded Jackson, whose single talent is playing baseball (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives).

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fan, a sportswriter, and Jackson’s own teammates about his illiteracy. The kids are free from such antagonisms; all they want is Jackson. Nothing else matters. In other words, they are pure observers of the game, unsullied by ego, gossip, or greed. Critics see the adoring boys as one portion of a Greek chorus, with Ring Lardner and Hugh Fullerton representing the older, more world-weary half. The boys are ﬁctional creations; the sportswriters are based on real people. Credited with breaking the story about the scandal, Fullerton, who was extremely well known at the time, lost his livelihood and reputation, all because he spoke out. Lardner, a sports reporter and ﬁction writer, was known for his cynical, mordant treatment of his subjects. His best-known book, You Know Me, Al: A Busher’s Letters (1916), chronicles the life and times of Jack Keefe, a rustic pitcher whose naive ineptitude is comically endearing. When Lardner and Fullerton ﬁrst appear on screen, they are photographed from behind in the press box, typewriters with copy in front of them, looking down on the playing ﬁeld, commenting on the game with insiders’ knowledge. Their moral position within the frame is obvious. Like the boys, Lardner and Fullerton stand for something more: they are adults who cannot give up their fascination for a boy’s game, even when they recognize and comment on the blatant corruption unfolding before their eyes. Quickly, Sayles sets the pair in opposition to Comiskey. Another reporter announces, “Better get movin’, boys, Commy’s pourin’ in the clubhouse.” Lardner’s deadpan response indicates his weary awareness: “Sportswriters of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your bar privileges.” Comiskey enters the press box like a patrician: “Hello, boys. Is everybody happy?” Commy greets the pressmen by name. When he passes by Lardner, he says, “Hello, sourpuss,” and pushes the writer’s straw hat over his eyes, distancing himself from Lardner and his friend Fullerton, by displaying his control over all the other writers. Sayles cuts away to a lavish spread—meats, cheeses, breads, drinks, champagne— inside the ornate clubhouse. The sportswriters follow dutifully behind Comiskey as he holds forth about his baseball team, talking like a proud father, the head of a grand American family. The writers pounce on the drinks and the food, like cattle at a feeding trough. In his book, Asinof makes it clear that the newspapermen were Comiskey’s boys: “Ofﬁcially they were on the staff of their respective papers, but Comiskey always made them feel as if they were working for him” (Eight Men Out 22). Comiskey continues to deﬁne the strengths of his players, arriving, ﬁnally, at baseball’s grand illusion: “Every man for the good of the team,” he happily spouts. Eight Men Out, however, is about the fragmentation of a team, the lack of community, so Sayles juxtaposes the artiﬁce of the clubhouse with the reality of the ﬁeld. After turning a tough double play, the White Sox inﬁelders run off the ﬁeld. Swede Risberg (Don Harvey), the shortstop, and Chick Gandil (Michael Rooker), the ﬁrst baseman, harass the second baseman, Eddie Collins (Bill Irwin), as they all jog toward the dugout, Swede and Chick taunt Collins, calling him “college boy,” because the second baseman will not join the team during their nights out. Collins tells his teammates that they would beneﬁt from a little sleep. The Swede responds, “Shove it.” With short bits of conversation, Sayles precisely captures the language of rough, male sporting life, where team unity is more of a hope than a fact. Clearly, Collins (historically a solid second baseman) is an outsider, not one of the “boys.” The animosity directed at Collins is twofold: He is the highest-paid player on the team, and he has an education. By contrasting Comiskey’s clubhouse with on-ﬁeld scenes, Sayles starts peeling back the veneer covering the White Sox, and team sport in general.

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Two scheming gamblers, “Sleepy” Bill Burns (Christopher Lloyd) and Billy Maharg (Richard Edson), are another essential part of the opening sequence. Sayles uses these characters to introduce the White Sox players, to promote the idea that a ﬁx is possible, and to show his audience that Eight Men Out will make its statement through juxtaposition— cutting back and forth between various characters and scenes, communicating visually the elaborate structure of the ﬁx. Burns explains to Maharg what role each player assumes on the team. Their conversation reveals that Collins’s salary will prevent him from going along, that Chick Gandil might “play ball” with them, that Buck Weaver is “one of the boys” but he hates to lose, that Eddie Cicotte is the key to their scheme, and that Comiskey’s incredible parsimony will sway the players to throw the Series. Moreover, Burns’s appraisal establishes the close relationship the gamblers and the players share: These people know each other well. For anyone who sees baseball as a paradigm of purity, Sayles’s opening wipes away nostalgic possibility. Yet Sayles is doing more here than simply debunking the romance of baseball as a boy’s game, free from skullduggery, a refuge of innocence. Eight Men Out is, for the most part, historically accurate. Baseball and betting go together, and they have been linked since the game’s popular emergence. According to Asinof, the gamblers were a highly visible part of the baseball world, as common in the lobbies of major-league hotels as bellhops: “Nice guys, one and all; friendly guys, ready with the warm hello and the funny yarn. They got to know the ballplayers well” (Eight Men Out 13). When we see “Sport” Sullivan entertaining Chick Gandil with women and drinks in a saloon, such a public meeting seems improbable by today’s standards, but it was commonplace before baseball appointed its ﬁrst commissioner, whose charge was to weed out corruption. With the chummy rapport between players and gamblers so blatant, many of the shots in the opening sequence are ironic, serving to point up the hypocrisy that surrounded baseball in the period during and just after World War I. Sayles does not use many long shots in Eight Men Out, especially in the opening sequence. Instead, most of the images are tightly framed in closed form. For example, when “Shoeless” Joe Jackson ﬁrst comes to bat, Sayles places him in the center of the frame, blocking out a great deal of the background. But the midground links Jackson to the reality of what is going on behind his back. On the green waist-high wall that separates the fans from the ﬁeld of play is a white lettered sign in bold capital letters that reads “No Betting Allowed.” In its composition, this shot is simplistic, perhaps even trivial, but the contrast between the foreground, where Jackson stands ready to hit with pronounced determination, and the midground, which registers as an empty attempt to impose a rule on the fans, suggests that what the players do not see is far more important than what they do see. While the sportswriters are drinking, eating, and laughing with Comiskey, Sayles’s camera frames the owner from a low-angle, highlighting his imperious nature, reinforcing his nickname, “The Old Roman.” Comiskey turns his talk to Eddie Cicotte, his star pitcher: “Eddie’s got the best arm I’ve ever seen.” The background in this shot is dark, almost black. There are a few writers near Comiskey, but they are obscured by Sayles’s high contrast lighting and the cigarette smoke ﬁlling the shot. Comiskey, bathed in light, dominates the scene, and by extension the writers and the players. His words, of course, are hollow. Sayles crosscuts to Cicotte struggling on the mound. Clearly Comiskey’s star pitcher is getting by on guile and desire; his playing days are all but over, age has run its course. Sayles cuts back to the pompous Comiskey, still praising Cicotte. He then quickcuts to Lardner in a medium close-up as he whispers to Fullerton, “If he’s such a fan, why doesn’t he pay him [Cicotte] a living wage?”

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When Comiskey addresses the sportswriters, we witness his ability to create. He controls the print image of his ballplayers. The sportswriters, with the exception of Lardner and Fullerton, never talk to the players; they take all their information from Comiskey, who ﬁlls their stomachs with food and drink and their heads with his version of the team. On the other hand, the gamblers, who represent a less-revered business system, one lacking a publicity machine, provide food, drink, and women for the players. Neither the players nor the writers question the motive of the forces supplying their pleasures. However, Sayles’s camera does by stitching these disparate groups together with telling precision. Both Comiskey and the gamblers use the players for proﬁt. In the opening sequence, after Comiskey’s pennant-clinching players leave the ﬁeld, they enter the clubhouse in a happy, buoyant mood. Framed by a doorway behind them, the players are photographed in a traveling shot, uniﬁed by their success. Dirty from work, but illuminated in a diffuse gold-hued light, they are emblematic of team camaraderie. Approaching a table lined with bottles of champagne, a symbolic connection to the party going on in Comiskey’s above-ﬁeld clubhouse, the players, led by Cicotte, reach for the bottles with suspicion, not joy. Sayles’s shot is low-angle, which again suggests a link to Comiskey by giving the players a slightly heroic presence. But this shot is not as pronounced, lacking a single dominant like the owner, and the mise-en-scène is accented by high-key lighting, and white ﬁlls the frame, undercutting the shot of Comiskey. Yet the camera distance diminishes the players. Because the camera is closer to him, Comiskey ﬁlls the frame. Removing the cork from a champagne bottle, Cicotte inquires about the pennant bonus Comiskey promised the team. Comiskey’s accountant responds, “This is your bonus.” The players’ champagne is ﬂat. Upstairs, the sportswriters toast “The Old Roman,” smashing their glasses in his ﬁreplace. These counterpoised shots underline Comiskey’s fastidious thrift. He owns the team; they are his undisputed property, without any agency of their own. The gamblers merely repeat the exploitation that drove the players to the ﬁx in the ﬁrst place. Only “Sleepy” Bill Burns shows any concern for the players when it becomes obvious to him that the money promised them will never reach their hands. Tellingly, Rothstein, who engineers the ﬁx and, it is suggested, reaps the greatest proﬁt, never goes near the players, who are part of the rabble from which he has extracted himself. In a marvelous re-creation, Sayles shows Rothstein and other New York businessmen watching the Series reproduced on a large tote board in a New York City hotel. A man reads from a ticker-tape account of the proceedings, while another moves cutout ﬁgures of baseball players around a painted picture of a ballﬁeld. Only the score matters to these men, not the game. Likewise, Comiskey operates from a corporate boardroom, handing down edicts from behind an immense desk, removed from the ﬁeld of play. In Marxist terms, Rothstein and Comiskey control the players, consuming the proﬁts these workers generate through their ﬁeld performances. The players, of course, have no power, as their ill-fated, misdirected scheme to boost their pay indicates. “Sport” Sullivan sums up the players’ position with metaphoric precision: “Ya know what ya feed a dray horse in the mornin’ if you want a day’s work out of him? Just enough so he knows he’s hungry.” Only Cicotte and Jackson receive any ﬁx money up front. The others wait for a payoff that never arrives. In the end, with several players experiencing doubts, Lefty Williams ( James Read) concludes the ﬁx after a thug threatens his wife. Rothstein and Comiskey proﬁt. They completely control the game and the players, manipulating them like cardboard cutouts.

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Sayles concludes his long opening with a team photo, often a standard in the Hollywood baseball movie. Buck Weaver ( John Cusack) yells, “Come on, fellas, pretend it’s Commy’s wake.” Everyone smiles. The color image turns to a black-and-white still photograph. Sayles uses a ﬂash frame to bathe the image in white, effectively emphasizing the punchline. Sayles wryly points out the artiﬁcial nature of this baseball cliché: the team photo is a fraud, just like the description of the ballplayers in the press. Sayles’s critique of herd media is subtle and covert. Team dissension exists, gamblers are out to ﬁx the Series, and the owner, the players’ enemy, a stingy tyrant, manipulates the press. Only the sandlot kids exist in a state of willing innocence, but they are learning the rules of the game. Baseball’s romantic image is as fraudulent as this photograph full of smiling faces. John Tintori’s editing of Eight Men Out is crisp and sharp, using numerous quickcuts to pace the ﬁlm and to show the multilayered ﬁxing scheme in detail. For the most part, Sayles uses editing as a counterbalancing device, communicating ideas through juxtaposition. Sayles cuts from various individuals and groups to show contradictions and the function of power. In the courtroom scene that closes the picture, Tintori’s rapid cutting technique accents the fragmentary nature of the outcome of the ﬁlm and the Black Sox scandal itself. If Comiskey and Rothstein were explicitly connected up until this point in the ﬁlm, the crosscut editing implicitly links the owner and the gambler. When the defense lawyer asks the prosecutor to produce his most incriminating piece of evidence, the signed confessions, he is told that the evidence is missing. Sayles cuts to Fullerton and Lardner, who speculate on the behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Lardner says, “Must have cost somebody an arm and a leg. Rothstein or Comiskey?” Fullerton answers, “Maybe Rothstein’s arm and Comiskey’s leg.” Indeed, Comiskey’s lawyer and Rothstein’s lawyer discussed ways to protect their employers’ “business interests.” Comiskey and Rothstein, apparently, ﬁxed the trial. As David Scobey notes, “One preserves his baseball property, the other his proﬁtable secrecy” (1144). Editing serves the thematic integrity of the ﬁlm by linking people involved in the scheme. Musically, Eight Men Out is not as impressive as Matewan. In order to create an appropriate historical context, Sayles and Mason Daring chose a Chicago-Dixieland–style sound to accent the ﬁlm. One tune, “After You’ve Gone,” an ironic bit of mock praise for the fallen players, is sung to them in a saloon before the ﬁx occurs; it also closes the ﬁlm, an appropriate bookending technique that shows Sayles’s sympathy for these players. Sayles and Daring collaborated on “I Be Blue,” which, as its title suggests, is a fan’s lament. The musical soundtrack passes judgment on the unsuspecting players, who are drawn into a web so complex that they cannot ﬁnd their way out. The music, according to Frank Ardolino, ushers in “the cynicism of the Jazz Age,” a decadent, freewheeling time. As the ﬁnal credits roll, “After You’ve Gone” plays, announcing the loss felt when baseball fell from grace. For production design, Sayles used his Matewan crew, led by Nora Chavooshian, to create an authentic 1919 setting. Filling a stadium with extras was difﬁcult: the residents of Indianapolis, Indiana, where the baseball scenes were shot, were not interested in showing up at “their local minor league park,” changing into “period clothing,” and cheering for Cincinnati and Chicago teams of 70-plus years ago. Chavooshian used cardboard cutouts scattered among real people to create a World Series–sized crowd. Cynthia Flynt’s costumes, again, were period perfect, right down to the straw hats and the cigars. Baseball movies, however, must make the actors into players, a difﬁcult undertaking. Speed usually betrays illusion; actors, for the most part, do not have an athlete’s ability to

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Bill Irwin, left, a physical comedian and stage actor, portrayed Eddie Collins, Chicago’s slick ﬁelding and college educated second basemen. Irwin’s physical skills made Collins believable. Don Harvey, as shortstop Swede Risberg, completes the double-play relay throw to ﬁrst base. Sayles cast actors with athletic skills to enhance his game sequences—many of them look like they know what they are doing on a baseball ﬁeld.

accelerate. Sayles disguised this weakness with editing and camera movement; he did not let the camera linger on players or their turns at the plate; he did not substitute former professional ballplayers as stand-ins for his actors. As Roger Angell, a veteran baseball observer, says, “Sayles’s feat ... is to make some of his players recognizable in the end not by their acting but by the way they look on the ﬁeld” (52). Their acting, of course, has a great deal to do with the way they look on the ﬁeld. Eight Men Out shows off a stable of talent. D.B. Sweeney brings “Shoeless” Joe Jackson to life on the ﬁeld, and makes the storied, illiterate hitter an empathetic ﬁgure. Sweeney worked for months perfecting Jackson’s signature batting style, which Roger Angell describes as an “open-stance, ﬂat-bat, left-handed cut at the ball” (52). He looks authentic both at the plate and running the bases. David Strathairn is Eddie Cicotte, a tough, veteran pitcher getting by on savvy, who, after a big hitter for the opposition drives two long foul balls, delivers a dead-on inside pitch to strike the man out. Baseball movies rely on strike-outs and home runs, deﬁning actions for most ﬁlmgoers, but few show pitch location. Strathairn delivers a pitch a long-ball hitter would chase and a true fan would recognize as ideal for that situation. Charlie Sheen is perfectly tuned to play the goofy Hap Felsch, both on the ﬁeld and off. Allowing a herd of sportswriters and fans to buy him beer after beer, Felsch sits atop a bar and admits that he took part in the scheme because it was the smart thing to do. “I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid,” he announces without a trace of understanding.

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Sayles makes these actors believable by showing us just enough of their on-ﬁeld play to establish their positions. We see John Cusack’s Buck Weaver track down two hot smashes at third base—each diving stop is edited to make the difﬁcult play seem real. Even though Cusack lacks the speed and form of a major leaguer, he looks good holding the bat and shouting encouragement to his mates in the ﬁeld. The rest of Sayles’s ensemble cast enhances the ﬁlm. There are no stars here, as usual, just quality craftsmen. Kevin Tighe plays the Boston gambler “Sport” Sullivan with unctuous panache. Holding his hat in his hands talking to Arnold Rothstein, Tighe takes on the personality of a schoolboy talking his way out of some bad luck with the headmaster. Trying to look calm, with Rothstein’s henchman, Monk Eastman (Stephen Mendillo), hanging over his shoulder to ensure Sullivan takes care of the ﬁx, Tighe precisely captures the nervous tics of a man who feels mortally threatened. But when dealing with an underling, such as Chick Gandil, Tighe’s slimy smile and patronizing tone capture this Boston glad-hander with pitch-perfect ease. Michael Lerner plays the iconographic Arnold Rothstein, the undisputed king of the underworld, like a man in total control, someone who knows what will happen before it does, someone who appreciates his own skill and power. His presence underlines the manipulative, inscrutable root of power behind the scenes. Rothstein focuses on business, and business alone. He is Comiskey without the veneer of legitimate business to conceal his dealings. He stays away from the spotlight, but his shadow hangs over the playing ﬁeld. He possesses a hard, trenchant point of view. Rothstein explains his truth to bagman Abe Attell, a former boxer: Fame is ephemeral, economic power is strength. Rothstein intones, “Altogether I must have made ten times more betting on you than you did slugging it out. I never took a punch.” Attell responds, “I was champ.” Rothstein counters, “Yesterday. That was yesterday.” Lerner gives these words a resonance that carries a deeper meaning— there is only one man in control, Arnold Rothstein. Control, in a word, sums up Eight Men Out. Charles Comiskey’s lawyer deﬁnes the purpose of their mission in the inquiry against the eight White Sox players: “Our job is to control that investigation. Make the public think you’re clean.” In other words, Comiskey and his legal team will manufacture public consent to save his baseball business and his workers, who are, of course, necessary to his ﬁnancial success. Therefore, the ﬁrst rule of order is to hire a commissioner, and the owners ﬁnd Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. In a rotogravure-style grouping of the baseball owners on a staircase, Comiskey announces their choice for Commissioner in glowing, patriotic terms, like a politician making a committee appointment. Landis, the assembled reporters are told, will clean up the game for its own good. Lardner leans over to Fullerton and in a whisper says Landis should “start with the birds up on the stairs with him.” Corruption is the rule, not the exception. The players are pikers compared to the owners. Owners like Comiskey had complete legal and institutional control over players, giving them monopolistic power. The players’ actions, then, can be read as a foolish attempt at sabotage. As with the use of force against the coal company in Matewan, the White Sox players chose a destructive form of rebellion, one that serves the gamblers, the businessmen, and the lawyers who play by adult rules, not the rules of a child’s game. By the end of the ﬁlm, the players recede into the background. Moving from the ball ﬁeld to the courtroom, the players become, as Scobey notes, “pawns in an arcane struggle among Comiskey, Rothstein, the baseball establishment, and the state” (1145)—abstract powers that the ballplayers cannot comprehend. Their inarticulate, unsophisticated presence in

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the courtroom is emphasized by Sayles’s mise-en-scène. Marginalized, they all sit around a table for the court audience to gawk at, like creatures in a zoo. None of the ballplayers, except Buck Weaver, seems to understand or care about his position. Removed from the baseball ﬁeld, they lack deﬁnition. Rothstein’s brusque words, “Yesterday. That was yesterday,” hang over every shot of the fallen players. Ball players believe the game will never end for them; power brokers know the game is terminal. Although the players were acquitted, Landis bans them for life. His words arrive in a voice-over, contradicting the visual image of the players’ celebration at a restaurant. Sayles uses a slow motion shot to ensure the pain of Landis’s historic decision strikes in image and word. These men have no rights; they are the property of the league, not citizens of a democratic republic. They are in the end as they were in the beginning, talented innocents. Sayles ends Eight Men Out on a nostalgic note: we see Joe Jackson bat one more time. As he did in the opening sequence, Jackson hits a triple. The handful of fans present at the semipro ballpark clap, but Sayles ﬁlls the soundtrack with the applause and cheers from a big-league crowd, an aural reminder of the past. Here, Sayles shows us his own unabashed love of the game and the players. Although Sayles returns to a romanticized image of baseball, he ends the ﬁlm on a realistic note. “Shoeless” Joe is pictured alone. He is not the same man he was, and he is no longer a part of the game he loved. There is no transcendence here, no ﬁeld of dreams. Jackson no longer has a name, an identity. As the men in the stands speculate whether the tremendous player before them is Joe Jackson, a youngster asks his father who Joe Jackson is. The father responds, “One of those bums from Chicago, kid. One of the Black Sox.” Sayles’s ﬁnal point suggests it is the players, the visible performers, who will be committed to historical memory, not the owners or gamblers, the real power players. As Scobey points out, Sayles “vividly portrays the class conﬂicts that underlay baseball’s growth as a commercial entertainment.... What preoccupies Eight Men Out is less the moral condition of its protagonists than the social construction—the making and meaning—of their actions” (1143). Sayles’s narrative analyzes social and economic circumstances rather than spinning cinematic fantasy, and it asks us to take pity on the poor devils who are baseball’s lost souls.

City of Hope Urbanites I wanted the feeling that these were parallel stories that eventually converge. The ﬁlm is like a knot. Everyone is tied up together. I wanted people to be able to tell—in part by the way it is shot—that there’s no way these people can avoid affecting each other, even if they never met each other. —John Sayles, Press Release, 1991

City of Hope (1991) is an urban allegory. In Hudson City, New Jersey, Sayles’s ﬁctional setting, corruption is the rule, not the exception. Depicting the natural progression of a society built on proﬁt and greed, City of Hope complements Matewan and Eight Men Out nicely, continuing Sayles’s American historical analysis of wealth and power: how economic space was captured and held in the past, and how economic history informs the present. City of Hope is about contemporary urban issues, about an especially large group of characters. As Greg M. Smith comments in his essay “Passersby and Politics: City of Hope and the Multiple Protagonist Film,” every character Sayles integrates into the

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narrative has a purpose: “City of Hope creates an urban environment in which people with only passing familiarity with each other may have profound effects on each other’s lives” (Sayles Talk 117) Like Sayles’s period ﬁlms, City of Hope is panoramic in scope, presenting a large cast of characters connected by a nonlinear storyline that demands audience concentration. In this way it resembles a Faulkner novel with its multiple perspectives, rather than a contemporary American ﬁlm. Sayles’s impressive narrative reveals the inner workings of the people who populate Hudson City, while disclosing deep social criticisms steeped in humanity. Sayles emphasizes the systemic evils that suffocate his characters. City of Hope paints an authentic, complicated, relentless portrait of urban America. Sayles’s political and social criticisms are clear and unambiguous: Urban relations based solely on power and money, the cornerstones of corrupt democratic politics, will lead to social fragmentation and decay. The content of Sayles’s ﬁlm is both adventurous and disturbing, a risky proposition after eight years of conservative Reagan ideology. The condition of Hudson City is a metaphor for the pitiless political culture that dominated the 1980s. Though not highly visible, big-money players are well represented in City of Hope. Those on top do well: The culture of capital is robust, thriving. But Sayles’s cityscape is bleak, evoking a city in collapse. The majority of the characters get by on hope alone, which is in short supply. Yet, even though proﬁts never trickle down to street level, these people persevere. According to Sayles, “The hopefulness for me comes from some of the people from below. I don’t have hope coming from above” (Demyanenko 23). While real estate deals are cut to advance political careers and stuff bank accounts, Hudson City crumbles and burns, trapping its citizens. Here, social polarization is an ever-expanding norm, a condition met with cynical acceptance by those in control. Sayles makes numerous stylistic adjustments to create a ﬁlm that is dramatic and compassionate, analytical and politically progressive. Camera movement and expressionistic mise-en-scène bolster content. City of Hope incorporates at least 50 speaking parts, a narrative strategy that would make Hollywood producers shudder. Sayles’s camera intertwines his characters as Hudson City’s story unfolds over the course of three days and three nights, a time frame designed to provide unity and compression to his broad canvas. City of Hope’s narrative strategy and style are established in the opening credits. The credits appear in red letters on a black background, accompanied by a driving urban blues tune composed by Mason Daring. We see groups of names, never just one. The credits sweep in from the bottom of the frame, pause, and then vanish through the top of the frame, in cadence with the start-and-stop wail of a blues harmonica. As Daring’s tune builds in tempo, the credits quicken. This fusion of image and sound approximates the ﬂeeting glimpses of people and signs seen from the interior of a subway car. Indeed, as the title of the ﬁlm appears on screen, we hear the grinding, metallic sound of a train braking. Like the brief power outages experienced inside a subway car, the title City of Hope blinks on and off while the harmonica screams. The screen fades to black. Similarly, Sayles’s characters do not remain on the screen for long; their stories come in fragments as his peripatetic camera moves from person to person, group to group, visually fusing these urbanities. Sayles’s script resonates with city voices—raw and conventional, blue collar and white collar, street cops and detectives, lawyers and thieves—making them undeniably distinct yet interconnected, which makes the ﬁlm personal—characters might not recognize one another but they all occupy the same space.

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Most urban dramas follow the activities of one or two people. Even Martin Scorsese, the dean of urban American ﬁlmmakers, focuses on small ethnic groups, never offering a complete, top-to-bottom urban portrait. Typically, Sayles goes against the generic grain. Each character he draws makes an imprint. This approach aptly portrays the people who make up any city. As Thulani Davis suggests, all the characters are skillfully delineated, deﬁned so that the reasons for their actions make sense, “even if they bust kids up against a wall or assault an innocent passerby or burn people out of their homes” (22). All of the characters are dominated by corrupt city politics. Representing an outdated mode of thought, lacking the will to attack problems, driven by greed, Hudson City’s government is the ﬁlm’s villain. Sayles’s cityscape expands quickly. His camera pans seamlessly among characters, circumstances, and places, a visual syntax Sayles wrote into his script. He deliberately avoids conventional character presentations. Each ﬁgure emerges from the hurly-burly streets of Hudson City as he or she is, without explanation, adding not only depth and richness to City of Hope but also humor and lyrical interludes. Sayles understands that city life is an unpredictable swirl of romance and realism, full of tension and release, mad characters, and tender moments. For example, Sayles photographs a television through a large plate-glass window showing a commercial for Mad Anthony’s electronics store, creating an image familiar to most metropolitan New Yorkers. Outside the frame we hear a palsied voice imitating the

In City of Hope (1991), Wynn ( Joe Morton), a Hudson City Councilman, attempts to preserve what remains of his city. He discovers that doing the right thing for his community comes with its own complications. Still, he has the support of his wife, Reesha (Angela Bassett), and he wins the support of skeptical members of Hudson City’s African American community (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives).

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hyperbolic enticements of Mad Anthony ( Josh Mostel). Slowly the camera pans left to reveal Asteroid (David Strathairn), a mentally disturbed homeless man. He follows Mad Anthony’s every move, reprising each gesture and phrase in his own twisted dance. Wynn ( Joe Morton), the only African American member of the city council, passes behind him. The camera picks up Wynn as he walks away from Asteroid. Coming toward Wynn are two policemen, Bauer (Stephen J. Lang) and Rizzo (Anthony John Denison), who listen to a torrent of complaints from Connie (Maggie Renzi) and Joann (Marianne Leone), a nonstop verbal tag team determined to list Hudson City’s ills, blaming every problem on the minority underclass. Leaving Wynn, the camera picks up this quartet as they pass Asteroid, looking at him with pained annoyance. We follow the four until the cops get into their patrol car. Once inside, they roll up the cruiser’s windows to block out Connie and Joann’s cacophony of complaint. Sayles introduces all his players in a similar fashion, mixing long master shots with more typical setups. The moving camera works like connective tissue, even though each character’s personal motivation is vastly different. Inevitably, City of Hope invites comparison to Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), which also used a broad canvas and a multi-character cast to comment on contemporary society and politics. Sayles, however, is not as oblique as Altman, and his characters are more distinct. By comparison, Altman plays it safe; his politics and intentions are sardonic, abstract. City of Hope is concrete: Failing American cities and corrupt politicians share a long, storied history. Still, like Altman, Sayles explores politics with a skeptical eye. Like Nashville, City of Hope suggests the acceptance of corrupt democratic politics as cynical and troubling. With unﬂinching awareness, Sayles shows how a city and a society built on bureaucratic power and proﬁt incentive at the expense of community needs is doomed to fail. Sayles’s narrative is tight, a circular tour de force that welds form with content in an ambitious, accurate account of urban decay. Although Sayles carries his story through to a conclusion, City of Hope has no plot, per se. Sayles’s storyline is a Gordian knot, involving the interactive lives of more than a dozen essential characters and an even larger number of peripheral, though not unimportant, ﬁgures. Hudson City’s population is urban, familiar: corrupt politicians, tough cops, real estate speculators, criminals, dopers, barﬂies, construction workers, professionals, street people, racial separatists. Hudson City is in trouble; it is exhausted and divisive, like much of urban American. Typically, many residents of Sayles’s ﬁctive city place the blame for this collapse squarely on the shoulders of those who have the least—welfare recipients; unwed mothers; aimless, drug-addled kids; people who do not vote. Moreover, the major, unspoken divide is race. Sayles, to his credit, takes a broader, more radical view of urban problems: “If you mechanize and bureaucratize things and the human factor isn’t involved, very often you end up with a system that doesn’t serve anybody, but everybody keeps serving it” (Demyanenko 22). City Hall, where the politics of business as usual are orchestrated, is the root cause for the decay of Hudson City. The political infrastructure has little patience or feeling for its constituents, except to shake hands and request their votes. Instead, tax abatements, luxury housing, and foreign investment are the chief concerns of this city’s government. Mayor Baci (Louis Zorich), Hudson City’s nominal leader, speaks for the politics of proﬁt as he tries to appease Joe Rinaldi (Tony Lo Bianco), a successful contractor tied to city government and the Mob: “Next couple of years this town is going to be one big yard sale. And anyone with half a brain will make tracks. Let the blacks and the Spanish duke it out over what’s

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left ... America, huh?” As Baci’s prodding suggests, Hudson City is the end result of corrupt pragmatism. Thus, City of Hope presents a bleak, realistic view of contemporary urban corruption. The motives of every political ﬁgure are clearly spelled out: Each represents a gang of proﬁteers subsumed by an archaic system, a tribal mechanism based on power and territory. As a group, the mayor and his aides, the district attorney and his staff, and most members of the city council subscribe to the politics of proﬁt: Their rhetoric is rich with platitudes, their public gestures garner votes, and their back-room deals are conveniently obscure. Real power, according to Sayles’s ﬁlm, comes from political control, which is where the money lies. City of Hope examines a worn-out urban system badly in need of change. Place is central to City of Hope. Hudson City, which is being sliced up and burned down for money, dominates the ﬁlm. Sayles, who has always been more interested in character and social behavior than conventional narrative structure, uses his ﬁctional city as a stage for his various characters, the sort of people any sentient urban dweller knows well. Each of these people belongs to his or her own sect. “In City of Hope,” says Sayles, “you see the black tribe, the Italian tribe, and the police force who are always their own tribe” (Crowdus and Quart 4). But Sayles is no soapbox polemicist advocating for one group against the others. Rather, he shows us what this tribalism, the fractionalization of a community, does to a place. Hudson City suffers from entropic malaise. Although any rigorous deﬁnition of entropy involves high-level mathematical considerations, the key words used in any interpretation are randomness, disorder, and uniformity. A schematic representation of Hudson City will help in understanding this analogy, the action of the ﬁlm, and Sayles’s pessimistic description of American cities. Imagine Hudson City as two boxes, one inside the other. The interior box represents the political system, tightly controlled and orderly, which inﬂuences all the activity in the surrounding box, the urban community, which is unorganized and volatile. The political system negatively inﬂuences the community, causing more and more randomness and disorder. On the other hand, the urban community has little or no inﬂuence on the system. Thus, Hudson City operates in a constant state of confusion, where nothing will upset the political system until the city is completely destroyed, ﬁnally engulﬁng the political system in its own chaos. As Sayles explained to Thulani Davis, There is this idea that inner cities are just going to be abandoned, that the money is going to be stripped from them, and whoever wants to deal with them can deal with the problems. And that people are going to have their little enclaves and take out of their own pocket to buy a police force or good schools and, in a perverted way, that’s the American Dream: I’ll take care of my own and fuck the rest of you. Finally, though, I think that leads to bigger crises [22].

Even though Sayles has stated in numerous interviews that there is hope in Hudson City, signiﬁed, he suggests, by small, bright moments of reconciliation and repair, these glimmers of possibility are overshadowed by the pessimism that characterizes City of Hope. Resignation is the norm, hope the exception. Sayles uses a more subjective and expressionistic photographic style throughout City of Hope, a radical visual shift from his previous ﬁlms. This stark change in Sayles’s visual technique is announced in his ﬁrst shot. Nick Rinaldi (Vincent Spano), desperate to get out from under his father’s shadow, is photographed from an oblique angle with the frame

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washed lightly in red, hinting at both his imbalance and the threat of danger to come. This shot announces a fresh approach for Sayles, a switch from his signature imagery, which tends to be straightforward. The canted angle of the shot and color ﬁlter are fresh additions to Sayles’s visual style. While he lacks the heightened visual ﬂair of Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee, Sayles’s awareness of visual syntax has always been in evidence throughout his directorial career, but City of Hope marks a signiﬁcant change. Sayles designed City of Hope around long, uninterrupted master shots that contain the entire scene, underscoring the interconnectedness of his characters. He employed Robert Richardson, who shot Eight Men Out, as his director of photography because of Richardson’s Steadicam talent. Richardson photographs Hudson City’s city people with perseverance, tracking them like an anthropologist with a camera. Sayles wrote the ﬂuid character transitions into his script, before he had decided on a cinematographer, as he remarked to Gavin Smith: “The word I used was ‘trade.’ I would have a conversation going, and then the stage direction would say, ‘And we trade and follow these two characters. And these are the ﬁrst lines that we hear, and these are the ﬁrst lines that we see on camera’ ” (67). Using a widescreen format, Sayles and his photographic crew were able to shoot characters in the foreground and the background without losing clarity. According to Sayles, he and Richardson decided that the extra heavy Steadicam would enhance City of Hope. Everything, of course, comes with a price. “Bob’s a hardass on his crew,” Sayles explains. “He said, ‘What the hell, he’ll [the Steadicam operator] be in good shape when the movie’s over’—I think our guy checked into a hospital” (Smith 68). The choreography of the opening shot, for instance, is a ﬂawless weave contrasting Nick’s pessimistic confusion and Wynn’s idealistic willingness to work for change. After the red wash fades from Nick’s image, the camera returns to a normal horizontal and vertical axis point and pulls away for a full master shot of Nick and Yoyo (Stephen Mendillo), the shop steward who, like Nick, is paid to show up but not work. Nick tries to tell Yoyo about his internal chaos, but he gives up quickly. Frustrated, he asks for cocaine to relieve his “fuckin’ head.” Nick then tells Riggs (Chris Cooper), the construction foreman, that he is quitting. As Nick heads for the stairs, the camera picks up Nick’s father, Joe, talking to Wynn about minority hiring. After Joe denies the request because he is carrying too many union no-shows, Wynn asks, “So, we’re good enough to pay rent on these apartments but we’re not good enough to build them?” Frustrated, Wynn understands he lacks real political power and thus the ability to put his people to work. Nick, who does not understand the covert system that made his father successful, begins a hopeless search to make sense of his own life, a journey across Hudson City that will come full circle. As the opening sequence indicates, Wynn and Nick are central to Sayles’s narrative. Each is fundamental to the outcome of the ﬁlm. Their parallel stories provide City of Hope with a framework for all the other characters as they move toward the dark conclusion of the ﬁlm. Nick and Wynn, though, scarcely know each other. The opening shot is the only time they share the frame, and that is momentary. Still, like every other character in City of Hope, these men are inexorably linked, and this connection is Sayles’s main point: Hudson City is an organic whole, and its life stories never separate. As Sidney Gottlieb points out, “Without denying the fact of individuality—people do indeed have personal goals and private desires—Sayles nevertheless insists that the primary reality of life, for better or for worse, is social” (73). Therefore, even though City of Hope seems epic, or panoramic, it is claustrophobic, a hermetically sealed place where every action has a consequence. Sayles’s visual composition reminds us of this theme again and again.

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Although Sayles used a moving camera in Eight Men Out, the connections between the characters were generally established by crosscutting, a technique that establishes and underscores the social and economic division among the characters by keeping them in separate frames. Conversely, City of Hope’s long, complicated takes establish a different visual construction in bold strokes: “I think what I wanted to get at—in the writing and in the style of shooting—is the fact that, like it or not, people depend on each other. We’re stuck with each other, and we have to deal with each other one way or the other” (Davis 21–22). While Eight Men Out examines the fragmentation of a baseball organization, City of Hope examines a larger community fraying badly. From the beginning, Sayles’s cityscape narrative unfolds rapidly on Hudson City’s unstable streets. Although Sayles never completely embraces a view of the city as a hopeless wasteland beyond reconstruction, City of Hope does display the characteristic ﬁlm noir moods of claustrophobia and despair. Although City of Hope might look dated and sound clichéd today, it stands as evidence against the suggestion that Sayles’s visuals are unremarkable. Filmmakers and television producers borrowed from Sayles’s screenplay and his visual design. Narrative, funding, and cinematography are all fundamental components in any Sayles project; in the main, each changes from ﬁlm to ﬁlm. In City of Hope, this conjunction of cinematic language systems is especially effective. The work site is an important beginning for Sayles. It functions on a number of levels, introducing both characters and themes necessary for understanding City of Hope’s narrative. At the work site, political clout makes or breaks the project; jobs exist for political or familial reasons; corruption grounds the project, which is an essential part of Hudson City’s renewal. The unﬁnished building provides both open and closed forms in which Sayles frames his characters. Initially, Nick and Yoyo are presented in closed form; they are part of the construction culture charged with building, even if they do not really have to work; the job is totally corrupt, an apt metaphor for the possibility of renewal in Hudson City. Councilman Wynn, on the other hand, who truly wants to serve his constituents, is photographed in open form, indicating that his world has not yet become constricted. In addition, the building is a high-rise, separated from the street by height and the powerful forces behind its construction. Appropriately, when Nick leaves the building he exits into the city, the outer box, where he is not separated from other people and where his father’s money and connections cannot protect him. Nick is never allowed power or control in the frame; he exists in a labyrinthine nightmare, walled in from every side. Nick is alienated even from the corrupt world of Hudson City. Sayles places Nick in a Hamlet-like paradox: He cannot decide to stay, yet he cannot leave. Nick’s scenes, then, present a bleak vision. Ironically, there is nothing for Nick to revolt against because the world around him lacks values of any kind. No positive systems of order exist, only corrupt ones. Nick’s condition is as damaged as Hudson City’s. Still, even though the city is corrupt, exhausted, uncaring, and racially divided, Nick in his own confused way seeks an ideal world, the sort of place that makes sense even to a confused young man. Sayles photographs Nick in a ﬁlm noir style to indicate the character’s true feelings. Nick’s world is one of desolation and muddle. On a number of occasions, Sayles photographs Nick aimlessly running through Hudson City’s streets of at night, trying to escape but lacking both the will and the means to do so. In each of these sequences, Sayles places Nick in an expressionistic mise-en-scène. In the background or the foreground, pools of light dot the city’s darkened streets, suggesting street lamp illumination, the sodium-vapor

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look so common in contemporary cities, but the amount of light is strong and direct, not diffuse. Though realistic, the lighting is also symbolic, in that its effect signiﬁes how difﬁcult it is for any of these urbanites to ﬁnd their way in Hudson City, especially Nick. Except for brief moments of illumination, Nick remains in the dark, suffering both emotional and intellectual turmoil. Sayles also uses high-key lighting to jar the viewer into experiencing the cause-andeffect relationship among his characters. In a sequence recalling Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, we see two African American teenagers, Tito (Eddie Townsend) and Desmond ( Jojo Smollett), roaming Hudson City’s nocturnal streets. They verbally taunt women they pass. Tito is the leader, unafraid to say anything. Desmond, a physically softer, younger-looking kid, follows Tito’s lead but lacks his friend’s sexually charged enthusiasm. As they pass into a pool of white light, they are suddenly pushed up against the brick facade of a building. Two cops, Paddy ( Jude Ciccolella) and Fuentes ( Jaime Tirelli), enter into the circle of light and begin to hassle the teenagers. Typically, Tito takes the offensive; the cops shout back. The mise-en-scène is lurid, making the characters appear unreal, nightmarish. The low-angle shot gives the cops authoritative presence and strength, physically overmatching Tito and Desmond. Sayles highlights the racial antagonism that exists between the cops and the teenagers, members of two warring urban tribes. Tito shouts at Paddy, “Man, this is a free fuckin’ country.” The cop responds, “Where’d you hear that one. You keep your shit south of L Street.” Paddy turns Tito around and pushes him toward L Street, the racial line of demarcation in Hudson City. With precision, Sayles shows a transfer of power from the mouthy teenagers to the hard-edged cops who control their section of town. Both the cops and the teenagers are in the wrong. Everyone within the frame, then, is under a hot lamp, suggesting that the cops and the teens share in a collective guilt, a manifest lack of understanding. As Tito and Desmond walk away, Fuentes says they may have treated the youths too harshly. Paddy gives his new partner some sage street advice: “If you can’t get respect, you settle for fear.” Yet by showing disrespect for Tito and Desmond, the cops unknowingly establish a motive for revenge, which will be carried out on a white man jogging alone in a nearby park. Tito and Desmond began as elements within the ﬁlm’s background, but as Greg Smith acknowledges, “these minor characters become major players. Without them the plot of City of Hope could not move forward” (Sayles Talk 124). Traditionally, ﬁlm noir uses low-key lighting and garish high contrasts to create a shadowy world both sinister and inviting. Sayles, however, puts his own spin on this visual style. The high-key spotlights wash the color from his images, often turning characters into expressions of pure rage. This type of lighting becomes claustrophobic, capturing Sayles’s performers within a spotlight from which there is no exit. Sayles’s lighting pattern exaggerates his characters. Every move and every word demands scrutiny. In Nick’s case, the lighting is ironic; he cannot see a way out of the trap that is Hudson City. The cops and the teenagers, street antagonists in a turf battle, are placed on display. In City of Hope, Sayles’s lighting scheme creates the same links and disruptions as his roving camera. Sayles also uses different evocative lighting techniques in two pivotal sequences near the end of the ﬁlm: one, a confrontation between Nick and Carl (Sayles); the other, Nick’s nighttime conversation with an African American man shooting baskets on an inner-city court, a character, like so many others, who has appeared on screen before; now, he ﬁgures into a major thematic sequence in the ﬁlm, for he knew Tony brother as a basketball player.

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The mise-en-scène of each scene discloses thematic connections and Sayles’s broader political intentions. For all of his tough-guy posturing, Nick remains an innocent wandering though a place he truly does not understand. Memories of Tony, Nick’s older brother who died in Vietnam, haunt him. Early in the ﬁlm, Sayles shows Nick looking at Tony’s ﬂattering photographs and athletic awards, kept with shrine-like reverence in his father’s bedroom. These signify Tony’s importance to the family, particularly his father. Tony was an allstate basketball player, a popular kid, whose life was cut tragically short by an unpopular war. Even in death, Tony represents the traditional all–American kid, an impossible image for Nick, a non-athletic loner, to equal. Nick blames his father for Tony’s death. According to Nick, Joe Rinaldi sent Tony to Vietnam, where he was killed. Nick, however, does not know the true story. The varnish must be stripped away from Tony’s history so the truth—Tony went to Vietnam to avoid jail, like a character in a Bruce Springsteen song— will be revealed. But discovering the truth is no panacea. Awareness, Sayles suggests, comes with a price. To save himself from jail, Carl tells O’Brien (Kevin Tighe), a politically ambitious detective, that Nick participated in a botched burglary at Mad Anthony’s electronics store. This information is used, in turn, against Joe Rinaldi to get him to cooperate with the Mob. Nick, on the run for almost the entire ﬁlm, is unaware of his father’s intervention. Without thinking, Nick decides to confront Carl to exact revenge. But Carl, Hudson City’s ﬁxer, the man people— cops, politicians, mobsters— turn to when they need information, a fence for stolen property, or professional arson work, delivers a history Nick is not prepared to hear—the truth about how Tony landed in Vietnam. As he approaches Carl’s garage at night, Nick’s image is reﬂected in a darkened window, suggesting that we will now see another portion of his personality. Nick hides in the shadows as one of Carl’s Sayles’s performance as Carl, the proprietor of a downtown mechanics leaves the garage Hudson City garage, was his last major role in one of his carrying a comically massive own ﬁlms. Carl is connected to almost all the small-time boom box blaring a heavy crimes in the city, including loan-sharking and various acts of larceny. Carl hires an arsonist to burn down a tenement metal tune, “All for Nothing, building standing in a developer’s way. Crippled in a Our Balls to the Wall,” a predrunken-driving accident that forever connected him to cise deﬁnition of Nick’s condiNick Rinaldi (Vincent Spano), Carl is an embittered, cyn- tion. Cloaked in darkness, the ical low-life who sums up his world with succinct precision garage takes on a haunting when speaking with Nick’s father about a death that was a result of the tenement ﬁre: “It’s life, Joe, whaddya gonna look. Sayles cuts to a shot of do?” Yet, Carl’s world-view can be explained by his own bad Carl leaning up against a car inside the garage. He looks up luck; he is one of Sayles’s human bad-guys.

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when he hears Nick, and, looking directly into the camera says, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the fugitive.” The camera picks up Nick’s point of view, moving slowly around Carl, tentatively assessing the situation. Carl remains cool, calm, framed by a background that is an off beat scheme of light and dark marked with diffuse pools of red and blue. The miseen-scène establishes Nick’s American nightmare, with the sinister Carl at its center. Carl, a character equal to Matewan’s C.E. Lively in unctuous deceit, knows more about Tony and Joe Rinaldi than Nick does. Carl inhabits a world hidden from plain view. Sayles photographs Carl in a variety of shots, but his face is always half in shadows. Clearly, Carl is a heavy, at home in his world of shadows. Carl displays no surprise or fear over Nick’s desire for revenge throughout the sequence. He is a man who understands Hudson City’s invisible mechanics. Conversely, Nick’s face is photographed in direct light. Still, he too is framed by the background darkness of Sayles’s symbolic mise-en-scène, which indicates the corruption that engulfs both these characters. Nick yells at Carl, “You rolled over on me just as you did on Tony.” Carl begins to move toward Nick, reducing the visible space between them, snarling, “Don’t talk about that old shit.” The camera’s gaze follows Carl as he tightens the space between himself and Nick. “You think he was a fuckin’ hero,” Carl disdainfully shouts. He reveals Tony’s story, the facts behind the image: Tony was drunk, driving a stolen car when it jumped a curb, hitting a woman. Panicked, Tony left both the woman and Carl, his passenger, for the cops to deal with. Nick calls Carl a liar. Carl says, “Ask your daddy, Nick.” Nick than accuses Carl, who has moved away from him to get into his car, of torching L Street. “Like I said,” Carl taunts, “ask your daddy.” Carl’s mocking tine hits a nerve. The implication is that Nick is unable to take care of himself and must rely on his father to get by. Nick, of course, thinks he is rebelling against his father. Now, however, Nick confronts the truth of his past and present. In a rage, he grabs a ratchet and begins smashing the windshield of Carl’s car. Inside the car, which is ﬂooded with white light, Carl reaches for a gun. As Nick opens the door, Carl raises the gun and asks Nick if he is through. “Because if you’re not,” he says, “I’m going to blow your fuckin’ head off.” Sayles spots a red light on Carl’s forehead, indicating the rage and willingness behind his threat. Illuminating the scene with a variety of lighting sources, and symbolic reds and blues, Sayles emphasizes his meaning. Many of the characters in this ﬁlm hold secrets. Rizzo, for example, never tells his partner about the existence of his young son, because the child has a physical disability. The politicians heedlessly practice featherbedding and nepotism. Nick lies about his relationship with his own sister to Angela (Barbara Williams) to make himself look better. Sayles, clearly, wants to make a comment about America’s tendency toward secrecy and lies, a form of moral corruption that has trickled down from the top. The past, the history tormenting Nick, is revealed as more complex than he ever imagined, especially his father’s own corruption. Sayles’s mise-en-scène exposes the hidden side of an often ugly world. Nick’s inchoate rage ﬁnally takes on meaning: He has been deceived his entire life. But he is powerless to do anything about his condition, except face the truth. The antithesis of the nightmare, however, follows shortly. Nick, who injures his hand while trying to attack Carl, sits near a basketball court, thinking through all that he has learned. A man shoots baskets in the background. As his basketball rolls off the rim toward Nick, he asks for a “little help.” Nick obliges. The ballplayer comments on Nick’s hand. Nick looks down at it and says, “My life is messed up. This is nothing.” Again, Sayles’s mise-en-scène is conﬁgured with reds, whites, and blues. Unlike the previous sequence,

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the basketball scene is outdoors, and it is shot in open form. The symbolic colors do not conﬁne these ﬁgures; rather, the colors are spread evenly across the foreground, the midground, and the background, giving the shot balance, unity. Even though it is night, the diffusion of color suggests no threat. Brieﬂy, equilibrium is achieved. Nick and the basketball player talk about Tony. The basketball player remembers how quick Tony was “for a white guy.” Nick mordantly replies, “Not fast enough.” Their talk is urban, good natured, and friendly. In the hands of a less serious director, this sequence could be wrung out for every drop of sentimentality. These characters only talk for a moment. Sayles plays it straight. He uses this moment to release us from the violent action of the confrontation with Carl, to highlight the fact that people in America are not as far apart as they might think. Mistakenly, critics focus on Nick as City of Hope’s protagonist, seeing the progression of the ﬁlm as his story. Phillip Lopate, for example, writes that City of Hope is at its weakest centering “on young Nick, a drug-confused young man who is simply too much of a washout to carry the ﬁlm” (12). In Cineaste, Leonard Quart, a strong supporter of Sayles’s political themes, points out that “Nick’s character just can’t sustain the moral and social weight that Sayles has grafted to him” (45). But Nick represents old, corrupt Hudson City; he has not been able to release himself from his father’s grip. Nick, then, is Wynn’s opposite. Unlike the energetic, committed city councilman, Nick is enervated, confused. Ironically, both men search for hope, something to make their city a better place. Nick, who has been smothered by his father, does not understand how to bring about change; his good looks and family name have always been enough. Wynn, a college political science professor turned politician, wants to lead, a duty, he discovers, that is more difﬁcult to perform than achieve. Wynn, in fact, occupies a more important position than Nick, for he is working to improve the condition of his community. He is more focused, more goal oriented. Moreover, he learns that high moral standards must be jettisoned in order to be an effective political leader. Taking responsibility is a fact from which there is no escape for both Nick and Wynn. Nick’s response to every problem is visceral, ill deﬁned. Wynn, a more cerebral character, is an idealist who, in the end, sacriﬁces his values for political expediency. When City of Hope opens, Wynn seeks change through the political system, acting in a controlled, professional manner, even though he disagrees with his political peers. Eventually, Wynn realizes that his struggle comes at a price. But unlike Nick, Wynn has the ability to make change for the common good, however brief his term might be. Wynn becomes less highminded, and therefore a more popular leader as he practices political gamesmanship. Leonard Quart notes, “In City of Hope, there is no escape from interest group politics and maneuvering, but, for Sayles, some interest groups have greater justice than others in their claims on society” (45). After Wynn fails to convince Joe Rinaldi to hire more minority workers on his construction job, he walks to the P Street Community Center, the heart of Hudson City’s black and Hispanic community, to ask Levonne (Frank Fasion), a radical community activist, and Malik (Tom Wright), a recent convert to Islam, for help that evening at the city council meeting called to vote on a school bond issue. Wynn’s reformist political views clash with the more radical ideals of Levonne and the doctrinaire Malik. Wynn leaves, looking for some other means of community support. Wynn believes in the system and in his own ability to institute change by taking the higher ground. Wynn is rankled at the thought of nepotism, quid pro quo, and the political handouts that are the foundation of

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the politics of business as usual. Early on, Wynn remains true to his personal, albeit naïve, philosophy. Wynn represents the opposite end of the continuum from Nick, the cops, and the teenagers. He is idealistic and optimistic, articulate and intelligent. Sayles’s camera never captures him within the indicting high-key hot lamp. Instead, we see Wynn as a hardworking, diligent, committed councilman who is just a bit unsure about how to unify his constituency. Wynn works for the passage of the school bond issue, which the white majority on the council rejects, helps the residents of L Street who lost their homes in an arsonist’s blaze, and continually appeals to Levonne for greater community support. Wynn recognizes the type of polarization that economic abandonment breeds. As he says in his defense of the school bond issue, “You pay now or you pay later.” Still, he loses more than he wins: The council votes against the school bond issue, no housing is set up for the victims of the arsonist’s ﬁre, and Levonne refuses to help the man he calls “Professor Oreo.” Wynn then seeks outside help from his father ﬁgure, a retired African American mayor, Errol (Ray Aranha). In a mixture of cheerful anecdotes and stern declarations, Errol tells Wynn that power always wins out over moral integrity. In a ﬁlm ripe with astute political observations, Wynn’s trip to a country club golf course to speak with Errol sums up the hard truth of American politics: Always take the offensive, never retreat. This conversation, held on the playing ﬁeld of choice for the powerful and the elite, shows Sayles at his best. Errol, tellingly playing alone, drives his golf cart around the course gleeful satisfaction. He is the only African American seen playing. Moreover, Errol tells Wynn that the course was once restricted—no blacks, no Jews, and no “undesirable elements.” Errol, as he says, “sued the bastards” for the opportunity to play. Wynn innocently remarks, “It must have been hard to concentrate on your game.” Errol corrects him: “I never played better.” Metaphorically, Sayles calls attention to the fact that those in power, the elites, traditionally run roughshod over minorities. Visually, the golf course allows Sayles to shoot the sequence, for the most part, in open form, indicating the relative freedom Wynn has while listening to Errol, who splices his direct comments on American politics with observations on his golf game as he moves from tee to green with an anxious Wynn in tow. Here, a quiet day on the links becomes a lesson in political reality. Wynn learns to trim his notion of justice in order to play tough politics. Sayles conﬁrms that no matter which tribe is in charge, a corrupt system will always prevail. For instance, Wynn is troubled by the story Tito and Desmond told after they were arrested for mugging Les (Bill Raymond), the white jogger. The boys told the police that Les propositioned them as they sat in the park, so they beat him. Wynn suspects the story is a lie, and so does Errol. It only stokes Hudson City’s overheated political climate. But the incident has serious political and social ramiﬁcations. The Hudson City police have used extreme force in the past when dealing with African Americans. If Wynn does not support the teenagers, Levonne will make sure his political power base, as small as it is, evaporates. Even though the incident has been blown wildly out of proportion, Wynn must voice his opinion, and truth gives way to political expediency. For Sayles, the circumstances surrounding this incident play themselves out practically daily in our own media-saturated political environment. As he said to Gary Crowdus and Leonard Quart, Whether you’re a black politician or a white politician, you have to have an opinion about this kind of thing.... Every time something happens now, the media calls Dinkins [a former mayor of New York City], they call D’Amato [a former junior senator from New

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The politics of race dominates the discussion, rather than any effort to discover the truth behind an incident. Of course, the painful irony of Sayles’s ﬁctional situation is that the minority voice must be heard and developed when the corrupt majority ignores the minority’s concerns. When an opportunity presents itself, a leader takes it, which is the unsettling lesson the idealistic Wynn learns from Errol. Errol slowly narrates how his own idealism was compromised, effectively ending his reign as mayor. But, Errol says, approaching the green, “I had twelve years in ofﬁce, which is a pretty good run.” Wynn responds with disbelief, “So I should lie and hope for twelve good years?” Approaching his golf ball and lining up the putt, Errol replies with a smile, “This isn’t the Old Testament, Wynn. People didn’t vote you in so you could test your moral ﬁber.” Sayles cuts between Errol and Wynn, keeping them in separate frames, indicating their moral and philosophical division, which adds power to the dialogue, for Wynn’s political transformation emerges slowly. He does not sacriﬁce his moral standards willynilly. The background also plays a prominent role here. The golf course is bright, full of green grass and trees, balanced by a clear blue sky, removed from the mean streets of Hudson City. Still, the golf course signiﬁes the world of dealmakers, and with little warning, the blithe golf outing turns sinister. The tone of Errol’s voice changes from that of benevolent mentor to that of political realist. He turns to look at Wynn and says, “If you’re going to be a leader, lead! Take it to the man every chance you get.” Sayles cuts to Wynn, who answers with a touch of anger in his voice, “This is not about a ﬁght with white people.” Sayles’s camera captures Errol in full proﬁle, the muscles in his jaw indicating anger, as he walks toward Wynn. Richardson’s Steadicam ﬁlms Errol in motion, obscuring the background, effectively creating a closed shot. He walks right up to Wynn. Now in closed form, sharing the frame with the councilman, Errol delivers Wynn’s political education: “It’s always about that, Wynn. If it isn’t, you’re just another ward heeler. You don’t defend anything, you attack what’s wrong. That’s what a leader is.” By compressing the visual space, created by using the moving camera instead of cutting between shots, Sayles emphasizes the tense situation. Wynn and Errol are both leaders of the African American community, albeit representing two generations, but they still have to abide by the system’s rules. The incident involving Tito, Desmond, and Les is mere political fodder, the sort of stuff that could get a man elected mayor. Ultimately, Wynn registers his understanding. By constricting the physical space in the frame, Sayles shows us that Wynn has no options. Sayles then returns to the shot-reverse shot technique he used at the beginning of the sequence to release the tension brought on by Errol’s explicit deﬁnition of American politics. Wynn quietly says, “Worked so hard to get on the damn council.... I never thought about....” Wynn’s subdued tone and loss of language indicate how his hopeful outlook has changed. Sayles shoots him in closed form. Richardson’s camera wraps around him like a cocoon, signifying Wynn’s limited options regarding his public statements concerning the boys’ credibility. If he wants to effect political, truth becomes relative. Errol, on the other hand, returns to his upbeat mood. Framed in a deep-focus shot, free from political entanglements, he stands ready to make a putt: “Can’t know how you’re going to play the green when you stood back at the tee, Wynn. You just ﬁgure it out when you get there,” he says

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calmly. The sequence with Errol stroking his putt, smiling ear to ear. He understands the game. Of the two central characters, Wynn learns the realities of Hudson City politics. Nick, who attempts a different type of search, never does. Wynn convinces Les to drop the charges against Tito and Desmond, even though he knows Les’s story is true. He then goes to the P Street Community Center and delivers a rhetoric-rich, rabble-rousing speech. The citizens of his district rally around him. Wynn then leads an impromptu march to confront the mayor, who is holding a political fund-raiser with the business community of Hudson City. Wynn has changed. He now understands that in the game of politics, where truth and integrity are secondary, it is more important to wield power than to adhere to principles. After interrupting the mayor’s pro-business speech, Wynn, basking in the lights of television cameras, says, “I brought some concerned citizens. They’ve been looking for you, Mr. Mayor. Got a minute?” Mayor Baci stands at the lectern speechless. Wynn confronts Hudson City’s ruling class, its private proﬁt core, with a united public citizens group, his constituents. While Wynn confronts the atrophied political machine head-on, Nick wanders without purpose. Nick is feckless because of Hudson City, his father, and his past. Nick views Hudson City as corrupt, lacking possibility, without hope. Wynn, conversely, tries to reconstruct his city. He sees small hope, signiﬁed by his attack on the entrenched political system. Change, however, comes with a price, even for the politically idealistic. Wynn sacriﬁces the purity of his ideals and the truth for a chance at real political power. Wynn’s triumphant march parallels Nick’s possible death. Out of jealous rage, Rizzo, drunk and off duty, shoots Nick because he is involved with the cop’s ex-wife, Angela (Barbara Williams). Even though Joe Rinaldi tried to keep Nick from going to jail by using all his political “juice,” the code word for doing the power brokers a favor, which, in this case, meant agreeing to burn the L Street apartments and then sell the property to the Galaxy Towers developers, Nick cannot escape the city streets. Hudson City, then, represents more than a physical space. Leonard Quart complains that “Hudson City’s physical texture—its streets, buildings, and neighborhoods—are never granted a distinctive character” (45). Sayles, however, shows the contemporary city as a form of currency, to be hoarded, divided, and controlled for private proﬁt. It is a place of compromise, where honest thought is easily subsumed by a corrupt system. And it is the system, not a speciﬁc physical space, that Sayles examines in City of Hope—Hudson City is universal, any small city, anywhere in America. Joe tearfully admits as much to his severely wounded son during their attempt at reconciliation at the construction site: “All my life I thought that I was the one in control. I made sure I had the juice. I had all the angles. Jesus, I’m not in control of a damn thing.” As Nick slumps to the ﬂoor, Joe realizes that his son truly needs medical care. He shouts from the open facade of his building out across the night-shrouded city for help. Sayles’s camera follows Joe’s cries down to the street, where Asteroid, set off by a reddish circle of light, shufﬂes along. He hears Joe’s cries. Grabbing the high wire fence surrounding the construction site to anchor himself, Asteroid listens for a moment, then begins an apoplectic shadow dance, mimicking Joe’s desperate calls: “Help! Help! We need help.” Here, Sayles’s mise-en-scène is oblique, an echo of his opening shot. The wire fence breaks up the already skewed frame, sectioning off the lower right-hand corner of the image. Metaphorically, the fence cuts Joe and Nick off from Asteroid, the one person who might help them. Sayles’s camera lingers on the scene. We see a master shot of Asteroid

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dancing around in the ghostly red light, a dominant color found throughout the ﬁlm to suggest anger and violence. He ﬂails about, repeating Joe’s words, a cry in the dark for both Nick and Hudson City. Sayles ends City of Hope with this disturbing, ambiguous image because Hudson City remains a place fragmented, full of rifts that cannot be repaired without serious cooperation among all the urban tribes. Given the title of the ﬁlm, the bleak cityscape depicted, must be read as ironic. There are characters working toward a better city and a better life in Hudson City. While Sayles clearly despises the cynical nature of American politics, his own populist philosophy has enough play in City of Hope so a completely fatalistic view of urban America and, by extension, civic life is not absolute. For example, Jeanette (Gloria Foster) discovers that Desmond, her son, has lied about the incident in the park. She then reminds him that in order to live properly, you must stand up for what is right; that is, living honestly and with integrity. After some screen time passes, Desmond ﬁnds Les, who is about to go jogging. He apologizes to Les by saying, “I know you are not a faggot.” Les responds, “We’ve got a long way to go.” Various critics have remarked that Sayles appeals to sentimentality with the ﬁlm’s multiple conclusions, wrapping his story up like a nineteenth-century novel. When these small epiphanies are juxtaposed with the fact that the big-money people in the ﬁlm get away with all their schemes at the expense of the citizens of Hudson City, it becomes clear that the point Sayles is making is that ethical behavior will not come from above. If people are going to survive with integrity, they must make individual choices to live properly within an atmosphere of massive corruption. Common citizens are Hudson City’s only hope. As a coda to his multiple endings, Sayles uses a song sung by Aaron Neville and the Neville Brothers Band, “Fearless,” which is melancholy and positive, an afﬁrmation of the resiliency of the human spirit, not a celebration of corruption. Sayles’s crew is on full display in City of Hope. Most of the production team and many of the actors who worked on Matewan and Eight Men Out, among other Sayles ﬁlms, are at work here. Sayles wrote the parts of Wynn and Nick speciﬁcally for Joe Morton and Vincent Spano, respectively. Sayles’s script is full of memorable lines, which the actors deliver with energy and style. His actors, mostly members of the unofﬁcial Sayles repertory company, put their talent to solid use. Bobby ( Jace Alexander) and Zip (Todd Graff ), a not-too-bright pair of rock ’n’ rollers who supplement their incomes by committing burglaries for Carl, are the ﬁlm’s comedians, postmodern Bowery Boys. Arrested and in jail after the failed electronics heist, Bobby laments, “Maybe this is hell.” Zip says, “No. If this was hell, my mother would be here, reading from USA Today about which foods are the most mucus producing when you have a cold. Compared to my house, this is Disneyland.” Kevin Tighe plays O’Brien, who works to better himself, not enforce the law, with despicable charm. Barbara Williams turns in a solid performance as Nick’s love interest, who understands that taking care of her son, going to school, working, and getting enough sleep are, for her, life’s key ingredients. Angela Bassett plays Wynn’s loyal wife. Sayles presents her in an uncharacteristic love scene that is private, romantic, and humorous (she experiences a foot cramp while making love to Wynn). In a brief cameo, Lawrence Tierney plays Kerrigan, the local mob boss who bankrolls Joe’s construction job. He delivers a deliberately ironic version of trickle-down economics to Joe: “It’s the way our society works, Joe. Ya got something good, ﬁrst everybody on top of ya gets a taste. Then ya share what ya got left with everybody below ya. We’re social animals. Human beings, not dogs.” Once again, Sayles used talented actors

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he knew were reliable, and who could play the kinds of roles necessary to bring Hudson City to life. Sayles ﬁlmed City of Hope for less than $5 million. Raising the money for the City of Hope was not as difﬁcult as securing budgets for some of Sayles’s previous projects. Perhaps Sayles’s name recognition had something to do with this, but, according to Sarah Green, Maggie Renzi’s coproducer, the story struck a chord with many of their backers. Each one, it seemed, could relate similar stories about the cities they lived in. For additional funding, Sayles’s production team also worked out a distribution deal with RCA/Columbia for the video rights. City of Hope was shot on a 30-day, ﬁve-week schedule, using 40 locations in Cincinnati, Ohio, where it was cheaper and easier to move around than in New York City or Hoboken, New Jersey. City of Hope is a brilliantly designed, troubling ﬁlm. Like Matewan and Eight Men Out, it did not fare well at the box ofﬁce. Sayles could not have picked a worse time to release any of the ﬁlms in his American historical cycle: They reﬂected none of the values of the Reagan administration, were left-leaning, and were written with story in mind, not empty action. City of Hope, however, suffered an even worse fate than its two predecessors, which does not diminish its importance artistically or intellectually. Sayles shows us a modern city based on greed, graft, dishonesty, corruption, racism, and confusion, emphasizing the evils of a layer-caked political system. Yet we also see compassion, honesty, and love, which suggest the possibility of hope. City of Hope is an urban collage, and an important American ﬁlm. As the ﬁlm implies the symptoms of social breakdown are not the causes.

5

The Power of the Physical World: From Soap Opera Diva to Celtic Myth Passion Fish Bergman in Louisiana I was thinking about what people do when they think they’re on one life path and then it all gets blown in another direction. —John Sayles, Press Release, 1992

Hollywood’s publicity machine declared 1992 “The Year of the Woman.” Yet only one ﬁlmmaker with commercial name recognition actually made a ﬁlm about women: John Sayles. A small story focusing on the relationship between two willful women who understand life’s pain, Passion Fish (1992) revisits the intimate, domestic milieu of Return of the Secaucus Seven and Lianna. Stylistically, it is far removed from hurly-burly visual design of City of Hope. Passion Fish features a concise narrative focusing on characters that are complicated, confused, and funny; these are functioning adults, not people prone to cheap sentimentality or cliché. Set in Louisiana, Passion Fish resonates with a deep sense of place, and Sayles uses the bayou to examine the transformative power of the physical world, adding a lyrical quality to the ﬁlm. Passion Fish tells the story of two headstrong women from distinct yet similar cultural backgrounds: May-Alice Culhane (Mary McDonnell), a privileged white Southern woman who ﬂed her rural home for an actor’s life in New York City only to have her television career cut short by a nasty accident; and Chantelle Blades (Alfre Woodard), a privileged African American woman whose life never met the expectations of her stern physician father, bottoming out in cocaine addiction and a struggle to rehabilitate herself in order to regain her young daughter. The ﬁlm opens after May-Alice, a fortyish soap opera diva, has been hit by a taxi in New York City while on her way to have her legs waxed, leaving her permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Sayles’s credit sequence shows her brief, tumultuous rehabilitation period. As the credits conclude, May-Alice returns home to the bayou country of 144

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Louisiana, back to her family’s old plantation house, a place she could not wait to escape while growing up. Cut off from career, friends, and ambition, the home on the edge of a cypress swamp cocoons May-Alice; she takes up a spot on the living room couch to drink white wine and watch television, reveling with self-destructive, masochistic pleasure in her misery. After May-Alice runs through a series of live-in nurses, establishing herself as a fullbore bitch, Chantelle arrives at the doorstep. True to form, May-Alice attacks her new nurse with the same tough, angry, self-pitying attitude that is her only resource. Chantelle, however, is her antagonistic match; she shares May-Alice’s frustrations, though not her bellicosity, keeping her personal life hidden from plain view. Passion Fish chronicles this testy relationship, depicting how May-Alice and Chantelle learn to trust and work with each other, a hard task for two people used to concentrating on themselves. Unfortunately, any short description of Passion Fish tends to make the ﬁlm sound melodramatic. Indeed, the publicity blurbs for the ﬁlm did it a great disservice by comparing Passion Fish to the overrated but commercially successful Driving Miss Daisy and Fried Green Tomatoes, two sentimental mainstream melodramas. By comparison, Sayles’s characters are fully articulated. Chantelle’s story carries as much weight as May-Alice’s; this is not the boss lady’s tale. Sayles explains: “To a certain extent, so many mainstream movies are just consumable items. They aren’t things people can remember and apply to their lives” (Dreifus 33). Passion Fish presents life lived, not imagined by the movie industry. Sayles’s realist aesthetic pumps life into all his characters, allowing them to speak in raw, educated, comic, and colloquial voices: I had been thinking about the movie for probably close to ﬁfteen years. I had seen Ingmar Bergman’s movie Persona, and I had worked with hospitals and visiting nurses and heard a lot of stories about their parents and their families. I have always felt that if I was going to make an American version of Persona it would have a white woman in a wheelchair and a black woman pushing her around, and it would be a comedy [ Johnson Creative Screenwriting 12].

Passion Fish is a rueful Sayles comedy, one that addresses issues of class and race, and how people progress as human beings. Passion Fish just begins, introducing us to May-Alice without warning, a device that works well because she is not somebody who engenders sympathy. She is in a hospital room, Sayles crosscuts between close-ups of May-Alice’s twitching hands and her eyes. Awake, she desperately reaches for the nurse’s call button but instead turns on the television. She is transﬁxed by the televised image, no longer seeking a nurse’s assistance. Panning from the hospital bed to the television, the camera connects Sayles’s master shot of May-Alice with an afternoon soap opera. A familiar voice comes from the television, as the camera slowly adjusts to May-Alice’s point of view: “It’s all so strange. All I remember was that I wasn’t happy. Was I?” The camera reveals the woman speaking on television is MayAlice, albeit in soap opera performance. With focused intent, she watches herself. The television camera shifts to a reaction shot from another actress in the scene. From her hospital bed May-Alice snarls, “That’s my close-up. He gave her my fucking close-up.” Without knowing what is wrong with May-Alice, her antagonistic nature, a natural mode, is established. Hers is a small, claustrophobic condition, completely unaffected by the world around her. Quickly, Sayles depicts May-Alice’s self-infatuation. She is more concerned with how she appears on television, the length of her shot, than why she is in the hospital. Her hubris

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is extreme yet artiﬁcial—her emotional life comes from a televised soap opera, a choice, Sayles points out, that many people make (Smith 62). Sayles’s ﬁlms the entire opening sequence examins May-Alice in microscopic detail. Every other ﬁgure in the frame with her is cut off. We hear their voices, see hands and body parts, but we never see a complete picture of the people trying to help May-Alice. They represent impedimenta, not people. May-Alice dominates the frame. Sayles cuts against the generic grain. For the most part, Hollywood ﬁlms about people with disabilities want us to feel for the patients, participate in their struggle, share the joy of their recovery, and wallow in sentimental narrative moments. Sayles, however, draws from the real world. The genesis for Passion Fish was a stint Sayles had as a hospital orderly. He became intrigued by the dynamics between caretakers and newly paralyzed people. May-Alice/Scarlett (a sly cinematic allusion) is accustomed to being treated like a star; she is the focus of attention, not a paraplegic in recovery. Because she is no longer the person on television, no longer independent, May-Alice ﬂees to the dark comfort of her Louisiana home. Visually, Passion Fish lags behind the stylized, simultaneous storyline of City of Hope, since its narrative focuses on two central characters, not a population cross-section of a disintegrating city. Passion Fish is not any less dynamic than Sayles’s urban drama; instead, it requires a different visual composition, one that Sayles and his cinematographer, Roger Deakins, accomplish with grace and beauty. Using expanding deep focus shots, a less ostentatious mobile camera, multiple exposure montages, sequence shots, lyrical master shots, and Louisiana’s physical environment for an exotic backdrop, Sayles brings a style to the screen that is completely different from that of any of his previous ﬁlms, indicating, again, his understanding of cinematic grammar and syntax. Passion Fish lacks the gritty texture of his earlier work, and the colors are robust and inviting. He also displays a poetic use of open and closed forms, which articulate the shifting conditions in his characters’ lives. Sayles establishes the major theme of Passion Fish early on. May-Alice lives in a tight, insulated world—there is not much beyond herself. For almost one-quarter of the ﬁlm, she is photographed in closed form, a visual reminder of her constricted world, of her psychology: She cannot come to terms with the fact that she has lost her livelihood, her legs, and her notoriety. She is, to paraphrase Andrew Sarris, a Nora Desmond for the soap opera crowd (Film Comment 30). Sayles understands the seductive power of illusions. During her escape from New York to Louisiana, May-Alice meets two of Scarlett’s fans. While asking for her autograph, they address May-Alice as “Scarlett,” telling her that she will make a marvelous comeback. The unreality of the situation is not missed by May-Alice, who ﬁghts back tears behind her black sunglasses. Sayles photographs her in close-up, trembling and afraid. Sayles’s mise-en-scène thematically expresses May-Alice’s claustrophobic condition. Unlike her adoring fans, “Scarlett” knows that the world she once knew has come to an end. The multiple-exposure shot that concludes the credit sequence shows May-Alice’s transition from television star hiding behind sunglasses to an angry paraplegic. Still, MayAlice refuses to do anything for herself in Louisiana, except drink and watch television, once the source of her star power. This self-imposed isolation feeds her anger. Sayles runs through a comic montage of caregivers. May-Alice does whatever she can to get rid of these women, who all seem to have more emotional trouble than she; they just do not know it. These rapid scenes show Sayles at his comic best, a reminder of his witty B-genre

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scripts. From the Teutonic Drushka (Marianne Muellerleile) to Lawanda (Leigh Harris), whose biker boyfriend has to have the plate in his head adjusted from time to time, these characters make May-Alice’s life even more miserable. Sayles ﬁlms the interaction between these women exclusively in the living room, signifying the size of May-Alice’s world. Then Chantelle arrives. Unlike May-Alice, Chantelle occupies open space within the frame, even though her surroundings are overwhelming. Too much space, too much possibility has a negative effect on Chantelle. Sayles has said that there are many factors that could keep these women apart—race, power, class (although each comes from an upper-middle-class background). Chantelle faces an enormous world; May-Alice exists in a suffocated condition. What draws these women together is need. These are two smart, bruised people. Unlike the other live-in nurses, Chantelle has little to say. Finding May-Alice on the couch with the television playing, empty wine bottles on the coffee table, and rotten eggs hanging on the wall, Chantelle immediately comes under ﬁre from her hung-over employer, who has wet herself over the course of a long night of drinking. Chantelle helps May-Alice into her wheelchair, for her new employer, who has been alone for days, needs a bath. May-Alice says, “Ya got any problems, personal problems, I don’t want to hear them.” Sayles cuts to a shot of May-Alice resting in her bathtub, as she runs through a graphic list of her own personal problems. “All the things I can’t do,” says May-Alice, “you do for me.” Chantelle, in other words, will be a virtual servant. Chantelle, who wears a permanent look of disgust, takes none of MayAlice’s caustic malice. Feeling sorry for herself, May-Alice declares: “I can’t have sex I can feel. Unless I get into blowjobs. Sorry, you’re probably some big Christian and I just put my foot in my mouth.” Chantelle responds directly: “It’s none of my business what you put into your mouth, Miss Culhane.” This ﬁrst riposte, completely unexpected, reveals Chantelle’s quiet strength and elicits a faint smile from May-Alice. After this exchange, however, Sayles juxtaposes these two women in their separate yet mutual loneliness. Downstairs, May-Alice sits in her dark living room, drinking and channel surﬁng, a perpetual ritual. Upstairs, Chantelle sits on an unmade bed. Heavymetal posters, Lawanda’s remnants, hang limply on the walls, making Chantelle more out of place than she already seems. The doorway to her bedroom creates a constricted proscenium-like masking of the frame, as if Chantelle were locked inside a detention cell. Sayles photographs her in a medium shot, in proﬁle, staring at nothing. Only the paroxysms of her body reveal she is crying. Then she begins to gasp for air, as if sucking on an oxygen tank. These shots link the two women. Sayles’s mise-en-scène is closed, claustrophobic; there is no escape from the frame. Both Chantelle and May-Alice are conﬁned, locked in. Sayles’s use of open and closed form in Passion Fish is masterful and thematically appropriate. In fact, it is not until Sayles opens up the frame that we begin to notice a change in May-Alice. Chantelle, in a no-nonsense fashion, forces May-Alice to begin physical therapy outside the house. She wants her employer to take responsibility for herself. Chantelle wheels May-Alice outside, rolling her into the light and to the edge of the lawn, which ends at a bayou slough. Predictably, May-Alice refuses to work out, dropping a dumbbell to the grass, demanding that Chantelle take her back into the house. Chantelle leaves May-Alice to wheel herself from the lawn to the house. May-Alice complains, “It’s uphill!” Chantelle yells back, “So’s life.” Sayles uses a wide-angle lens to photograph this exterior shot. As Chantelle retreats, May-Alice’s image dominates the foreground. She is obviously upset, but from fear, not anger. Oddly, May-Alice does not turn to shout at Chantelle. Instead, May-Alice stares

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with tear-swollen eyes at what lies in front of her. Her wheelchair rests just at the edge of the bayou, where the muddy, brown water laps at her property. Beyond her wooden boat dock, we see a green line of cypress trees, which mark the swamp, an area neither May-Alice nor Chantelle understands. Metaphorically, the horizon before May-Alice becomes a barrier that must be crossed if her world is to expand. In contrast to other ﬁlms that use Louisiana as a setting, such as Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort (1981), Sayles does nothing to enhance the physical environment. Instead, he records the natural terrain. May-Alice’s fear comes from this open, watery country, which represents her past and a wildness she cannot control; this is, after all, the place she ﬂed after her mother and father died. Clearly, she fears being left alone again. When Chantelle returns a few hours later, May-Alice sits transﬁxed looking at the dimensionless landscape of the bayou. Notably, she does not scream at Chantelle. Something has happened to May-Alice; she talks about the water’s texture, the jumping ﬁsh, and the herons in ﬂight, elements of a small epiphany. May-Alice come to terms with a vastness outside of herself; she has begun to move away from the unreality of television by investing time in the physical world. Early on, May-Alice’s deserted family home is a purgatory for these women. Chantelle and May-Alice have to adapt to the bayou country. For May-Alice, this means coming to terms with a place she never wanted to see again. Chantelle’s task is different. Arriving on May-Alice’s doorstep, she looks out of place. Her hair is styled in thick, black cornrows, accented by stylish gold hoop earrings that add to the beauty of her face; her clothes are fashionable, and she is clearly a far cry from the other nurse attendants. Later in the ﬁlm, we discover that Chantelle is from a stable, upper-middle-class neighborhood in Chicago. Louisiana, then, is new, foreign terrain. Sayles deliberately chose Louisiana to countervail May-Alice’s world of television culture and Chantelle’s background. When Chantelle ﬁrst arrives, she exits a bus at the side of the road. The bus recedes into the background. Behind her, white petrochemical tanks and tall, thin smokestacks rise out of the landscape. Sayles cuts to her point of view, sweeping across the area directly in front of her. We see an unpaved, crushed shell road, a rusted, empty mailbox, and a single house removed from the main road. Sayles cuts back to Chantelle in a full shot. His camera lingers on her, a solitary ﬁgure on a wide, ﬂat landscape. This short sequence is a model of camera placement, camera movement, and visual design, all conveying Chantelle’s anxiety about her position within this seemingly inhospitable place. Sayles reprises the shot later in the ﬁlm, when Chantelle’s estranged father and her daughter, whom she has lost custody of because of her cocaine addiction, arrive for a visit. They too arrive by bus. The camera placement is identical. Here, however, Chantelle stands on the opposite side of the road. For a moment, she simply looks at her father and daughter. Then, her daughter breaks across the road to hug her mother. Chantelle’s father stands rigid, looking at his daughter and granddaughter as they embrace. This silent master shot is accented by the stark, empty background and the placement of the actors, wordlessly commenting on Chantelle’s struggle to come to terms with a new life in a new place, and the amount of space she still has to cover. Louisiana’s polyglot culture spices Sayles’s narrative mix, adding energetic music, appealing cuisine, and backwater folklore. Passion Fish’s setting was key for Sayles: “I had been trying to think of where it should be set, because I wanted the place to be part of what drew the woman who was paralyzed out of her shell, and was traveling through

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Louisiana listening to Zydeco and Rock and Roll. When I got to Cajun country I felt it was the perfect place to set it” ( Johnson Creative Screenwriting 12). Mason Daring’s score includes traditional Cajun songs from D.L. Meynard and the Balfa Brothers, the bluesy Creole zydeco of John DeLafose and The Eunice Playboys, and the reggae-inspired Loup Garou. Daring himself contributed only one number, “La Dance de Mardi Gras,” a new interpretation of a traditional Louisiana bayou country arrangement. In the ﬁlm, Sayles balances Daring’s piece with a more traditional version by the Balfa Brothers during the journey Chantelle, May-Alice, and Rennie (David Strathairn) take into the bayou. Musically, Sayles indicates May-Alice’s transition from the old country she did not take time to understand to her fresh appreciation for Louisiana. Only Daring’s musical choice for the credit sequence seems to lie outside the inﬂuence of Louisiana. The long electric guitar notes he uses underscore May-Alice’s condition early on; they are loud, aggressive, and not particularly inviting. These searing guitar licks mark transition points in May-Alice’s rehabilitation rejection, leading to her decision to return to Louisiana. For the most part, the music Daring and Sayles use in Passion Fish is boisterous, a musical form combining African percussion, French peasant instrumentation, Mardi Gras Indian vocals, and Southern bluegrass ﬁddles, along with washboards, accordions, and sexy, provocative lyrics, which blend to create a truly original sound found only in Louisiana. Food is an essential part of Louisiana living, and it does not escape Sayles’s eye. At a rollicking Cajun community social, he photographs a steaming pile of crawﬁsh being lifted from pot to plate. Sayles also uses food to inject humor into his narrative. At one point in the ﬁlm, Chantelle, who cannot cook, says to May-Alice, “Is there a rule that all black people got to know how to cook?” Applying her best overdone Cajun accent, MayAlice responds, “Darlin,’ down here there’s a rule that everyone got to know how to cook.” And everyone seems to. Rennie, who displays the casual ease of someone used to the backcountry, says, “Bird eggs. Fish. Everything out here that ﬂies, walks, hops, or crawls got a use. It’s all good eatin.’ ” Sugar (Vondie Curtis-Hall), Chantelle’s rakish lover, takes her to lunch at the horse track where he works as a blacksmith. Proudly, he tells Chantelle that she is eating Boudin, a Cajun rice sausage, which he made himself. Chantelle, trying to keep the randy Sugar at arm’s length, declares the food “ﬁne.” Twice Chantelle has to go to the kitchen to prepare food for May-Alice’s guests, and each time she fails miserably. Sayles uses these situations for some sly humor. When MayAlice’s former high school acquaintances, Precious (Mary Portser) and Ti-Marie (Nora Dunn), two screwball Southern gossips, come to see May-Alice, out of curiosity rather than concern. Chantelle serves them Campbell’s tomato soup, a cardinal sin in Louisiana. After they abruptly leave, May-Alice congratulates Chantelle for using such a clever ploy to get rid of the two pests. But Chantelle, who does not understand food, is unaware of what she has done. Moreover, when May-Alice’s costars from the soap arrive, Chantelle again ﬁnds herself lost in the kitchen. We see her trying to cut a tomato with two carving knifes, one to hold it steady, the other for slicing. At the end of the ﬁlm, Sayles uses Chantelle’s lack of dexterity in the kitchen as a release from dramatic tension and to underline the fact that these women have come to accept their place in the bayou country. With humor, May-Alice explains, “If we’re going to stay, you have to learn how to cook.” Food, however, is more than just a comic device; it adds realistic detail to the everyday lives of these women. For example, as a gesture of reconciliation, May-Alice, who is too proud to apologize to Chantelle for yelling at her because Chantelle refused to buy

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more wine, makes an elaborate meal of okra gumbo and jambalaya. When Dr. Blades ( John Henry Redwood) and Chantelle’s’ daughter, Denita (Shauntisa Willis), arrive, MayAlice prepares a traditional Louisiana meal, but she gives Chantelle the credit for cooking. Dr. Blades, who does not understand the linkage between life and food in Louisiana, responds, “We’ve never had a cook in the family.” In Passion Fish, Sayles uses regional cuisine not as mere local color but to add authenticity to his characters and to comment on their lives. Passion Fish reveals a spiritual connection to the land. Sayles shows how people transcend their human ﬂaws, their natural limitations, by looking at the world around them. The lyrical journey into the bayou at the center of the ﬁlm signiﬁes the bond in MayAlice and Chantelle’s relationship. But it is also exposes the poetic mystery of the swamp, including its folk traditions, the pleasure of discovery, and the restorative power of the physical world. Rennie, who grew up on the bayou, guides May-Alice and Chantelle into the watery backcountry. Chantelle is clearly uninterested in the uninviting landscape. May-Alice, on the other hand, revels in the wilderness. Sayles uses a multiple exposure montage to illustrate both the beginning of their journey and the end; in between they stop for lunch on an island named Misère, the isle of misery. Sayles uses the montage to indicate May-Alice’s shifting perspective. May-Alice begins to take stock in the people and the place around her. Although she has been photographing the bayou from her dock, the journey inside this exotic landscape is a revelation: The land teems with life, a direct contrast to her static house. Sayles’s overlapping images indicate May-Alice’s reinvigoration, a renewal that takes place in a primeval world, far from the constricted vision of a soap opera culture. May-Alice reacquaints herself with what she had once known but chose to forget. Sayles, of course, is not prone to “New Age” whimsy; he keeps his story grounded. Chantelle is constantly on the lookout for snakes, which helps balance the sequence, keeping it from becoming overwrought with romantic sentimentality. Rennie, the Cajun “coonass,” represents regional culture. As folklorist Suzi Jones points out, “People share a body of folklore because they live in a certain geographical area; their geographical location is the primary basis for a shared identity that is expressed in their lore, and they themselves are conscious of their regional identity” (107). May-Alice wanted nothing more than to escape Louisiana. Earlier in the ﬁlm, she snidely tells Louise (Maggie Renzi), her physical therapist, that she paid thousands of dollars to get rid of her accent. Rennie and the environment change that attitude. Rennie is laconic, friendly. He makes his living doing odd jobs, such as building MayAlice a badly needed ramp for her wheelchair. Like any real character from the backcountry, Rennie has a depth of knowledge that is prodigious yet understated. Strathairn captures this country stoicism beautifully. Rennie communicates all we need to know about his wife when he says, “She got religion between the second and third babies. She got the kids in with her now. They pray for me a lot.” Strathairn’s quiet delivery tells us that Rennie bears life’s difﬁculties with acceptance, not angst. Traveling on a boat at night in the mysterious bayou, Chantelle inquires, “Now are we lost?” Rennie replies, “No matter where you are, there you is.” It’s a response that does not sit well with the woman from Chicago, but clearly deﬁnes the easygoing Rennie, who understands life’s travails and takes pleasure in the bayou sanctuary. Rennie’s easy charm attracts May-Alice, rekindling an old ﬂame, reminding her rural Louisiana has qualities she let herself neglect for too long.

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Women ﬁgure prominently in most of Sayles’s ﬁlms; he is a feminist ﬁlmmaker. In Passion Fish (1992), Chantelle (Alfre Woodard) and May-Alice (Mary McDonnell) are among his ﬁnest creations. Both women are damaged, yet they are strong, intelligent, resilient, and feminine. Here, Chantelle wonders what May-Alice is truly up to as she listens to Rennie (David Strathairn) explain what a “passion ﬁsh” is. Like most of Sayles’s female characters, they are complex, complicated individuals (photograph by Bob Marshak).

When Rennie enters May-Alice’s world, her appreciation for life blooms. Rennie, then, is an important narrative catalyst. With Chantelle’s presence and the possibility of seeing Rennie more often, May-Alice comes to understand Louisiana as home. A major theme of Passion Fish is the need for place in people’s lives. In fact, the title of the ﬁlm is wholly regional. As they watch a great blue heron take off from its perch. Rennie tells the women his father held to the superstitions of Cajun culture, recalling how he once marveled at seeing one of those birds carrying a two-foot mud snake; for his father, this was a sign of bad luck. As he explains to May-Alice, “Everything meant something to him. He had all them coonass superstitions. Catch somethin’ in his traps, whatever it was—turtle, gator, opossum—he’d cut open the stomach. See what was inside. Tell the future.” At Misère, Rennie catches a ﬁsh for lunch. As he guts the ﬁsh, he squeezes two smaller ﬁsh from the egg sack. Rennie calls these “passion ﬁsh,” telling the women to squeeze the ﬁsh while “thinking about somebody you want some lovin’ from.” Chantelle responds, “You makin’ this shit up, right?” Rennie tells her that it is an old Cajun tradition; indeed, some of his people say “that you gotta swallow them raw.” Chantelle hands her ﬁsh back, saying, “I don’t need it that bad.” Sayles adroitly fuses a sense of folkloric wonder while balancing it with his dry wit. Even Sayles’s odd title suggests Louisiana—

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local custom deﬁnes the “passion ﬁsh,” and by wishing on them, the holder will ﬁnd true romance. Emotional ballast is exactly what both of these women need. Their return trip is photographed at night, giving the sequence a sense of the fantastic. The cyclopean spotlight on Rennie’s boat captures glimpses of owls and alligators; it cuts the slick, black water, adding color and texture to the strange beauty of the swamp at night, a place, according to Rennie’s God-fearing wife, where Satan lives because the trees do not grow straight. Clearly, May-Alice loves this wilderness. In one particular shot, Sayles focuses his camera on a cypress branch dripping with blanched Spanish moss. The branch blurs as May-Alice’s proﬁle comes into the frame, approximating the movement of the boat. The shot links May-Alice to the natural world. The artiﬁciality of her soap opera existence has evaporated. The bayou journey provides Passion Fish with a thematic and structural core. Exploring the physical world metaphorically represents the chance both of these women have to look at life anew. The nighttime boat ride has what Sayles describes as an “otherworldly, lyrical thing going on” (Smith 64), which is abstract and stylistically distinct from most of the rest of the ﬁlm. Reinforcing the notion that May-Alice can live without her television life, Sayles introduces May-Alice’s friends from her soap opera days. At this point, May-Alice, who has been forced to quit drinking by Chantelle, is emotionally strong enough to have visitors. Like her high school friends, who served to point out the cultural rift between MayAlice and her hometown, Dawn (Angela Bassett), Kim (Sheila Kelly), and Nina (Nancy Mette) also contrast with May-Alice’s new life. These women, especially Kim and Nina, are so involved in their soap opera world that fact and ﬁction blend with delightful consequences, allowing Sayles to poke fun at ersatz acting methods and overzealous actors. Nina has assumed May-Alice’s role as Scarlett on the soap. She proudly announces, “I’m pregnant!” May-Alice tells her to have a seat, rest. It is, of course, Scarlett who is pregnant, not Nina. “But,” responds May-Alice, “I had a hysterectomy.” Nina says, “Oh, I’m sorry.” “No,” says May-Alice, “not me, Scarlett.” The soap opera story, bounded by ratings, becomes even more bizarre: a space alien becomes Scarlett’s love interest, a convenient device allowing the scriptwriters to work around Scarlett’s hysterectomy. MayAlice admits that she has not been keeping up with the program. Like May-Alice’s high school friends, the soap opera women mistakenly think that Chantelle is May-Alice’s servant. After making this blunder, Kim, switching gears, tries to describe the Southern environment, searching for adjectives to illustrate her feelings. “May-Alice,” she says, emoting for her audience, “this country is so, it’s so laden, you know ... the atmosphere ... it’s....” In a wry jab at bad acting, Sayles shows us how hard it is for this woman to speak without a script. Kim tries to sum up the land in a single word, fecund, which diminishes the land and its history. As the sequence continues, Sayles photographs Kim whirling around near a tree, reciting a deliberately ﬂorid paean to May-Alice’s ancestral place. May-Alice, who has clearly seen enough bad acting, explains, “I’ve had enough of that Gothic shit.” The bayou, as Sayles shows, holds a mystery all its own, an ineffable quality that cannot be put into words. Kim does not understand where she is or why she is there. All of her experiences come from television scripts. Still, these soap opera stars take their work seriously. In a clever, humorous parody of the process of screen testing, acting, and directing, Sayles has Nina recall her ﬁrst real audition—a “zero-budget” horror ﬁlm “about people taken up into spaceships and given physicals against their will.” As Kim tells the others, she will leave the lucrative world of soaps to go into real theatrical acting, a line they have all heard or uttered themselves,

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Nina says, “I didn’t ask for the anal probe.” The other women are mystiﬁed by her odd statement. She then goes on to recount her ﬁrst screen test, which proved to be a success—she got a part. When the script arrived, Nina discovered he had only the anal probe line—a small letdown, but Nina was determined. She created background for her character, asked her boyfriend to help her with sense memory, and waited for her big-screen opportunity, an event that proved anticlimactic. Facing an empty chair, Nina recalls how the director wanted her to speak the line in a variety of “colors,” which she does for her friend, repeating the line over and over in a variety of tones and voices. The scene is both comic and sad. Indeed, Sayles calls it “a metaphor for life, and limitations” (Smith 62). As Sayles related to Tod Lippy, “The character is basically talking about the theme of the movie: ‘I got a raw deal, and I didn’t ask for it. But what did I do? I acted like a professional, and found different ways to attack it’ ” (193). During this long take, Sayles’s camera slowly, almost imperceptibly, tracks in on Nina. Her humiliation and sense of letdown are extreme yet balanced by her recollection, which is solid and to the point, a ﬁne bit of acting. Acting is her world, her life. Sayles captures the moment in all its natural clarity. In the world of contemporary ﬁlm editing, a scene this long would never have been allowed to play itself out. But the scene is quintessential Sayles: The language is real and poignant, the camera takes us to the actor, and Sayles allows the scene to play without interference from the editing table, fundamental to André Bazin’s deﬁnition of realism. Sayles receives splendid support from his cinematographer, Roger Deakins, who has worked with the Coen brothers and David Mamet, among other ﬁlmmakers. Like Robert Richardson, Deakins is adept with moving cameras. Sayles uses Deakins’s talents throughout Passion Fish, adding more dynamic involvement to the narrative. Deakins has a solid visual style. His photography of the Louisiana landscape and backcountry is rich and masterful. Having shot Mountains of the Moon, Pascali’s Island, and The Secret Garden, all ﬁlms primarily shot outdoors, Deakins understands how to photograph the natural world. He carefully makes the visual elements striking, although not overly lush. The Spanish moss is gray, not emerald green. The water in the sloughs Rennie navigates is brown, uninviting. May-Alice’s house is dark, but not Gothic. When beauty is called for, though, Deakins delivers. For instance, the dream sequence between May-Alice and Rennie lyrically captures her fulﬁllment and frustration. In her dream, May-Alice, who puts her loss of sexual ability in graphic, concrete terms throughout the ﬁlm, ﬁnds herself suddenly liberated. She walks from the edge of the dock to where Rennie is working with his ﬁshing nets. May-Alice lowers herself onto Rennie’s lap. Deakins’s camera wraps around them as they embrace and kiss, making the scene even more intimate. Andrew Sarris called this scene “the most sweetly erotic movement of ﬂesh toward ﬂesh in any movie of 1992” (Film Comment 30). But May-Alice’s pleasure is momentary. In the background, someone calls her name. Looking up, she sees Chantelle and a young girl at the edge of Misère, waving and shouting, an interruption that breaks her erotic reverie. Deakins photographed this portion of the sequence early in the morning, capturing the mist rising from the still water to approximate the hazy quality of a dream and to suggest May-Alice’s subconscious sexuality. In real time, May-Alice awakens, back on her couch, in a room with the window shades drawn; nothing has changed. Once again, Sayles found a cinematographer with the ability to enhance his writing through a camera lens. Unlike most commercial feature ﬁlms, Passion Fish focuses on the friendship between two women in complete dramatic accuracy. The ﬁlm ﬁts Molly Haskell’s categorical deﬁnition of what the better women’s ﬁlms aspire to:

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John Sayles, Filmmaker They take the woman out of the plural into the singular, out of defeat and passivity and collective identity into the radical adventure of the solitary soul, out of the contrivances of puritanical thinking into enlightened self-interest [162].

While Chantelle and May-Alice have separate, distinct lives, they are not completely singular. They form a community of two that is hardly utopian but it functions. In order to gain an understanding of one another, May-Alice and Chantelle fence with words. Through their verbal bantering, these women come to appreciate each other. They combine sensitivity, wit, and toughness. But this mutual respect is earned. Chantelle conceals her murky past from May-Alice. May-Alice enjoys her role as demanding bitch. A small exchange between employer and employee typiﬁes their relationship. Waking up hung-over, MayAlice says, “I kind of gross you out, don’t I?” Chantelle answers, “Is this a trick question?” By not succumbing to pat Hollywood formulas—there are no big climaxes here—Sayles created two people who open up and evolve slowly into emotionally rich characters during the course of the ﬁlm. While the acting is superb, what makes these characters so exceptional is Sayles’s writing. His level of realism never seems contrived or staged. People talk, swear, and yell. A subtle power shift exists between the two women—ﬁrst one, and then the other takes control. In the ﬁlm’s most explosive scene, May-Alice, who has been making an effort to stop drinking, confronts Chantelle in the kitchen; she is desperate for a bottle of wine. The scene starts off slowly. Chantelle softly says that she has thrown all the bottles away. MayAlice begins to lose her temper, reminding Chantelle she hired her and that she wants her to get some wine. Again, Chantelle quietly refuses. The tension escalates. May-Alice yells at Chantelle as if she were a common servant. Chantelle yells right back, exploding at the imperious May-Alice, calling her selﬁsh, demanding, and impossible. Then, just as quickly, the scene ends, with May-Alice alone in her wheelchair, surrounded by the fragments of the dishes she has smashed in anger. May-Alice and Chantelle are not stylized women. They display a complete range of feelings. Their anger is true, but they are also funny, and endearing, not mawkish. Whatever respect we give these characters, they earn it. Obviously, Sayles did not set out to make a 12-step feel-good movie-of-the-week. Whatever injuries their self-destructive behavior has caused, these women live with their choices and learn to live with each other. They are not victims; they are trying to ﬁgure out how to keep living, even though that choice means struggle. By interacting with the other characters, both May-Alice and Chantelle confront their own histories in order to proceed with their lives. Knowledge of the past is fundamental to many of Sayles’s narratives, particularly Passion Fish. Each woman is trapped in what seems to be a dead end by different circumstances: May-Alice’s accident and attitude, Chantelle’s cocaine addiction and separation from her daughter. Neither anticipated ending up in the backwaters of Louisiana. Yet, because of the people they meet and the place in which they ﬁnd themselves, May-Alice and Chantelle begin to come to terms with their past lives and each other. In other words, they are granted a second act, as Sayles makes clear: That’s where Passion Fish ends: These two people have fucked up in a way. They’re about to embark on a second life. So what they’ve done with adversity is to say, “Okay, I’m not going to roll in a ball and lie in front of the TV set drinking. Or I’m not going to go back to drugs. With reduced expectations, I’m going to throw myself into this second life” [Smith 62].

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Sayles presents a fully articulated cast of characters from different races, different classes, and different generations. All the players grafted to the central story leave their mark, no matter what the duration of their screen time. Some of these characters provide Sayles’s narrative with an indelible sense of the past, which helps to fashion both MayAlice’s and Chantelle’s history. For example, Reeves (Leo Burmester), May-Alice’s uncle, recalls her father as headstrong and imperious; obviously, his daughter’s father. He delivers the story of the death of May-Alice’s parents with an acid-tinged Southern gentility. His disgust for his brother is undisguised. May-Alice’s father died because of his own willfulness, a trait that also drove her from his home. Burmester plays this role with understated zest, every movement indicating a world-weary ennui. Likewise, Tom Wright, who plays Luther, Chantelle’s cocaine-addicted boyfriend, leaves a mark as he ﬁlls in Chantelle’s mysterious background. In his scene, May-Alice sits taking pictures of the bayou. Luther drops into the camera’s viewﬁnder, seemingly out of nowhere, obscuring the future as part of the past. Wright’s body movement undermines Luther’s hard, urban facade. This guy is in trouble; he nervously shufﬂes about, exhibiting the characteristic tics of a drug addict. He needs Chantelle yet cannot burden her with

Vondie Curtis-Hall and Alfre Woodard in Passion Fish. Writing in a 1996 issue of Cineaste, Cliff Thompson deﬁned John Sayles’s ability to create realistic African American characters: “Virtually alone among black movie characters, who are largely either walking history lessons (Glory or Malcolm X), second-banana types whose jobs are to marvel at the daring of white heroes (Die Hard with a Vengeance or the Lethal Weapon series), or nameless small-time criminals (you name it), blacks in John Sayles’s movies are what real blacks know themselves to be: ﬂesh-and-blood people” (32). Sayles has called himself a conduit for voices, and his ability to cross race, class, and gender lines is unequaled among contemporary ﬁlmmakers (photograph by Bob Marshak).

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his crippled presence. Using clipped, staccato language, Luther completes Chantelle’s history. Satisﬁed his former drug partner is living outside addition, he leaves. While May-Alice is learning about Chantelle, Chantelle is learning about “Sugar” LeDoux, one of Sayles’s more colorful characters, played with swaggering enthusiasm by Vondie Curtis-Hall. Sugar’s role parallels that of Rennie. Like May-Alice, Chantelle seeks some kind of romance in her life. Living a humdrum existence as May-Alice’s nurse, however, and fearing a return to her irresponsible ways prohibits any type of relationship. In addition, Chantelle is skeptical of men, especially a ladies’ man like Sugar. The oft-married Sugar is different. He embraces life in his work, music, and overt sensuality. Sugar proves to be tender, understanding, and steady, all traits that make Chantelle’s new life tolerable. Curtis-Hall displays remarkable range, and he typiﬁes the kind of actor Sayles likes: someone comfortable on screen or stage, willing to work for a small salary, and able to create an honest character. As an actor, Curtis-Hall has appeared as the Cuban band arranger Miguel Montoya in The Mambo Kings, as a barﬂy in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, and as an African expatriate in Coming to America. He is undeniably charming as the rafﬁsh, lifeloving blacksmith. In a clever scene in the horse paddock, Sayles has Sugar describe his wives and his children. His daughter Albertine ( Jennifer Gardner) helps him recall the names of his newest kids, as he takes a horse’s hoof between his legs to shoe it. Chantelle is nonplussed, remarking that he is just like people in the movies. He says, “I’m a blacksmith.” Chantelle says under her breath, “You’re a black something, all right.” The three principals are excellent. David Strathairn, acting in his sixth Sayles ﬁlm, delivers a performance so natural that it is hard to believe he is acting. The distance between Rennie and the disconnected Asteroid from City of Hope indicates the talent of this underappreciated artist. Sayles once remarked that Strathairn’s physical dexterity is comparable to Steve McQueen’s. Like McQueen, Strathairn communicates a raw masculinity, bringing an ease to his ﬁlm work, a natural, unactorish ability that is poised, controlled. In Passion Fish, he is always doing some task that lends his character believability—pounding nails, ﬁshing, or just slapping his hat to his knee. Usually these are small, easily missed gestures. For example, as he steers his boat into the swamp, we see him quietly whistling while playing with a wild ﬂower. Small gestures give indicate Rennie a quiet, peaceful charm. Sayles wrote the part of May-Alice with Mary McDonnell in mind. For her work, she received an Academy Award nomination for best actress. In order to prepare for the part, McDonnell did physical and emotional background preparation, visiting with physical therapists and paralysis patients. An actress at home in ﬁlm or theater, McDonnell has acted in Dances with Wolves (1991), Grand Canyon, Sneakers, and Matewan. Her best scenes are often silent. When she attempts, in vain, to get her body to respond sexually to touch while cloaked in the darkness of her deserted living room, with only the ﬂickering eye of her constant companion, the television, bearing witness, she produces real emotion. McDonnell also conveys May-Alice’s nastiness well; she is easy to hate. Still, she shows us the cost of pride and independence. May-Alice’s appearance is unadorned, plain, not glamorized in any way. The closest she comes to a love scene with Rennie is quiet, creating heart-felt sentiment. At the Cajun community social, she says, “Rennie, you don’t have to have a job or something to ﬁx to come out and visit.” He says, “Yeah, well, I’ll do that then.” She adds, “Do it real soon.” These are two people who ﬁnd each other after too many years and too many mistakes. Even though Rennie is below May-Alice socially,

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she now sees—an attractive, sweet man. As Caryn James points out, “A complex fabric of inﬂuences come together in the scene—sexual need, the difﬁculty of communication, the fear of rejection, class barriers—yet none of them are expressed directly” (11). The scene shows us how two talented actors work with solid writing. Of all the performances in Passion Fish, however, Alfre Woodard’s is most striking. She plays her role with gusto, making Chantelle nasty, kind, and sexy, a complete, complex, unique woman. The personal touches Woodard brings to her role are remarkable, her comic timing is excellent, and the acidity she adds to her lines gives Sayles’s language multiple meanings. Woodward’s ﬁlm credits include Grand Canyon, Remember My Name, Health, and Crooklyn. Like all good actors, Woodard does not announce she is acting; she is Chantelle. In the beginning, Woodard keeps Chantelle in check. Because of the early bedroom shot, it is obvious she holds a secret. Like her smiles, her tears are not on public display. She plays it tough. At the community social, when Sugar leaves the bandstand to ask her to dance, Chantelle communicates the presence of her strict father with just her eyes. Sugar catches the cue and asks Chantelle’s bespectacled little girl to dance instead, which, as Andrew Sarris says, takes “this musical tableau into the emotional stratosphere” (Film Comment 30). For her work, Alfre Woodard received the Best Supporting Actress Award from Independent Feature Project/West, the largest nonproﬁt group of independent ﬁlmmakers in the nation, which is rapidly becoming a alternative version of the Academy Awards. Passion Fish just ends, leaving May-Alice and Chantelle ﬂoating on the bayou water. They will stay in Louisiana and that they are “stuck with each other.” They have learned to live together, to tolerate each other. May-Alice will not return to the soap opera world in New York, and Chantelle will continue on as her nurse/caretaker. What makes this moment in the ﬁlm so special is that it ends too soon. Sayles has paced this ﬁlm with a languid quality that ﬁts the characters. Passion Fish shows the lives of two normal, yet exceptional women. Sayles used his production team, loose ensemble of actors, and ability as a director and a writer to create an emotionally charged ﬁlm about women’s lives, free from melodrama, superﬂuous action, and an overly dramatic climax. In other words, he examines adult problems with adult eyes. Passion Fish is a small, intimate ﬁlm full of personal observations. After seeing this ﬁlm, Andrew Sarris, not always a strong supporter of Sayles’s work, wrote, “Sayles has directed, written, and edited the most accomplished, the most nuanced, and most lyrical English-language movie of the year” (Film Comment 30).

The Secret of Roan Inish Responsible Children I think that magic realism has to do with telling a story that is not literally true; it’s not literally possible. It may have elements of fantasy to it, but it actually gets to deeper truths than you might by documentary means. —John Sayles, The Charlie Rose Show, 1995

Stories lie at the heart of every John Sayles picture, but The Secret of Roan Inish (1995), his ninth feature ﬁlm, stresses the power of storytelling. Sayles structures the ﬁlm’s narrative around a group of interconnected stories—some mythic, some oral history—told to Fiona Coneelly, an independent ten-year-old who, as she searches for her lost brother,

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connects with forces of nature conspiring to return her family to their rightful home, Roan Inish, an island off the west coast of Ireland. These stories link many generations of Coneellys and reveal “deeper truths” about the clan’s connection to Roan Inish and its environment. The stories intertwine like braids, convincing Fiona that the remaining Coneellys must return to Roan Inish. The Secret of Roan Inish is Sayles’s most poetic ﬁlm, weaving oral stories with stunning visual compositions to reveal the magic possibility of the ordinary world. The Secret of Roan Inish presents two new creative directions for Sayles: This is his ﬁrst picture shot outside the United States, and it is his ﬁrst children’s story. It is also a screen adaptation, something Sayles usually avoids in his own ﬁlmmaking. The movie’s complicated narrative, however, is clearly designed for adult appeal. Maggie Renzi introduced Sayles to his source material, Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry, a children’s book by the British writer Rosalie K. Fry. First published in Britain as Child of the Western Isles, in 1957, the tale revolves around a young girl’s encounter with “selkies” (seal people). Renzi believed Fry’s book, long out of print, could be made into a movie. Sayles decided to adapt the story for a simple reason: “I’ve always liked stories of children raised by animals” (Holden “Departure” 13). Yet Renzi reveals in Skerry Movies’ production notes that Sayles took some convincing: Even though he liked the book he found it “rather slight” (2). Before starting City of Hope (1991), Sayles asked Renzi to research the book’s screen rights. Even though Fry had published 52 books, she was not especially well known; it took the production team six months to locate Fry, and another year to secure the rights to Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry (Skerry Movies 9). Renzi was determined to prove the book’s integrity and relevance, however. She ﬁeldtested it on friends’ kids and a grammar school class in Massachusetts (Skerry Movies 2). Renzi discovered the children were moved by the idea of a lost sibling: “This compulsion to look for your little brother really belongs to kids ... siblings are the important companions with whom they share their day-to-day lives” (Skerry Movies 3). Moreover, Renzi believes that adults are also interested in stories that revolve around early childhood: “I think tapping into your childhood is generally a good idea but some people need to be reminded of that. I am sure that’s why we love to see Cillian [Byrne], who plays Fiona’s lost brother, tearing across the beach; his delirious sense of freedom is so affecting because we know we can never be that carefree again. It’s good to spend time with children” (Skerry Movies 3). Indeed, Renzi and Sayles are friends with and serve as a surrogate aunt and uncle to an expanding circle of children and young adults, so they felt an obligation to make a solid movie for them. Children, according to Renzi, are an underserved audience. For his screen adaptation, Sayles ﬂeshed out the history of the Coneelly clan, using two ﬂashbacks, including one about the mythological selkie woman, which help explain the Coneelly’s connection to Roan Inish and the natural world. The selkie legend is Celtic in origin. It tells of a creature who can be either a seal or a woman. Typically, a man captures the seal skin of a selkie who has transformed into human shape, claiming her for his own; she bears him many children, mixing the blood of man and beast. One day she ﬁnds her seal skin, transforms back into a sea creature, and returns to the sea, her true home. Although Sayles left the spine of Fry’s plot intact, the beauty of his retelling lies in the visual descriptions, the moody atmosphere, the garrulous people, and the wondrous happenings that surround Fiona, all combining to create a cinematic tapestry quite unlike any other Sayles has constructed. As Maureen Turim notes, though, The Secret of Roan Inish is both distinctive and Saylesian: “A surprising foray into legend and fantasy from a

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director known for his intimate leftist social realism and his sharply focused eyes and attuned ears, this ﬁlm does represent a departure in many ways. In others, however, it is quiet consistent: it explores the patterns of communal life in which work and interpersonal negotiation are foregrounded” (Sayles Talk 135). Sayles’s cinematic tale unfolds with an unhurried grace, much like a spoken story. Set in Ireland in the early post World War II years, The Secret of Roan Inish revolves around ten-year-old Fiona Coneelly ( Jeni Courtney), sent by her widowed father, a laborer who lives in an industrial, oppressive city, to live with her grandparents, Hugh (Mick Lally) and Tess Coneelly (Eileen Colgan), on the west coast of Ireland. From their cottage, Roan Inish (Gaelic for Seal Island) can be seen in the distance but only by those who know it well. It has been three years since the Coneellys abandoned Roan Inish. Through a series of stories told by several people, Fiona hears her family’s compelling history. Fiona connects the ﬁlm’s desperate characters, binding them to their history and their land. Sayles presents the experience though Fiona’s eyes, ears, and imagination. Sayles’s narrative places demands on the audience, who must listen as carefully as Fiona to assemble the magical story of the Coneellys. Moreover, The Secret of Roan Inish marks an intriguing addition to Sayles’s thematic concerns: it is rumination on the essential relationship between human beings and the physical world. The ﬁlm opens with a silent shot of a ﬁshing boat moving toward the camera, resting just above the water line; this shot presents a seal’s point of view, which is not clear at ﬁrst. The sea creature ﬂoats just on the top of the water, watching the approaching boat and Fiona. The seal dives into the water. Sayles cuts to another perspective, closer to the passing boat. Fiona, a pale, thin, blonde child, quietly stands on the deck of the boat; she is reserved, a trace of melancholy registers in her soulful brown eyes. She looks directly into the camera, into the seal’s eyes, a subtle hint indicating the linkage between the child and the natural world. Sayles reverses the shot, switching to Fiona’s perspective; she sees a seal resting on a rock. Visually, Sayles reveals the secret of Roan Inish at the start of the ﬁlm: Fiona and the seals share a vital connection. The narrative explains why. Fiona arrives at her grandparents’ home, and they all discuss the city and the jobs that drew the younger Coneellys away from Roan Inish and the life of the sea. Hugh says, “Ah! City indeed. Nothin’ but noise and dirt and people that’s lost their senses. Couldn’t tell the difference between a riptide and a raindrop if you shoved their face in the water.” For Tess, the island remains a sad memory. From the cottage window, Hugh points out Roan Inish to Fiona. He is visibly pleased when the girl recognizes the island, a sliver of green on an endless blue horizon. Eamon (Richard Sheridan), a cousin, arrives and hints about the mystery of Roan Inish—tales of lights seen at night. It is a place other ﬁshermen fearfully avoid, even though Hugh always ﬁlls his nets ﬁshing its shoals. That night, Hugh tells Fiona the ﬁrst of many stories about her ancestors; this one explains how his great-grandfather, Sean Michael, an independent Irishman forever at odds with British rule, kept the Coneelly name alive after escaping a drowning death at sea during a storm that killed all the other male members of the clan. According to the tale, Sean Michael was saved by a seal, which plucked him from the raging water and carried him safely to shore. Found unconscious on the beach by a group of women, Sean Michael was revived by a series of ancient methods, including being placed between two cows to restore his body temperature. Fiona’s grandfather’s story of his “father’s father’s father,” a Fenian “saved by a seal and two cows,” and, as her grandmother adds, “the smart thinking of women,” connects, as Turim observes, “the female and animals as saviors of the

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male ancestor” who founded the Coneelly clan on the islands” and “anticipates Fiona’s role in saving Jamie” (Sayles Talk 140). Later that night, unable to sleep, Fiona stares out the window in the direction of Roan Inish, where she sees the mysterious light. “The light!” she whispers in wonder. Storytelling matches seamlessly with the images of the landscape to form an intertextual foundation for the entire ﬁlm. The next morning, Fiona asks Hugh about the day the Coneellys evacuated Roan Inish, the day Jamie, her infant brother, was lost, washed out to sea in his wooden cradle. As Hugh recalls the day for her, Fiona imagines the gulls and the seals collaborating to steal Jamie away, making him their own. Later, at the quay, Eamon tells Fiona there are stories of Jamie being sighted near Roan Inish ﬂoating on the sea in his cradle, sitting upright in the stern like a miniature sailor. Excited by these tales, Fiona persuades Hugh to take her to Roan Inish when he goes ﬁshing. Alone on the island she explores one of the family’s abandoned cottages and discovers traces of life: fresh ferns on the bed, hot embers in the ﬁre. Later, strolling on the beach, she sees small footprints in the sand just before the tide wipes them away. The following day, Fiona meets Tadhg ( John Lynch), another cousin, one of the “dark” Coneellys, labeled “daft” by the locals. He, too, has a tale for Fiona: the story of Liam Coneelly, who centuries ago made an intimate connection with the natural world,

The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) resonates with stories and storytelling. The central tale is that of Liam Coneelly (Gerard Rooney) and Nuala (Susan Lynch) the selkie woman. Nuala’s ﬁrst born, Jamie, rests in the cradle-boat that will pass through generations of Coneellys—symbolically, it connects the clan to the sea. Sayles’s shot composition demonstrates the central role of women in the ﬁlm: Nuala dominates the foreground and the center of the frame. Liam stands behind her at a slight distance, and deep in the background of the shot stand other members of the community. Visually, they are removed from the Coneelly clan, and even Liam is not completely linked to Nuala, which is understandable because she is not completely human (photograph by David Appleby).

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something that still lingers in Coneelly blood. According to Tadhg, the “seals and birds moved aside to make room for them” when the Coneellys ﬁrst arrived on Roan Inish. Walking on the beach one day, Liam, a loner among his own, saw a selkie transform into a woman by shedding her seal skin, a folkloric grail he claimed, thus making the selkie woman his own. They married, even though the family was suspicious of this strange woman, who spoke an ancient form of Gaelic. When her ﬁrst baby was born, the selkie woman, who called herself Nuala (Susan Lynch), asked that the baby’s cradle be made from the “wood of a ship that sailed the ocean.” Liam obliged, making a cradle resembling a small ship, marked with carved shells, ﬁsh, and seaweed. Nuala claimed the cradle would rock all her children on the “motion of the sea.” Together the couple had many children, living in relative peace. Yet Nuala, with her wild, black, Pre-Raphaelite hair and dark sensual looks, remained a stranger, an outsider among the island people. Often she would spend days sitting on the beach, gazing at the sea, listening to the sounds of the waves, gulls, and seals. Nothing could disturb her. One day, Nuala’s oldest daughter, also named Fiona, asked her mother about the “leather coat” her father kept hidden in the roof of their home. With her seal skin secured, the selkie resumed her original form and returned to the sea, her natural home. Once the selkie recovers her skin, she is bound to wear it. According to Tadhg, the selkie always kept watch over her children from the water; and from the day Nuala returned to the sea, no seal was ever harmed near Roan Inish. Every generation, Tadhg says, a “dark” Coneelly is born. These family members are fearless sea travelers and exceptional ﬁshermen, profoundly connected to the water. He ﬁnishes his story by whispering, “Welcome back, Fiona Coneelly. We’ve been waitin.’ ” Tadhg mystiﬁes Fiona. Tess says Tadhg exists “between earth and water,” a demarcation line perfectly describing a selkie’s condition. Tadhg’s story reveals the Coneellys’ connection to the natural world and its history of absent mothers. Fiona asks Eamon to take her back to Roan Inish. Once there, she falls asleep and dreams of the selkie woman. In the dream Nuala rises from the sea, turns directly toward Fiona, and with her hand beckons the child. The gesture signiﬁes a return home. The dream startles Fiona awake, and she decides to explore Roan Inish. While walking through an open ﬁeld, she sees Jamie in the distance. Naked, he picks wildﬂowers on a bluff near the sea; he looks beautiful, strong, and healthy; spools of wild black hair spring from his head. When Fiona calls to him, Jamie runs away, escaping to the sea in his cradle-boat, which moves effortlessly through the water, propelled by an unseen force. Because of to a dense fog the next day, Hugh refuses to take Fiona ﬁshing. As Fiona stands alone on the quay, an oar-less boat inexplicably ﬂoats to her, and she boards. Surrounded by seals, the boat effortlessly moves through the thick fog. She is deposited on Roan Inish. There she once again falls asleep and dreams of a cottage; inside the building, the cradle-boat rocks gently and crabs scurry about. Startled, Fiona awakes. She runs to the abandoned cottage, peeks through a window, and sees Jamie and a seal engaged in a mock tea party, a game she used to play when she lived on Roan Inish. Fiona watches until the boy and the seal become aware of her. Jamie looks up, his blue eyes wide, full of fear. He runs to his cradle-boat and escapes to the sea, with the seal in fast on his heels. That night, Hugh and Eamon rescue Fiona. She tells them about Jamie. Hugh is curious but decides it is a young girl’s dream. Still, he cannot explain how the row boat magically navigated a course to Roan Inish. Fiona feels if she can bring the Coneellys back to Roan Inish, then the seals will return

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Jamie to the family. She plots with Eamon to refurbish the abandoned cottages. They work hard for days, without seeing Jamie but being observed by the gulls and the seals. On the mainland one night, watching rain clouds collect, Fiona nonchalantly says, “I hope Jamie comes in out of the storm.” Tess demands to know what she means, and Fiona fervently tells her Jamie is alive and living with the seals. Hugh dismisses the sighting as a fanciful dream. Tess, however, believes Fiona, relying on her maternal instinct rather than rational sense. Hugh and Eamon watch with disbelief as Tess hurriedly packs for a trip to Roan Inish. Tess has always felt Jamie’s presence. On Roan Inish, the small group settles into one of the restored cottages, preparing a ﬁre and then seaweed soup, a recipe Nuala left the family, according to Coneelly lore. As the storm breaks, seals pull Jamie ashore in his cradle-boat, which they take from him. The seals refuse to let him back into the water, slapping their bodies against the beach to prevent his return to the sea. Finally, Jamie runs into Tess’s arms; he is reunited with his human world. In the end, Hugh, Tess, Eamon, Fiona, and Jamie reassemble as a family on Roan Inish. A natural balance is restored. The Secret of Roan Inish underscores how difﬁcult it is to pigeonhole Sayles as a ﬁlmmaker. Although certain issues—history, community, place, work, politics, class, gender— are recognizable in all of Sayles’s work, including Roan Inish, the critical impulse to describe him as a particular type of ﬁlmmaker collapses under the weight of his versatility. As Sayles remarked to George Hickenlooper, a writer and documentary ﬁlmmaker, in response to a question about the director’s eclectic range, “It’s always interesting to me to try and put myself inside people’s heads—that’s part of why my stories are so different” (308). And, as Maggie Renzi warns, “I actually think people make a mistake when they try to describe John’s career in a linear way” (Skerry Movies 4). Still, many critics saw The Secret of Roan Inish as a departure for Sayles, a break away from his social realist aesthetic. After all, Sayles’s reputation as a ﬁlmmaker who makes muscular political pictures stands at odds with a fey, mythic tale that points up the need to return to one’s roots and to the physical world. Sayles has delved into the fantastic before, in 1984’s The Brother from Another Planet, a ﬁlm idea that came to Sayles in a dream. But the issues of race and inner-city life, as seen through the eyes of “the Brother,” were based on reality. The Secret of Roan Inish is more an extension of Passion Fish, where the transcendent power of the natural world informs the entire picture. Still, The Secret of Roan Inish’s narrative presents people trying to regain control of their lives by coming to terms with their roots, a theme evidenced in Return of the Secaucus Seven, Baby, It’s You, The Brother from Another Planet, and Passion Fish; moreover, once Sayles establishes this thematic concern, it reappears in his later work, including Lone Star, Sunshine State, and Honeydripper. Sayles, of course, steadfastly cleaves to storytelling, for he is intrigued by how other people, even children, see things. The Secret of Roan Inish is no exception. Good children’s stories contain powerful lessons. In Don’t Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children’s Literature, Allison Lurie says “children’s literature suggests that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form” (xi). Fiona’s awareness of the connection between man and nature allows for the presentation of a different experience, one removed from contemporary cultural signposts. Sayles makes Fiona a complex youngster trying to make sense of her world, and, in turn, that of her ancestors, all of her ancestors. Fiona’s story is complicated; she is no ordinary ten-year-old. When asked, in 1995, by PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose, if this story would appeal to children, Sayles

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compared The Secret of Roan Inish to a “pre–Disney Hayley Mills movie, or To Kill a Mockingbird.” Although Sayles admitted that To Kill a Mockingbird was not necessarily a children’s movie, the analogy ﬁts. Fiona, like Scout, is a child-guide, a ﬁgure who explains the narrative to outsiders. Both Fiona and Scout bring an unspoken moral seriousness to their stories. As he does in his adult dramas, Sayles expects his audience to linger over the sight and sound of this ﬁlm. Children (or adults) accustomed to MTV-like edits, silly humor, and the whirling images spawned by video games will ignore the calm pace of Sayles’s ﬁlm. Sayles, who also edited the picture, replicates a storyteller’s style of speech in The Secret of Roan Inish, as he described to Rose: “Somebody sits down. They begin to speak. We begin to see what they’re talking about, and their voice may fade out or it may stay on the screen, but I want the movie to have a more kind of oral tradition feeling to it. That’s a risk” (11). Assembling the ﬁlm as a series of oral tales is indeed risky, but the images Sayles constructs to illustrate the spoken word are mesmerizing, and his unhurried folktale offers a valuable, albeit layered message, a characteristic missing from most Hollywood pictures designed for children. Although The Secret of Roan Inish celebrates the imaginative and unrestricted agenda of childhood, its poetic goodwill does not neglect adult sensibilities. While Sayles shows the world as Fiona sees it, taking her side instinctively, The Secret of Roan Inish reaches adults willing to concentrate and follow Fiona into a world of stories that carry universal power and meaning: “The story has more resonance than just an animal story.” Where so many Irish songs and stories are about leaving Ireland, this was about people making the decision to go back to their roots. It became an exploration of roots in general and what they mean to people” (Holden “Departure” 13). Exploring her own roots, Fiona comes to trust and communicate with the gulls and the seals, the sea and the land. Sayles shows these fantastic connections, which align to form a magic realist tapestry that reaches both children and adults. Describing a central theme of the ﬁlm, producer Sarah Green underscores this magical connection: “Like children we can plug into the greater forces of nature; we can rekindle our relationship with the natural world” (Skerry Movies 3). Fiona accepts magic of a world free from socially imposed restrictions, as Green details: For me it’s about trust and faith. I have a strong belief that kids grow up with a natural sense of spirituality which they forget as they are socialized into a busy world. Fiona is at that age when she can choose to forget because everyone is saying “you didn’t hear this,” or “that seal did not talk to you,” or she can choose to keep her faith and she does” [Skerry Movies 3].

Fittingly two young people, both unfettered from the industrial world, plot the Coneelly family return to Roan Inish, and Tess, the harsh naysayer, drops her adult resistance to Roan Inish and its terrible memories when she realizes her suppressed belief in Jamie’s existence proves true. Sayles’s ﬁlm resonates with substantive ideas meant for children and adults. Children naturally enjoy taking control and challenging the attitudes of the adults around them. Fiona’s search for Jamie, which is a traditional quest, holds universal appeal; the scenes between Fiona and Jamie are deeply emotional, especially her anguish when he runs from her. When Fiona successfully reunites Jamie with the family, the ﬁlm hints at a sympathetic charm but avoids saccharine platitudes. The scene occurs at night, bathed in deep, mysterious blues. Fiona thanks the seals before returning to the cottage, a reminder of the Coneelly connection to the natural world. Sayles does not end with a warm shot of the

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family, an image adults have seen often enough; rather, he concludes with a freeze frame of a seal—one last reminder that nature remains inscrutable yet an essential part of existence. The image provides a ﬂeeting moment of poignancy: the power of the inscrutable natural world deserves respect. Ireland, especially the western shore and off-coast islands, functions for Sayles as Louisiana does in Passion Fish. A place of rough, mysterious beauty; western Ireland is a vestigial place, shaped by memories and legends, a reminder that rugged outdoor life has not been eradicated entirely. In The Secret of Roan Inish nature has a consciousness and a power to control human events. The gulls and the seals conspire to steal Jamie away from his family because the Coneellys break their centuries-old covenant with the physical world by evacuating Roan Inish. The Secret of Roan Inish, like Passion Fish, observes the power of women. When Sean Michael is revived, women save the Coneelly family line from dying out. When we see Sean’s picture of “heaven,” Sayles’s camera pans across the faces of peasant women (including Maggie Renzi), people with the knowledge and the ability to bring the young man back to life. Nuala, the selkie woman, represents the spiritual center of the Coneelly family. Fiona, after a push from Tess, reestablishes the entire family on Roan Inish, their spiritual and natural home. The Secret of Roan Inish is about the loss of tradition, the loss of language, the loss of place, the loss of self, and the hard work required to restore missing pieces of one’s culture. While Roan Inish reaches children on an imaginative and adventurous level, it stirs deep emotions within some adults, asking them to ponder their own connection to the past, to family, and to the environment. Sayles’s practical touch and literary taste ground The Secret of Roan Inish, capturing the mystery behind the visual reality of his story, using an ancient form of storytelling, one that informed generations, to make his essential point. As Sayles explained in a 1995 Charlie Rose Show interview, “Somebody tells somebody who tells somebody who tells somebody. So the story is not just a story, it’s also a link with who you are in the world, and where you came from.” In other words, the ﬁlm’s narrative mimics an ancient organic form of oral storytelling, communicating values, mores, and knowledge of the physical world as myth but with a realistic impulse to educate. While Brother from Another Planet also embraces the fantastic, The Secret of Roan Inish does a better job of wedding the magical and the real. It can, in fact, be described as magic realism. Magic realism, an overused critical term, describes an approach to subject matter and style found, originally, in the ﬁction of some Latin American writers, notably Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Love in the Time of Cholera. American writers such as John Cheever, Robert Coover, William Kennedy, and Toni Morrison have also used magic realism in their ﬁction. Magic realism blends the fantastic and the real, the speciﬁc and the mythic, transforming both into something extraordinary. Sayles, like Márquez (a writer he admires), understands magic realism to be ﬁrst and foremost based in the everyday, not the remarkable. Mystery is an accepted element of daily reality, territory Sayles knows well. The Secret of Roan Inish suggests the world deserves real notice, real care, which is why he explores this world through the eyes of an enlightened child guided by her imagination and the power of nature. Cinematically, Sayles uses magic realism with quiet restraint, never overloading the frame. The ﬁlm’s visual composition is beautifully ordinary, exactly capturing the mid–1940s in northwest Ireland. The magic remains below the surface. For example, seals and gulls are characters in the ﬁlm, not props, for these animals propel the mythic aspects

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of Sayles’s narrative, making them more than natural components of the environment. Fiona, of course, realizes what the creatures mean to the Coneelly clan, representing the family’s spiritual connection to Roan Inish. The animals desire to re-establish the Coneellys on Roan Inish, no matter how bizarre in rational terms, is perfectly acceptable, understandable, part of the bargain Liam and Nuala established centuries ago; it’s as natural as a mother wanting her children close to home. Only Fiona imagines the natural physical and spiritual connection between the Coneellys and Roan Inish: She sees the gulls and the seals steal the infant Jamie away; she sees a perfectly sunny day turn to dark, thundering rain. Sayles presents the fantastic elements of his story through Fiona’s imagination—it is her reality. Fiona must convince the rest of her family that the mystery of Roan Inish is part of their shared history. There is no question, then, that a family of seals and gulls, indeed the entire natural environment, can raise a healthy human baby on their own. Filming The Secret of Roan Inish removed Sayles from the United States, a major endeavor for an independent ﬁlmmaker. Ireland has tugged at many well-known American directors, such as John Ford and John Huston. Huston, also a ﬁlmmaker with a literary sensibility, found Ireland so appealing he lived there for a number of years. Sayles, who is half Irish, had only been in the country once, having spent one day in Belfast. The untamed coastline of County Donegal, in the village of Rosberg, about 120 miles south of Belfast, proved both enchanting and burdensome, added a historic literary and cinematic background to The Secret of Roan Inish. Irish literature is thick with myth, struggle, and exile, often capturing William Butler Yeats’s vision of the country’s “terrible beauty,” his famously descriptive observation of Ireland as a beautiful battle zone. The typical Irish ﬁlm released in the United States, however, presents a different perspective, one dominated, until recently, by cobalt skies, green ﬁelds of Shamrocks, thatched cottages, and little people guarding pots of gold, romantic images usually created by foreigners, particularly Americans. Writing in Film Comment, Harlan Kennedy succinctly summed up the popular Irish cinema: “Romantic movies from The Quiet Man (1952) to Far and Away (1992) hint at a never-never Golden Age, a time of simple pastoral integrity, churchblessed community spirit, heroic faith in the Irish struggle” (24). Continuing, Kennedy deﬁnes two dominant generic strands within Irish cinema: the political—Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn (1920), The Informer (1935), Odd Man Out (1947)—and the bucolic— Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), Young Cassidy (1964), Finian’s Rainbow (1968). Although The Secret of Roan Inish has some standard Irish ornamentation—cottages, drink, green ﬁelds, a rugged seacoast—Sayles’s Ireland melds picture book beauty with the reality of a working existence. He shows cottages are thatched, why men drink, and the reasons why the Irish are known for their practicality and strength in the face of adverse conditions. Sayles’s characters have dirt under their ﬁngernails, and work—cutting peat, whitewashing cottages, sealing a boat hull with pitch, ﬁshing—deﬁnes these characters, people committed to the land and the sea not romantic fancy. Irish ﬁlms such as Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934), a landmark documentary, and Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1934), a narrative ﬁlm about Shetland islanders who resist economic displacement, add to the country’s rich cinematic history. Like Sayles, both Flaherty and Powell explore ﬁshing economies, albeit they in the 1930s, which pushed people into urban areas. As Turmin observes, Sayles’s precursors attracted his notice because the “historical transformation of an economy as it affects a deﬁned community” is common ﬁctional thematic territory for the writer-director (Sayles Talk 136). Neither Man of Aran nor The Edge of the World romanticizes Ireland or the characters in each ﬁlm. Sayles,

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too, avoids romanticizing the country by mixing pastoral beauty with honest reality, which is a difﬁcult task when dealing with material originally written for young readers. Fiona and Eamon restore the family home through extremely hard work. These children take a pragmatic, responsible approach to their own lives and that of their family, establishing a community based on shared labor. Sayles creates a grown-up mythic tale in which a motherless child ﬁnds spiritual guidance through stories, hard work, the natural world, and her own family’s unique genetic history. In the end, Fiona learns about her history, her family, her home, and what it means to be self-reliant—this that would have been lost in she had remained city-bound. Sayles’s mise-en-scène describes Fiona’s world, and her odd lineage, which is infused with a touch of the magical. Sayles and his crew deliberately kept the fantastic in check, though. When the mysterious selkie woman transforms from a seal into a human being, for example, the sequence could easily have been lost to special effects. A woman slips off an artiﬁcial seal skin, as a diver might peel off a wetsuit. The selkie woman is shot in closeup to reduce frame space, a composition choice designed to illuminate her beauty and indicate her freedom has been compromised. Sayles opted to present the transformation in a “fairly mechanical, simple way ... about the same way they would have done it in the silent movie days. It was labor intensive. A lot of KY Jelly” ( Johnson Creative Screenwriting 10). The transformation would not overwhelm the union between the selkie woman and Liam Coneelly. Although Sayles does not ignore the scene’s magic veneer, the linkage between the Coneellys and the natural world outweighs anything a special effects department could do. Instead, Sayles opts for a simple, straightforward look, underlined by close-up sensuous photography. Haskell Wexler photographed the ﬁlm, and its lyrical beauty cannot be ignored. Wexler, a three-time Oscar winner, called Sayles and asked to be the director of photography for The Secret of Roan Inish, knowing full well that he would have to commit to a reduced salary. For him, working with Sayles is a rare, welcome opportunity: After I worked with John on Matewan, I came away with great respect for his views and his abilities. Marketing, advertising and demographics seem to be the motive power of our business now, and it’s possible to come up with a lot of ﬁlms aimed at the lowest common denominator. But with John, no matter what you think of his ﬁlms, he makes his own pictures [Gritten F20].

Likewise, Sayles appreciates Wexler, a cinematographer with a prickly history but uncommon skill: “One of the things that Haskell excels at is maintaining consistency when the weather is changing every hour or every few minutes, especially when you are shooting part of the scene on one day and the rest on another” (Skerry Movies 5). Camera movement and color add a dreamy, otherworldly quality to the ﬁlm, illustrating the magical power of the physical world. Visually Sayles strives to articulate the stories Fiona hears. Wexler’s immaculate shots provide the ﬁlm with commanding beauty. Set against the wild coastline of County Donegal, Ireland, the ﬁlm features an evocative visual composition, designed to illustrate Fiona’s experiences through ﬁnely choreographed pictures. Sayles and Wexler crafted a visual style to match the ﬁlm’s written narrative. As his characters tell their stories, Sayles illustrates their words with wonderfully conceived images from Fiona’s imagination. Sayles adjusts the visual composition with grace and skill, adding rich textures to this strange tale. Yet the most troublesome aspect of the Roan Inish shoot was the environment the ﬁlm celebrates. Weather on the coast of Ireland varies wildly, which means light is subject to ﬂuctuation, a headache even

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Haskell Wexler, left, and Scott Sakamoto, center, the Steadicam and camera operator for Wexler, line up an outdoor shot along the Irish coast with an unidentiﬁed crew member. Wexler has shot four Sayles ﬁlms—Matewan, The Secret of Roan Inish, Limbo, and Silver City—and Sakamoto, Wexler’s onetime assistant, has worked on two, The Secret of Roan Inish and Limbo, both ﬁlms dominated by the physical world (photograph by David Appleby).

for an Academy Award–winning cinematographer. Still, Haskell Wexler’s photography frames the damp beauty of the region skillfully. In the 1940 northwestern Ireland was removed from the world, a place out of step with the postwar industrial boom. Early in the ﬁlm, Fiona travels between two worlds: the industrial, unnatural city, and the untamed, natural west. Sayles’s use of a short, twopart ﬂashback—Fiona’s mother’s burial and her resulting city life—contextualizes Fiona’s journey to her grandparents’ home. Sayles juxtaposes the beauty of the west, even in a time of death, with the alienation of the city through a mise-en-scène that comments on Fiona’s condition. Even though Fiona is unaware of where she belongs as the ﬁlm opens, Sayles, with Wexler’s help, visually describes where her true home is and why. After the opening credits, we see Fiona alone on a ﬁshing boat. Sayles’s camera tracks in on her, capturing the young girl in a medium close-up. Then he cuts to a ﬂashback of the recent past, starting with a slightly low-angle medium shot of the younger-looking Fiona holding a bouquet of wildﬂowers. A priest, who is reading a burial prayer, stands to her right, and her father stands to her left. A stone cross, part of her mother’s headstone, dominates the foreground of the frame, effectively sealing Fiona into a constricted space within the frame, indicating the impact of her mother’s death. This shot gives way to Fiona’s point of view. The camera pans slowly from a slightly low angle, and through her eyes her father and her older brother, who holds a crying baby, come into view grouped around the grave. These shots are closed, and her father and brother seem to loom over Fiona. Her gaze then shifts to the headstone, which reads Brigid Coneelly: 1910–1946, an

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echo of Powell’s The Edge of the World, which also opens with a shot of a tombstone. The camera slowly pans away from the headstone, out across the graveyard to the open sea gleaming in the morning sun. The continuous movement of the camera, which preserves Fiona’s place within the frame and the story, countervails the somber burial scene. If Sayles had cut to a separate shot of the sea, we would not understand Fiona’s spatial interrelationship with her family, Roan Inish, and the sea. Sayles’s choice of an open shot underscores the natural physical beauty of Ireland’s seacoast. Moving from the burial ground to the sea also suggests a connection between these two places; indeed, the earth and the sea provide the Coneellys with the only life they know, one full of sweeping beauty yet grounded by harsh realities. Each shot is beautifully photographed, ﬁlled with various shades of blue and brown. More important, however, is the silent awareness of Fiona’s pivotal role in the ﬁlm’s narrative design. The grandeur of the sea dissolves into a harsh urban scene. Sayles’s soft edit illustrates how quickly the natural world can fade from view. Natural light gives way to darkness, steaming machinery, and sweaty workers. The frame is severely restrictive and highly formalistic, representative of Fiona’s dislocation. A tension exists between Fiona, with her blonde hair and bright dress, and the bleak, dark, steam-ﬁlled laundry room where her older brother and father work. Through a cloud of white steam, Fiona wanders into the shot from the right side of the frame. The camera tracks her through the cavernous commercial laundry room. She seeks her father. Sayles’s camera stays on Fiona as she moves through the noisy, crowded room. For the most part, the workers who pass her are anonymous. Because the camera holds Fiona in a tight medium shot, only parts of the workers’ bodies are seen. She is directed by her brother to the pub where her father stands drinking at the bar. As she enters, Fiona is referred to by amorphous voices as a “sprat,” a “creature,” as “pale as a ﬁsh’s belly,” analogies that suggest Fiona’s true character. Sayles makes it clear that the unhealthy, waif-like Fiona is completely alone. Even her father does not acknowledge her presence; he too is a victim of this polluted world, although he announces that he cannot go back to the west coast because of the lack of work. The island, he says, is ﬁnished. The female bartender pleads with Jim Coneelly to look at his little girl, who is in need of something more than he can provide. Conspicuously, Sayles places Fiona between her father and his drinking partner, both standing at the bar dressed in old work clothes. Cigarette smoke and pints of brown stout also work to constrict Fiona’s space within the frame. She can hardly see above the bar. The men are truncated, just two bodies bookending her at the bar, people heard not seen. Fiona is trapped. This shot recalls Brigid Coneelly’s burial. For the most part, Sayles shoots this two-part ﬂashback in oppressive closed form. In each case, therefore, the mise-en-scène details Fiona’s powerlessness. Still, Sayles’s positioning of Fiona vis-à-vis the camera draws sympathy: She is the dominant, the brightest character in the frame, and her eyes communicate all we need to know about her emotional condition. The only other appealing image in this ﬂashback sequence is the loosely framed shot of the sea, shown from Fiona’s point of view. Efﬁciently, Sayles and Wexler indicate the binary contrast in Fiona’s life. The physical world, though, lies at the thematic core of the ﬁlm. With speed and economy, Sayles introduces all the ﬁlm’s major thematic elements and its central character. Sayles uses Fiona, whose point of view will control the ﬁlm, to celebrate storytelling. Fiona’s beguiling tale disguises some of the ﬁlm’s more astute observations about childhood and the inﬂuence of history. Because Fiona Coneelly exists out-

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side the modern world, time and place are important character elements, for each allows Sayles to create a character free from industrial urban culture, which destroyed her father by causing loneliness and drunkenness. “With Fiona’s character in Roan Inish,” Sayles told Mary Johnson in an interview for Creative Screenwriting, “I wanted her to be somebody who had never seen a TV show or a movie. So in her imagination when she illustrated a story in her mind, her references weren’t Disney movies, they were things in the natural world that she had seen” (9). While living with her grandparents, Fiona translates and transforms all the stories she hears, making her unlike most children seen in movies: She is curious, intelligent, and responsible. Fiona’s innocent, inquisitive view of the world dominates The Secret of Roan Inish, and we experience her transcendence, that moment when she becomes completely aware of her connection to Roan Inish, which is not presented with lavish fanfare but as the direct result of her intellectually connecting all the stories and experiences she has taken in, elevating the story intellectually and poetically. Fiona is free from external inﬂuences. Her full range of imaginative possibility has not been saturated by artiﬁcial images. Fiona is a ﬁlter, a guide; over and over throughout the ﬁlm someone tells her a story, and her imagination creates vital links to the language. Sayles explores the nature and power of storytelling through Fiona, who intently listens as each tale is told. Sayles feels that America’s oral tradition has slipped away, having been replaced by an artiﬁcial, media-generated history, devoid of real people and real drama: “I think it’s a very strange thing to look to ... network television to ﬁgure out who

Sayles’s ﬁrst feature shot on location outside the United States, The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) is about how stories are told, what they mean, and who listens to the truth. Here, Fiona ( Jeni Courtney) listens to her grandfather Hugh (Nick Lally) spin a tale while she keeps an eye on an unusual sea gull that seems to trace her every move (photograph by David Appleby).

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you are in the world; whereas, if your ... grandparents are telling you a story that happened to their grandparents—that has a much more organic thing to with who you are than The Brady Bunch” (Charlie Rose Show interview [1995]). The Secret of Roan Inish reminds viewers that stories transmit history and truth, and feed the imagination. Even though the ﬁlm revolves around spoken stories, Sayles and Wexler show viewers the water, the rocky green landscape, and the sea creatures, all essential to the Coneelly environment. Every time Fiona looks toward Roan Inish, always shot in an open, inviting form, suggesting limitless possibility and honest natural beauty, something magical is suggested. What elevates Sayles’s mise-en-scène is point of view, a device established in the ﬁlm’s credit sequence, which is a mysterious, ephemeral journey through a watery ﬁeld of luminous blue. This brilliant blue denotes wonder, and hints at the mystery contained within the physical world. When the credits end, Sayles cuts to a shot just at the water’s surface, where a small steamship, belching black smoke, moves toward the camera from right to left. The kinetic pattern here is strange, moving against the grain. The expectation is to see a subject move in the opposite direction, just like reading words on a page— from left to right. But Sayles suggests something odd, something magical. In fact, this is a seal’s perspective. The creature watches the ship carrying Fiona, who journeys home, with rapt attention, as if it has been waiting for the girl to arrive. Once the creature recognizes Fiona, it dives into the sea, and Wexler’s camera follows. Wexler ﬁlls The Secret of Roan Inish with inﬁnitely variable light, and it rebounds from the screen frame after frame: the glimmering mackerel blue water along the Irish seacoast, the fresh whiteness of newly restored cottages, the detailed dark tones in a prescient dream, the mysterious shadows formed by heavy fog, the bright earthy look of a ﬁshing quay, the soft morning light that suffuses Fiona’s bedroom, the gorgeous blue ﬂowers on a ﬁeld of green grass lit by a brilliant sun. Yet there is nothing ornate about these shots. All the visual choices Sayles and Wexler make strengthen the ﬁlm. In The Secret of Roan Inish, Sayles’s images speak as clearly as his characters. With Wexler’s artistic input, Sayles used the color and light of Ireland to highlight his story of magic possibility. Sayles, however, still comes under regular attack for his visual style: many ﬁlm critics recognize him as a writer only. Such a reductive view of Sayles as a complete ﬁlmmaker has followed him since he started making movies. For example, critic Michael Atkinson, writing in Baltimore’s City Paper, observed, There’s so much that’s ravishing and original in The Secret of Roan Inish, it’s a crushing shame John Sayles directed it. Never a graceful ﬁlmmaker, Sayles is best at male-oriented political combats like Matewan and Eight Men Out. Projects like City of Hope, Passion Fish, and “Roan Inish” require a subtle touch, a visual ﬂuency and an emotional tenor that Sayles apparently lacks [25].

Atkinson believes Sayles incapable of creating a visually poetic ﬁlm. This type of misreading stems in part from the popular critical notion that Sayles is not a visual artist, but it also ignores a major stylistic component of his ﬁlms, including The Secret of Roan Inish. Sayles approaches each ﬁlm differently, fusing the look of a ﬁlm to its story. His pictures match his language. Sayles also takes a pragmatic approach to each of his ﬁlms, weighing budget limitations, narrative, and the strength of his director of photography. The visual style of each Sayles ﬁlm is tailored to enhance its story, theme, and mood. Without apology, Sayles displays no personal visual signature, which bewilders most ﬁlm critics trained to focus on the director as the major creator of ﬁlm art. Even though the magical aspects of the visual narrative are presented in a low-key style, The Secret of Roan Inish is still full

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of beautiful, well-choreographed images, but they all stand in service to the story, Sayles’s primary concern. Sayles also uses natural sounds to push the magical aspects of The Secret of Roan Inish. “The soundtrack,” according to Renzi, “will creep up on you so that you become aware that the waves are making more noise; that the wind has increased and suddenly there is too much bird song. There will be all these indications that it is not just the seals or the gulls, but nature in general which is conspiring to let Fiona know what she needs to know” (Skerry Movies 3). The waves, the wind, the birds, and the seals all add their natural music to the narrative. As he has done in the past, Sayles makes sure sound complements image. For instance, as Hugh tells Fiona Sean Michael’s story, Sayles uses blowing wind nonsynchronously, enhancing the drama of the tale. The increased wind also allows Sayles to make an auditory cut from an interior shot of Fiona listening to Hugh to the images of a thrashing sea conjured by her imagination and to segue from the Coneelly cottage to the pictures Fiona sees in her imagination. In addition to the aural cues on the soundtrack, Mason Daring again composed all the music for the ﬁlm. Working with Sayles has provided Daring an opportunity to explore a variety of musical forms, including traditional Celtic ballads. For The Secret of Roan Inish, Daring used traditional arrangements, his own compositions, and the Irish lyricist Maire Breatnach to comment on and accent the atmosphere of rich mystery that Sayles desired. “Fiona’s Lullaby,” a traditional arrangement by Daring, performed by Eileen Loughnane, illustrates how Daring’s research and musicianship fuse to embellish a sequence in the ﬁlm. The gentle lyrics encourage Fiona to sleep in maternal security. On screen, we see Fiona fall asleep inside the deserted family cottage, a building Jamie uses as a shelter, and Daring’s score and Sayles’s mise-en-scène combine to describe an intense feeling of maternal safety and peace. Daring used mostly Irish musicians to perform his score, and they played traditional Irish instruments—ﬂutes and whistles, ﬁddles, uilleann pipes, bouzouki, Celtic harp, bodhran, mando-cello—to underscore the authenticity of Sayles’s project. Sayles also worked for the ﬁrst time with a group of foreign actors. His talent as a director transferred well. Sayles draws strong yet earthbound performances from his cast, all of whom were either trained Irish actors or unknowns who answered an open casting call. They deliver Sayles’s words in actual Irish speech, never resorting to stagy mock Irish. Ros and John Hubbard served as casting directors, chosen because of their ﬁne work on The Commitments (1991) and Into the West (1993), ﬁlms requiring unknown performers. For his picture, Sayles sought unknown actors for the roles of Fiona and Eamon, key characters. Over 1,000 young girls were tested for the role of Fiona. The physical description for the role, which appeared on Irish television and in local newspapers, called for a young girl: “Thin, underweight, pale complexion, but perky and not afraid of water” (Skerry Movies 16). Elaine Courtney thought her daughter, Jeni, ﬁt the description. Jeni, who had never acted, was selected because of her looks, her love of the water, and her raw talent. Jeni ﬁt right into the world of ﬁlmmaking, showing an uncanny calm in front of the cameras. Sayles was pleased because Jeni was a natural actor, someone who took pleasure in the process of creating a ﬁlm. Jeni Courtney presents Fiona as caring and intelligent, using her face to communicate fear, hope, frustration, joy, and pleasure. She makes Fiona a believable ten-year-old, one free from modernity. Richard Sheridan also came with no professional experience, and he too proved to

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be a real ﬁnd. His genuine, youthful enthusiasm, coupled with a quiet reserve, allows Eamon, who is a bit skeptical of Fiona and her ideas, to be at once reserved yet willing to take a chance. As Sheridan told an interviewer, however, he has little in common with the character Sayles created: “I am more like Fiona—very impulsive.” Answering the newspaper ad for actors was indeed a rash move for the young man. “Wise boy wanted for ﬁlm. Big lumps need not apply” read the headline announcing the open casting call. According to Ros and John Hubbard, Sheridan is more accurately described as “tall and coltish” (Skerry Movies 15). Nevertheless, they decided on Sheridan with one week to go before shooting. By the time his character agrees to help Fiona rebuild the cottages at Roan Inish every move seems natural, appropriate. Both of these young actors committed themselves with grace and subtlety, and they clearly enjoyed working under Sayles’s direction. The remaining players in the ﬁlm are accomplished Irish actors, many of whom work regularly in the theater, including Eileen Colgan, Mick Lally, and John Lynch. Colgan, who trained under Shelagh Richards, the Abbey Theatre actress and director, sees Tess as an archetypal Island woman. Says Colgan, “Women at that time were used to their children emigrating and never seeing them again. They were resigned to loss and carrying a fair amount of pain” (Skerry Movies 11). Tess, of course, is strong and wise, gruff and tender. Colgan uses her talents to bring out all of Tess, who seems to be the only truly practical member of the Coneelly family, until she realizes Jamie is alive. Like many actors who have worked with Sayles, Colgan took the part because the script was intelligent and because Sayles is an actor’s director. According to Colgan, Sayles is “concerned primarily with the performance and making actors feel as though they are being catered [to] rather than concentrating on things technical which can be the case with others” (Skerry Movies 12). Colgan sees the message of The Secret of Roan Inish as anodyne for spiritual ennui: “We have an expression in Ireland which we use when we say good-bye, which is ‘Keep the Faith’ and I feel that, in a sense, this is its message. In other words, if one does not close doors, if one keeps hope alive, then things can happen” (Skerry Movies 12). Mick Lally, too, sees a deeper truth at the center of the ﬁlm: “There is a theme running through the ﬁlm about the importance of traditions and how modern-day life and developments should not require us to discard or jettison our heritage. It is telling that we cannot divorce our selves from the past” (Skerry Movies 14) Lally, a seasoned stage, ﬁlm, and television actor, knows a good role when he sees one. Hugh Coneelly was a role he could not ignore. Filling young Fiona with stories from the past, which reveal her family to her, appealed to Lally’s sense of tradition. Lally’s Hugh Coneelly brims with honesty, either when he is telling Fiona a tale or when he visually communicates the pain he feels over losing his seaside cottage. Lally’s range as an actor comes across under Sayles’s direction. Moreover, Lally relished working with Sayles: “What struck me reading the script for the ﬁrst time was that John’s dialogue is very accurate and true to the way Irish people speak which is unlike what most overseas screenwriters put into our mouths in terms of what they assume we say” (Skerry Movies Corp. 5). Lally appreciated the fact that Sayles took time to research the region, the people, and the culture of rural Ireland. In Pat O’Connor’s Cal (1984), John Lynch found the type of notoriety that generated roles in television, ﬁlm, and theater. Lynch worked with Daniel Day-Lewis in Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father (1993), a ﬁlm that drew favorable attention in the United States. Lynch, then, is perhaps the best-known actor in The Secret of Roan Inish. His role as Tadhg, though small, is memorable, especially his ﬁshing technique. What Lynch brings to the screen is a sense of darkness, the feeling that suggests his character

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has been places, and that he carries an awareness others cannot possibly share. He ﬁts Tadhg, who is at odds with everyone, with tailor-made precision. Lynch appreciated Sayles’s ﬁlm work and wanted the chance to work with the writer-director: “He’s great, he’s different. He has an honesty and a sense of commitment that I respond to. On set he gives clear, concise direction, managing to convey in simple terms, very complex ideas” (Skerry Movies 17). Sayles’s ability to connect with his actors, to write a literate screenplay that would appeal to Irish actors, and to convey his own sense of integrity and commitment helped to make The Secret of Roan Inish a picture full of solid performances. Most of the ﬁlm’s primary photography was done in County Donegal, concentrated at Kate’s Strand, Rosbeg. According to Renzi and Green, the search for the right location was difﬁcult. Green noted, “John was looking for beauty, but of a more harsh, rugged kind” (Skerry Movies 9). Sayles used Fry’s original line drawings from her book as a visual reference for the ﬁlm (Skerry Movies 5). Sayles worked closely with production designer Adrian Smith to achieve the appropriate period look for the ﬁlm, “since a lot of what the story is about is people who come out of the land and have to carve their homes out of the land” (Skerry Movies 5). The frame is not overwhelmed with color, underscoring the harshness of the land and the sea, so the stories being told command attention. Natural lighting was used whenever possible. Sayles chose Ireland for his ﬁlm because it is a beautiful land made famous by immigration, clashing cultures, and improbable stories. Like Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish is about place, and how place shapes people. The seals and the gulls proved a challenge for the production crew. According to Sayles, It’s the logistics of the place that are tough. It’s not that the seals didn’t do what we wanted them to do, it was a question of positioning them in a suitable but natural looking environment in which they could swim around. However, as it is impossible to conﬁne them to a particular area, they had to be ﬁlmed in a pen, so not seeing the pen was a problem [Skerry Movies 6].

R. Paul Miller, the associate producer, was largely responsible for the wildlife units. In order to achieve a realistic look, his solution was a threefold design: He used environmental footage shot by Jeff Goodman, trained-seal footage, and shots using animatronic seals. Sayles edited these disparate shots to create a realistic-looking community of seals. Working with the birds proved to be much more difﬁcult, but in the end dedicated teamwork paid off. What we see on the screen looks natural, as if the seals and the gulls responded to acting cues. Although the local Donegal communities supported the ﬁlmmakers, loving the idea of participating in the ﬁlmmaking process and of ultimately seeing their village on-screen, one major mishap occurred, and it almost scuttled the entire project. As reported by David Gritten in the Los Angeles Times, “A mentally unstable young local man employed as a laborer on the ﬁlm set ﬁre to three thatched cottages, built by the crew on the beach” (20). Insurance covered the cost of the damage, but for a ﬁlm that got off the ground with shaky ﬁnancial backing to begin with, a setback like this one could have stopped the entire picture. But the ﬁlmmakers persevered, with increased help and support from the locals. The Secret of Roan Inish has proved to be a popular success, particularly on the video market. Its crossover appeal, reaching both children and adults, has helped to turn a solid proﬁt for Sayles. But he had a difﬁcult time selling the picture. “Our timing couldn’t have been worse,” Sayles recalled for Stephen Holden. “It would have been better had we started a year earlier. That was when studios would buy anything with sprocket holes that they

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could call a children’s ﬁlm” (“In a Departure...” 13, 21). The completed ﬁlm sat for almost two years before First Look, a West Coast company owned by the Overseas Film Group, agreed to handle the property (“In a Departure...” 21). The ﬁlm cost $5 million to make, a modest sum by studio standards, especially for a foreign location shoot, but more than most of Sayles’s ﬁlms, exceeding his average budget by $2 million. Just raising money to produce the ﬁlm was problematic. Sayles invested considerably more of his own money in the ﬁlm than he had intended, although he ﬁnally reached an agreement with the Denver-based Jones Intercable, a deal secured two weeks into ﬁlming in 1993. “Getting money for [The Secret of Roan Inish] was a huge hassle,” revealed Renzi, “a really ugly experience. At one point John said he just wanted enough money to pay the crew severance and send them home” (Gritten F12). Thankfully, that scenario never occurred. After completing The Secret of Roan Inish, Sayles wrote two original screenplays and, to pay off his initial debt, worked on a number of Hollywood ﬁlm scripts: Apollo 13 for Ron Howard, The Mummy for Universal, a basketball movie for Disney, and two drafts of a ﬁlm about the 1960s for Rob Reiner, which was never produced. While working with Reiner, Sayles established a relationship with people from Castle Rock Entertainment, a Ted Turner company. Castle Rock expressed interest in backing Sayles’s next project, a story about a Texas sheriff trying to solve an old murder.

6

Borders: Texas, the Academy, and Mexico Lone Star Lines in the Sand In my movies, very often there’s a spine, which is the genre story, that’s almost generic, but not quite. Here it’s a detective story. But it’s only a spine, it’s not the most important thing. It’s like the difference between Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Hammett is very thin on the page, and it really is about who did what to whom, whereas with Chandler it’s about the trip. When you can join the two of them—which is why Chinatown is such a good script—you’re really doing something good. —John Sayles, Scenario

Lone Star (1996) is a sprawling, complicated ﬁlm about the burden of history and the rifts caused by arbitrary borders drawn between people and cultures, a sobering reminder of how economics and politics, age and race, power and violence affect one’s options in the face of social hegemony. The story focuses on the interactions of three ethnic groups—Mexican, Anglo, African American—in the ﬁctional town of Frontera, Texas, located on the Rio Grande River. Lone Star is a remarkable fusion, part murder mystery, part domestic saga, part love story, part Western, part cultural analysis. Using more than 50 speaking characters, Sayles’s elaborate screenplay makes demands on his audience, an independent trait marking all of Sayles’s own ﬁlm work. As the narrative expands, taking in multiple perspectives, the central story tightens, cinching Sayles’s characters metaphorically and literally. The U.S.–Mexico borderland has always interested Sayles, especially in Texas, a place with which he was somewhat familiar, having hitchhiked through the state during his itinerant college days and having watched his breakthrough script, Piranha (1978), shot on location in San Marcos, Texas. But, as Sayles explained to public television’s Charlie Rose, the idea for his multigenerational border history sprouted from an extremely different place: “Although it’s set on the Texas-Mexican border, a lot of what I was thinking about when I was writing it was Yugoslavia and how do you wake up one morning and have somebody come to your house and say, ‘Well, here’s a gun. You’re a Serb. Let’s go kill your next-door neighbor.’ ” Lone Star’s variegated histories and three principal storylines explore the tangled thinking that separates people from alternative histories and cultures. 175

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Because Sayles wanted to set his story on the border in Texas, Maggie Renzi and fellow producer R. Paul Miller set up a reconnaissance vacation in Del Rio, Texas, where the trio rented a houseboat on Lake Amistad and explored the borderland. Sayles started the screenplay. Originally, the ﬁlmmakers planned to shoot closer to Austin, Texas, a convenient place for cast and crew. But the borderland south of Del Rio had a look Sayles could not ignore: “There’s kind of a Wal-Mart feel to everything: it’s all about commerce, about signs—layers of signs” (Scenario 51). Although Del Rio, Texas, site of several contemporary movies—including Lonesome Dove and The Return of El Mariachi—was considered, Eagle Pass, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Mexico, connected by a busy international bridge, became the ﬁlm’s central location. “What we had in Eagle Pass,” said Renzi, “was the real resonance you get when you’re making a movie about a place. The extras look exactly right, the accents of the local actors are right, the costume department can shop locally” (Castle Rock 7). In addition, Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras sit on the Rio Grande, a physical borderline between the United States and Mexico. Symbolically the river calls to mind the problem of illegal immigration, always a contentious political issue. The international border between Texas and Mexico provides an appropriate stage for Sayles’s dynamic multicultural drama. One week after returning to New York, Sayles was ready to make the movie, a complicated layering of Anglo and Mexican, Tejano and African American stories. Sayles wrote the script in four months, from September to December 1994. He began ﬁlming in April 1995. In contrast with the Roan Inish experience, ﬁnding ﬁnancial backing for Lone Star was rather easy, because of Sayles’s association with Castle Rock Entertainment, a production company owned by Ted Turner: “This was one-stop shopping. I’d worked for Castle Rock as a screenwriter, working with Rob Reiner, so I kind of knew some of the people there, and asked them if they wanted to look at the screenplay when I was done, and they did, and said, ‘Yeah, why not’ ” (Castle Rock 194). The budget for Lone Star was $5 million, the same as The Secret of Roan Inish. Considering the scope of Sayles’s picture, this amount of money is incredibly small. Moreover, Castle Rock, promoted its products, and Lone Star experienced energetic public relations. Lone Star, Sayles’s tenth feature ﬁlm, was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay, his second nomination, and the ﬁlm generated a large, mostly positive, critical reception. Shot in wide-screen Super 35 mm, the ﬁlm looks like none of Sayles’s other pictures. Yet even with its high production values, heavy promotion, and commercial recognition, Lone Star remains a John Sayles ﬁlm, powered by carefully drawn characters, personal stories, revealing history, and a social-realistic aesthetic, now a devalued style within American cinema. Lone Star extends some of the themes Sayles investigated in The Secret of Roan Inish: familial roots, the power of history, place, and oral storytelling. Lone Star is, however, a vastly different ﬁlm in look and intent. Like Sayles’s more overtly tough-minded pictures—Matewan, Eight Men Out, City of Hope—Lone Star examines social stratiﬁcation and political ideology from multiple perspectives. Various ﬁlm critics noted the similarity between Lone Star and City of Hope, Sayles’s take on urban life and competing political camps. City of Hope interweaves characters whose lives collide even if they do not know one another, as Sayles explained to Tod Lippy: “City of Hope is very much a snapshot of the present” (51). Unlike Sayles’s urban drama, Lone Star seamlessly connects the present and the past in a lavish visual style. Indeed, the ﬁlm illustrates William Faulkner’s famously accurate assessment of history: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

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Set in Frontera, Texas, part of Rio County, the narrative glides between two primary time frames, 1957 and the present. In 1957, the Anglo population controlled the town, but in the present, the Anglo power base has eroded and the Mexican majority is emerging politically, economically, and culturally. Lone Star focuses on the current and past lives of three main characters: Sam Deeds, Pilar Cruz, and Delmore Payne, each representing one of the major ethnic groups that make up Frontera. Sam, the Anglo sheriff of Rio County, attempts to solve the 40-year-old murder of Sheriff Charley Wade, an old-fashioned “bribeor-bullets” lawman who terrorized Rio County. Sam believes Buddy Deeds, his late father and Wade’s deputy, murdered his boss. After Wade vanished, Buddy Deeds succeeded him as sheriff of Rio County, and he became a local legend. Pilar, the daughter of a prominent Mexican restaurant owner and now a high school history teacher, was Sam’s teenage love, but Buddy forcibly ended their relationship, an act for which Sam never forgave his father. When the story begins, Sam and Pilar have been separated for more than twenty years. Army Colonel Delmore Payne, an African American career ofﬁcer who grew up in Frontera, is only peripherally connected to Sam and Pilar. His father, Otis Payne, however, played a major role in Charley Wade’s death. But Sam and Delmore are thematically linked: both suffer from damaged father-and-son histories. Typical of a Sayles independent script, Lone Star’s robust narrative is ﬁlled with fully realized secondary characters who establish emotional, intellectual, and historic lines of connection among his primary ﬁgures. These characters provide Lone Star a rich backdrop, making for a labyrinthine murder mystery narrative that undermines generic conventions. More important, however, the residents of Frontera, Texas, are evocatively realistic. They expose the multicultural community dynamics that exist in America today. Sayles is not interested in the mechanical design of a crime story; rather, he wants to explore how these diverse groups of people interact among themselves and as part of a larger community. Sayles’s assembly of voices connects races, classes, and cultures. Any attempt to summarize Lone Star’s narrative is bound to fail, but what follows is a truncated yet fairly complete summary of the ﬁlm’s major plot elements. The ﬁlm opens in the 1990s, and the ﬁrst image is desert fauna, sun-baked and uninviting. As the camera slowly pans to the right, we see Cliff (Stephen Mendillo), an army career man, catalogs local vegetation. In the background, Mikey (Stephen J. Lang), also an army ofﬁcer, sweeps a metal detector over the dry desert ﬂoor, looking for spent bullet casings, which he uses to create metal sculptures that resemble the work of Frederic Remington. Mikey discovers a Masonic ring, a skull, and then a corroded sheriff ’s badge, symbols of power and prestige. These are the remains of Big Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson), the corrupt, violent sheriff who ran Rio County with an open palm and a quick gun. Wade disappeared in 1957, after a public argument with his deputy, Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey). Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) opens an investigation to determine how Charley Wade ended up buried on an abandoned army riﬂe range 40 years ago. Sam, long estranged from his father, believes that Buddy murdered Charley Wade. At the Café Santa Barbara, a well-known Frontera eatery, Sam asks Hollis Pogue (Clifton James), the current mayor of Frontera and also a former deputy to Wade, to recall his version of the night Wade vanished. Hollis obliges, and the narrative shifts to 1957. An unbroken elide shows the same restaurant, albeit smaller, darker. A confrontation between Buddy Deeds and Charley Wade erupts over the mordida the restaurant owner pays to Wade in order to keep mojados (wetbacks) working in his kitchen. Buddy refuses to pick the money up for Wade, telling

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Chris Cooper as Sam Deeds in Lone Star (1996). Cooper also appeared in Matewan, City of Hope, and Sliver City. Cooper was an underappreciated member of Sayles’s loose repertory company until he won an Oscar for his performance in Adaptation. Like David Strathairn, Cooper is a recognizable American actor (photograph by Alan Pappe).

the sheriff that the entire county has had enough of his tactics and it is time he left. The argument is tense, serious. Each man threatens the other with death. Buddy Deeds, however, holds his ground against the notorious Sheriff Wade, as a terriﬁed young Hollis ( Jeff Monahan) watches from the background. The narrative shifts back to the present and Hollis declaring Wade “went missing the next day, along with ten thousand dollars in court funds from the safe at the jail.” Buddy became the sheriff of Rio County, and his legend was born. According to Hollis, Buddy ran Rio County in a different manner: “Money doesn’t always need to change hands to keep the wheels turning.” In contrast to Wade, Buddy was admired by the Mexican community for his fairness. He became legendary for keeping Fontera’s economy running smoothly and equally, even though the three ethnic communities remained separate. The scene shifts to the local army base, which is scheduled to close, where Colonel Delmore Payne ( Joe Morton) addresses his ofﬁcers. His language and demeanor indicates Del is a spit-and-polish, by-the-book military man, an inﬂexible career soldier who takes his command seriously: “You may have heard rumors that I run a very tight ship. These rumors are not exaggerated.” Later, at Big O’s Roadhouse, the black community’s gathering place, owned by Del’s father, Otis Payne (Ron Canada), a wailing blues tune and loud talk ﬁll the air. Everyone is having a good time. A teenager, Chet Payne (Eddie Robinson), Del’s son, walks into the tavern. Chet focuses his attention on Big O, who is working behind the bar, smiling,

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laughing, and serving drinks. Chet pulls a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, a label for Big O’s barbecue sauce, with a picture of Otis the Chef on it. Chet looks from the label to the man behind the bar, making a visual connection. Behind him, an argument suddenly turns violent. Two men ﬁght over a woman, and one of the men is shot. Athena (Chandra Wilson), a black army private, kneels over the bleeding man. She screams for help. Otis appears behind Chet, wraps his large arm around the teenager’s shoulder, and calmly says, “You weren’t here tonight, were you?” Chet responds, “No, sir.” Otis tells Chet to exit though the back door, then he turns his attention to the chaos in his bar. That same evening, at a parent-teacher meeting, members of the Anglo and Mexican communities debate how history should be taught at the high school. The argument revolves around Pilar Cruz’s (Elizabeth Peña) pluralistic approach to teaching, which runs counter to the prescribed textbook. Paloma (Carina Martinez), Pilar’s daughter, brings word that her brother, Amado (Gonzalo Castillo), has been arrested. Pilar exits the meeting and rushes to the county jail. There, Sam, now dealing with the troubling discovery in the desert and the shooting at Big O’s, sees Pilar from a distance. His lingering gaze and body language make it clear they know each other well. Sam retrieves Amado for Pilar. Their dialogue reveals Pilar is widowed and that she is trying to raise her children alone. In order to compress time, Sayles employs a languid tracking montage dominated by close-ups detailing the forensic examination of Wade’s remains. The gathered bones of his skeleton are tagged, photographed, and measured. The camera glides over the bleachedout remains, concluding with a tight shot of a container half full of ﬁzzing rusty liquid; a pair of tongs removes a badge reading sheriff—rio county. Ben Wetzel (Richard A. Jones), a Texas Ranger, meets Sam in an empty bar. He holds the forensic report conﬁrming the remains are Charley Wade’s. Ben, who grew up in Rio County and who remembers Wade well, tells Sam that he will “keep names out of [the investigation] till we got some answers or hit a dead end.” Sam now has time to ﬁnd out if his father killed Charley Wade, a suspicion he ﬁrmly believes and wants to prove. Sam continues to ask questions around town about Charley and Buddy and their ﬁnal confrontation. That same day Minnie Bledsoe (Beatrice Winde), whose husband, Roderick (Randy Stripling), used to own the roadhouse, tells Sam more about Wade’s abuse of power and something about how the African American community felt about Buddy Deeds’s political style. The narrative glides into the past, back to the roadhouse in 1957. We see young Otis (Gabriel Casseus) working as a waiter. He walks toward Charley Wade’s table, where the imperious sheriff and young Hollis sit watching over the patrons. From Wade’s point of view a man is seen slipping money—a gambling debt payment—into Otis’s shirt pocket. Young Otis is running numbers out of the club. Because he did not cut Wade in on the illegal proﬁts, the sheriff beats the young man. For good measure, he shoots up Roderick’s club, a reminder of his absolute power. When the narrative returns to the present, Otis, not Minnie, concludes the story for Sam. Otis calmly defends Buddy: “I don’t recall a prisoner ever died in your father’s custody. I don’t recall a man in this town—black, white, Mexican—who’d hesitate a minute before he’d call on Buddy Deeds to solve a problem.” Neither Otis nor Minnie has anything bad to say about Buddy Deeds; rather, they have the utmost respect for his methods, which Sam, who is searching for moral truth, ﬁnds questionable. Sayles cuts to the kitchen of Café Santa Barbara, where Mercedes Cruz (Miriam Colon) and Pilar argue about the past. Mercedes refuses to return to Mexico even for a short visit, a choice that disturbs Pilar. Mercedes bitterly responds, “You want to see

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Mexicans, open your eyes and look around you. We’re up to our ears in them.” Later that night, as Mercedes gets into her large, expensive Buick, Enrique (Richard Coca), a recently immigrated employee, admirers the vehicle: “Es muy lindo, su coche.” Mercedes scolds him, “En inglés, Enrique. This is the United States. We speak English.” At the roadhouse the next day, Otis and Del have their ﬁrst meeting in almost forty years. Because of the shooting the night before, the colonel threatens to declare Big O’s off limits to all army personnel. Otis, who abandoned Del when he was eight years old, explains the signiﬁcance of the bar to his son: “There’s not enough of us to run anything in this town—the white people are mostly out on the lake now and the Mexicans hire each other. There’s the Holiness Church and there’s Big O’s place.” Del says derisively, “And people make their choice.” Otis replies, “A lot of ’em choose both. There’s not like a borderline between the good people and the bad people—you’re not either on one side or the other.” The remaining conversation reveals Del’s unhappiness being back in his hometown, a place he had trying to erase from his memory, and his bitterness toward his father, who moved three houses away to live with one of his mother’s best friends. Otis and Del do not communicate in this exchange. Maintaining a cold, professional distance, Del informs Otis that he will receive ofﬁcial notiﬁcation of the impending ban. A cut to Sam in at night in his ofﬁce shows him searching through piles of old Sheriff ’s Department records. A series of dissolves illustrates a paper trail of payroll reports, real estate transfers, many with Buddy’s signature, autopsy reports, eviction notices, a map of Perdido, and Sam’s own handwritten notes, suggesting he has dedicated himself to this case. This archive describes the extent of Wade’s legally sanctioned brutality, raises questions about Buddy Deeds’s hiring practices at the county jail, and his real estate holdings. In the morning, Sam crosses the Rio Grande to Ciudad León, Frontera’s sister city. There he meets Chucho Montoya (Tony Amendola), who tells Sam about the death of Eladio Cruz (Gilbert R. Cuellar, Jr.), a young day-laborer brutally and senselessly murdered by Charley Wade for smuggling Mexicans across the border. The narrative shifts to the 1956, and how Charley Wade conducts business. Wade tricks Eladio into showing him the shotgun the young man keeps in his truck. As soon as Eladio turns to touch the shotgun, Wade shoots him in the back of the head. Sickened and shocked, the young Hollis gasps, “You killed him!” In a matter-of-fact tone Wade responds, “You got a talent for statin’ the obvious.” As the narrative glides back to the present, we see Sam looks over the site of Eladio Cruz’s murder, standing just above the spot where the young Chucho Montoya ( James Borrego) hid from the savage Wade. Marisol (Lisa Suarez), the high school principal’s secretary, jokes with Pilar about working too much, not having a lover. She says, “How ‘bout the sheriff ... the old-highschool-heartthrob sheriff. I thought you were crazy about each other. He’s available, you’re available.” With difﬁculty, Pilar mutters a response, “Nobody stays in love for twenty-three years.” The narrative shifts to 1972. At a drive-in a B ﬁlm, Black Mama, White Mama, a low-rent version of The Deﬁant Ones, plays on the screen. Buddy and young Hollis stride through the lot, searching the cars with their ﬂashlights. Buddy discovers young Sam (Tay Strathairn) and young Pilar (Vanessa Martinez) groping each other in the backseat of a car; he rips them apart. In a rage, young Sam screams and curses at his father, while young Pilar begs Hollis not to tell her mother. The narrative returns to the present, where Sam stands alone by his car in the lot of the long-abandoned drive-in. After he drives away, a crane shot lingers on the derelict screen. An impressionistic montage shows Sam driving at night, thinking about Pilar and

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what Buddy Deeds did to them; he ends up at the high school where Pilar is working late. Separately they drive to her mother’s restaurant. Alone inside the Cafe Santa Barbara Sam and Pilar talk brieﬂy, then dance. The scene illustrates their deep romantic connection, alive even after twenty-three years. Finally, they make love in Sam’s bare apartment. At the Café Santa Barbara the next day, Hollis sits eating breakfast when Sam arrives to remind the mayor he needs to know more about the night his father refused to be Charley Wade’s bagman. Sam tells Hollis that he is going to San Antonio, and that he wants an answer when he returns. Sam drives to San Antonio to see his ex-wife and retrieve a box from her garage; it holds Buddy’s personal papers, which he hopes will shed some light on Buddy’s real estate transactions and, perhaps, Wade’s death. Along the way, he stops to talk with Wesley Birdsong (Gordon Tootoosis), a Native American who sells curios at a roadside stand near where Buddy Deeds grew up. Wesley knew Buddy before he became a law enforcement ofﬁcer. “If he hadn’t found that deputy job,” Wesley tells Sam, “I believe Buddy might’ve gone down the other path, got into some serious trouble. Settled him right down. That and your mother. ‘Course he had that other one later.” This news stuns Sam, and he asks for the woman’s name, but Wesley feigns amnesia; however, he warns Buddy, using a deft metaphor, to stop digging into the past. Back at the military base, Del upbraids Athena for breaking the drug policy and for her involvement in the shooting at Big O’s. But before he starts, Del wants to ﬁnd out why she joined the army. Athena declares, “It’s their country. This is one of the best deals they offer.” The remark troubles Del, who believes in service to country. He asks, “How do you think I got to be a colonel?” Athena says, “Work hard, be good at your job. Sir. Do whatever they tell you.” Del then asks her why “they” let blacks in on the military opportunity. She says, “They got people to ﬁght. Arabs, yellow people, whatever. Might as well be us.” Del is obviously affected by Athena’s description of the military; the social and economic implications are sobering. Del straightens Athena’s cap and tries, halfheartedly, to explain the type of community the army can generate. Then he dismisses her. The camera lingers on him as he leans against his desk, gently slumping, staring straight ahead, mulling over Athena’s words. In San Antonio, Sam asks Bunny (Frances McDormand), his manic-depressive, football junkie ex-wife, for his belongings. He ﬁnds a love letter from the “other woman” to his father, and he learns that Buddy had had a baby girl with Mercedes Cruz, his longtime lover. Sam now realizes that by breaking up his teenaged romance, Buddy Deeds was trying to prevent his children from committing incest. Still, Sam remains convinced that his father murdered Charley Wade. Del, dressed in civilian garb, pays an unexpected visit to Otis’s house. Carolyn (Carmen de Lavallade), Otis’s wife, shows Del the shrine Otis has kept of his son’s academic and military achievements over the years. Shaken and confused, Del says, “My mother said he never asked about me.” Carolyn smiles slightly and replies, “He never asked her.” That same night, Mercedes, resting in a chaise lounge on her patio, is startled by Enrique, who emerges from the dark without warning. He is soaked and in need of help; his ﬁancée broke her leg as he was helping her and some other illegal immigrants cross the Rio Grande. Mercedes reaches for her phone to call the border patrol, but quickly changes her mind, deciding instead to help the young people. When he arrives home, Del immediately tells Chet and tells him that military life is not for everyone. With some discomfort, Del says he would be happy with any decision Chet makes concerning his own life. After some uneasy small talk, Chet asks if they are

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ever going to visit Del’s father: “He lives here, right?” Del says “yes” and then suggests, awkwardly, that the two families could get together for a barbecue. Chet grins, “Cool. He makes his own sauce.” The narrative moves to 1945. A young Mercedes stands in the middle of the Rio Grande, abandoned, terriﬁed. Eladio Cruz, her future husband, comes to the river’s edge with a lantern in his hand. He says, “Me llamo Eladio Cruz. Bienvenido a Tejas.” Mercedes’s memory reveals that she, like the young people she is now helping, crossed into Texas illegally, a fact she has kept secret for decades. Back to the present on the same night Del and Chat have their conversation, Sam angrily confronts Hollis and Otis at the roadhouse. He accuses them of having witnessed Buddy murder Charley Wade. Otis and Hollis ﬁnally tell Sam the truth. The narrative returns to Roderick Bledsoe’s roadhouse. Young Otis is conducting a card game when Charley and young Hollis arrive ahead of schedule for the monthly payment. Wade brieﬂy looms over the table, then knocks it over. He kicks and punches Otis, beating him into submission. Wade commands Otis to turn over the gun kept over the bar in a cigar box. Stunned and bloodied, Otis obeys, falling into the same setup Wade used to kill Eladio Cruz. As Otis reaches for the gun, Charley Wade takes aim at the center of his back. Framed by the doorway of the roadhouse, Buddy Deeds shouts at Charley Wade. Two shots ring out, and Sheriff Wade, blood pouring from his body, falls to the ﬂoor. Young Otis looks over the bar at the dead lawman. Wade’s has spattered over the cash on the bar. Sayles’s camera ﬁnds Buddy Deeds, and pulls back as he approaches the bar. A smoking gun comes into the frame. As Sayles’s camera continues to pull back, a stunned Hollis stands on the side of the frame holding the smoking gun. Otis concludes the story: “Sheriff Charley had some real big friends in politics then, and if the truth come out it wasn’t going to go easy on Hollis. I don’t know why I trusted Buddy with it—don’t know why he trusted me. The ﬁrst time I ever talked with him was right there, and then with a dead white man leakin’ blood on the ﬂoor between us. He could charm the scales off a rattler, Buddy Deeds.” Now Sam must choose between the truth and the legend of his father. Hollis says, “Word gets out who that body was, people are gonna think Buddy done it.” Visibly relieved Sam replies, “Buddy’s a goddam legend. He can handle it.” The next day, Sam and Pilar meet at the deserted drive-in. Sam reveals that Buddy was also her father, that he bought the restaurant for Mercedes with the missing $10,000, and that he paid the hospital bill when Pilar was born. Mercedes was Buddy’s longtime lover. Pilar is stunned and angry, not because of Sam’s discovery but because she does not want to lose him again. Sam and Pilar must face the future knowing that their happiness together can only be achieved if they turn their backs on social norms and on their shared past. “Forget the Alamo,” Pilar says, suggesting that they will escape history and stay together. Sayles concludes the ﬁlm with a wide shot of the drive-in. Sam and Pilar sit side by side holding hands on the hood of his car, looking at the blank, dilapidated screen. Lone Star’s complex structure borrows from two masters of American crime ﬁction. What begins as a straightforward Dashiell Hammett–like detective story slowly opens up into a Raymond Chandler–like journey, in which numerous points of view collide, revealing the socio-cultural condition of Frontera, Texas. Hammett, the great progenitor of realist American detective ﬁction, concentrated on linear plotting; Chandler, who despised plotting, concentrated on atmosphere and character. Chandler created self-contained scenes, placing a cinematic template over his work. Sayles follows both models. Lone Star seems byzantine, yet the ﬁlm is well plotted and direct. Still, the atmosphere and the

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characters Sayles creates make Lone Star more than an intriguing whodunit. Like Chandler, Sayles vividly renders the actualities of American life by moving through various social tiers. Like Hammett, Sayles works from a speciﬁc outline, and he shows why all the stops in the ﬁlm are necessary. Overall, of course, Lone Star is driven by characters, the voices Sayles creates for the screen. Sayles’s large ensemble cast infuses Lone Star with a rich subtext, adding a sociological and psychological depth not usually seen in commercial ﬁlms. As Gavin Smith suggests, the struggles these people face allow Sayles to comment metaphorically on the “racial stratiﬁcation and cultural conﬂicts of contemporary society” (58). For example, Lone Star countervails the conservative notion of America as a melting pot. In response to a question from writers for Cineaste magazine about his interest in Latinos and Hispanic American cultures, Sayles deﬁned his view of the United States: Where I’m coming from, in fact, is pretty much the opposite of Pat Buchanan’s idea of this monoculture which is being invaded. English-speaking culture is just one of many cultures. It has become the dominant culture or sub-culture in certain areas, but it’s a subculture just like all the others. American culture is not monolingual or monoracial. It’s always been a mix. As one character [Cody, a bartender] says, “We got this whole damn menudo down here” [West and West, “Borders” 15].

Sayles’s tripe stew uses history as its stock, the essential ingredient binding all the major and minor characters, people from different generations, different ethic communities, with different moral agendas who reveal their ﬂaws, strengths, fears, and passions throughout the course of the ﬁlm. Incest, perhaps the ultimate western taboo, functions as Sayles’s primary metaphor for the “interconnected ethnic threads that constitute contemporary American life” (Davis and Womack 212). Frontera, Texas, is the place all these people share; it serves Sayles well because it is a nondescript place, much like the ﬁctional Hudson City he used in City of Hope. Both ﬁctive locations are nowhere and everywhere, isolated yet representative of the strained borders that exist between race and race, class and class, and gender and gender throughout the United States. Indeed, borders, real and imagined, are a central theme in Lone Star: “Within the movie there are lines between people that they choose either to honor or not to honor. It may be this enforced border between Mexico and the United States, it may be one between class, race, ethnicity, or even military rank” (West and West 14). Because of its unique history, the Texas borderland supplies Sayles the proper milieu to comment on the arbitrary quality of all borders. In Frontera, the Anglo minority has used the border to protect its own values and to seal in its own political power. At the curriculum meeting, for instance, one of the parents declares his deﬁnition of the border: “I’m sure they got their own account of the Alamo on the other side, but we’re not on the other side, so we’re not going to have it taught in our schools.” The Anglo speaker sees Mexico as a defeated foreign country, lacking political and economic might. From his perspective, Mexico was ﬁnished in 1836 with the formation of the Texas Republic. And, as he believes, “Winners get the bragging rights, that’s how it goes.” His argument, however, ignores the culture in which his daily life is immersed, a mixture of both Mexican and American perspectives. For Sayles, this character illustrates the tribalism at the core of Frontera’s social structure. The speaker’s tribe, the Anglo winners, are in control, so they dictate the rules of the game by presenting a heroic history of the state, not a messy, complicated historical analysis. Pilar, the history teacher anchoring the curriculum discussion, argues for a more inclusive view of

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history, one that grows from both sides of the debate, one that includes multiple perspectives, a distinct change from the prescribed “textbook” curriculum. Pilar desires, as she says, to show “cultures coming together in both negative and positive ways.” Pilar’s view challenges the status quo interpretation of history by adding perspective, reshufﬂing the deck to offer a more realistic view of history. Sayles’s most overt comment on the Mexican-American border comes from Chucho Montoya, El Rey de las Llantas (The Tire King), in Ciudad León, Mexico. Montoya, who lived in the United Sates for ﬁfteen years, was transported secretly across the border by Eladio Cruz, and he witnessed Charley Wade’s murder of Cruz. Chucho mocks the notion of borders of any kind. Drawing a line in the dirt with a Coke bottle, he challenges Sam to cross the line. Sam obliges. Chucho responds: “Ay, qué milagro! You’re not the sheriff of nothing anymore—just some tejano with a lot of questions I don’t have to answer.” Sam’s power, sanctioned by the United States, signiﬁed by the line in the dirt, no longer exists in Mexico. Facetiously, Chucho suggests that Sam has been magically transformed by crossing an arbitrary line drawn in the sand, a ritualized point in a Western-style standoff, a symbol at once arbitrary and potent. Chucho is not ﬁnished. “Bird ﬂying south,” he says, “you think he sees that line? Rattlesnake, javelina—whatever you got—halfway across that line they don’t start thinking different. So why should a man?” Speaking metaphorically, Chucho indicates that the natural world holds to no boundary; in other words, an invisible line drawn in the sand cannot decide ownership. Although he understands Chucho’s bitterness, Sam points out that Mexico has “always been pretty happy to have that line. The question’s just been where to draw it—.”Chucho, however, has little patience for the world of politics, which, from his perspective, causes more harm than good: “My government can go fuck itself, and so can yours. I’m talking about people here—men” (Scenario 33). Clearly, the symbolic and physical borderline has bred a malevolence that Chucho sees as poisonous. He then tells the story of the killing of Eladio Cruz, a consequence of crossing the international border illegally and challenging Charley Wade’s power. Charley Wade murdered Eladio because he was nothing in the lawman’s eyes, just, as he says, a “little greaser sonofabitch ... running a goddam bus service.” Wade’s form of justice is arbitrary and capricious, a ﬁctional reminder of Texas Rangers who abused their power. Chucho’s story has the thematic strength of a border ballad, in which Eladio is the defenseless innocent and Charley Wade a brute who exploits Mexicans. Chucho’s story also asks why men use borders as lines of power. According to Sayles, “I think that’s one of the reasons that people like borders— they can say, ‘South of this line, I’m a big guy, and I run things here.’ Or it may be as literal as, ‘This is my land and, if you come on it, I can shoot you’ ” (West and West 14). Each of the primary characters in the ﬁlm confronts far more personal borders, those found in their familial histories, race, class, and ethnic culture. In Lone Star the thorny relationship between fathers and sons informs Sayles’s screenplay. The generational conﬂicts that exist between Buddy and Sam, and Otis and Del and Chet tell a political story that adds a deep personal resonance to Sayles’s ﬁlm. Likewise, Mercedes and Pilar share a generational mother/daughter antagonism. For Sayles, the personal is the political. “I spent my ﬁrst ﬁfteen years trying to be just like Buddy and the next ﬁfteen trying to give him a heart attack,” Sam says to Pilar as they walk together along the Rio Grande. Early on, Sam, like everyone else in Rio County, revered Buddy Deeds, the archetypal Texas frontier lawman: brave, fair, honest—heroic in proportion to other men. The ﬁrst time we see Buddy on screen underlines his larger-than-life persona. Staring out at Charley

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Wade from under the brim of his cowboy hat, Buddy refuses to become one of Wade’s lackeys. Self-contained and forceful, Buddy stands in stark contrast to young Hollis, who fears the sheriff. When Buddy places his Colt .45 six-shooter on the table, daring Charley to draw on him, shades of the Western hero, virile, brave, and forthright, arise. Because he threatened violence against an enemy of the community, indeed an Anglo man, Buddy’s legend took ﬁrm root. Although it is only implied in Sayles’s ﬁlm, Buddy ﬁlls a natural patriarchal role common to the borderland. As Americo Paredes, noted scholar of lower border culture, describes it: “The original settlements had been made on a patriarchal basis, with the ‘captain’ of each community playing the part of father to his people.... Obedience depended on custom and training rather than on force” (With His Pistol 11). Following the brutal reign of Charley Wade, Buddy was embraced by the community because people credited him with Wade’s disappearance. Even though Buddy was not completely honest and carried on an extramarital affair, the residents of Frontera felt protective of him and were willing to ignore his indiscretions because he rid the town of a monster. However, even though Buddy is memorialized as a great man, Sam, who uncovers his father’s graft, the shady real estate deal, missing money, illegal uses of prisoners for private work, and inﬁdelity, sees him as more of a hypocrite than a hero. Because of his deep animosity toward Buddy for destroying his love with Pilar, the information Sam ﬁnds helps him paint an ugly picture of his father. Sam wants to prove his father killed Charley Wade so that he can collapse the legend of Buddy Deeds. Sam’s deepest anger, though, comes from his belief that Buddy was a racist who deliberately fractured his relationship with Pilar because she was Mexican. The drive-in scene suggests miscegenation is what the Anglo community fears most, and Buddy, Frontera’s moral arbiter, appears to uphold this unwritten law. However, as Kim Magowan observes, “The multicultural population of Lone Star ’s Frontera facilitates not only the threat of miscegenation but the fact of it” (21). Therefore, as his murder investigation deepens, Sam discovers more about himself and his father than he could ever have anticipated. Buddy was, in fact, attempting to prevent his son from committing incest, an ancient taboo. Buddy could not, of course, reveal this fact to his son because to do so would have exposed his own blood ties to the indigenous Mexican community. What Sam uncovers represents a generational microcosm of Texas border history. Charley Wade sees the Mexican population as inferior, expendable. Therefore, he feels justiﬁed in exploiting Mexicans and killing them if necessary. Buddy Deeds, on the other hand, represents a generation that recognized the presence of the Mexican population, and he worked with them (and the black community) to ensure his power. Yet Buddy’s relationship with the Mexican community is best witnessed through his relationship with Mercedes Cruz. Buddy could not, for generational-cultural reasons, make his love affair known, nor could he admit to being Pilar’s father, although he took tacit responsibility for the child. Revealing his intimate connection with Mercedes would have eroded Buddy’s public standing. As the third generation sheriff, Sam displays a more compassionate connection to the Mexican community. He understands how his neighbors were exploited throughout the history of Frontera, which gives him an outsider’s perspective on his hometown. When Sam discovers his relationship with Pilar is incestuous, it is a galvanizing moment in Lone Star, creating a powerful metaphor that draws attention to how tightly the Mexicans and Anglos are bound: everyone is involved in the mix, and it is almost impossible to separate oneself completely, even though many try.

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Otis, Del, and Chet’s common situation is more traditional and more straightforward. Unlike Sam, in his relationship to his father, the three generations of Payne men have the opportunity to change their relationship; moreover, because they are all alive, their reconciliation is a possibility because they can share history. Chet seeks information from the past; Del does not. He is curious about his grandfather, and, therefore, family history. Del, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with his father, considering Otis irresponsible for abandoning and embarrassing him and his mother. For example, the scene where Chet sneaks into the back room of Big O’s, where Otis keeps his Black Seminole Indian exhibit, reveals a great deal about generational relationships. Chet admits to his grandfather that Del is a difﬁcult father: “Every time he moves up a rank, it’s like he’s got to tighten the screws a little more.” Chet shows an interest in Otis’s collection, and he asks Otis why he got involved with such an arcane hobby. Otis says, “These are our people.” Chet asks, “So I’m part Indian?” Otis responds, “By blood you are. But blood only means what you let it.” Chet responds, “My father says the day you’re born you start from scratch, no breaks and no excuses, and you got to pull yourself up on your own.” Otis is visibly disturbed by this remark. Not only does Del’s declaration echo conservative dogma, but it also suggests Del has turned his back on both his race’s social history and his family’s personal history. The encounter with Athena, however, forces Del to face truths that he has never allowed himself to consider. Athena, as her name suggests, offers wisdom on the conditions of life and contemporary warfare. When Del discovers his father is incredibly proud of his accomplishments, he makes an extraordinarily difﬁcult personal decision to reclaim his past. He realizes his ties to the military are nothing compared with the deep, albeit troubling, personal history shared by a father and son. Even though Otis, Del, and Chet’s relationship of is not as dramatic or as surprising as Buddy and Sam’s, it does show how important it is to understand one’s historical roots, both from an individual perspective and from that of the group. The primary women in this picture, Mercedes, Pilar, and Bunny, struggle with history as well. As mother and daughter, Mercedes and Pilar are strong female characters, women who are intelligent, complex, and troubled. History is the taproot of their problems. Mercedes has completely divorced herself from her roots; she calls herself Spanish, not Mexican. Ironically, Pilar teaches history at the local high school, and her son, Amado, displays a growing interest in Tejano culture and a rejection of his own ethnic background. At the outset, Mercedes represents a conservative Mexican attitude, one suggesting that it is appropriate to slam the immigration gate once one has crossed the border. Pilar sees Mercedes as cold and secretive; indeed, Mercedes seems most comfortable when she is alone on her back porch, drinking scotch and water, waiting for sleep to take her away. Even here, however, Mercedes is not content, as Sayles’s camera indicates. In these early shots, Mercedes is photographed at a canted angle, a visual hint suggesting something is unbalanced, unﬁnished. Mercedes, of course, entered the United States illegally. According to Sayles, she is “very closed about [her past] because in the culture in which she lives, there’s a certain amount of shame in being a mojado, a wetback” (West and West 16). Her restaurant is well known, a member of the city council, mother of the ﬁery high school history teacher, Mercedes is an important member of the Frontera community on multiple fronts. For most of the ﬁlm, though, Mercedes’s economic ties seem to run deeper than her blood relationships. Americanized to a fault, she has everything to lose if her real history is revealed. Understandably, Pilar runs into roadblocks every time she attempts to locate her own

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family history, particularly her supposed nominal father, Eladio Cruz. Pilar’s personal history is full of missing men, her father, her ﬁrst love (young Sam), her husband, Fernando, and her son Amado, who rejects the education she reveres. Under these conditions, it is easier to accept her willingness to commit to an incestuous future with Sam. Unlike Mercedes, Pilar has little left to lose. On a deeper level, their union signiﬁes the complexities and challenges of contemporary life. Bunny, too, struggles under the yoke of history; in her case, however, her father is a dominant force, an deceased patriarch who still runs all aspects of her life, including which NFL team she roots for. Unlike most of the characters in Lone Star, Bunny will never escape her father’s reach. Bunny and Sam’s entire relationship is played out in one short, intense scene that is both funny and sad, and it is made clear why Sam had to ﬂee from Bunny and her father’s grave bound inﬂuence. As Sayles described the scene to Tod Lippy in Scenario, “It has the arc of a play; there are two acts in it, almost, because she gets that second wind. And she has incredible insight, and can be charming, but at other times she’s completely crazy. But above all, she’s going to be there complaining about Daddy even after he’s dead” (193). Because Bunny cannot escape her own history, the scene serves to illustrate the burden of the past. Historical interpretation reﬂects one’s personal agenda. Some, like Cody (Leo Burmester), the ornery redneck bartender, who questions the eroded lines of “demarcation,” cleave to idealized stories and idealized heroes. He tells Sam that the bar is the last stand, an overt link to the Battle of the Alamo, a pivotal event in Texas’s history. Cody then tells Sam that Buddy “stood for something,” as though all that was truly good and valuable is gone. Sayles’s use of the Alamo is deliberate: “When Sam goes down to Mexico, the Mexican guy [Chucho Montoya] draws a line in the sand, which refers to a famous moment from the history of the Alamo, when [William] Travis drew a line” (West and West 14). These historical signposts help set the Anglo community off from the Mexican community, for they are speciﬁc to the history of the Republic of Texas. Yet the context in which Sayles uses the images reveals much about how he presents history in the scene. Leo embraces the same sorts of values as the father at the curriculum meeting, seeing history in a series of large, swaggering images. As Sayles presents these characters, he raises questions about how his audience sees history, what its agendas are. History, of course, is not tidy, and Sayles’s narrative illuminates this fact. Ideally, the true history of the border should be presented from multiple points of view. As Americo Paredes observes, “Texas-Mexicans died at the Alamo and fought at San Jacinto on the Texas side” (With His Pistol 19). Even Cody, who does not understand the diversity of his community, sprinkles his speech with Spanish. Moreover, the black community stands as a reminder of Texas’s slave-holding past, a bit of history that Pilar passes along to her high school students but a fact history books tend to ignore. Sheriff Charley Wade, for example, who represents oppression on multiple levels, tells the young Otis Payne the ﬁrst time they meet that black people in Frontera stay in their place and stay quiet. Big O’s place is the only location where blacks can feel at ease, and the army base is the only place where they can ﬁnd meaningful work, as Athena notes, and protection from the chaos of contemporary cities. Wesley Birdsong, the only Native American in Sayles’s Western, chooses not to live on the reservation because he “couldn’t take the politics.” He has deliberately marginalized himself, living between “Nowheres and Nothin’ Much,” a situation that pleases him. Still, these disparate ethnic representatives are all connected, sharing a common past and a signiﬁcant place.

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As he did in City of Hope, Sayles uses the camera to interconnect characters, but in a vastly different style. Lone Star uses wonderfully choreographed elisions from one time frame to another that reinforce the power of history, a thematic technique Orson Wells used in Citizen Kane, albeit with more ﬂash. British born cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, known for his work with director Jane Campion, particularly on The Piano (1993), served as Sayles’s director of photography. Like Sayles, Dryburgh had never worked in Super 35 mm wide-screen format. Super 35mm uses normal lenses, allowing for greater horizontal dimension, instead of anamorphic lenses, which squeeze the total image horizontally (Wilson 66). To capture the long, ﬂat look of the borderland, Super 35mm was a logical choice. The results are evident in Dryburgh’s photography. When Sayles’s characters speak about the past, the camera slowly tracks in toward each speaker. The camera reinforces the importance of history that suffuses Sayles’s ﬁlm as it slowly glides into the past. Sayles used a similar device in City of Hope, employing a lurching Steadicam to weave the diffused, hyperactive citizens of Hudson City together. In Lone Star, the transitions are poetic, languid, designed not to speed up present time but gently compress decades. Sayles wrote these visual transitions into the script for Lone Star, as he did in his screenplay for City of Hope. Achieving these elisions required creative teamwork. With Dryburgh and Dan Bishop, the production designer, Sayles used stagecraft and lighting to achieve the seamless transitions witnessed throughout the ﬁlm. More than just stylistic ﬂashes, these transitions thematically contribute to the story. For instance, when Chucho Montoya tells his version of Eladio Cruz’s murder, he walks toward the left side of the frame, passing in front of a bright yellow sign, part of the mise-en-scène of the tire yard. The sign is lit in high key, so it attracts attention. The camera follows Chucho from a personal distance. As he reaches the border of the sign, the camera rises above it, lifting us into a crane shot, to reveal Eladio Cruz forty years earlier repairing a ﬂat tire on his truck, which rests on a bright, sunny bridge spanning an arroyo. The cinematographer had to match two different lighting keys: Chucho in the tire yard, and the wide-angle shot of Eladio Cruz on the bridge. In order to accomplish this visual movement in time and space, Sayles’s production crew had to erect a small version of the tire yard near the bridge. Combined, these two ﬁlmmaking units created a visually tantalizing transition into the past. Eladio’s clothes and the make of his truck indicate a cross-over four decades into the past. Yet the shift in screen time is borderless, transporting the audience into the past in a cinematic, ﬂuid, organic fashion. An edit cuts, or breaks, the ﬁlm strip. Lone Star, which is about the psychological power of history, the inability to break away from the stories that affect each character and the entire community, employs editing for thematic purposes, at various times. On the visual level Sayles attempts to avoid breaks of any kind, particularly when moving into or out of the past. “In Lone Star,” Sayles told Gavin Smith, “I didn’t even want a dissolve, which is a soft cut, I didn’t want that separation if I could avoid it” (63). For the most part, shifts into the past are smooth, without an editor’s interference. Needless to say, André Bazin, the high priest of realism, would understand and celebrate Sayles’s use of elisions rather than cuts, for the technique deﬁnes Bazin’s “mummy complex”—the innate human need to halt the ceaseless ﬂow of time by embalming it in an image. Still, to achieve the ﬂuid movement witnessed on the screen, the ﬁlmmakers had to move backgrounds and often shoot two halves of a set in different places. This technique, however, adds vigor to Sayles’s composition. His camera typically establishes a personal

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distance from the speaker, inviting viewers into a private world, then displays an event from a subjective, historic point of view. Thus, Sayles deepens the psychological complexity of the ﬁlm. Removed from the frame by a slow pan, speakers remain as part of the narrative—the character’s story, typically his or her struggles with the past, stay on screen, usually without the assistance of a voice-over, making the image even more impressively Faulknerian. At times, Sayles starts a story in the voice of one speaker and concludes it in the voice of another; for instance, when Minnie Bledsoe describes Charley Wade to Sam, the ﬂashback ends with Otis telling the story. Shifting the storyteller connects Minnie and Otis, even though they never appear together on the screen. Sayles also uses editing to link his characters. For example, when Pilar mutters that no one stays in love for twenty-three years, Sayles suddenly cuts to 1972, forcing his audience to make an abrupt leap in time; deliberately more jarring than the gliding visual elisions, the drive-in sequence must be disruptive. Pilar is no longer telling the story—stylistically the intrusion of the past is out of balance. The drive-in sequence ends with a shot of Sam, in a medium shot, standing next to his car in the abandoned parking lot of the defunct drive-in; visually, Sayles has captured his memory, and therefore, the harsh cutting into and out of the past underscores Sam’s feelings. The glides into the past serve as a visual metaphor representing the memory of the speaker; the edits, which are abrupt, announce a memory a character has internalized, something he or she is unwilling to share with others. Sayles’s mise-en-scène also reinforces the role of history in the ﬁlm. The opening scene, in fact, is an excellent illustration of how the director uses the frame to transmit story ideas. The ﬁrst image seen is a medium shot of the Texas scrub, cacti, yuccas, and other indigenous plants. Then, the camera slowly moves to the right, expanding the frame. In the foreground Cliff looks over local vegetation; he dominates the shot as the camera glides over him, moving from left to right, capturing the ﬂat horizon line of southwest Texas scrub country. Cliff ﬁlls the left side of the frame, but the camera moves toward Mikey, an insigniﬁcant ﬁgure in the background, who will shortly uncover the bones of Charley Wade. Sayles accomplishes a number of things in this shot. First, the vegetation indicates an uninviting place. Second, he introduces us to the gently moving camera he will incorporate at signiﬁcant moments throughout the ﬁlm. Finally, Mikey’s position in the frame metaphorically suggests that history is never far away. Visually, Sayles also works against the conventional grain. Lone Star, which has some of the trappings of a Western, is clearly a revisionist ﬁlm: Sayles takes a skeptical look at the popular values celebrated in classical Westerns. Sayles does not stun his audience with the epic grandeur of the western United States, as did John Ford in the majority of his Westerns. Cliff and Mikey are on an abandoned riﬂe range, an arid, inhospitable desert patch. The colors in this opening shot are not vibrant; rather, they are washed out, deliberately made unappealing. Cliff and Mikey stand out because of the odd clothes they wear, looking like guys from New Jersey, not Westerners. Sayles presents a different look at the Western, one less heroic, less iconic, less romantic than is typical of the genre. In fact, when the ostensible hero of the ﬁlm, Sam Deeds, enters the picture, the ﬁrst thing we notice is that he does not carry a weapon of any kind, a costuming choice that marks Sam’s character. Because he lacks the primary piece of law enforcement equipment, a gun, his position is suspect: Is this man really a peace ofﬁcer? Moreover, Chris Cooper’s sensitive performance contrasts with Matthew McConaughey’s ﬁrm-jawed sheriff; Kris Kristofferson is truly and iconic representative, a decayed Billy the Kid with a badge.

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Another illustration of Sayles’s use of the frame occurs at the end of the ﬁlm, when Sam tells Pilar they share the same father. Sam and Pilar, sitting on the hood of his car in the abandoned drive-in, are shot from a personal distance, which is in balance with most of the master shots evidenced throughout the ﬁlm. The proxemic pattern within the frame is intimate; the distance of physical involvement is appropriate for lovers. Everything within the frame suggests an honest connection between these people. They are, of course, closer than either of them ever imagined. After Sam presents Pilar with a photograph of Buddy and Mercedes playing in the water years ago, Sayles cuts to a wide shot taken from a slightly low angle. Sam and Pilar are now in the middle of the frame, no longer dominating it. Instead, the empty movie screen, long neglected, hangs over them. The mise-en-scène is suggestive. Sam has accepted his past; it no longer plays like a bad movie in his head. Although he hated his father and wanted to convince the community of Frontera that Buddy murdered Charley Wade, Sam has instead uncovered the truth. Buddy did not want his son committing incest with his daughter, and he covered up the murder of the corrupt Charley Wade to save the life of the kind yet feckless Hollis Pogue. While not truly at peace with his father’s memory, Sam can now walk away from the cover-up. He can also, if Pilar is willing, walk away from their shared past and cross the social borders set up against incest to create their own new story. Historical images no longer loom over them. The unused movie screen is empty. Pilar urges Sam—and, perhaps, all of Frontera—to “Forget the Alamo.” Sayles closes with the optimistic “I Want to be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” a 1950s hit by Patsy Montana; however, the song also leaves a trace of irony in the air—Sam is no cowboy. The couple can attempt to renew and revise their shared past, but it will not be an easy task. Sayles is not one for pat endings. As he suggested to Gavin Smith, the empty screen can suggest something less positive: There is a sense at the end of the ﬁlm “that they are looking at the screen as if something may come up, but the screen is wasted” (62). Their love, their relationship, which is antisocial by common deﬁnition, cannot be projected, cannot be sanctioned by society; it is beyond the boundary of socially acceptable behavior. Therefore, they have to create their own story, create their own pictures, but in isolation. Nothing can remain in Frontera for Sam and Pilar if they stay together. This ﬁnal shot displays Sayles’s use of the wide-screen format. “What I wanted to do ... was to make everything more visual,” said Sayles, “because there wasn’t much action in the ﬁlm” (Scenario 195). Mercedes Cruz serves as a good illustration of how Sayles uses the frame and the camera to comment on his characters. “With Mercedes,” Sayles remarked, “she’s ﬁrst seen out-of-focus in the background—this little woman Hollis brieﬂy refers to in the cafe scene. Then you see her in the restaurant kitchen, and even though she’s still small, she’s giving orders, and every time you see her she gains stature, literally. So that by the time you see her alone, we’re below her, and she seems bigger” (Scenario 195). Mercedes too has evolved by the end of the ﬁlm. No longer willing to exist in a world of shadows and secrets—underlined by the canted night shots in her backyard—Mercedes decides to help Enrique and his ﬁancée (Maricela Gonzalez), an act of compassion Mercedes seemed incapable of earlier. Sayles, then, uses the frame and the camera to depict Mercedes’s adjusted life and remembrance of things past. Colonel Delmore Payne, on the other hand, is introduced as a forceful ﬁgure. His face ﬁlls the frame as he tells his ofﬁcers exactly who he is and what he expects. Sayles cuts this scene to reinforce the colonel’s presence, balancing close-ups of Del with reverse angles of his ofﬁcers in medium shots—he is in control. Yet as the story builds, Del falls

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from the center of the frame, moving to the margins. Moreover, Del begins to share the frame with others, and he is usually dressed in civilian clothes, removed from the military base, his seat of power, and the trappings of authority. When Del speaks with Chet at the end of the ﬁlm, he is once again photographed in a close-up; however, the detailed shot reveals an emotional and intellectual change. Del understands his version of military life has separated him from his father, his son, and even his troops. Sayles’s compositional progression signiﬁes how this character has evolved over the course of the ﬁlm. Sayles deliberately establishes proxemic patterns within the frame to deﬁne positions of power among his characters. Dryburgh and Sayles designed a stylistically signiﬁcant sequence to detail Sam’s emotional life, which functions like the nocturnal boat ride in Passion Fish. The montage is dominated by dissolves, adding a lyrical quality to the images, a formalistic touch within a realistic ﬁlm. Sam drives down a deserted highway, the broken white line of the road reﬂected on his windshield. Other cars, their headlights gliding across his windshield, pass him, but only their headlights and the movement of Sam’s eyes to his rear-view mirror suggest the presence of another driver. The imagery here provides a different look at Sam, a subjective take on his mysterious love for Pilar. For most of the ﬁlm, Sam asks objective questions like any good investigator. This montage, however, because it is stylistically distinct from the rest of the ﬁlm, communicates something different about Sam, according to Sayles: “This is the part of Sam’s life that he has a chance to change. This is the part that, if it goes right, is outside of society. I wanted something about what’s going on inside him, which has got to be very hopeful” (Smith 64). For the most part, the frame is dark, except for Chris Cooper’s face, which is lit in high contrast. As the sequence unwinds, the camera moves closer to Cooper, until he appears in close-up. Sam’s conﬂicting emotions are transmitted by the actor’s look of concern and confusion. With only the haunted sound of Little Willie John’s voice singing “My Love Is” to describe Sam’s condition, Sayles and Dryburgh silently communicate the character’s desires. Dryburgh used a variety of visual techniques shooting Lone Star: the ethereal montage explaining Sam’s love for Pilar, sun-baked natural history footage of the scrubland, Steadicam shots, and one or two documentary-like images; every bit of footage uses color, balance, and the complete frame to enhance Sayles’s screenplay. The powerful, unedited glides into the past and return to the present are the visual trademark of Lone Star, however. Remarkably, some critics, bound to see Sayles as a writer only, refused to acknowledge the symbolic power of Lone Star’s visual construction. Hal Hinson, the Washington Post’s ﬁlm critic, suggests that “his directing style hasn’t grown much beyond that of a ﬁrst-year ﬁlm student. Perhaps his literary roots make him suspicious of Hollywood slickness, but as an alternative, Sayles foregoes style altogether. Visually, his ﬁlms are inert, dead on the screen” (6). In her Salon Magazine essay, Virtue’s Hack, Laura Miller calls Lone Star a “quintessential message picture” and Sayles “less a director than an instructor, an operative from that class of social critics obsessed with ‘positive role models’ and the control of media images” (3). Using standards that apply to Hollywood ﬁlmmakers working without budgetary restraint does not do Sayles justice. “I’m totally uninterested in form or style for its own sake,” Sayles remarked. “But I am interested in the technique of how to tell a story” (Smith 67). Sayles believes he does not have a signature visual style, which is part of his ﬁlmmaking philosophy: “I’ve been able to work with different DPs [directors of photography], and haven’t always tried to work with the same person. I’ve tried to work with ones who don’t have a recognizable style, but kind of go with the subject” (Smith

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67). For Sayles, story reigns supreme, and the look of each of his ﬁlms reﬂects that aesthetic. Lone Star is about history, and Sayles’s camera reproduces history’s power with clarity; in addition, the camera signiﬁes the potency of point of view. Music too is fundamental to Sayles’s cinematic storytelling. As Sayles told Megan Ratner, one of the reasons for Lone Star’s large budget was so that he could buy music: “Music costs have quadrupled since I made Baby, It’s You ... there were some songs we just couldn’t get ... it went down from 27 songs. But that’s all right, it was never meant to be Casino, where the soundtrack is a great double album” (34). Once again Sayles sat down with Mason Daring to design the musical soundtrack. Certainly subject dictates the type of music Sayles selects for his ﬁlms. Half jokingly, Daring remarked to a National Public Radio interviewer that Sayles loves all music and that he intends to use all of it in his movies (Dowell). Daring segued from the melancholy Celtic arrangements of The Secret of Roan Inish to the music of the Anglo-Mexican border country, akin to quitting The Chieftains to join Los Lobos. Essentially, Lone Star’s soundtrack aurally illustrates the three dominant cultures represented in the ﬁlm: Mexican, Anglo, and African American. For Sayles music was a primary part of his research: “I learned more from listening to songs—both Spanish and English—than from the literature I read” (Scenario 51). Daring’s music is wide ranging, a collection of broad musical styles. In the 1950s rhythm and blues music still had a large listening audience, even as it was transforming into rock ’n’ roll. American genres like blues, gospel, and country and western combined easily with ranchera boleros (country ballads), conjunto (ensemble harmonizing), and corrido (traditional Mexican folk songs revolving around a heroic ﬁgure) music from Mexico. The wailing harmonica of bluesman Marion “Little Walter” Jacobs, for instance, sounds like the saxophones heard in early rock tunes. Ivory Joe Hunter, a piano crooner, who wrote “Since I Met You Baby,” witnessed the transformation of his song into a major Mexican hit sung by “El Rock ’n’ Roll Kid,” Freddie Fender. “Desde Que Conozco” was a major Spanish-language hit for Fender as a young San Antonio singer, before going on to become one of Texas’s best-known musicians. Little Willie John’s “My Love” seals the emotional impact of Sam’s nighttime drive; Ruben Mendez’s “Mi Unico Camino,” announces Sam’s quest during the opening credits, albeit in Spanish. Daring selected Lucinda William’s “The Night’s Too Long” and Rudolfo Olivares’s “Juana La Cubana” to add a dash of the 1990s to his soundtrack. Like the movie itself, the music Sayles and Daring chose offers a rich take on cultures from different decades. More important, the music spices Lone Star’s story and its visual composition. For example, the master shot of Sam and Pilar in Café Santa Barbara illustrates how Sayles uses music in Lone Star to comment on the history of his characters. The scene opens with Sam and Pilar sitting in chairs, gazing out into the night. Sayles then cuts to a shot of them in proﬁle. They are on the right side of the frame and the alignment of their faces draws attention toward an old-fashioned jukebox glowing brightly in the background. Pilar rises and walks toward the jukebox. She looks at the selections and says, “My mother hasn’t changed the songs since I was ten.” She puts a quarter in the machine and punches in her selection, “Desde Que Conozco,” sung by Freddie Fender. Earlier in the ﬁlm, when Del walks into Big O’s, Sayles uses Ivory Joe Hunter’s original version, “Since I Met You Baby.” Using two versions of the same song, Sayles provides a cultural anchor for both the black and Mexican characters in the ﬁlm: “It was a song that was a hit on black stations, and then it was the ﬁrst hit for Freddie Fender, the ﬁrst Hispanic rock-and-roll guy. He took rock’n’roll, black music that was becoming used by white

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people, and brought it to Latin America” (Smith 64). Ethnic culture percolates throughout Lone Star, even the sound mix. Sayles and Daring also use music traditionally—commenting on characters, establishing settings, advancing the story—and to suggest the mood and spirit of Lone Star. “Mi Unico Camino” plays over the opening credits, to establish the locale. The Spanish lyrics, accordion, and guitar work indicate that we have crossed a border. The title of the song, “My Only Road,” indicates Sam’s reason for returning to Frontera, which is to renew his love for Pilar. On-screen his police cruiser cuts through the Texas scrub toward the place where Charley Wade’s remains were found. The song, then, suggests Sam’s affair of the heart, and it ironically comments on the unexpected road Sam has taken, one that could prove his father murdered Charlie Wade. To reinforce the fact that America is, from Sayles’s point of view, a multilingual country, the song comes without translation. In contrast to this traditional recording, the next major selection, “Juana La Cubana,” announces a generational distinction. The song play as Amado Cruz puts a stolen CD player in a friend’s car, while a deputy sheriff watches. Performed by Fito Olivares, the instrumentation is electronic, bass driven, contemporary. On-screen Amado’s friends, who are all young and aimless, bop to the beat of the song blasting from a boom box—a subtle comment on the economy of this Texas border town—so distracted they fail to see the police cruiser pull up. Big O’s also comes with its own music, the rousing rhythm and blues of Little Walter, whose harmonica screams out the pleasures of a night away from work. “Boogie” foreshadows the shooting that occurs at Big O’s, capturing both the joy and the violence at the core of the blues. Duke Levine’s sonic electric guitar riff on “Papertrail,” which overlays Sam’s review of the old police ﬁles, highlights Sam’s attempts at connecting the pieces of the murder mystery and, more importantly, the facts of his own history. The guitar lick returns ﬁrst with a close-up of young Chucho Montoya hiding near the bridge where Eladio Cruz is murdered, then again when Sam Deeds stands on the same bridge forty years later. Levine’s guitar calls attention to connections Sam is making in his head. Little Willie John’s “My Love,” used to articulate Sam’s love for Pilar, contains a reverb effect and fades out slowly, adding to the transcendent quality of Sam’s nighttime drive toward Pilar. “Sam and Pilar,” written by Mason Daring and performed by Duke Levine and Mike Turk, fuses blues harmonica and Spanish folk guitar to highlight the combination of cultures represented by Sam and Pilar’s love. Typically, Sayles and Daring did their homework when it came to selecting music for Lone Star. By the time the crew started shooting, Sayles already had the soundtrack (Ratner 34). The primary example of his careful planning is Charley Wade’s murder scene, which contains no words, only images, an unusual dramatic choice for Sayles. He selected Little Walter’s “Blue and Lonesome,” a tune dominated by a searing guitar and wailing harmonica ﬂourishes. “There’s a great internal violence to it,” Sayles remarked, “a pounding rhythm and a kind of inevitable feeling” (Ratner 34). As ﬁlmed, the sequence is impressionistic, full of canted angles, and marked by abrupt cuts. The characters do not speak; instead, the music carries the sequence. Sayles breaks the tension enhanced by the music with Buddy Deeds shouting at Charley Wade from the doorway of the bar. The gunshots punctuate the scene’s inevitable conclusion. Even the song heard over the closing credits, Patsy Montana’s “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” provides an ironic coda for the romanticized cowboy life for neither Sam nor Pilar match the deﬁnition of a rock-ribbed Westerner. Lone Star features many familiar faces, actors who have worked with Sayles before.

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Sayles actually wrote some of the parts with speciﬁc actors in mind: “I had Chris Cooper in mind to play Sam, and Elizabeth Peña as Pilar. And I also had Steve Lang [Mikey] in mind” (Lippy 194). In addition, once Sayles created Bunny, he immediately considered Frances McDormand for the part. Because of the respect many actors have for him, Sayles still attracts talented yet little-known performers, people who can, according to Sayles, inhabit a “character and really listen” (Zucker 329). All three of the leads, part of Sayles’s loosely afﬁliated repertory company, had previously worked with Sayles. Joe Morton, who has enjoyed a long working relationship with Sayles, ﬁrst appeared as the charming alien in The Brother from Another Planet; later Morton appeared in City of Hope as the idealistic young city councilman, Wynn, who learns that truth and integrity are characteristics that a strong political leader cannot afford. Chris Cooper, whose performance as Sam Deeds perfectly matches Lone Star’s quiet style, ﬁrst appeared in Matewan as the paciﬁst union organizer, Joe Kenehan, and then as Riggs, a construction foreman, in City of Hope. Elizabeth Peña, although never previously involved in one of Sayles’s ﬁlm projects, worked for him on Shannon’s Deal, his short-lived television drama, as Lucy, a woman who became Shannon’s secretary because she could not afford to pay him for his legal services. In addition to the three leads, some of the other cast members who have worked with Sayles include Miriam Colon (City of Hope), Clifton James (Eight Men Out), Leo Burmester (Passion Fish), Stephen Mendillo (Lianna, Eight Men Out, City of Hope), and Stephen Lang (City of Hope). As is his practice, Sayles wrote short biographical sketches for each of the 50-odd speaking parts in the ﬁlm. Although recognized as an actor’s director, Sayles allows little creative leeway on the set: “I don’t want to be on the set and ﬁnd them playing something in a certain way, and when I ask why, they say, ‘Oh, my uncle burned me with an iron when I was 5 years old.’ Because actors will do that, they’ll ﬁll it in if they think they need to. So I’d rather ﬁll it in for them, so they’re grounded” (Scenario 52). The biographical sketches ensure Sayles’s own vision of the ﬁlm reaches the screen, free from improvisational indulgences. Moreover, the sketches allow each actor to understand his or her character fully and adjust easily to minor script changes. The sketches also help conserve Sayles’s budget: There are fewer takes, almost no rehearsals. Because Sayles knew so many of his main actors, he spent more time with the secondary performers, people who always ﬁgure prominently in a Sayles ﬁlm. This connection allowed Sayles to get the best performances as quickly as possible: “So much of movie acting is about the moment. If they know where they’re coming from before we start shooting, then they can really play the moment. Especially with a low budget, where you’re not going to want to do it a million times” (Lippy 52). Morton, who grew up in a military family, turns in another strong piece of work for Sayles, who is obviously comfortable working the accomplished character actor. Because of Morton’s professional background and personal history, Sayles expanded Del’s role in the ﬁlm, a revision tactic he often employs: “If it seems the [actor] might [take the part], it inﬂuences what I do. Usually I think I might expand the part because the actor is so good or can bring something personal to it.... So when [Morton] took the role of Delmore and got to the set of Lone Star, he was the guy who knew who saluted who” (Nechak 25). In Lone Star Morton gives a superb performance. Moreover, as Cliff Thompson observes, Morton plays a black man “within the larger society,” yet he is not reduced to a simplistic stereotype, so often the picture received by the American moviegoing public (32–33).

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Delmore Payne, who cleaves to ruling authority without question, must change as Lone Star unfolds, bending to realities he previously ignored. His father, Otis, has little regard for formal rules and laws, but he does understand how the game of life is played, an awareness Del comes to late in his own life. Morton must transmit Del’s new understanding without the aid of dialogue, because even though Del changes internally, he is still not well practiced at articulating his emotions. Therefore, Morton must use his eyes and body to make the audience recognize Del’s modulated conversion. When Athena reveals her take on the military to Colonel Payne, his carefully constructed world visibly shifts. In the scene, Morton drops the ramrod-straight posture that has marked his character since the opening of the ﬁlm; he sags just a little, his eyes move downward slightly, communicating a change in his perception. In addition, Morton silently reveals the compassion beneath Del’s military-hardened exterior when he tells his son that the military might not be his best career choice. As he did in The Brother from Another Planet and City of Hope, Morton shows us a complex, intelligent man who is troubled and compassionate. When Sayles told Chris Cooper he had written the part of Sheriff Sam Deeds speciﬁcally for him, the actor was staggered. “Thirty or forty minutes into the story I realized this is not a small part,” Cooper noted (Ryan “Mr. ‘Last Minute’ ...” 11). Ironically, Sayles almost passed over Cooper for the role of Joe Kenehan in Matewan because of the actor’s quiet seriousness, a trait that ﬁts Sam Deeds well. Still, Sayles cast Cooper a bit against type: “I don’t think anybody has thought of Chris as a romantic lead, but he has that side” (Ryan “Mr. ‘Last Minute’...” 11). Like Morton’s Delmore Payne, Sam Deeds is haunted by a ﬂawed father-son relationship. In Sam’s case, according to Sayles’s character description, “when he was an adolescent, a guy [Buddy] he used to idolize turned out to be a hypocrite.” Sam drives himself to expose that hypocrisy to a community that deiﬁed Buddy. Psychologically, Sam is riveted to the past, to Buddy’s mythic ﬁgure. Yet, while Buddy Deeds proﬁted from a conveniently arranged real estate deal, Sam discovers that his father was an honorable man who understood the rules of the game, both written and unwritten, and held to his own code of integrity. Cooper, then, must play a deeply conﬂicted character without relying on the histrionics often associated with confused men. Instead he uses silences, gaps in dialogue, to speak for him. Sam Deeds unfolds slowly. By the end of the ﬁlm he has made peace with his past. Andrew Sarris, the noted ﬁlm critic, observed that Cooper’s “Sam Deeds is the antithesis of the ﬂamboyant stereotype of Texas heroes. There is no swagger in him, only a soft-spoken authority, and a cautious tread through the still-hot embers of his troubled adolescence” (“At the Movies...” 28). Cooper offers a low-key performance, which underlines his talent. Elizabeth Peña may be the most recognizable of Sayles’s leads, having acted in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, La Bamba, Jacob’s Ladder, and Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home, among other Hollywood ﬁlms. A theater-trained actress, Peña is ideal as Pilar Cruz, who unlike the male leads does not overtly struggle with her past. For Pilar the present is the challenge, particularly her son, her mother, and Sam Deeds. The role demands that Peña mix the reserve of a high school teacher, the worry of a troubled mother, and the sexuality of a long-lost lover. She makes Pilar believable, an honest portrait of a woman laboring with her life as a daughter, mother, and widow. Peña jumped at the chance to work with Sayles again, not realizing she was cast as the female lead. Nevertheless, she was gratiﬁed to play a nuanced, complex Latina. The central characters do not foreground a Sayles picture. The secondary characters

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John Sayles and Francis McDormand, Sam Deed’s ex-wife Bunny, a rabid Dallas fan, discuss a scene on set. The set design announces Bunny’s obsession—football, college or pro.

typically carry just as much weight as the leads, frequently understanding more than the people who are the focus of the ﬁlm. Clifton James communicates Hollis Pogue’s troubled spirit, stained by a blood soaked moment from his past. He adds intrigue and ultimately empathy to a character whose role grows with the ﬁlm. Matthew McConaughey, now a bankable Hollywood star, looks like the legendary Buddy Deeds; his demeanor is cool, collected, and dangerous. His dark eyes hint at a willingness to kill. Kris Kristofferson plays Charley Wade with unrestrained malice, a wrinkled presence carrying a whiff of the old west. When he tells young Otis Payne that “runnin’ numbers without I know about it is both illegal and unhealthy,” Kristofferson bites out the words—the young man is in deep trouble. Eddie Robinson’s Chet Payne stands in stark contrast to his stern father; he looks and acts like the graphic artist he longs to be. Miriam Colon hides Mercedes Cruz’s compassion beneath a hard exterior. Gabriel Casseus marks young Otis’s cockiness through smirks and sideward glances, and he maintains his pride when overpowered by the vicious Sheriff Wade. Finally, Frances McDormand delivers an incredible cameo as Bunny, a not-so-atypical American manic-depressive football addict. Lone Star carried Sayles’s screenwriting talents to a much wider audience than he had ever reached before. The ﬁlm deserved the Academy Award nomination it received because Lone Star is a language-based ﬁlm that is as complex as a piece of ninetieth century British literature. Sayles’s ability to keep multiple story lines moving toward a believable and startling conclusion raises him above most American ﬁlmmakers—independent or commercial. Sayles also makes a few cinematic references in Lone Star, notably to Chinatown (1974), Citizen Kane (1939), and Touch of Evil (1969), all ﬁlms dealing with history and

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its complexity. When Charley Wade kills Eladio Cruz, out of the frame emerges a brief glimpse of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), a Western that ends with a close-up of an outlaw ﬁring his pistol at the audience. Sayles even recalls his B movie roots when he places Black Mama, White Mama on the screen during the drive-in scene. Lone Star revises and updates the Western with a skeptical eye on its past incarnations and a clear eye on its present condition. The death of Charley Wade, for example, looks and feels like a traditional Hollywood Western showdown. With Kristofferson playing Charley Wade, shades of Sam Peckinpah haunt the frame. Of course, Sayles’s story is about real conditions, not ghosts from Hollywood’s past, and the shoot-out sequence shows how he tips the Western upside down. The ineffective young Hollis should not be involved in the conﬂict, but he kills Wade in a style far more historically accurate than most deaths witnessed in countless Hollywood Westerns. Hollis shoots Wade in the back. Sayles’s remarkable tapestry, moreover, reﬂects contemporary life on the border and throughout the United Sates, matching believable conditions to his ﬁctional account of community dynamics in Frontera, Texas. As Andrew Sarris observed, “What begins as a murder mystery ends as an Oedipal conundrum with two double-whammy revelations of Sophoclean grandeur” (“At the Movies...” 28). Sayles wrote, directed, acted in (his part, that of Zack, a border patrolman, was cut), and edited Lone Star, which stands as his most commercially successful achievement. When asked in 1995 by Stephen Holden of the New York Times to comment on being a well-known director, Sayles observed that only a “small minority” of moviegoers actually recognize a director’s name and that an even smaller number recognized his name. Lone Star changed that assessment. Because of his talents, Hollywood’s inability to produce ﬁlms tailored for adult sensibilities, and the ﬁnancial backing and public relations machine of Castle Rock Entertainment, Sayles reached a large audience. He appeared on Late Night with David Letterman to promote the ﬁlm and at the Academy Awards ceremony, two places seemingly outside his world. In addition, Sayles opted to include Lone Star in a package of movies—including Space Jam, Michael, and Mars Attacks!, all commercial Hollywood ﬁlms—that ran on TNT and TBS. Sayles struck a rich deal with Turner’s company, which agreed not to cut the ﬁlm’s running time. Clearly, Lone Star elevated Sayles’s commercial name recognition. Yet Sayles, always cutting across the grain, had already started working on his next ﬁlm, even while he was being advertised to mainstream ﬁlmgoers. Shooting for Men with Guns (Hombres Armados), his Spanish-language ﬁlm based loosely on the Guatemalan civil war, began ﬁlming in January 1997 and wrapped in late February. Working outside the English language is chancy, but taking chances is what Sayles’s brand of ﬁlmmaking is all about.

Men with Guns (Hombres Armados) A Road Trip When people hear about genocide, it shocks them for a few seconds and then they just say, “Well, those are the kind of people who kill everybody.” For awhile it was, “Anything could happen in Uganda, but it couldn’t happen in Zaire.” Then there’s a moment of shock when it happens in Zaire and then people say, “Well, of course, it’s Zaire, what do you expect?” I don’t want people to have the click-off reaction: “Well, of course, it’s Guatemala. They’re very primitive there, even for Central America.” —John Sayles, Sayles on Sayles

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The March 1997 Oscar Ceremony was unusual—the wrong people attended. Many of the nominees represented the independent wing of American ﬁlmmaking, a group that included John Sayles. Billy Crystal, the M.C., used the new faces as part of his stick, asking at one point, “Who are you people?” Just before a commercial break, Sayles appeared on television, and he was dressed in a tuxedo, a strange look for a man who takes little stock in his attire. Lone Star, a commercially signiﬁcant ﬁlm, took Sayles to new heights, and Hollywood was extremely interested, once again, in Sayles as a writer who wanted to direct. Sayles attended the Academy Awards presentation because he had been nominated for Best Original Screenplay for the second time. The independent coup d’état did not last long, and the industry would soon return to normal, if it had ever changed at all. Before the ceremony, Sayles had already completed principle shooting for Men with Guns; he ﬁlmed in more than forty locations, in three Mexican states, in thirty-seven days, starting in January and ending in February 1997. Men with Guns marks an unusual turn in Sayles’s ﬁlmmaking career. For his own reasons, Sayles followed his largest commercial success with a ﬁlm written entirely in Spanish, featuring a narrative that challenges most of the critical commentary applied to Sayles, especially the label “realist.” The ﬁlm includes Mayan, Tzotzil, Kuna, and Nahuatl, and together these languages make Men with Guns a polyglot linguistic experience, something Hollywood producers wanted nothing to do with. The ﬁlm itself has a dream-like quality more common to magic realism than traditional domestic literary realism. Men with Guns (Hombres Armados) (1997) marks another shift in Sayles’s cinematic storytelling, for it overtly addresses political themes, but with an allegorical touch. Men with Guns is a “historical” ﬁlm that, to paraphrase Robert A. Rosenstone, renders meaning rather than presenting a “literal reality of past events” (133). Sayles has always been associated with left-wing sympathies, identifying strongly with working people, the women’s movement, and oppressed minorities. For the most part, though, his personal politics remained unannounced, contained sub-textually in his ﬁctive or ﬁlmic narratives. He did send the earnings from one of his Bruce Springsteen videos to the people of Nicaragua, then suffering at the hands of the Sandinistas and right-wing, government sponsored death squads, even though his biggest problem as a ﬁlmmaker is raising ﬁnancing for his work. Because Sayles chose to tell the story allegorically, as invented narrative, the ﬁlm asks universal questions about civilizations and national cultures. In Men with Guns, Sayles’s society doctor, his protagonist, witnesses the economic and social plight that surrounds him, but he ignores what he sees until forced to make an interpretation. According to Sayles, though, his focus, as always, remains on people: The idea for this particular story came from two different friends. Both had family who had been involved in international programs in Latin America. One was a doctor who trained other doctors, and the other was an agronomist who trained people in growing corn. Both had these experiences in helping people out. The very people they helped became suspect in the eyes of their own government, basically because they were helping Indians, and that was something that only a communist would do. They discovered that most of the people they had trained were murdered within a few years [ Johnson 10].

Based loosely on the Guatemalan civil war, which lasted for thirty-six years, Sayles wrote his screenplay in Spanish and then translated it to English, wanting to keep the dialogue direct. “No matter what language you speak,” Sayles says in the ﬁlm’s production notes, “some of the story will be received through subtitles. I didn’t want those subtitles to be as reductive and inaccurate as usual” (2). Sayles’s ﬁnal draft was in English. He then had

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Mexican writer/director Alejandro Springall (Santitos; My Mexican Shivah) translate that version into Spanish. The indigenous people in the cast translated the Spanish into their native languages. Language does not connect the characters in the ﬁlm, just the opposite—many of these characters cannot communicate with each other. Men with Guns, the English-subtitled version of the ﬁlm, was released in the United States and in Europe, where audiences remain more receptive to multilingual ﬁlms. It did not fare well domestically. Sayles put up close to half the production money ($1 million dollars) himself. Sayles’s scripts-for-hire work, boosted by the success of Lone Star, paid his share of the production. Originally, Sayles wanted to make Men with Guns after completing The Secret of Roan Inish, but the Zapatistia rebellion closed down Chiapas, a primary location, so the production was shelved. Still, the project was worthy and Sayles never lost his passion for it. As Molyneaux observes, “If he did not make this ﬁlm about oppression of the poor, nobody would do it, especially nobody in Latin America, where the cinema is state-supported and the ‘shit list’ of political protesters is long and lethal” (237). Sayles’s screenplay features a narrative populated by invisible people. Men with Guns follows Dr. Humberto Fuentes (Federico Luppi), a recently widowed physician nearing the end of his successful and rewarding career; yet, he is a man who exists within deliberate ignorance. He attends to the medical needs of the ruling class in an unidentiﬁed Latin American country. With his wife dead and at an emotional distance from his daughter, Fuentes displays concern for his professional legacy, so he decides

Dr. Humberto Fuentes (Federico Luppi), deep in thought yet not connected to the world around him, passes by signs of trouble in the city where he lives and works. Men with Guns, Sayles’s Spanish language ﬁlm, was a radical reversal for a man nominated for an Academy Award, but it announced Sayles’s intention to remain independent.

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to travel to the countryside to ﬁnd out how the young students he trained in an international health program to work as doctors for the rural poor have done. Fuentes’s well-meaning mission soon turns horriﬁc: He discovers that all of his students have been murdered by men with guns—government troops or rebels who brutally suppress the indigenous population. Having moved beyond his urban, enclosed society, Fuentes begins to face his own ignorance. As Fuentes travels, he is joined by a plucky orphan boy, Conejo (Dan Rivera Gonzáles); a soldier who has deserted the army, Domingo (Damián Delgado); a shamed priest, Padre Portillo (Damián Alcazar); and a mute woman, Graciela (Tina Cruz). Each of these pilgrims has been stained by men with guns, and they exist in a ghostly reality, the unnamed territory where Sayles stages his historical interpretation. Together these disparate travelers, all seeking enlightenment, cross paths with numerous people who enhance their knowledge of themselves and the horrendous political reality that surrounds them. Finally the group reaches Cerca del Cielo (“Close to Heaven”), the place “where rumors go to die,” the place that exists outside politics, and the place where Fuentes’s heart gives out. Upon his death, Fuentes’s medical bag is passed on to the soldier, who must assume the doctor’s work. Sayles’s ﬁnal shot, a view of a higher mountain seen from the perspective of the mute woman, suggests that the journey toward enlightenment is continuous, more than a walk to a singular place. Sayles’s allegorical treatment of Fuentes’s movement away from ignorance illuminates the ﬁlm’s fundamental theme: Political awareness is a responsibility that arrives with a price. The ﬁlm, which contains echoes from City of Hope, particularly unseen corruption, uses Dr. Fuentes, a character derived from stories told to Sayles by friends, including the novelist Francisco Goldman, whose The Long Night of White Chickens weaves elements of Guatemalan history into a murder investigation, as a guide into unknown places for both the people he picks up along the road and for Sayles’s audience. According Sayles’s comments in the production notes for Men with Guns, Goldman had an uncle who was a doctor in Guatemala and got involved in an international health program. A few years later he found that most of his students, whom he had sent off in good faith to serve as barefoot doctors in the poorer communities, had been murdered by the very government that claimed to support the program. Another friend’s father was an agronomist for the Rockefeller Foundation—several of the people he trained to increase their corn yield were killed within three years of their return to the countryside [www.spe.sony.com].

Goldman received screen credit from Sayles for creating Dr. Arrau, from The Long Night of White Chickens, part of the inspiration for Sayles’s Dr. Fuentes. Surrounding Fuentes is at least two decades of Latin American political history, reduced into a screenplay Sayles called “part haiku and part catechism,” hinting at the didactic elements some critics see in Sayles’s ﬁrst international ﬁlm. Indeed, for the ﬁrst time in his career, Sayles would be called to task for how he dealt with politics and narrative in one of his pictures. “While Sayles has created an affecting humanistic portrait of a man who realizes too late that ignorance is as much a part of the problem as the men with guns,” wrote Susan Ryan in Cineaste Magazine, “the ﬁlm will certainly disappoint viewers who want a stronger political statement” (44). The narrative explores war, responsibility, and the weight of history, common threads in all of Sayles’s ﬁlms. Sayles also frames his narrative with a dash of magic realism, which forces his audience to question the reality of all the characters and situations in Men with Guns. Therefore, Sayles reaches, once again, for universal elements in his cinematic storytelling, even though the story is grounded by its Latin

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American setting. He does not want his viewers to see only a nameless Latin American country on the screen; rather, he paints conditions that exist all around the globe. At this stage in his career some critics, such as Stewart Klawans and Laura Miller, were pointing out Sayles’s deliberateness and mediocre cinematic style, and others began to suggest his classic approach to narrative robbed his ﬁlms of their political pulse. Men with Guns would prove to be a test for Sayles on multiple fronts. Many critics, including Janet Maslin of the New York Times, read Men with Guns as a ﬁlm about Dr. Fuentes’s political awakening, what Maslin calls a “voyage of discovery,” a shift in perspective brought on by Fuentes’s road trip (26). Fuentes life changes and erodes during the journey, but his pilgrim tribe seeks fresh lives “más adelante” (“farther ahead”). These uninvited companions help Fuentes learn about his repressive country, a political condition he willfully ignored, and they contribute to the historical signiﬁcance of Sayles’s ﬁlm. Their journey ends when they reach Cerca del Cielo, where Domingo and Conejo assume the Doctor’s medical legacy, while Graciela is left to wonder where heaven truly is. Academic critics were not as kind as Maslin. Susan Ryan believes Sayles’s allegorical treatment weakens the political thrust of the ﬁlm, making the audience part of the problem. Ralph Rodriguez, though supportive of Sayles’s willingness to tell the story, states that “the allegorical nature of Men with Guns runs the risk that some viewers will miss the point of the ﬁlm and the political and historical context that underwrites it” (173). Robert Rosenstone, however, would suggest Sayles is not constructing a piece of straight realism; rather he is using “innovative strategies” to contest the nature of “historical knowledge” (151). The mixed critical response to the ﬁlm indicated a growing scholarly interest in Sayles’s work. After the release of Men with Guns, Sayles would ﬁnd himself under a greater critical microscope than ever before, an indication of his position within the domestic ﬁlmmaking community and his position as one of the few American ﬁlmmakers with name recognition still willing to tackle difﬁcult subjects. In true literary fashion, Sayles begins the picture with a framing device: an Indian woman describes the movements of Fuentes and his pilgrims before they meet, before he embarks, and before he begins to learn the truth about his country. This dash of magic realism connects Men with Guns to The Secret of Roan Inish, Sayles’s other recognizable fable. Fuentes, like Fiona, learns through listening, through narrative. Because of Fuentes age, however, he is not as open-minded as the young Irish girl; nor does he possess the willingness to confront the past in order to make sense of the present and to inﬂuence the future. The opening sequence is marked by a lush color scheme seen all throughout the ﬁlm. The intense browns and vibrant greens that dominate Sayles’s mise-en-scène are established in the credit sequence. Sayles’s framing device establishes the type of story Sayles will tell. The Indian woman tells her daughter the story of the people who will travel to their place, Cerca del Cielo, and that they will use their skills to dress her wound—she has been damaged by a mine but lacks the skill and the medicines to treat herself. She is a potent metaphor for Sayles: “So this woman has certain cognitive powers, she can see Fuentes coming, she has a certain prescience— but she didn’t see the mine in front of her. She wasn’t prescient enough to see that cold hard fact right where she put down her foot” (Sayles on Sayles 242). In other words, her gift does not help her with everything just some things. Reality trumps magic, but she still “sees” the travelers and she knows what will happen when they reach her. Fuentes, then, is no deus ex machina; he is a doctor with a malfunctioning heart—not a heroic type, just a man who gains knowledge through experience and thought.

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The ﬁrst time Fuentes appears on-screen, Sayles ironically establishes the doctor’s connection to the ruling class, as he is about to administer a rectal examination for a military General. Fuentes casually goes about this invasive procedure, but Sayles’s dialogue suggests the deeper signiﬁcance of the examination and the connection between the two men: GENERAL: The people—the common people—love drama. FUENTES: True. They watch soap operas. GENERAL: Which is why you can’t believe any of these rumors. How is it? FUENTES: It does seem to have changed. GENERAL: It isn’t bigger? FUENTES: It isn’t smaller either. We’ll have to watch it. GENERAL: What a thought—watching my ass.

While the dialogue may be about a swollen prostate, the political subtext is evident. Neither of these men, both representatives of a higher caste, thinks anything of ordinary people, folks who waste their time on mindless activities. The General cautions against “rumors,” the whispers that threaten his government. A cancer remains inside the military man, an agent of control, however, and it has changed, grown; it is a hidden, internal threat. Moreover, Fuentes, the scene suggests, is so close to the government, he is unaware of the reality around him. Finally, the men share a laugh about “watching the General’s ass.” Each of these men has decided to follow a similar path—to take care of themselves and to ignore whatever plagues the commoners. The General, though, knows the truth. Fuentes, who is, as the scene indicates, intimate with the ruling elite, knows nothing by choice. In the introduction to Men with Guns & Lone Star, Sayles acknowledges both ﬁlms are about searches and that both Sam Deeds and Dr. Fuentes lack historical awareness. Deeds confronts a past full of lies and deceptions, but his condition is different than the Doctor’s: “Fuentes is also ignorant of history—but this time it’s a careless, even willful ignorance, that of the man who subconsciously does not want to know” (vii). His journey is Conradian not Chandleresque, which is Sam Deed’s condition. Like Conrad’s Marlow, Fuentes is unaware of real evil until he is forced to see it. Even the General, a man who seems to trust and value Fuentes, treats him like an innocent: “You’re like a child, Humberto. The world is a savage place.” Fuentes’s journey, moving through speciﬁc geographic locations, transforms his child-like acceptance into an adult awareness of no return. Film locations where selected in Mexico City, Veracruz, and Chiapas, an impoverished and volatile Mexican state, and each location shift indicates a change in Fuentes’s perception. On his route to self-discovery, Dr. Fuentes learns that identity is not marked by clear borders. Like the characters in Matewan, however, geography (topography) does separate people. As Fuentes moves away from the city, his concrete and plastic world, he passes Salt People, Corn People, Charcoal People, and Cane People, each inhabiting a position connected to a speciﬁc crop. Sayles uses these types to expand Fuentes’s idea of his country. Early on in the ﬁlm, Raúl, Fuentes’s daughter’s ﬁancé, tells his future fatherin-law, “My family has been living with them [Indians] at our ranch for centuries. The more you do for them, the lazier they get. Giving them a taste for modern things—ideas, medicine, television—you just destroy their souls.” Raúl’s “keep them down on the farm” thinking reinforces the General’s take on the indigenous population—the less they know, the better. Moreover, like the General, Raúl serves to reinforce Fuentes’s naiveté, his lack of experience. Speaking with writer Renfreu Neff, Sayles deﬁned the inspiration for his agrarian people and Raul’s imperiousness:

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That kind of attitude [Raúl’s] is something I heard verbatim in Georgia during the civil rights movement. It’s fairly universal stuff. As I was thinking about the people Fuentes would meet, one of my ﬁrst ideas, if we had more money, was to start in Buenos Aires and go to the Dominican Republic and then to Bolivia; you know, shoot all over Latin America and have not just Indians, but Africans too.... One of the points in using names like the Lotecs and so on, which may seem like puns, is that I didn’t want to place them exactly, like saying they’re real Indians—Incas or Mayans or Olmecs. Then you’re giving them and exact place. I knew the kind of locations I wanted, and it was let’s go ﬁnd those places and hope that we can reach them all within six weeks, and on a two-and-a-halfmillion dollar budget [34].

Further, Sayles told Neff that many of the incidents depicted in Men with Guns did not happen in Latin America, but in Vietnam and in Bosnia. Fuentes’s journey, then, is an allegory that begins in captivity—in his case, cultural and intellectual—and ends in freedom, albeit not clichéd limitless freedom typical of so many domestic cinematic stories. Fuentes has been removed from his country for so long, shielded by his class, social position, and his urban environment, he must rediscover indigenous agrarian traditions in order to better understand the oppression of modernity. Fuentes’s progress countervails Raúl’s cynicism. He uncovers communities that sustain people, whether they are connected to the land or religious belief. Before Fuentes takes to the road, he has one more encounter that underscores his lack of awareness, a chance meeting with Bravo (Roberto Sosa), one of his former students, and a catalyzing agent in the narrative. Sayles uses a tracking shot of Fuentes walking in the city, his environment, lost in thought. Poor Indians beg for change with open palms; he rewards one without looking at her. Fuentes exists at a distance from his own environment—he walks past grafﬁti marked buildings and street people without seeing them, his well-tailored suit and white hair marking a stark juxtaposition with the world that surrounds him. Sayles uses a black and white ﬂashback to reveal Fuentes’s thoughts: he lectures to a group of young medical students—Cienfugos, Montoya, Brazos, Arenas, Echevarria, De Soto, Hidalgo. “In a struggle against death,” he declares, “a small advantage in technology can win the battle. Cortés won an empire with a few men—but he had the horse and the gun and his adversary didn’t. Where you’re going your principle enemies will be bacteria and ignorance. Bacterias can be fought with drugs, but their ally, ignorance—.” Fuentes’s words are prescient, but he fails to see what technology has done to his own country. At market the next day, the ﬁrst day of his vacation, he sees Bravo, and recognizes him as one of his Alliance for Progress medical trainees. Fuentes pursues him to a barrio dominated by a mountain of garbage. Bravo tries to explain why he now sells drugs from a shack in this place, Los Perdidos, but Fuentes responds with contempt. “Dr. Fuentes, you’re the most learned man I’ve ever met,” Bravo says. “And the most ignorant. Go ﬁnd Cienfugegos. He’s got the whole story.” This ﬁnal encounter pushes Fuentes away from the city and on to the road, which he follows from village to village and place to place, trekking always deeper into the mountains, only to discover that his young medical students have disappeared, victims of an indigenous genocide perpetrated by men with guns. Sayles’s narrative is a psychogeographic tour undertaken by car and foot that carries Fuentes into his country’s past so that he might make sense of the present. On the road, a truck loaded with soda bottles (Kokal) passes Fuentes. This suggestively named drink appears throughout the ﬁlm; it seems to be everywhere, a commercial presence in even the most remote places, a ubiquitous brand, and a sign of a globalized corporate economy

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completely at odds with native culture. The ﬁrst person Fuentes encounters is one of Sayles’s agrarian people, an old Indian man selling bags of salt. Nothing exists in this portion of the landscape, which is a dry plain stretching for miles in every direction. Fuentes stops and asks the man what town he is from. The Indian’s response is direct: “From here.” Fuentes seeks the name, the identity of the place, but all the old man does is shrug and say, “We’re the salt people. This is where we live.” Fuentes looks around at the dry landscape and remarks, “But there’s nothing here.” The old Indian responds by telling him “You can’t see anything from a car.” In order to truly understand a place, one must engage it, live it, know it. Fuentes cannot see value in emptiness. Like Kokal, Fuentes is a product out of place. The old man, like many of the characters Sayles has created in his later work, speaks obliquely, which puts Fuentes, a highly educated guide ﬁgure, at a sever disadvantage. Slowly, Sayles establishes how much Fuentes does not know, both at home in the city and in rural places, where his country’s history resides in scattered fragments. Compiling the whole story, as Bravo implored him to do, will not be simple. At several points in this strange road trip, Fuentes falls into conversation with Andrew and Harriet (Mandy Patinkin; Kathryn Grody). This odd couple continues the subtext of American intrusion ﬁrst introduced by Raúl. But they are benign, not tropes escaped from a Graham Greene novel. Andrew seems to posses more knowledge about the country than does Dr. Fuentes. The couple talk about their inability to communicate with the indigenous people. Fuentes points out that American Indians have their own native languages, too, a point that confuses Andrew. Harriet and Andrew have heard rumors about “atrocities” and seek a response from the doctor, who says, “The common people love drama.” Fuentes cleaves to the party line. Andrew shifts the conversation to food: “Ask him why they don’t have fajitas here. Que no—what’s the word for fajitas?” Sayles ends this ﬁrst encounter with a comedic line. Andrew and Harriet run a course parallel to Fuentes, but Fuentes learns to connect to his country. The Americans, who have no real stake in this unnamed place, are, according to Sayles, “Teﬂon tourists” (Heff 34). As Hamilton Carroll suggests, these characters indicate some of the harm caused by rampant, unchecked globalization: “Andrew and Harriet travel in a world in which the plight of the country’s indigenous populations is either rendered invisible or easily explained away within the logic of tourism that orders their interactions with their surroundings and the people who populate them” (Sayles Talk 199). Because Fuentes is tied to the country, part of its tissue since birth, he can learn from his journey because of his psychological connection to the place. Andrew and Harriet are tourists, gadﬂies with no claim to place, and therefore they will never know the country they pass through. In order to underscore this blindness, Sayles begins to construct the horror at the core of Men with Guns in the next major sequence, a stop in Rio Seco, home of the Sugar People. In order to get there, Fuentes must exit his car and walk through a cane ﬁeld to ﬁnd the small, rural outpost of a dozen small homes. When Fuentes asks a woman who tries to ignore him if she knows Dr. Cienfuegos, she grabs her children, enters her home, and shuts the door. No one in the village will listen to Fuentes; doors slam in his face. “It’s like nobody speaks Spanish,” Fuentes says to himself. Then Abuela, an old, blind woman sitting on the ﬂoor of her ruined home, calls out to him in Spanish. Abuela is acerbic, and like many of Sayles’s “road characters,” such as Wesley Birdsong in Lone Star or Luther in Passion Fish, she stands at an ironic distance from Fuentes, the seeker, for she possesses knowledge he does not have. Her blindness signiﬁes, in the classic tradition, knowledge, awareness; moreover, she provides Fuentes with knowledge he needs

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but is not prepared to understand. He tells Abuela that he is a doctor, and she responds: “Good. We need a doctor, ‘cause the last one died.” Abuela goes on to describe Cienfuegos’s death in graphic terms infused with a tone of acceptance. Men with guns arrived, shot Cienfuegos and three others, and then burned the bodies with gasoline; the villagers were forced to witness the murders. Fuentes wonders why this happened. Abuela, who says she knows “everything that happens,” the whole story, explains: “Because they had guns and we didn’t.” Technology, a sign of progress in the doctor’s world, lies at the center of the carnage. Abuela’s dialogue deepens the ﬁlms subtext, however. Fuentes asks her, “But who are these men? Are they white or Indian? “When an Indian puts on a uniform he turns white,” she says. Abuela’s conversation concludes on a dark note. She tells Fuentes Cienfuegos “wasn’t a good doctor.” Fuentes takes this remark as an affront directed at him, the man who trained the young doctor. She continues: ‘Cause so many of his patients are dead!” Abuela breaks into demented laughter, the sound of a powerless peasant who has lost everything and knows her life has no value in a world controlled by men with guns. The meaningless and brutal slaughter at the village of the Sugar People stands as a demarcation point in Sayles’s screenplay. Men with guns, who exist in the Conradian shadow world, are willing to do anything. Violence is their ideology. Abuela, one of the common people, does not describe a melodramatic soap opera moment to Fuentes; instead, she deﬁnes the savage world the General told Fuentes about. When the doctor returns to his car, he ﬁnds the driver’s window smashed, the contents of his suitcase scattered about, and his camera, a tool he could have used to document rural horrors, gone. His medicine bag, which also signiﬁes technology but countervails the gun, remains untouched. Nothing in it, the shot suggests, can guard against bullets. Andrew and Harriet, also blind travelers, bump into Fuentes that night. They meet at a hotel, Pozo de los Caciques (Well of the Chiefs), a place, as Carroll points out, that references the “mythic history of the country’s indigenous peoples as perpetrators of human sacriﬁce (transformed into a consumable tourist attraction),” but which “masks the country’s history of imperial conquest” (Sayles Talk 200). Inside the hotel, Andrew turns the country’s history into a joke, but not one steeped in awareness. His laugher is the antithesis of Abuela’s: “Thousands of them— tore their hearts out and threw them in the well. Must have been a labor surplus.” Fuentes rejects this version of his country’s history: “Not our people. It was other tribes, attacking from the north.” Once again the comment seems directed at the Americans themselves, even through Andrew uses a history text to defend his position. Oddly, Andrew, Harriet, and Fuentes are part of a tribe colonizing the countryside, tourists who do not see the horrors swirling around them. They eat in the same restaurants, stay in the same hotels, and seek stories to conﬁrm their interpretation of the country’s history. Narrative layers mediate history. Fuentes collects oral histories, but he remains suspicious of the common people. Andrew accepts whatever he gleans from books. In the scene that follows the brief exchange in the hotel’s restaurant, Fuentes relocates to the pool where two tourist women (Maggie Renzi and Shari Gray) lounge by the pool. Another layer of mediation is presented in the form of a travel brochure. One woman reads it aloud: “There is a place where the air is like a caress, where gentle waters ﬂow, a place where your burdens are lifted from your shoulders on wings of peace.... A place to forget, a place to grow, a place where each day is a gift and each person is reborn—.” The brochure, which describes Bali, exempliﬁes how reality can be easily replaced through fabrication. The woman listening to the “poetic reading” of the travel brochure asks, “Where is this paradise on earth, this haven, this safe harbor?” The comodiﬁcation of place suggests an

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escape from reality, the goal of most tourists. The accumulation of narratives, which escalate as Fuentes’s journeys continues, work to prevent discovering the real story of his country. Fuentes decides to tell the authorities about Cienfuegos’s murder, sharing his suspicions with a rural police Captain. The Captain asks him if he plans to return to the city, but Fuentes wants to travel up to Tierra Quemada, home of the Coffee People, where Dr. Arenas, another student, practices medicine. The Captain, an Indian himself, distrusts Fuentes’s intentions and asks him for identiﬁcation: “Could I see your identiﬁcation? I need to be sure you’re really a doctor and not a journalist. We’ve had problems with journalists. They go up there to take pictures, then they disappear. And I get blamed for it.” Slowly, Fuentes loses contact with his comfortable world. The Captain represents authority, and he replaces the General. The Captain, though, is indigenous, and his shift in tone indicates a real threat to Fuentes, now in a completely foreign place. Tierra Quemada is even poorer than Rio Seco. No men are there, only women, and they turn their backs on Fuentes. Here Fuentes takes on his ﬁrst fellow traveler, Rabbit, a precocious orphan boy. Rabbit is willing to speak directly with Fuentes, and he tells the doctor that the man he is looking for was taken to “school.” Rabbit tells Fuentes he will guide him to the school for a price. Information is a valuable commodity. As they walk back to Fuentes’s car, Rabbit admits that he is “as fucked as the rest of them.” After a short drive, Rabbit takes Fuentes through a wood lot and then into a clearing, which is littered with human bones, artifacts Fuentes does not see at ﬁrst. Rabbit explains: “This is where they take you when you graduate.” Fuentes examines a skull with a bullet hole in it. The doctor says, “People should know about this.” Rabbit responds: “Everybody knows. The Army brought us to see what could happen.” Fear keeps the common people in line. Fuentes declares, “I didn’t know anything about it.” Rabbit tells him that is because “you’re a stranger.” The boy tells the older man that he knows nothing about his own country. The authority Fuentes believed in has blinded him to the truth. Educating young doctors was supposed to be Fuentes legacy, the thing he planned to leave behind for his country. Rabbit reveals an alternative legacy: murder and fear combine to form the ultimate lesson. Common people are powerless when confronted by men who teach these lessons. Their methods are far more potent than the lessons the liberal minded Dr. Fuentes transmitted to his students, especially in a country where violence is the dominate cultural code. Rabbit has assumed this fatalism—anything can happen at anytime. “I’m as fucked as the rest of them,” he again says to Fuentes. In a voice-over, the daughter of the indigenous woman seen at the opening of the ﬁlm speaks with her mother about Rabbit: “The boy has no mother.” Sayles uses the voice-over to segue back to the woman’s camp, where she teaches her daughter how to make corn tortillas. Rabbit, her mother says, has been abandoned by his mother: “His mother is alive but she won’t look at him.” Soldiers raped her when she was only a girl, and after his birth she could no longer look at him. Now he lives “as a dog does. He takes scraps that real people leave.” Her comment about Rabbit not being a real person suggests his status in this country—he has no purpose, no meaning, no place. Because he is a “dog,” Rabbit makes no judgments about the world around him. According to the mother, “dogs can’t be bad or good. They’re just dogs.” Rabbit guides Fuentes to a school turned into a torture chamber, a place where the men with guns conducted “operations” with Arenas’s medical equipment. Lacking all emotion, Rabbit says, “The soldiers were always making jokes.” The long wooden tables once used for teaching were converted into torture slabs. Education has been inverted, and Fuentes is

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stunned by the dehumanizing perversions he sees all around him. At this point in the narrative, Fuentes believes the rumors he heard about atrocities in the backcountry are true, but he still forges ahead, assuming, it seems, that some power will intervene to help him and, perhaps, the poor victims of the “education system.” Caras Sucias, home of the Banana People, is deserted, houses scorched and abandoned, when the mismatched pair arrives. Echevarria, the village doctor, has vanished. After Caras Sucias, others join Dr. Fuentes’s progress toward awareness. The ﬁrst of these wayfarers is Domingo (“Sunday”), who claims to be an Army medic. Rabbit, who speaks the same Indian language as Domingo, calls him a deserter. Fuentes has to ﬁeld-dress Domingo’s gunshot wound before they leave for Mercado. At the town market, Fuentes sees medical equipment for sale. Like all the towns and villages on this road, Mercado was home to another of Fuentes’s pupils, Dr. de Soto. The town Barber and his client explain what happened to de Soto: BARBER: He treated wounded soldiers when the Army came. Then the guerrillas come back to punish the people who helped them. FUNETES: What if he refused to treat the soldiers? CLIENT: (smiles) You don’t refuse men with guns. BARBER: They killed him to make an example. Fuentes stands. FUENTES: So now you don’t have a doctor. BARBER: (shrugs) It seems simpler that way. Would you like a haircut?

The Barber sounds resigned to the reality of his world: he, like everyone else, is trapped in between two warring campus, and like everyone else, there is little he can do about his position. Mercado highlights the absurd condition of the backcountry people. Men with guns have them trapped on all sides, and each faction is violent, arbitrary, and committed to killing innocents. Back on the road, the interior of Fuentes’s car starts to resemble something out of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: Domingo, as angry as Jewel Bundren, and Rabbit, happily eating bananas like Vardaman. Fuentes stops to pick up a man dressed in rags who has waved the car down. Portillo, one of Sayles’s most intriguing creations, says he was once a priest; now, people call him “The Ghost.” Padre Portillo explains what happened: “I taught the Indians religion through theater. People love drama. But I was a bad actor—I stopped believing my role and lost my faith.” Portillo, an ethereal presence, complicates the narrative, now dominated by dread. Fuentes tells “The Ghost” he does not believe in religion: “No, I’m a doctor—a scientist. I believe in progress.” The journey he has been on contradicts any deﬁnition of progress, but Fuentes fails to register the ironic connection at the core of his declaration. While stopped for the night, the group meets Javier and Amparo, Gum People. Unlike the other generic tribes, the Gum People lack a permanent place; they go where the sap is running. Sitting around a campﬁre next to a palm frond lean-to, the group allows the Padre to tell his story, a tale of faith, courage, and pragmatic choice. Javier asks, “Is this a true story?” Portillo responds, “It’s a ghost story.” Speciﬁcally, it is about the creation of a ghost. The camera slowly tracks in for a close-up of Portillo. Until this point in the narrative, every ﬂashback has been in black and white, images from Fuentes’s memory of his students. A dissolve opens on a bloody hand resting on some corn stalks, then slowly pans left, following a boy blacked by ﬁre; soldiers pass him moving from left to right. In the background, two soldiers drag a dead body. A hut in the background is charred and burning. In voice-over, Padre Portillo says the Army

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burned a village above and a village below his village; the village where the Corn People live, is not connected to a particular religion, but it is clear the priest practices liberation theology, a belief system anchored by a humanist perspective. The local Commandante, he says, left a list of names, ﬁve men and the Padre himself, and all must die. At a group gathering, the citizens of the town vote to execute the men on the list so the rest of the village will be spared. The men dress in colorful clothing, take communion, and one by one are shot in the head. The Padre escapes into the jungle. Sayles shows only one death, the ﬁrst. He shows an old pistol in extreme close-up; it rests on the forehead of the ﬁrst man. The hammer is cocked, and then begins to move forward slowly. A shot rings out as the frame fades to white. An overhead shot of the graves reveals ﬁve graves holding the chosen men. The last grave is empty. Portillo elected to save himself. The scene shifts back to the camp, and Fuentes asks about the village. Portillo answers, “I’ve been to the place where it was.... Obviously I don’t believe in Heaven. But Hell—I can give you a tour of Hell.” Domingo asks about the priest in the story, and Portillo says he now wanders the roads and pathways: “He is neither here not there—a ghost.” Padre Portillo’s guilt over his sin of omission has turned him into a haunted man, both alive and dead at once. The next day Domingo approaches Padre Portillo and asks him to hear his confession. His story is told in color ﬂashback, as was Portillo’s. There is a slight contrast in image quality and look. Portillo’s ﬂashback was bright, dream-like. Domingo’s arrives without a voice-over, and the ﬁrst perspective is a point-of-view shot from below, looking up at a ring of shouting soldiers dressed in camouﬂage fatigues, just like the men who burned Portillo’s village. Sayles cuts to a tracking shot moving from left to right behind the shouting men. In a large pit below the shouting men stands Domingo, dressed in his fatigues, his bright white T-shirt contrasting him with the men outside the pit, clutching a large knife. A boy with a bullet wound in his left shoulder lies on the ground behind Domingo. He drops to his knees, raises the blade, and drives the blade into the boy’s chest again and again. Blood splatters his face and clothes while the soldiers cheer him on. In his DVD commentary, Sayles explains this scene is based on an initiation rite used by Manuel Noriega, the military dictator of Panama from 1983 to 1989. It bonds the military men, and it deﬁes god, the deity of the people. The sequence matches Domingo’s attempt to participate in the ritual of confession, a purging of sin; with a ritual of blood, a sin from his haunted past that cannot be purged. Sayles’s narrative suggests a complete lack of personal autonomy. Everyone lives in fear, even the men with guns. At a military roadblock the next day, the Ghost sacriﬁces himself to save Domingo. When the military men remove Portillo from the car, he looks back at Domingo and says, “I absolve you.” Soon the pilgrims arrive at Modelo #4—Community of Hope, a fenced-in and well guarded refugee camp. Rabbit says this is one of the places the soldiers bring people after they burn their villages. The camp’s name echoes Sayles’s City of Hope; moreover, it is supposed to be a model for the future. It is, of course, a battered holding tank for people with nothing. Fuentes and Domingo go to work helping some of the incarcerated Indians. As he has done for the entire journey, Fuentes inquires about another of his students, asking one of the military men, “Wasn’t there a doctor in Pico de Aguila before you got here? Doctor Hidalgo?” The Sergeant responds, “He was executed.... For helping the guerrillas.... Why else would an educated man live out here?” Fuentes anticipates the answer; he is no longer shocked by the truth. All choice has been wiped away for this population. The men in power have weapons, and they are willing to

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do anything to keep the military in power; on the other side, the guerillas will do anything to harm the military. The Community of Hope signiﬁes Portillo’s hell. Modelo #4 is the last piece of civilization seen in the ﬁlm. Although it is a place of conﬁnement, the need for other people, community of any kind, becomes an essential part of Sayles’s narrative. Domingo, a bitter pessimist for the entire journey, even when Portillo sacriﬁces himself to save the deserter, begins to help others people using his rudimentary medical skills. Fuentes, who cannot speak the indigenous language, uses Domingo as an interpreter, and he shows him how to diagnose patients. Fuentes himself speaks with his guards, even though he knows that many of them have participated in atrocities. Rabbit does what children his age do: he plays with great joy, stopping at night to watch a portion of a Rambo-type movie on television. These travelers have all been looking for something: Fuentes sought his students and his legacy; Rabbit wanted food and someone to be with; Padre Portillo needed a chance at redemption. Before entering Modelo #4, the Ghost found what he was seeking. At the camp, the travelers pick-up one more passenger, Graciela, a mute woman who stopped speaking after she was gang raped by soldiers. Domingo ﬁnds it difﬁcult to look directly at the young woman, but he gives her a card of aspirin tablets, a humane gesture after Fuentes declared her a psychological problem. Graciela, too, needs something: a place removed from men with guns. After Fuentes and Domingo do what they can for the citizens of Modelo #4, they begin the ﬁnal leg of their journey, seeking Cerca Del Cielo, the mythic place many speak about but none have seen. If they locate Cerca Del Cielo, where Fuentes’s last living student, Dr. Montoya, a woman Fuentes remembers as a kind, but squeamish trainee, is rumored to live. The climb up through the jungle taxes Fuentes’s already weakened heart, and the vegetation, which stands in contrast with the city streets he was used to, is overwhelming: “Human beings can’t survive in this. Jaguars, snakes, insects that eat everything in the night.” Rabbit tells him that people come here to get away from white people. Fuentes responds, laughing, “I guess that might be worth it. There should be somewhere that white people aren’t allowed.” A long hello echoes through the jungle, capturing their attention. Andrew and Harriet have climbed up the mountain; they stand waving on the steps of ancient stone ruins. Harriet tells Fuentes that their car was stolen; Domingo, the thief, vanishes unseen into the jungle. Sayles includes this last encounter with the Teﬂon Tourists to indicate a change in Fuentes. On their third encounter, Fuentes is willing to listen to and speak with the couple, particularly Andrew, a man who actually possesses knowledge of Fuentes’s country but lacks lived experience. Fuentes appreciates Andrew’s grasp of ancient history, but what Fuentes now knows has deeper implications. Andrew prattles on about the Lotecs, an ironic name Sayles created, a tribe with a history that parallels the present: a “homogeneous group or a mongrelized culture ... driven up here by the more dominant civilizations. Another theory is that this site was founded by runaways from different cities in the lowlands. Possibly people earmarked for sacriﬁce.” When they depart, Andrew and Harriet speak in English. Andrew says, “We’ll probably see you at the hotel at Tres Cruces.” In Spanish, Fuentes responds, “Yes. Probably.” A group of guerrillas, who are as lost as Fuentes’s strange new family, arrive at the ruins with Domingo. Fuentes lies to save him. The guerrillas are no threat, however, and they join Fuentes and his fellow travelers for lunch. They talk about the magic place, Cerca del Cielo, Dr. Montoya, and ice cream. Even though they are men with guns, the Guerillas are benign. This short sequence concludes with the ﬁlm’s ﬁnal ﬂashback, a black and white return to the medical school autopsy room. From Fuentes’s point of

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Domingo the soldier (Damián Delgado) is haunted by his past throughout the journey to Cerca del Cielo, a place that does not exist. By the end of the ﬁlm, the soldier will surrender his gun and become a medic trained by Dr. Fuentes (photograph by Shane Young).

view, one of his students, a young woman, Montoya, ﬁngers the black, silky hair of a dead girl whose corpse is about to be dissected. Fuentes, a professional man, frowns at this human touch, and Montoya removes her ﬁngers from the dead girl’s hair. Fuentes has been portrayed as a proud and practical man; here, for a moment, he contemplates what the loss of humanistic feelings meant to his own life. In the morning, the travelers climb to Cerca del Cielo, the mythic, magic place that will release them from their journey. Cerca del Cielo, home of the indigenous woman seen at the beginning of the ﬁlm, is a holding area, a place to hide, hardly a place to live. The place lacks value. Fuentes inquires about Montoya and is told Cerca del Cielo is a place where rumors go to die. He lowers himself in between roots jutting out of the ground at the base of a tree. First Domingo and then Rabbit echo lines used throughout the screenplay: “This village is fucked”; “This is where the Sky People live. They eat air and shit clouds.” Fuentes allows a bitter laugh and says, “Every man should leave a legacy—something he built, something he left the world. Somebody he passed his knowledge to—one person to carry on for him. This is what I leave.” Quietly, the doctor dies. Domingo picks up the doctor’s bag as the daughter of the wounded Indian woman appears. She asks Domingo for help. Graciela makes sure he accepts the challenge. Domingo has become Fuentes’s legacy, the only living medical man trained by the old doctor. Sayles’s narrative has come full circle. Fuentes mimics the Indians seen sitting on the concrete sidewalks of the city in the opening

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sequence, but he has left something for the greater good, even if the hidden village offers little more than the shelter of tall trees. Cerca del Cielo is free from men with guns, making it the place Graciela was seeking. Sayles’s ﬁnal image shows Graciela step into a clearing and break into a smile as she looks into the distance. Sayles cuts to an over the shoulder shot: in the distance is another mountain, a higher place covered with lush green vegetation. The screen fades to black. Sayles’s open-ended conclusion underscores the endless journey away from violence and the fact that a singular place established to conceal people from the world’s savagery cannot exist. Fuentes geographical movement, marked by the various “people” he encounters, signiﬁes a profound change in his own emotions and behavior. His exploration of the country beyond his city leads to a sense of dislocation because the haunted geography he traverses shifts his perception. Sayles combines place with story to underscore one’s psychological connection to home territory. Sayles himself has suggested the journey is comparable to The Wizard of Oz (1939), because all the characters seek something; the literary and cinematic allusions to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902); and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), in which Professor Isak Borg, a physician who travels to Lund to receive an honorary award for ﬁfty years of service, confronts dreams and hallucinations that accumulate to expose his darkest fears, seem intentional. Borg realizes the choices he made in his life created a cold and empty life, devoid of meaning or value. In the end, Borg achieves redemption and reintegration through his family. Fuentes, too, achieves redemption through his family, made up of all the people he encountered on the road. Some of his interior thoughts are revealed, but it is the land and the generic people who occupy it that truly help him see what urban living concealed. Fuentes has to take his own interior journey in order to come to terms with the reality of his country: brutal killings, fear, and repression are the tools of the government he supported, trusted, and tended. Men with Guns warns against the compartmentalized life, a condition Sayles explores in almost all of his ﬁlms, starting with Return of the Secaucus Seven. Like that ﬁlm, Sayles’s allegory, or “realistic fable,” borrows from American popular culture. Like Return of the Secaucus Seven, Men with Guns draws from The Magniﬁcent Seven. Late in that ﬁlm, Chico (Horst Bucholz), the young want-to-be gunﬁghter, says to Chris (Yul Brynner), “But who made us the way we are, huh? Men with guns. Men like Calvera (Eli Wallach), and men like you ... and now me.” Sayles’s title, then, comments on American Westerns and the use of force as an essential story element within the genre. Moreover, by recalling John Sturges’s ﬁlm, Sayles further implicates the United States in what is played out in his allegory. Though the United States is never overtly mentioned in the ﬁlm, much to the chagrin of many critics, the references to white men, arms, and intrusion from the north all add up to implicate domestic foreign policy in Central and South America. Typically, Sayles refuses to call direct attention to a particular historical moment, preferring instead to communicate with suggestion, invention, and metaphor. Sayles uses open and closed forms in his mise-en-scène to deﬁne the plight of Fuentes and, especially, the rural people who lie at the thematic core of the ﬁlm. Slawomir Idziak’s cinematography captures the hash urban and lush jungle environment with a perceptive eye. Idziak, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s longtime collaborator and cinematographer, joined the production after Haskell Wexler dropped out. Idziak’s skills are in evidence throughout the ﬁlm, especially in the ﬂashbacks, which each take on a different look to suggest a different point-of-view—Fuentes’s, Domingo’s, and Padre Portillo’s. Gerry Molyneaux notes the testy relationship between Sayles and Idziak: “On the shoot, the only

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real breakdown in communication occurred when the director and his Polish-speaking photographer, Slawomir Idziak, disagreed about how the movie should be lighted. The cinematographer was resisting the use of hard white sunlight that the director favored. Their standoff was unresolved, giving the movie a look that neither wanted but which Sayles begrudgingly said was “ﬁne” (242). Further, in conversation with Anthony Kaufman for Indiewire, an on-line ﬁlm magazine, Sayles explained why things did not go well with Idziak: “‘No hicimos buenas migas.’ We did not make good crumbs together is the idiom. We didn’t get along very well. I was looking for a Hispanic D.P. and all the really good ones were working, most of them up here.... We didn’t agree on anything ... it absolutely doesn’t look they way that I would have liked it to look.” Sayles wanted the Mexican sun, the intensity of the southern light, at times a blinding white, to play into the visual story. Idziak worked to blunt overwhelming whites. Oddly, in a public forum, Sayles indicated a loss of control with a ﬁlm he had total control over— writing, directing, and editing. Sayles’s antagonistic relationship with Idziak illustrates his desire for complete directorial control, something Wexler is clearly comfortable with, and it indicates how much he is concerned with the visual architecture of his storytelling. When Sayles talks about how important the color white was to his complete story scheme, he alludes to Fuentes’s movement from urban environment to rural environment, and therefore a shift into a different world, one lush with color and bright with light. Still, Idziak’s cinematography matches the mood of the ﬁlm. All the images contain a bright clarity missing from some of Sayles’s other work. While the look of the primary locations does not change from episode to episode, the soundtrack features a shift marking Fuentes’s movement. The soundtrack, again created by Mason Daring, features meringues, salsas, and cumbias, taken from tracks suggested by Tom Schnabel, a expert in Latin and world music. As the ﬁlm’s production notes indicate, the music was “from a variety of countries,” so it would not suggest a speciﬁc country or time period. By the conclusion of the ﬁlm, most of the music is Daring’s, and it is designed to create an eerie feeling. The layering strategy used for the soundtrack parallels the dramatic narrative, which places story on top of story. Sayles’s choice in actors also enhances the ﬁlm. Federico Luppi plays Dr. Fuentes with a mixture of exhaustion, intelligence, and bewilderment. Lizzie Curry Martinez and her brother David located the cast for Sayles. She employed grassroots solicitations, placing signs with local theater groups, schools, art organizations, and cultural centers. She held open auditions, where she discovered Dan Rivera González, who played Conejo. Martinez also worked with some of Mexico’s better known acting agents. The entire production was unusual from the beginning, and it is a ﬁlm that probably should have failed completely. While Men with Guns did not see the type of box ofﬁce returns Lone Star did, it remains a ﬁlm that reﬂects an independent sensibility. The narrative asks questions without answers: Who are the men with guns? Why do they torment the indigenous people? Where are they committing these atrocities? When is this story taking place? As Marcus Embry points out in his perceptive analysis of the ﬁlm, “Men with Guns leaves the viewer with a pile of rubble growing ever larger, a tremendous amount of violence and oppression with no suggestion that it will even cease nor that we can stop to ﬁx what is broken” (178). Indeed, even the end credits, designed by the same team that did the credit work for David Fincher’s Seven, a montage of images from the camera of Guatemalan photographer Luis González Palma, are haunting visions of Mayan Indians

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accented with references to European and Christian iconography. These concluding images offer one more layering technique that is not easy to unpack, and therefore presents a haunting reminder of unseen violence and historical responsibility. Men with Guns attracted a great deal of critical response, especially from academics, because it crossed new borders for Sayles and his production team.

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Commodities: Real Estate and Babies Limbo Locked In “I was raised Catholic and a Catholic concept of limbo is the place where the souls of unbapitzed people go, those who haven’t ofﬁcially been able to be good or bad. The thing that sets it apart from purgatory, which is sort of a waiting room where you do your time and eventually go to heaven, is just that limbo is inﬁnite. For me, limbo is a state people get trapped in.” —John Sayles, Cineaste

Sayles’s deﬁnition of limbo marks both his screenplay and the visual construction of Limbo (1999), his twelfth feature ﬁlm. Often embedded in realistic and naturalistic literary works as a material object or a narrative trope, the trap is apparent throughout the ﬁlm. Limbo, as many critics note, divides into two parts: the ﬁrst involves an ensemble collection of characters and the Alaskan wilderness stands as background, a place removed from Port Henry, the setting of this portion of the picture; the second half stands in contrast to Sayles’s other ﬁlm projects, as it focuses on three characters bound by the wildness with no prospects for escape. In both portions of the ﬁlm entrapment functions as a signiﬁcant part of the narrative. Realism deﬁnes the ﬁrst section of the ﬁlm, while naturalism looms throughout the ﬁlm’s second half. In both sections, Sayles’s characters and the physical world are intertwined, but in the ﬁrst portion of the ﬁlm nature is inviting, almost romantic; in the second, it functions as an enclosure, a natural threat. In Limbo, Sayles’s visual conﬁguration of the Alaskan landscape is both beautifully seductive and an inscrutable trap. Land is signiﬁcant in Men with Guns. Sayles stresses its importance by naming some of his characters after crops or resources, anchoring people to particular places. In Limbo and Sunshine State (2002) land also functions as a potent symbol. Because these ﬁlms, one set in Alaska and the other in Florida, do not employ the same narrative structure as Men with Guns, Sayles uses each setting with a different thematic goal in mind. In Limbo, his characters ﬁrst exist as part of a picture postcard wilderness; monumental physical beauty surrounds them, albeit at safe distance. After an abrupt narrative shift, three of them confront 214

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a harsh wilderness and Londonesque naturalism replaces a tourist’s vision of the physical world. In Sunshine State, Sayles’s characters face relentless real estate growth, but nature itself is not a physical force. Both ﬁlms ask questions about unrestrained American development, a theme Sayles ﬁrst broached in Piranha. Limbo and Sunshine State are serious dramatic ﬁlms about cultural, social, personal, and economic destruction. Limbo functions on a smaller scale than many of Sayles’s mid-career ﬁlms. The story balances on three characters: Joe Gastineau (David Strathairn), a landlocked factotum who cannot break free from the memory of a drunken ﬁshing accident, Donna De Angelo (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), a local singer and single mother trying to establish a real life for herself, and her daughter Noelle (Vanessa Martinez), a troubled young woman at odds with her mother. Sayles surrounds his protagonists with an intriguingly eclectic mixture of secondary characters, but the romantic relationship between Gastineau and De Angelo compartmentalizes the narrative. Sayles described Limbo as “a Robert Altman movie which midway turns into an Ingmar Bergman ﬁlm by way of about two or three minutes of Quentin Tarantino” (West and West, Cineaste 28). The Bergman comparison is apt and the Altman parallel seems possible, but Tarantino would want more blood. Limbo was an ofﬁcial selection at the 1999 Cannes International Film Festival, an honor for any ﬁlm and an indication of Sayles’s global stature. Critics dismissed the picture. When it opened domestically, Limbo again failed to impress critics and ﬁlmgoers. Made for $8.5 million, the ﬁlm grossed $2 million at U.S. Box Ofﬁces. Limbo failed to reach an audience. The second half of the ﬁlm generated most of the negative commentary, particularly its open-ended conclusion, a throwback to ﬁlms like The French Connection (1971). Limbo was produced by Sony Pictures, an unusual step for Sayles and his production team. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Maggie Renzi and Sarah Green formed a “ﬁrst look production deal with Sony Pictures” (Steuer 10). This working arrangement caused concern among long-time Sayles supporters, but the ﬁnal product, which is certainly unconventional, shows Sayles pursuing his own unique cinematic vision. Limbo is one more indication that Sayles takes his own path when it comes to his own productions. Sayles’s ﬁlmmaking skills and the picture’s sociopolitical subtext come into play before the opening credits are complete. A blank white screen is the ﬁlm’s ﬁrst image; the letter L emerges in black text, creating a contrast with the white background. The L remains on screen as an image of a stream ﬁlls the frame. The L turns white as an invisible cut takes the camera below the water plane. Underneath the water salmon swim in different directions, auguring for position within a concentrated space. The lens on the underwater camera compresses the image. This glimpse into the natural world is not pristine; one ﬁsh features an ugly fungus hanging from its mouth; the entire school ﬁghts against the current, not swimming in a logical pattern, unable to locate an outlet. Here Sayles presents a visual trope that informs the entire ﬁlm—the inability to break free from imposed boundaries, some visible, some not, inhabits every portion of this ﬁlm. L-I-M-B-O is spelled out in an alternating pattern—white to black, then black to white. This simple color scheme suggests a lack of complexity—seeing reality in straightforward terms. Nothing in Limbo is black and white. Sayles cuts to a shot seen through a television screen; this kinescopic collection of images, a mountain river valley blanketed in fog, shelves of stuffed toys—bears, Eskimo dolls—with price tags attached, a large tour boat, and tourists wandering around scenic locations, is Alaska. As heroic music swells in the background, a male voice-over (Michael Laskin, also an actor in the ﬁlm) says, “Welcome to America’s last

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frontier.” The voice-over text mimics valorous language, proclaiming this place to be stocked with “hardy souls,” full of “creatures great and small, strange and majestic.” This electronic tourist travelogue sells a place “appealing to the bold and the adventurous, to men and women willing to risk their lives for the promise of untold fortune.” On screen, dolls and stuffed toys are displayed, someone in a polar bear suit hugs an old woman, and a massive totem pole recalls indigenous cultural history. But nothing looks real. The kinescope technique washes color out of the images, the pixilation lacks strong deﬁnition. The promotional video gives away to an interior shot of a ﬁsh cannery, and then to the slime line, where salmon are gutted with speed and skill. Harmon King (Leo Burmester), a line worker, picks up the exact text of the voice-over, which he has heard for years. This image is in real time, and it is shot on ﬁlm in documentary style; it carries Haskell Wexler’s visual signature—handheld camera, close quarters, people at labor, naturalistic by design; the colors are rich and the ﬁsh guts real. Sayles juxtaposes the tourists and local workers in order to question the fraudulent, mediated world the tourists sees; he also presents the conditions under which men and women struggle to make a living. Line work involves risk; consuming a manufactured tableaux does not. In each case, however, Sayles’s images signify a trap: the tourist images reduce reality and the line workers are about to lose their labor-intensive jobs to the globalized economy. Unlike Men with Guns, Limbo uses exquisite scenery to complicate the harsh realities of Sayles’s characters. Harmon rages on about the cannery, hinting that it will soon close and be transformed into a tourist museum, a place where fake ﬁsh guts and dioramic images of workers will replace a real day on the slime line. Haskell Wexler, working with Sayles for the third time, shoots the images inside the cannery in a documentary style— straightforward, unembellished. An uneasy relationship between people and their environment is established early on, and Sayles uses the physical beauty of Alaska to complicate how all his characters function within the “last frontier.” Port Henry, Alaska, the ﬁlm’s primary setting, is a stunningly beautiful town in transformation. Harmon King declares he will leave the cannery and return to independent ﬁshing, provided he gets his boat back, punctuating his declaration by tossing a headless salmon over his shoulder. Sayles cuts to a point-of-view shot that directly involves the audience: Noelle, a teenager working for a local caterer at an outdoor wedding, holds a stylish appetizer tray in front of the camera and asks, “Hors d’oeuvers?” Like the title sequence, visually Sayles pulls his audience into the point-of-view shot—his camera intentionally frames speciﬁc individuals. Attention is not directed toward the natural world but toward a social environment and a gathering of people. Much like the salmon struggling for position, the people occupying this sequence are also trying to establish themselves. To a degree, each is trapped as well. Noelle moves away from the camera but it lingers on her, keeping her in a medium shot as she moves from guest to guest with her tray. Noelle passes Joe Gastineau, who tells her she “looks like an angel” in her white waitress outﬁt; she responds, “I look like a white maggot.” Noelle asks Gastineau why he is not wearing a uniform. He says he is, “The unemployed pulp mill worker’s uniform.” Sayles establishes a connection between these two workers without much exposition—they each seem to work for the same caterer. Visually, they are juxtaposed with the father of the bride, Albright (Michael Laskin), and his friend Phil Baines (Tom Biss), a lumber man. Baines wants to clear-cut tress while Albright stresses the need to retain the look of the environment. In her essay “The Space of Ambiguity: Representations of Nature in Limbo,” Laura Barrett calls this scene an example of “reality’s replacement with fabrication,” a duality

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she recognizes throughout the ﬁrst half of the picture (Sayles Talk 239). Embedded within this trope, however, is the trap limbo represents for Sayles. Albright and Baines believe they can tame nature, either by cutting down trees or by turning the Alaskan wilderness into a theme park. Both Albright, a real estate entrepreneur, and his friend Baines see Alaska as a fresh location for ﬁnancial gain. The entrepreneur, arguing against visible clear-cutting, relies on an axiom learned from his mother: “Don’t shit in your own front yard.” The logger knows he can make millions by cutting down trees. His friend is not a conservationist; rather, he sees proﬁt in a well-managed environment: “It’s ugly,” he says about extreme logging. “We’ll show them a little Indian ﬁsh camp, some totem poles maybe. We show them a black bear foraging for breakfast in the early morning mist. Cut the trees in the interior; turn it into a parking lot. Just quit with the chainsaws when you get to where people can see.” Albright plans to establish a controlled environment, a place where tourists can feel safe, yet still connected to the American frontier; in other words, a Disneyﬁcation of the physical world. He imagines attractions: “The Whales Causeway”; “Island of the Raven People”; “Kingdom of the Salmon”; and “Lumberland,” a “turn-of-the-century sawmill with a little water-powered generator and a gift shop,” all places, he contends, that would be “one step beyond Disney.” Alaska, then, would be “one big theme park,” because “history is our future, not our past.” Unlike Baines, Albright recognizes the longterm advantage of using Alaska for commercial purposes and to control its legacy, its past, its history, which he will mythologize, sanitize, and make his own as a series of set-pieces, sites tourists can consume without experiencing risk. Every visitor will enter into a space that is as tightly controlled as a zoo. As he toasts his daughter, Albright calls Alaska the “land of opportunity.” Behind him in the frame is a stunning body of water and snow capped mountains, all part of his proto–Disney vision. Sayles uses a mobile camera and long takes to capture the interconnectedness of the participants at the wedding—even Harmon shows up to argue with the caterers, Frankie and Lou, about his boat. The subtext here signiﬁes something sinister: people are being displaced within this extraordinary environment, and because of their social standing, their class position, there is little they can do about it, for they are powerless when placed against controlling commercial interests. The quest for money, if not considered responsibility, will erupt with unintended consequences. In order to underscore this division, Sayles focuses on Joe Gastineau as he helps Donna De Angelo move out of a beat up house she shared with Randy Mason ( Jimmy MacDonell), leader of the band she fronts as a singer. She has been with him for “three weeks,” and she breaks up with him while they are performing at the wedding reception, announcing the breakup through song. Gastineau, a former high school athlete and commercial ﬁsherman, wonders about the abrupt change De Angelo is making because he knows her daughter, Noelle. He takes Donna from the ramshackle house to a small apartment above the Golden Nugget, the local watering hole. De Angelo’s move underscores her social position, and the tiny apartment indicates the trap she is in. Joe and Donna are trapped by their economic conditions, their histories, and their social positions—they exist near the bottom of the socio-economic scale Sayles establishes for Port Henry. Unlike most of the wedding guests, Gastineau and De Angelo have worked to make Alaska home for a long time. The struggle has exhausted Joe, who gets by with Hemingway-like stoicism, but Donna remains resilient, believing things will change for her and Noelle. Joe and Donna are the only primary characters who face both the economic devel-

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opment of the “last frontier,” which is a thematic component of the ﬁrst portion of the ﬁlm, and the natural, unmitigated Alaskan environment that ﬁlls the second portion of Limbo. Joe and Donna need each other: she draws him out of his self-imposed social exile and he helps her regain her emotional footing after her latest break-up. In conversation with Joan and Dennis West, Sayles explained the signiﬁcance of his protagonists: Both [ Joe] and Donna are people who have had big failures, but they respond differently. I really don’t know why people have different reactions—sometimes it’s sociological, or maybe it’s chemistry. Joe’s reaction to failure, to the pain of being burnt is to not take another risk again, for twenty-ﬁve years. When Donna gets hammered, her reaction is to have a two-day period of mourning, and then to get up and say, OK, new day, and lead with her chin again.... He’s like a Conrad character—he’s go this terrible past, he wishes there was some way he could redeem himself, in his own eyes, for what he feels terrible about, but not enough to risk being responsible for another human being ever again [Cineaste 29].

When the ﬁlm opens Joe is getting by doing menial labor for two newly arrived transplants from Seattle, Frankie (Kathryn Grody) and Lou (Rita Taggart), a lesbian couple who are smart, educated, and ambitious; they are in Alaska to make money and to establish new lives. They operate a restaurant and a catering business. On the surface they appear vastly different from Albright, but they, too, are in Alaska to make money, albeit in a far less destructive fashion. Through Frankie and Lou, however, Sayles subtlety suggests the idea that change is possible. Frankie and Lou are revising their lives. Still, Joe’s connection to these women illustrates the erosion of his own life desires: he does whatever job is necessary, as long as it does not involve ﬁshing. Donna, on the other hand, expresses herself through song. Her gigs, though, are in bars, places full of weary listeners where her voice is simply background noise, often obscured by noisy chatter, clanking beer bottles. Both lack the means to escape their social positions, and therefore each is trapped ﬁnancially and psychologically as old Alaska evaporates. Old Alaska is located in many places within Limbo, but the best example is the Golden Nugget, a gathering place for workers, tourists, and the struggling lounger singer. Bars are a common setting in Sayles’s ﬁlms because they are essential gathering places, which is especially true in Limbo because Port Henry does not offer much. People gather at the bar because it is a place where they can interact with others. Like the salmon in the credit sequence, though, the patrons inside The Golden Nugget are moving in multiple directions. But the Golden Nugget is commercially compromised space as well—it is no longer a blue-collar tavern. Before establishing the Golden Nugget as a signiﬁcant place in the ﬁrst potion of Limbo, Sayles shows the closing of the salmon cannery. One of the workers says the “Chinese” are supposed to buy the place and “pack it up and ship it over.” Harmon King mutters, “They can have it. Anyone want a drink?” Sayles cuts to a master-shot of the Gaés exterior. A large sign announcing Rooms For Rent dominates the frame. Sayles cuts to the interior, and a young woman entering the bar says, “This is the Golden Nugget Saloon, founded back in 1881, when Port Henry was the gold mining center of the Northwest Territory.” She is followed by older adults, all part of a tour group, people who want to see an authentic Alaskan bar, preferably one stained with blood. The Golden Nugget tour, of course, has been sanitized to meet the expectations of the tourists who want to hear about what went on in this “frontier saloon,” which is just a stop on their commercial journey. At the bar the intruders draw little notice from the cannery workers. King

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wants to know why no one eats canned salmon anymore. One of his co-workers points out that anyone can buy it fresh, which sounds like a good thing, but the speed of modern transportation affects the slime-line workers. The tour-guide continues with her stories—wild animals, brawlers, shootings, and blood on the ﬂoor. Sayles contrasts her words with those of Smilin’ Jack Johannson (Kris Kristofferson), who recalls a wilderness incident for acquaintances at the pool table. Gastineau, in the bar to hear Donna sing, sits in silence. Sayles cuts between these characters to establish how and why stories are told—some are true, some are false, some remain unspoken. Each character has a story, however, and their retellings help them make sense of an often brutal world. Collectively, these people represent the differences Sayles saw in Alaska over a ten year period. More importantly, he saw this change as representative of something much larger: “It’s kind of a very broad metaphor for what’s happening in the economy of the United States in general, moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. More and more people are being waiters and stewards and selling T-shirts, and fewer and fewer people are cutting down logs and ﬁshing, and working in factories” (John Sayles Interviews 240). Smilin’ Jack is a throwback, a fading part of Alaska; the tourists are the T-shirt consumers; and the cannery workers are lost, victims of a shifting economy. The Golden Nugget, once an essential place for wilderness hands and factory workers, is now a tourist site, a place where things used to happen. When Donna De Angelo takes the stage she sings a vintage Tom Waits song, “(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night,” which recalls the spirit of Jack Kerouac and his failed attempt to locate an original and sustaining place within the American landscape. An example of Sayles’s solid editing skills, this sequence also adds dramatic tension to Limbo’s narrative. Even though these characters are in the same place, the cuts that separate them suggest how each group or each individual is dislocated, unattached to the other people in the bar. Real tension exists between Smilin’ Jack and “Jumpin” Joe Gastineau. These men know each other, and their body language, brief verbal exchange, and lack of direct eye contact suggest bad history. Johannson’s pool playing partner asks about Gastineau: “Friend of yours?” And Jack responds, “Not exactly.” When asked by Joan and Dennis West if Johannson represents the “shady adventurer” once common in a frontier setting like Alaska, Sayles said he based the character on a real person and a ﬁlm ﬁgure: “Certainly in Alaska folklore the most famous ﬁgure is “Soapy” Smith, who was this famous con man/entrepreneur during the Klondike Gold Rush. Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller was kind of extrapolated from his legend.... [ Johannson] is based on a historic ﬁgure from Alaska, a guy who’s willing to take a chance” (31). Moreover, Sayles went on to deﬁne Alaska as a one time haven for Vietnam veterans, for it was a place these men could retreat to, a place where they could forget about the war, change themselves, hunt, ﬁsh, and, perhaps most importantly, avoid people: “the further you get away from civilization, the more danger there is, not just with nature, but also with people” (31). Johannson is established as a threat, but Sayles does not spell out what it is that exists between him and Gastineau. The ﬁrst Golden Nugget Saloon sequence deliberately features a number of simultaneous stories—the tour guide’s canned history, the salmon worker’s complaints, Johannson’s tale of a backcountry pilot’s misadventure, Donna’s song, and Vic (Stephen J. Lang), the Golden Nugget’s bartender, story about some wealthy greenhorns who wanted to experience the wilderness wrapped in Gore-Tex and bulging with gourmet freeze-dried food.

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Sayles cuts between these six narratives, which create a natural comparison between each storyteller and his or her narrative. The tour guide recounts a simple, fabricated history of the saloon, a narrative meant to titillate her clients. All the other stories are full of bravado, backcountry tales about dangerous situations and lower-forty-eight ignorance. Donna De Angelo’s rendition of “The Heart of Saturday Night” adds a melancholy tone to the sequence. The Waits song seems romantic, even a bit upbeat; its lyrics, though, speak about a search for an idealized past, something that has slipped away from the song’s narrator, a character who stumbles onto the heart of Saturday night with one week’s wages. The song’s romantic tint belies the fact that its narrative is about a repetitive search, the journey taken Saturday after Saturday after Saturday—the endless possibility of a new beginning at the end of the work week; in other words, a history of failure and a willingness to ignore all the failures in the past. Every bar story deals with some aspect of the past, and Sayles accelerates his edits as the sequence continues, which calls attention to each separate tale. Before Donna ends her version of “(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night,” Sayles cuts to the apartment above the bar where Noelle unpacks her clothes; she stares at her reﬂection in a dressing table mirror. Sayles shoots this insert in natural time, leaving the fast-paced editing behind. This stylistic choice concentrates attention on Noelle. She moves toward the dressing table, picks up a scissors, opens the blades, places one of the sharp edges against her face, and then applies pressure, pushing the edge of the blade into her cheek. The characters in the bar all talk about the past. Noelle signiﬁes how the past affects the present. Noelle suffers because of her home life, a peripatetic existence with her mother as her only guide. Donna attempts to construct a home for her daughter; however, she is also reckless, especially in her relationships with men. As a result, perhaps, Noelle suffers from deliberate self-harm syndrome, commonly called cutting. Cutters use razors and scissors, among other instruments, to make slices on their arms, legs, and other body parts. Usually, cutting is a response to psychological stress or trauma, and people who suffer from the condition typically feel numb, emotionally removed from the world; the cutting, many victims say, helps them feel alive. Starting with the party sequence at the beginning of the ﬁlm, Sayles’s narrative illustrates what Donna’s lifestyle has done to Noelle. After the reception, Noelle realizes her mother has left her alone—and she has to ﬁnd her own way home, a place Donna has abandoned without telling her daughter. In her new place above the bar, Noelle almost cuts herself in response to this upheaval, but she stops short of marking her face, which would make her pain visible. Noelle’s story, unlike the adult characters in the ﬁlm, is submerged, hidden from view. Donna is not truly attentive to her daughter’s emotional needs. Like the adult characters in the ﬁlm, though, Noelle uses stories to make sense of her world, to create an interior identity for herself. For Sayles stories and storytelling occupy Limbo’s core: One of the things the movie deals with is how people use stories. The scene at the beginning of the ﬁlm, where all these Alaskans are telling stories about plane wrecks and so on, they’re using stories to deﬁne themselves, to tell the world, to tell themselves, “We’re Alaskans, we’re the people who live with danger.” Donna uses stories in the songs she sings. She talks about connecting emotionally with them and she picks the song for the moment emotionally—she even breaks up with her boyfriend through the lyrics of a song [West and West 30].

The ﬁrst time Sayles shows Noelle cutting herself her blood drops onto a piece of notebook paper containing some of her writing. Noelle uses a razor blade, cutting the inside

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Entrapment is an essential thematic trait running throughout Limbo (1999), John Sayles’s twelfth feature ﬁlm. Noelle De Angelo (Vanessa Martinez) lives in isolation at home and at school. Sayles’s mise-en-scène construction describes how alone she feels while at school.

of her upper arm, a place easy to conceal. At this point in the ﬁlm, Noelle has not really expressed herself. She seems almost sub-verbal, especially when compared to her mother, who speaks almost constantly. Noelle has not had the opportunity to express herself through story, but she has listened to those around her. Through stories, Noelle details her identity: who she is, how she feels, what she thinks. At school, she reads a story titled “The Water Baby” aloud to her classmates. It is a painful recitation that signiﬁes her lack of identity—her protagonist is half human and half ﬁsh. The reading is followed by a sequence in which Noelle walks anonymously though her school. Only her face is visible, and her fear is visceral. As this image suggests, Noelle is trapped in an educational institution that only exacerbates her resentment toward her mother for their shared existence; moreover, as Donna grows closer and closer to Joe, Noelle’s anger deepens. Noelle’s condition worsens because her mother and Joe support each other emotionally and physically. She withdraws into herself, locking up her emotions within a body she wants to damage. Noelle is wounded by her mother’s inability to provide what she considers to be a conventional domestic situation. Socially, Noelle is complete alienated. As Joe and Donna’s romance blossoms, their personalities change—they help each other become whole people again. Joe emerges from his dark cage to confront his great fear, the

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water, and to return to his great passion, ﬁshing. “It’s the thing itself,” Joe declares, sounding like many other stoic outdoorsmen. “You go out; you ﬁnd the ﬁsh; you pull him out of the water. Everything else is second-hand.” Fishing is an authentic act, an engagement with the natural world. Beyond that, life brings too many complications. While Limbo’s ﬁrst half illustrates how speciﬁc characters conceal their interior conditions, the relationship Joe and Donna construct argues that emotional empathy and physical love can be restorative. Noelle, of course, is the hinge ﬁgure within this trio, and her character signiﬁes the radical transformation Sayles’s narrative will take. With cause, Noelle lacks faith in the adult world. Her skepticism is a reminder of how difﬁcult it is to know another human being, even someone related to you by blood. Because of his relationship with Donna, Joe is able to confront his past. Sayles uses a dream sequence to show what happened during the boozy night he lost his boat and his ﬁshing partners and boyhood friends. More telling, though, is a poetic visual scene featuring Joe. Sayles shows his male protagonist confronting his past in order to pursue a new life, one he might share with Donna. Frankie and Lou own Harmon’s ﬁshing boat and license because he tried to use them to hide his boat from the I.R.S. They offer the vessel and license to Joe, so he can start ﬁshing professionally and help their ﬂedging restaurant in the process. In the scene, Joe stands on the deck of Frankie and Lou’s home deliberating the offer; it is dusk. For the most part, Sayles and Wexler use nature as a backdrop, a controlled piece of set decoration, in the ﬁrst half of the ﬁlm. In this scene, however, the natural world signiﬁes something larger. With Frankie and Lou in the background inside the house, separated from him by glass doors, Joe looks out across the bay, which leads to the sea and the ﬁshing territory he used to mine. Blue dominates the mise-enscène, giving the image a cool look that matches Joe’s personality, yet also recalls the ﬁshing mishap that pushed him away from the water. Sayles’s camera locates Joe in proﬁle and from behind. In each shot his emotional response to the offer of a boat and a new life is muted; his eyes, though, are locked on the water, which seems connected with the land and the sky. Psychologically Joe must overcome the physical world. As Joe looks out on the water a convergence of character and setting occurs. Because Joe turned away from ﬁshing, from the unpredictable natural world, Sayles’s soundless shot foreshadows the second half of the ﬁlm, in which nature becomes more than a setting. By contrast, the real estate speculators believe they can turn nature into a commercial amusement. Joe, who knows better, understands he can return to Alaska’s harsh waterscape and relocate himself only after he considers what it will cost if he once again challenges Alaska’s raw, untamed environment. The real estate speculators dream about taming the physical world. Joe needs to return to ﬁshing because the physical world features a direct simplicity that he understands. Joe’s early ﬁshing trip proves successful, and as a result he allows himself to believe that he might be able to reconstruct a new life. When Joe’s half brother, Bobby Gastineau (Casey Siemaszko), a charter guide who has been living in Southern California for six years, returns to Port Henry, things change again. Whatever small gains Joe makes by returning to ﬁshing for a living, Bobby’s presence, another piece of the past, negates them. Bobby asks for Joe’s help with a business venture that requires a boat trip. Reluctantly, Joe agrees, and he invites Donna and Noelle to come along. Sayles never shoots Bobby in the same frame with Joe; he almost always shoots Bobby alone. Typically, Sayles separates them with an edit. Sayles uses editing to create a barrier between the step-brothers, an indication of their relationship. Donna, Noelle, and Joe embark on the trip, which looks promising at the outset. Pristine and inviting, Alaska’s

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physical beauty dominates the early portion of the trip. Here Wexler’s cinematography takes over the narrative, rendering Alaska as a wondrous and magniﬁcent place—the land and the water make the boat and the people on it insigniﬁcant. When the weather shifts, however, and strong winds force the small party into an inlet, the story begins to turn in a new direction. The turbulent conditions make Noelle seasick; this is not the natural world she has imagined in her stories. While Donna cares for her below deck, Bobby tells Joe the truth about the trip—he has scheduled a rendezvous with a group of hashish smuggles who think Bobby has swindled them out of their product. Fate intrudes, and Sayles’s narrative fractures. After Bobby is murdered, Sayles reduces the narrative scope of his story both verbally and visually by focusing on Joe, Donna, and Noelle. Simultaneously, Limbo shifts from domestic drama to environmental allegory. Still, Sayles is able to build upon the themes presented in the ﬁrst half of the ﬁlm. The physical world, a location waiting for exploitation in the ﬁrst half of the narrative, takes on a distinct, inscrutable power once Joe, Donna, and Noelle ﬁnd themselves trapped on a desolate island. As the ﬁrst portion of the screenplay nears its culmination, just before Bobby asks Joe to sail with him, Albright sits in a restaurant talking to a group of investors about what the Alaskan wilderness could become: What are you buying when you get on a roller coaster? Not risk. There’s nobody but fringe consumers want that. But the illusion of risk, being hurled to the edge of danger but knowing you’ll never have to cross it. Now Mr. Disney’s innovation was to put these carnival rides and attractions in a story context, where you could imagine yourself as a character in one of his cartoon epics as you ﬂoated through a Plaster-of-Paris jungle. The obvious next step—and this is at the core of our proposal—is not bigger and better facsimiles of nature, but nature itself. Think of Alaska as one big theme park.

The businessmen are in Frankie and Lou’s restaurant, Noelle is their server, and Bobby is there looking for Joe, illustrating the interconnectivity among Sayles’s characters. While Albright’s desire to exploit Alaska for his own proﬁt is obvious, everyone connected to the scene is involved in the taming of Alaska in different ways. At the core of the real estate man’s speech is “the illusion of risk,” the belief that nature can be restrained and controlled to generate capital. He is dressed like an outdoorsman, but his outdoors is always controlled space—the wedding reception, the restaurant. He never appears in the wild. Instead Sayles uses the Alaskan wilderness as a backdrop to frame him and his speeches. In the second half of the ﬁlm, the wilderness is no background illusion; rather, it becomes a trap Joe, Donna, and Noelle cannot escape. Sayles complicates his narrative by subjecting this blended family to real risk. In Limbo: The Space of Ambiguity, Barrett suggests the abandoned family “serves as contemporary counterparts to Joseph, Mary, and Jesus” (252). The limbo Sayles explores is not especially religious but rather psychological: this small group must come to terms with themselves as they face death together. A skilled outdoorsman, Joe knows how to locate food; water, however, is scarce. According to the mise-en-scène Sayles creates, theirs is an environment of extreme alienation. While Barrett’s religious reading of this portion of the ﬁlm has validity, she is quick to point out that this family does not exist in a state of grace. When the group discovers the remains of an old homestead, Joe displays his knowledge of the region by correctly explaining the story behind the settlement: “They had a scheme.... Land was cheap, they hunted, ﬁshed, and raised foxes.” While clearing debris from the long abandoned “home,” Noelle ﬁnds a diary, which belonged to a girl

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about her own age named Annemarie. Annemarie arrived on the island with her mother and father, a logger who suffered a job related injury. He moved his family to the island to make money and to “live in the great outdoors and operate their own business.” This line echoes some of the tales Sayles’s characters related in the ﬁlm’s ﬁrst half, but this is not a bar story or some get rich scheme lacking real risk—Joe, Donna, and Noelle are lost in the Alaskan wilderness without the hope of rescue. The story contained in the diary sounds like something Jack London would concoct; indeed, coming from Noelle, Annemarie’s words exemplify American naturalism: fate conspires to bring her family to ruin and drive her mother into suicidal madness. Alaska offers no Eden for these travelers. The condition of Sayles’s characters countervails the depictions featured in the ﬁrst half of the ﬁlm. Thrown into an uncompromising environment, Joe, Donna, and Noelle must confront the inscrutable physical world; they are, then, comparable to the lost souls in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”: the forces of heredity and the environment affect and afﬂict their individual lives. Noelle undergoes the most drastic changes. She learns how to survive from Joe—catching ﬁsh, harvesting edible vegetation—but she grows tired of her mother’s false optimism. Donald Pizer, writing in Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, suggests two tensions at play in any naturalistic work. One is what he calls the extraordinary or the excessive at work in the novel, the impulse that forces unique situations. In Limbo, Sayles shifts his narrative in an extraordinary and rather unbelievable fashion. Likewise, Noelle’s embellishment of Annemarie’s story takes it to extraordinary heights. Pizer’s second point is evident in Limbo’s second half: [H]e (the naturalist) also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which afﬁrms the signiﬁcance of the individual and of his life. The tension here is that between the naturalist’s desire to represent in ﬁction the new, discomﬁting truths which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to ﬁnd some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise [10 –11].

Tossed overboard, escaping the twentieth century world, a ﬁgurative space where money dominates the world of legitimate business and the illegal world of hashish smuggling, Sayles’s three characters must understand each other and the untamed environment. Noelle’s ﬁctional narrative notwithstanding, they support each other even as they face possible death. In a Cineaste interview, Sayles hints at the signiﬁcance of the shift from the realism of mainland Alaska to the naturalism of the wilderness: One of the things I think is odd about this movie, or different than a lot of movies, is that we are asking the audience to really take the same trip that the characters are, and that trip entails surprise and risk. I think the most important phrase in the movie is when the developer says, “What do you get when you get on a roller coast? You get the illusion of risk.” Most genre movies—and I write them for other people—are the illusion of risk.... In Limbo, you get on one ride, and, all of a sudden, you’re thrown into another [West and West 31].

Sayles compares his ﬁlm to Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, which, as he says, “starts out as a screwball comedy and ends up a thriller,” but Demme’s ﬁlm plays with ﬁlm genres. Sayles fuses two literary movements that on the surface seem identical. Indeed, Naturalism was an outgrowth of Realism. Each explores local reality, things as they are.

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Naturalism, however, examines ways in which heredity and environment determine character and seldom provides a clear resolution. At the conclusion of Limbo, Sayles leaves his characters standing alone, waiting for their fate to drop from the sky. By removing his three primary characters from the “real world” Sayles can examine how each responds to the unknown. Noelle forces this point, for she creates an elaborate narrative meant to punish her mother. In the ﬁrst portion of the ﬁlm, these people were trapped by their social standing and their histories; in the wilderness, the cage they encounter is primal, threatening, a raw and wet place. After swimming from the boat to escape Bobby’s murders, Joe, Donna, and Noelle run into the woods in an attempt to escape the killers. Sayles uses handheld and tracking shots to capture their fear, and closeups of the killers’ boots, hands, and guns to add suspense to the sequence. For the most part, he uses closed images, signifying their entrapment. The mountains are no longer picturesque backdrops open to romantic possibility; instead, this displaced family ﬁnd themselves inside the place Albright wants to turn into a theme park. Joe tells Donna and Noelle to remove their wet clothes, and to huddle together while rubbing each other’s exposed skin, a survival technique meant to combat hypothermia. Wexler’s camera pulls back once the three squat down and wrap themselves into a ﬂeshy human ball. Intimately close, the trio work to save each other. This image illustrates how that they must work to help each other. Donna is angry, Noelle is sick and exhausted, and Joe is mystiﬁed by their predicament. When they ﬁnd the dilapidated fox farm, a rough shelter at best, Noelle becomes the focal point of the family. She reads installments from Annemarie’s diary for Joe and Donna. Noelle’s reading extends how characters use storytelling throughout the ﬁlm. Her fox farm history, though, contrasts with the Alaskans’ stories about the “last frontier.” Noelle, as Sayles points out in his Cineaste interview, uses stories that are “very creative” but also “very emotional”: This is how she gets her emotions out, and they are confused and angry and hurt. All that kind of raw teenage emotion is coming out of these stories, and she’s starting that they gave something to do with her mother and this guy, so she picks her spots. Sometimes the storytelling just takes her and sometimes she looks at her mother and just lays it out, especially the angry parts. She could not have these literal conversations with her mother, but she can tell those stories to them [30].

Sayles calls Noelle’s performance free association, even though the text itself sounds as if it has been written out and polished. Both Donna and Joe respond to the tale of the family who pursued a dream of living independently but succumbed to the combination of overwhelming nature and self-imposed isolation. In Noelle’s story, the mother goes mad and slaughters the family’s foxes, creatures the family was raising for proﬁt. The mother’s madness rips the family apart and cancels their social experiment. Donna is moved to tears at certain points during the readings. As she spins her tale, Noelle gets sicker and sicker. At one point, Donna removes the diary from Noelle’s hands as the teenager suffers through a fever-sleep. Then Donna discovers her daughter’s deception—the diary is mostly blank, the story was directed at her. In a way, the fox farmers parable is a classic piece of American naturalism—the family was unﬁt for their life in the wilderness. Noelle, the storyteller, exposes the ﬂaws within her own family; hers is not a romantic story about wilderness survival. Instead, it underlines the crushing power of the physical world, and it illustrates Noelle’s need for more emotional sustenance from Donna. “The Water Baby,” the story Noelle reads in school ﬁction piece, suggests her own

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alienation and her desire to be part of nature, albeit in alien form. Her experience on the island, however, changes her perspective on the natural world. The story she invents on the island allows for no escape: the mother is transformed into a mad woman who burns her husband, sends the family into economic ruin, and hangs herself. While it is easy to blame Annemarie’s mother for the family’s destruction, the father, a failed logger, placed his family in physical and psychological harm when he took them to the island. They, too, found themselves in limbo, caught in a place where simple classiﬁcations such as “good” and “evil” do not exist. Their condition is far too real, and the fact that they cannot escape, that they are puny players within an overpowering landscape, only makes their plight more meaningful. Once Donna understands Noelle made up most of the diary entries, that the stories are directed at her, the living situation on the island becomes severe. Pragmatically, Joe knows the chance of a rescue remains slim. Noelle lacks faith in anyone, so she sides with Joe. Only Donna stays optimistic, a condition she cleaves to throughout the ﬁlm. But hers is a hope tempered by bitterness and anger; she blames Joe for their situation. Joe uses his outdoor skills to locate food, but any rescue will hinge on pure luck. They maintain a signal ﬁre to capture the eye of an errant bush pilot. Sayles uses a helicopter shot, a set-up that recalls Haskell Wexler’s famous shot from The Picnic (1955) in which he tracked a freight train with his camera from the open door of a helicopter. Here, though, Sayles wants to show the vast landscape that surrounds Joe, Donna, and Noelle. When a plane does arrive, the surrogate family thinks they will be rescued, but the pilot is “Smiling Jack” Johannson, someone Joe does not trust. He tells them he will return, if he makes it home— his plane, he says, is low on fuel and he found himself off course. This chance encounter sets up Limbo’s conclusion, the most controversial part of the ﬁlm. When the ﬂoatplane returns, Joe, Donna, and Noelle watch from the tree line, just out of sight, as it breaks through a dense fog. Donna runs to the shore, completely exposed. Sayles adds tension to the sequence by cutting to glimpses of the plane and using the diegetic sound of its engine, which suggests the negative impact of machines on wild places and also sounds threatening. “Smiling Jack” had made it clear he know the anonymous men who killed Bobby Gastineau. Therefore, Joe, Donna, and Noelle must make a choice, and they choose to together stand as the plane descends. Sayles increases the volume of the plane’s engine, and then the screen fades to white; after a few moments, it fades to black and a Bruce Springsteen song, the ironically titled “Lift Me Up,” ﬁlls the soundtrack. Critics and the public reacted negatively to the ﬁlm’s indeterminate ending. An inconclusive ending is hardly new for a Sayles ﬁlm, however. Return of the Secaucus Seven just ends; Lianna stops without a complete resolution; City of Hope closes with a mad man screaming; Lone Star seems to reject history, which anchored the ﬁlm, when it concludes; and Men with Guns never takes its characters to the promised land. Open endings are commonplace and in keeping with Sayles’s realistic style and aesthetic. Limbo, however, feels incomplete because the primary players are trapped, in need of rescue; indeed, in limbo. Typically, abandoned characters are accounted for, especially in American feature ﬁlms. As Joe, Donna, and Noelle stand in silence watching the ﬂoatplane dropping toward them, they are locked in an odd location because they can experience either joy or dread once the plane lands. In silence, beyond language, they signify entrapment. Either rescue or death is coming toward them. That they wait together is Sayles’s essential point: they are willing to take a risk together. Laura Barrett suggests that theirs is an

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As he did in Lone Star, Kris Kristofferson, right, returns in Limbo to play another unsavory character, Smilin’ Jack Johannson, an Alaskan brush pilot and outdoorsman. His charter might be willing to save Joe Gastineau (David Strathairn, left) and Donna and Noelle De Angelo. On the other hand, he might be willing to kill them, too.

“enlightenment born of listening and speaking—a language that can muddle as much as it clariﬁes, a language that constructs our understanding of the world just as it reveals that construction” (255). Barrett sees Sayles “exploding the binaries of modernism and postmodernism” because he offers a “choice of sublimity or language” by offering an imaginative choice for his audience (256). Limbo is a work that contains many ﬁnely crafted scenes, which add up to an investigation of individuals trapped in a rapidly changing environment, a place where language is manipulated and shaped to mean something different to all listeners, a place where the wilderness remains untamed no matter how hard developers work to bring it to heel. Without discounting the ﬁlm’s theoretical implications, Limbo remains an example of provocative naturalism, a narrative in which characters struggle to preserve their humanity against relentless odds. In the end, however, both the civilized world and the physical world threaten the uninitiated. And Sayles shows how individuals are powerless in both the wilderness and a manufactured, mediated environment. Wexler’s wilderness compositions, especially the boat trip, which serves as an interlude between the ﬁlm’s two major sections, provide the only relief from the crushing realities of Port Henry, Alaska, and the island wilderness. In the ﬁrst half of the ﬁlm, Sayles echoes the sentiments voiced by the cantankerous Edward Abby in his essay “Gather at the River”: Alaska is the ﬁnal big bite on the American table, where there is never enough to go around.... Alaska, like the rest of our public domain, has been strapped down and laid open to the lust and greed of the international corporations.... Anchorage, Fairbanks and

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John Sayles, Filmmaker outposts like Barter Island, with their glass-and-aluminum ofﬁce buildings, their airlift prefab ﬁberboard hovels for the natives and the workers, their compounds of elaborate and destructive machinery, exhibit merely the latest development in the planetary expansion of space-age sleaze—not a frontier, but a high-technology slum. For Americans, Alaska is the last pork chop [340 –341].

In Limbo’s second act, Sayles shifts to the elemental, the primitive drive for survival within a natural environment that forces Joe Gastineau and Donna and Noelle De Angelo to support each other yet offers no transformative relief. Nature is trivialized and respected in the ﬁlm. This contradictory impulse matches Sayles’s enigmatic conclusion. Joe, Donna, and Noelle must rely on other people if they hope to survive. The second act focus on the inscrutable physical world, the place most characters in the ﬁrst half of the ﬁlm see as commercial fodder. The ﬁrst portion of Limbo reﬂects the tussling, misdirected salmon from the opening credits; the second portion, following the transformative interlude on the boat in which Sayles’s characters exist within Alaska’s visual splendor, albeit for a short passage, is a short story, a contained narrative about three people at great risk who attempt to overcome their fate, an impossible task that lies outside their control. Fittingly, the last diegetic sound Sayles leaves his audience with is the noise coming from the ﬂoatplane’s engine, a sonic reminder of the intrusive power a machine in the wilderness—equipment that could mean life or death.

Sunshine State Golf, Theme Parks, and Money I think that something happened with advertising, probably right around the turn of the last century, around 1900, where it stopped selling things that we needed. It stopped just telling you, oh, here’s a good soap, and started creating things that we didn’t even know we wanted. And certainly the history of Florida is the history of advertising. I think that the very concept of leisure in America is intimately tied up with the development of Florida. People didn’t know that people other than the moneyed classes could have this thing called leisure, and developers went down there and bought land for pennies an acre because it was considered uninhabitable, created this dream of The Sunshine State, of the vacation paradise. And then with the money they got in advance from people who hadn’t been down there, actually dredged the swamps and created the land that they eventually sold to the people who came down. —John Sayles, Now, with Bill Moyers

Released in 2002, Sunshine State continues Sayles’s examination of manufactured images, real estate abuse, and working people pushed to the margins. Florida, of course, is far more familiar than Alaska, and it has been tamed. Now a tourist wonderland of golf courses, manicured beaches, and massive resorts, Florida, with the Disney Empire occupying its heart, is a place most Americans think they know well. Los Gusanos, Sayles’s sprawling Florida novel about six decades in the life of a family of Cuban exiles living in Miami, indicated his life-long fascination with the sunshine state. An odd mixture of exotic frontier, outlaw spirit, and rampant overdevelopment, Florida has always appealed to American writers because it presents a compelling microcosm of America’s collective history; moreover, it is a manufactured place, a swamp turned essential destination by the Flaglers and the Rockefellers. Speaking to Rene Rodriquez in 2002, Sayles addressed this development: “They helped create the whole idea of leisure by getting people to come down to stay in their hotels and buy their condos. There’s something very American and very

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modern about the idea of creating a desire through advertising for something that didn’t exist before” (www.philly.com). Sunshine State examines development sprawl, community segregation, manufactured history, and place with epic sweep by focusing on Plantation Island, Florida, an old seacoast community facing down developers consuming almost every inch of open space in Sayles’s Florida. Before the historic election of 2000, Sayles had traveled Florida’s Gulf Coast to scout locations for a ﬁlm adaptation of Treasure, a short story ﬁrst published in Esquire in 1988. Revolving around dreamers who quarry for pirate gold, Treasure features characters who refuse to abandon their search for riches; in keeping with Sayles’s interest in community, it is also about how people across generations help each other through hard times. According to Rodriguez, Sayles was taken aback by the condition of the Gulf Coast: “The west coast I remembered just wasn’t there anymore. Everything had been so developed. Places like Naples had gone totally wild: That used to be a place you went when you wanted to avoid trafﬁc. Back then, Weeki Wachee wasn’t even a town; it was just a roadside attraction” (www.philly.com). Sayles is describing lost Florida, the land writers like Carl Hiaasen long for with romantic intensity. Observing the radical shifts brought on by development spurred Sayles’s imagination: “I started to think about what those changes do to people. Florida’s west coast has always been the quieter coast. There had been tourism there, but it was locally owned. When the corporate tourism comes in, it really changes your feeling about where you live. It changes the scale of things” (www.philly.com). Sunshine State is about how radical change occurs. The narrative divides between Delrona Beach, a predominately white community, and Lincoln Beach, an all black community—two small parts of Plantation Island that have not completely succumbed to development. Florida’s role in the contested 2000 election solidiﬁed Sayles’s desire to tell his story about contemporary Florida development and manipulation, but with a trace of old Florida still in evidence. He abandoned the Treasure adaptation in favor of a more complicated screenplay, one featuring elements found in City of Hope: The election helped me focus ideas that I had been think about for a long time. It reminded me how much Florida is a place of parallel communities that don’t always intersect and have totally different ways of looking at the world. They might do certain things together, but they don’t necessarily mix.... It’s no surprise that the election there ended in a deadlock. You could go district to district, not just county to county, and ﬁnd people voting in totally opposite ways [www.philly.com, pp. 1–2].

Sunshine State, like Sayles’s urban epic, employs over ﬁfty speaking parts, a large cast that serves to expose parallel communities common not only to a ﬁctional location in Florida but to America in general. Once again, Sayles examines American culture through a speciﬁc place. In fact, Plantation Island could be a stand-in for Florida’s Amelia Island. Sunshine State presents a signiﬁcant narrative shift from Limbo, beyond its two-part structure. Not only does it feature a large ensemble cast, the cultural allusions are quite common, and the characters are far more familiar than Sayles’s Alaskans. But Sunshine State features Floridians struggling with more than hanging chads. Sayles’s ﬁlm critiques the myths of American capitalism. Almost every character in the ﬁlm is tied to money— some have it, some want it, and some need it. Sunshine State shows what happens when a social order based on acquired wealth invades a historically signiﬁcant place, still occupied by real people, in order to homogenize it for resale. Sunshine State opens with two signiﬁcant sequences, each an example of dislocation. Sayles’s ﬁrst image is a dark night sky framed from below. Cinematographer

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Patrick Cady’s camera glides along the bow of an old, ornate ship, capturing it from below, as if it were ﬂoating in the water. A few innocuous cuts feature sections of the ship: a wooden pirate’s head, a mast with sails dangling limp, and a Jolly Roger ﬂopping in a weak breeze. As a haunting soundtrack comes up, the diegetic sound of glass smashing establishes real time. Flames begin to illuminate the ship. Sayles cuts to a teenager, Terrell Bernard (Bernard Alexander Lewis), standing near the ship; he watches the ﬂames build. Fire ﬁlls the deck of the boat, igniting the pirate ﬁgure, burning the Jolly Roger. A police car, lights revolving, pulls up behind Terrell. Now mesmerized by the ﬂames, he stands in an empty parking lot. The pirate ship is an ornament, a facsimile, a simulacrum designed to mimic the past in order to promote tourism. Terrell is from Plantation Island, but he is not concerned with civic pride. Sayles contrasts this silent opening sequence with robust, bombastic language. Using a transition dissolve, Sayles moves the narrative to a golf course, and a close-up of someone placing a golf ball on a tee. “In the beginning,” the golfer declares, “there was nothing.” His sonorous voice commands attention. Murray Silver (Alan King), addresses his ball while the other members of his foursome—Jefferson Cash (Cullen Douglas), Buster Bidwell (Clifton James), and Silent Sam (Eliot Asinof )—watch and listen. The course is beautifully landscaped, set in Florida palmetto and pine. Before hitting his drive Murray talks about the wilderness Florida once was: “Swamp land they were asking ten cents an acre, this was worse. The old name, in Seminole, means ‘You shouldn’t go there.’ ” With pride Bidwell says, “But we bought it.” Murray responds: “We bought it because we knew— knew—that you didn’t sell land. I mean what is land—a patch of dirt, a tree maybe—who cares?” Silent Sam interjects, “Farmers care.” Murray hits his drive. Clearly the leader of the group, Murray dismisses Sam’s attempt to counter his claim: “Farmers are only in the TV ads. People with tractors, amber ways of grain—they shoot it all in Canada. No, this is certiﬁed public accountants from Toledo with a ﬁxed pension and a little nest egg who don’t want to spend golden years trekking through slush. A dream is what you sell, a concept. You sell sunshine, you sell orange groves, you sell gentle breezes wafting through the palm trees.” Sam tees his ball and lines up his shot. The others talk about palm trees, which only appear “in the brochures.” Murray says, “As long as the dredge stayed three lots ahead of the buyers, we were in like Flynn.” Fast with a response, sly, and imperious, Murray is a master salesman, a snake-oil huckster who takes pride in his craftsmanship— he could be Florida’s P.T. Barnum. He knows where to ﬁnd suckers. Sam hits his drive, and Murray has the last word: “Remember, this was the end of the earth, this was a land populated by white people who ate catﬁsh, and almost overnight, out of the muck and the mangroves we created—this.” Murray holds his arms wide, as if he were conducting an orchestra: “Nature on a leash.” This foursome parallels Sayles’s Alaskan investors: nothing can stop them, not even swampy, uninviting mangrove jungles. But they also contrast Albright and Baines, because these men are playing a game within a space created to match Murray Silver’s vision. What he calls progress, the golf course, is evident, and it has been incubated by money. Therefore, the setting for this sequence adds visual signiﬁcance to Sayles’s language. The golf course is an artiﬁcial creation, a space manufactured for a game many see a leisure activity. Murray had a master vision: he turned an entire state into a game board for people. Murray’s Florida is something new, a location customers learn to crave. Terrell’s act of vandalism, on the other hand, makes no sense; after all, he destroys personal property, what turns out to be the lead ﬂoat for Delrona Beach’s annual Buccaneer Days Festival.

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Terrell is a powerless ﬁgure, a teenager who destroys things because he needs human attention. By contrast, Murray’s work seems positive—taking useless swampland and making it into something people believe they need; it represents the evolution of “useless” land. Like Noelle De Angelo, Terrell acts out against forces beyond his control, but he too is trapped in a world that offers him nothing. The golfers, on the other hand, are an Olympian force, an all powerful quartet, existing beyond the realm of mere mortals. In a manner, Sayles’s golfers control the narrative, for they created Plantation Island. In his introduction to the Sunshine State screenplay, Sayles compares the golfers to “the clairvoyant indigenous women in Men with Guns” (163). The golfers do not predict the future, however; they made it. They are far more reminiscent of the gods in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), a classic adventure ﬁlm enhanced by Ray Harryhausen’s visual effects. Murray and his crew control real estate, and therefore they can manipulate people. Like the gods in the old adventure ﬁlm, Sayles’s golfers are not part of the material world. They created something and turned their backs on the result. Sayles’s Floridians have to fend for themselves because his gods are playing golf. Deftly, Sayles uses an invisible dissolve to signify the distance between his golfers and the Terrell’s reality. At the conclusion of Murray’s speech, Cady’s camera slowly pans away from him, following the path of his outstretched arms. Blue sky ﬁlls the frame, recalling the opening credit sequence of Eight Men Out. Unlike that shot, however, this one is designed to illustrate the power and position of the gods of real estate, suggesting the world extends from Murray’s ﬁnger tips. Terrell’s world, by contrast, is marked by destructive activity, an indication of his alienated existence. After juxtaposing these two sequences, Sayles establishes the ﬁlm’s primary location. The dissolve becomes an overhead perspective—a crane shot looking down on a strip of old buildings set near an Atlantic beachfront. A combined business, the Sea-Vue Restaurant and Motel is surrounded by residences and shops. The place is weathered, like something out of the 1950s. As the camera drops toward ground level, a sound truck passes with its loudspeaker announcing Buccaneer Days events, including a treasure hunt. The truck recalls the opening of Robert Altman’s Nashville, which featured a similar sound truck that added political slogans to the ﬁlm’s soundscape. Sayles’s camera closes in on Desiree (Angela Bassett) and Reggie Perry ( James McDaniel) as they step out of their rental car near the restaurant. A cut to the interior of restaurant reveals a close-up of goldfoil wrapped doubloons tumbling into a faux treasure chest, a visual allusion to Sayles’s short story. As the camera pulls way, Marly Temple (Edie Falco) speaks with Krissy (Amanda Wing), one of her employees. Krissy tells her boss that her husband called. Marly responds, “He calls again you tell him to take a long walk off a short pier.” This cliché suggests Marly’s exhaustion—she is local, even her language is dated. The Perrys enter, and Marly directs Desiree to the bathroom. The Perrys and the Temples occupy the center of Sayles’s screenplay. Each family faces the shifting condition of Florida, struggles with the weight of history, and attempts to make sense of the place they share, Plantation Island. Real estate values and the gods who control the transformation of old Florida challenge both families. Notably, this is the only moment Marly and Desiree share on screen in the entire ﬁlm. Historically signiﬁcant, Amelia Island, Florida, home to American Beach, the ﬁrst African American resort in Florida, was a popular location for pirates and smugglers in the early nineteenth century. After an economic boom following the American Civil War, the area was ignored by Henry Flager’s trans–Florida railroad, his north-south rail line

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designed to take people deeper into Florida. This snub extinguished Amelia Island’s popularity. According to the Lonely Planet Guide to Florida, this change happened with great speed: “In a Pompeii-like ﬂash, the boomtown was frozen in time, and much of what you’ll see here today remains practically unchanged” (406). For Sayles, sections of Amelia Island were ideal for Sunshine State locals. Some buildings were old and weathered; although when his ﬁlm crew arrived, things were changing, buildings were coming down, new developments were going up. Flager, John D. Rockefeller’s right hand man at Standard Oil, saw Florida as a place he could make into his own version of paradise, which he would then sell to the general public. According to Michael Grunwald, journalist and author of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, Flagler considered “his Florida projects part hobby, part philanthropy ... he loved the idea of making an indelible mark on a virgin wilderness, and transforming a worthless wasteland into a vibrant civilization” (102). Sayles’s golfers are Flager’s offspring. Not only did Amelia Island afford Sayles the perfect setting for his screenplay, a great deal of signiﬁcant Florida history, much of it now ignored, ﬁltered into Sunshine State. Familial history lies at the center of Sayles’s screenplay, speciﬁcally the Temple and the Stokes families. Desiree Perry, née Stokes, exited Lincoln Beach in disgrace, pregnant at ﬁfteen. The Stokes family (perhaps a reference to Carl B. Stokes, the ﬁrst African American mayor of a major American city—Cleveland, Ohio) is headed by Eunice Stokes (May Alice), a proud, straight-laced widow who believes in strict morality and absolute responsibility, two elements that drove her daughter to rebel as a teenager. As Stephen Holden points out in his laudatory review of Sunshine State, when Desiree, who lived with an aunt in Georgia before moving north and ﬁnding a career doing infomercials, returns with Reggie, a successful anesthesiologist, “the scares of old family wounds are ripped open” (New York Times 29). Returning to Florida is something Desiree had to do in order to come to terms with her past and the woman she has become. Unlike the Stokes family, the Temples seem to be pulling away from Plantation Island and Delrona Beach. Age and place have taken a toll on the Temples, except for Delia Temple ( Jane Alexander), Marly’s mother, “the Sarah Bernhardt of Delrona Beach.” Delia runs the town’s community theater and is a staunch environmentalist. The ﬁrst time she appears on screen she is rehearsing lines from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Miss Delia recites Addie Bundren’s nihilistic monologue with passionate intensity. Ironically, Addie’s language announces her hatred of children, her father, and her life. Delia Temple, to the contrary, is full of life. She works with “young people who are having difﬁculties” and sums up her life without bitterness: “My youthful ambition was not to become the Sarah Bernard of Delrona Beach.” Delia is the antithesis of Faulkner’s creation. In real time, Delia seems zany, over the top, as if she is acting in a silent ﬁlm, but her dedication to community and craft cannot be questioned. Furman Temple (Ralph Waite), her husband, built Sea-Vue; he rants about the encroaching corruption of a changing culture while diabetes robs his eyesight. Delia and Furman are ﬁghters, but the Delrona Beach of the past has vanished. Marly, once a sea-world mermaid, now an odd blend of sincerity and cynicism, struggles to ﬁnd herself. When she was young, Marly expressed interest in marine biology, but a series of men and her attachment to Delrona Beach blunted her personal growth. Steve Tregaskis (Richard Edson), her ex-husband and leader of Skeeter Meter, a failed southern-rock cover band, works as a Union sentry at a local tourist attraction. Steve wants to open a water slide, but he needs Marly to seed the project. Marly wants nothing to do with Steve or his scheme. As a visual joke, Sayles costumes

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John Sayles directs Edie Falco (Marly) in Sunshine State, a ﬁlm drawn from “Treasure,” one of Sayles’s short stories.

Steve as a Civil War soldier and a pirate, absurd wardrobe changes signifying how history can be sanitized and trivialized. Marly’s young boyfriend, Scotty (Marc Blucas) announces early in the ﬁlm that he is leaving town to pursue his dream of becoming a professional golfer. Marly seeks solace in men and sex, but her relationships are short-lived. Marly exempliﬁes what can happen to people when they choose to stay where they grew up: Plantation Island suffocated Marly’s ambition. In some ways, Desiree and Marly parallel May-Alice and Chantelle from Passion Fish; however, their lives never intersect. Sayles uses these representative women and their discreet histories, which are connected by place, to illustrate the weight of the past on the present. Like Addie Bundren, Desiree and Marly cannot escape who they are. What makes them different, of course, is their willingness to persevere. Desiree rediscovers serenity as she reconnects with her mother and her home. Marly needs her father’s blessing before she can willingly consider leaving Delrona Beach. In contrast, Sayles uses the Pinkneys as comic relief. Earl Pinkney (Gordon Clapp), a banker who also serves as a county commissioner, has a gambling problem, which opens him up to bribery. The county, overrun with real estate developers and their lackeys, is a not good place for Earl Pinkney. Because he does not want to disgrace his family, particularly his fussy, high-strung wife, Francine (Mary Steenburgen), Earl concocts multiple ways to kill himself, each an example of slapstick incompetence. The Pinkneys are less well deﬁned than either the Stokeses or the Temples because Sayles uses Earl and Francine to illustrate what can happen to people within a culture that celebrates money. Earl is an especially intriguing character, for he does not speak much, and Sayles uses

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him to visually illustrate American anomie. The predatory nature of the forces working to transform Delrona Beach is illustrated in Earl’s actions. For most of the ﬁlm, Sayles shoots Earl alone in the frame. He is removed from life, a bungler who is so confused he cannot dispatch himself with precision. His ﬁrst suicide attempt, which occurs on a beautiful jogging trail, fails because the tree he selects for his hanging rope cannot hold his weight. After the branch cracks, Earl sits alone with the rope dangling from his neck. Earl suffers from adult boredom; he is trapped in a life without purpose. Francine, who displays relentless naïveté, has the Delrona Beach Chamber of Commerce and the Buccaneer Days Festival, which allows her to ameloriate the “mass murder, rape, and slavery” that are part of Plantation Island’s history. Instead, as Lilly Papagianni observes, “she constructs her own folkloric, cheesy world, made up of pirates, fake parrots, and third-rate beauty queens” (48th Thessaloniki International Film Festival: John Sayles, 172). Francine sees her world with Pollyannaish clarity—at one point she calls Earl her “rock.” Sayles introduces her as she stares at the torched remains of the pirate ﬂoat, a charred version of a Disney-like buccaneer boat. Upset over the loss, Francine says, “This is not in the spirit of the celebration.” Like all the characters in Sunshine State, the Pinkneys cross paths with most of the other players, but they are only connected to themselves, which makes them vastly different from Sayles’s primary families. The Pinkneys have no history; they live for the present and choose to ignore messy aspects of the past, both their own and Plantation Island’s. Sunshine State, like Lone Star, features multiple personalities and a vivid cross-section of the people who populate a particular American place. As he did in Lone Star, Sayles investigates the role of race within the dominate culture. Lincoln Beach, in contrast with Delrona Beach, was an autonomous community of support, a site of racial liberation and black pride, which still resonates with some of Sayles’s African American characters in the ﬁlm. Based on American Beach, for African Americans the only break point along Florida’s segregated coastline, Sayles’s ﬁctional Lincoln Beach, which Dr. Lloyd (Bill Cobbs), with assistance from Eunice Stokes, who parallels MaVynee Betsch, a.k.a. “The Beach Lady,” an environmentalist and activist who lead the ﬁght to protect American Beach from unrestrained development, ﬁghts to preserve, the place is historically and culturally signiﬁcant. While the white residents of neighboring Delrona Beach view land development with apathetic resignation, the African Americans work to protect Lincoln Beach because they are a “breed facing extinction.” The white characters, on the other hand, seem paradoxically trapped by Delrona Beach; this, certainly, describes Marly’s condition, for she has had to shape her life while connected to a place that has limited her possibilities for a full life. Francine ignores Plantation Island’s history, turning it into a Halloween-like event. Sayles builds most of his narrative around the Buccaneer Days celebration, for it draws tourists and former residents to Plantation Island; people like the Temples just put up with the event. Buccaneer Days is a homogenized version of history, a fraudulent pageant that replaces the truth about Florida. Francine’s world is utterly fake, absurdly artiﬁcial. Everything she does is supported by local commercial interests, many of whom are located “at the mall,” not in the old city. When she shills for her sponsors, Francine sounds like an announcer for bad radio commercials. The outsiders, men who want to transform this last piece of old Florida, businessmen, contractors, and laborers, represent change and modernization. Sayles has always been intrigued by insulated camps within a larger social structure. Some of the groups he created for Sunshine State embody what life might be

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like in small American towns, especially the Temples, Dr. Lloyd, the moral voice of the community, and the Stokes family. In Sunshine State, though, small town America faces economic failure, a situation Sayles presents matter-of-factly. His realistic stylistic approach highlights the power of systemic forces most people never see. Economics and the transformation of swampland into a commodity is one of the most important elements within the ﬁlm. Many outsiders in the ﬁlm signify something bad, change for the worst. Jack Meadows (Timothy Hutton), though, is a man who wants to create beauty. Meadows has become a peripatetic landscape architect, trying to outrun his failed marriage and reconnect with his father’s legacy—he took pleasure in landscapes as he mowed the lawns of the wealthy in his hometown. Meadows cites Frederick Law Olmstead, father of American landscape architecture, as his greatest professional inﬂuence. While the people he works for rip the land apart, Meadows believes any landscape can be made better, the topography richer—at least that is his hope. Marly, who tells Meadows that she learned about Olmstead watching Jeopardy, reminds him that his work, building gated, expensive communities, lacks the populism of Olmstead’s parks. The ﬁrst time Marly sees Meadows he is standing with some developers from Exley Plantation Estates, a high-end ﬁrm that has already acquired large real estate tracks in Delrona Beach and across Plantation Island. Marly calls them “buzzards” and then goes right after Meadows. Sayles uses a handheld camera and rapid cuts to create a dance between Meadows and Marly. She challenges him, and he tries to respond without emotion. Meadows says he is conducting a “feasibility study,” nothing more. Marly circles around Meadows, refusing to shake his hand when he offers it, physically registering her disgust for him. She accuses him of mentally undressing the beach front. Early on in Sunshine State, Marly tries to protect her father’s property, which is worn-down, tattered. Sayles’s camera movement and editing keep these two characters together. Here, the land, including a boozy night on a golf course, brings Marly and Meadows together. But they are an odd match: one needs the land for work; the other cleaves to the land even though it offers little. Both have an economic stake in Florida, even though they represent opposite ends of the development continuum. While Marly verbally engages Meadows during their ﬁrst encounter, Sayles upsets the balance he establishes in the sequence by cutting to a new perspective, a blurry long shot of the pair; this juxtaposition counters the handheld shot. Visually, the handheld image is closed, as it wraps around Marly and Jack, practically encasing them together. The long shot establishes an impersonal distance, and therefore the visual tone shifts. This shot establishes a new point-of-view, examining Temple’s property through binoculars from a concealed position. Once Greg (Perry Lang) focuses the image, he moves his sight-line to the Sea-Vue Motel sign. Greg’s perspective duplicates a surveillance camera. Lester (Miguel Ferrer), Greg’s partner, explains what they see with military language: “HQ says that’s where we establish our beachhead, then spread out and take the rest of it.” Lester holds a map with arrows marking how their company plans to take over the neglected beachfront. He compares the Temple’s property to Lincoln Beach, which he calls “hostile,” a “mineﬁeld.” What they are looking at, though, is the “soft underbelly of the island.” These real estate agents are separate players, not connected to the Exley Plantation developers, and they are decidedly more aggressive and more underhanded. For them, Sea-Vue is the “point of weakest defense.” Lester tells Greg to make the “frontal assault” while he will “go behind the lines.” Marly is surrounded by more buzzards than she realizes. Sayles uses the handheld camera to connect Marly and Meadows. When he

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cuts to Lester and Greg, however, he establishes separation by using a long shot, suggesting an unseen force surrounding Delrona Beach. Lester and Greg sound ruthless, but in an oddly gentle way; they are not vicious stock thugs, which makes them rather believable. Visually, the long shot establishes their predatory nature, but once they interact with their intended victims, their tough personas fall away, especially Greg’s. Sayles cuts from Lester and Greg to the hapless Earl Pinkney jogging without conviction through a beautiful Florida park, just the sort of place Lester and Greg covet. The logic behind Sayles’s edit connects Lester with Earl. Earl steals money to gamble, but he fails at gambling. As a county commissioner, Earl can help Lester’s frontal assault on Delrona Beach. Lester knows Earl is the man he has to sway, and it does not take much. When Earl loses money at a dog track, he calls Lester immediately, and they plan a clandestine meeting. Sayles shows them within a closed frame in a dingy motel room under stark lowkey lighting. Stylistically, this sequence is hyper-realistic, a closed-circuit look at a politician taking a bribe—interior surveillance. Earl needs money. Instead of an offshore account, which Lester suggests, Earl asks for “Hundred-dollar bills. New ones—. “ Lester has his man on the inside: “We have been a naughty boy, haven’t we.” Earl faces his endgame, and with comic élan he spends the rest of the ﬁlm attempting to put himself out of his own misery, a task he cannot accomplish. Before his ﬁnal suicide attempt, Earl tries to connect with Francine, but she is too busy with the Buccaneer Day Parade. Earl takes a nail gun from the ﬂoat staging area and drives to a construction site to kill himself. Earl has a wooded mermaid, a ﬁgurehead commonly found on the prow of a boat, attached to the top of his car. Eerie music, created by a glass harmonica, accents the scene. The ﬁgurehead again references Jason and the Argonauts. In that ﬁlm, Jason turns to the ﬁgurehead, Hera, for guidance. She is supposed to help him; she seldom does. Jason has to learn on his own. Earl drives his car to a construction site, exits the vehicle, walks to the front of a large road scrapper, and places the industrial nail gun against the side of his head. Before he can pull the trigger, Earl is startled by two tourists who look like something out of a Duane Hansen collection. They ask if Earl is ﬁnished burying the Buccaneer Days treasure because they want to claim it. Earl cannot escape his life. Earl provides some comic relief, but more importantly he signiﬁes powerlessness—he has allowed unregulated greed to corrupt him. Earl lacks appreciation for what is around him. He is trapped in paradise. Doctor Lloyd, the one character who understands history and works to preserve it, knows Lincoln Beach and what it used to be, and, more importantly, why it should be preserved. He does not lack enthusiasm for his cause, but he lacks support. Doctor Lloyd fails in his efforts to generate public interest in saving Lincoln Beach from developers. Sayles’s character is important within the context of his screenplay, but more importantly, Lloyd signiﬁes history, particularly the history of American Beach, the ﬁrst African American beach in Florida. In his personal history, American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory, Russ Rymer indicates what happens when history is lost, especially African American history: There are some to whom all black histories look alike, and the stories that make a place like Amelia Island what it is are drowned out in a chorus of slave chant and poor man’s blues. Amelia’s songs were brighter. I had come here to hear one of them—the history of a Jacksonville patriarch who founded Florida’s ﬁrst life insurance company, became one of Florida’s ﬁrst black millionaires, and built a town by the sea where blacks could enjoy, in the phrase in use in its advertisements at the time, “recreation and relaxation without

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humiliation.” The town was American Beach; the patriarch was A.L. Lewis—Abraham Lincoln Lewis [10].

Doctor Lloyd’s works to preserve the place where blacks could congregate without fear. When he meets Reggie walking along the beach, Lloyd asks him to attend the protest rally he has planned, and Reggie wants to know if “it is an ecological thing.” Lloyd responds, “We’re trying to save an endangered species. Us.” Reggie has a vague memory of Lincoln Beach, even though he had never seen it. Doctor Lloyd tells him how important the beach was in the forties and ﬁfties: “You’d drive through a couple hundred miles of redneck sheriffs, park your ride on the boardwalk, step out, and just breathe.” Around them the beach and streets are deserted, neglected. Sayles communicates this emptiness in a poetic long shot of Lloyd and Reggie walking away from the water toward the camera. A few palm trees stand along the road. The left side of the frame is empty; on the right is an abandoned beach motel. Reggie asks the doctor why people gave up on Lincoln Beach, and Lloyd responds with candor: “Civil rights happened. Progress. Used to be if you were black, you’d buy black. Jim Crow days, if you wanted your shoes shined or your laundry done or a taxi ride to the train station, you went to your own. You wanted some ribs, chicken, ﬁsh sandwich—chance are a black man owned the place you got it in. Now the drive-throughs serve anybody, but who owns them? Not us—our people just wearing paper hats and dippin’ them fries out. All we left now are funeral parlors and barber-shops.”

Reggie reminds Lloyd that blacks can now “do anything.” The doctor agrees, partially: “Them that can get over do ﬁne. Them that can’t are in a world of trouble.” Lloyd wants to preserve history, but he also wants to restore a town, a society in which blacks have social and economic agency. Small town life holds meaning for him. Politically, Lloyd is a citizen in full. Like Delrona Beach, Lincoln Beach appeals to real estate investors. The face the investors put forward, however, is much different. The long shot of Reggie and Doctor Lloyd walking away from the beach turns somber when Lloyd recounts Terrell’s story. Terrell’s father shot and killed the boy’s mother while in a drug fueled rage. Terrell sat with his mother’s body for two days before anyone arrived to help him—he was “six, maybe seven.” Dr. Lloyd calls drugs a pestilence, something he cannot understand. Then a gleaming new convertible sports car interrupts their conversation. Leotis “Flash” Phillips (Tom Wright), the driver, who looks as slick as his automobile, asks if Reggie and Elton “know where Buster’s Place is.” The doctor tells him Buster’s is long gone. Flash seems perplexed. Lloyd recognizes him as the Florida Flash, a local sports hero, a deiﬁed ﬁgure who played big time college football until he suffered a career ending knee injury. His sports history, though, did not fade, and his name still draws recognition. After the beach scene, the next time Flash appears on screen he is in a local mall waiting for the Pirate Queen fashion competition to start. Francine invited the Florida Flash to serve as a judge because of his gridiron fame. Of course, she admits to not knowing Flash or what he did on the football ﬁeld. Sayles’s subtext here points out what can happen to a wonderfully talented athlete who attracts many people while he is playing, but who has done nothing to counter his playing image after losing the ability to play football. Reggie Perry, a doctor, countervails Flash’s sports notoriety. Desiree, who is shopping at the mall, recognizes Flash and approaches him. She reminds him of a different event from his past, something removed from the football ﬁeld. When she was ﬁfteen, the Pirate Queen winner, and rebellious, Desiree and Flash were lovers, albeit for a very short

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time. She tells Reggie that he fathered her baby. Reggie is not prepared for this news, and he becomes visually uncomfortable, a condition he will display throughout the ﬁlm. Still nervous, Flash tells Desiree he is about to become her mother’s neighbor, and that he is hosting a barbecue near the now deserted Buster’s Place. Flash is the point man for investors attempting to take over Lincoln Beach. After losing a possible professional football career to a knee injury, the Florida Flash has become a salesman, working for a local car dealer. Now he shills for the investors who want what is left of Florida’s only black beach. Dr. Lloyd’s idealistic desire to save what is left of Lincoln Beach’s history is balanced by Flash’s pragmatism. When Desiree confronts Flash, exposing his duplicity and willingness to sell-out his own people and their remaining history, he delivers a vintage Saylesian summation of the state of things as they are: “Life goes on, shit gets bought and sold. There’s a handful of people who run the whole deal and there’s the rest of us who do what they say and get paid for it.” All style and swagger, Flash knows the system. Like many of Sayles’s ﬁlms, Sunshine State is about the complicated and often messy compromises people have to make to create or recreate themselves and how invisible barriers make change difﬁcult. In Lone Star, Sayles used visible borders—a line in the sand, a river—to indicate separation. Here he uses subtle images to signify how people are fragmented. “It is difﬁcult to stand up for what came before us,” remarks Dr. Lloyd, in an elegiac voice. Flash crosses back into his community after falling on hard-times, but he arrives with private intentions; working for the greater good is not part of his game plan. Whenever he speaks about what Lincoln Beach used to be, he is visibly uncomfortable. After losing his identity forged on the football ﬁeld, Flash tries to reclaim his life by relying on his diminished celebrity. Passing back into his old world is more difﬁcult than he assumes, however. By announcing he is becoming a “neighbor,” Flash suggests he has returned to help; in fact, he does not care about Lincoln Beach—he wants material success, rewards that would have been his if his knee had held-up. Sayles uses Flash’s slick automobile and cool look to signify his separation from Reggie and Dr. Lloyd. Flash, though, is a fraud; he does not own the car—it can be seen later in the ﬁlm on the used car lot sporting a For Sale sign. When he ﬁnds out Buster’s Place no longer exists, the look on his face indicates he does not know what to do next. Flash does not want to confront his actual past, and Lincoln Beach means nothing more to him than a commercial opportunity. Tom Wright, an excellent actor who has worked with Sayles regularly, communicates Flash’s discomfort with his eyes and his body. The barbeque sequence opens with a closeup of the brace Flash uses to stabilize his knee. While he invokes the past he does not want to talk about it. At the grill, surround by men, Flash tells them he has picked up what remains of Buster’s Place and a few more lots. Olney (Dennis Neal) says, “Speculation.” Flash responds, “More like preservation. This place was part of my—you know— growing up. Don’t want it to fall to pieces. We got enough neighborhoods full of empty buildings.” After Flash states his reason for being on Lincoln Beach, a football, a visible connection to his past glory, interrupts his declaration of purpose. As Flash walks the beach with Desiree, however, he tells her that his investment group is offering “a chance for people here to sell before they get taxed out of their homes.” Desiree’s mother’s house is part of his real estate scheme. Like all dialogue in a Sayles ﬁlm, this brief exchange seems realistic, as if he recorded the language while listening to people talk. Sayles’s language, though, is more potent than recorded speech. Angered by Flash’s admission, Desiree ends his speculation with a few

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words that compress their past, present, and future. Flash asks about her “straight-arrow,” and Desiree says his name in response, “Reggie.” She tells Flash that they were “just married.” Lost for words, Flash says, “Seems like a real nice guy.” Desiree replies, “Yeah. He is.” Flash cannot compete with Reggie Perry. Language in Sunshine State carries meaning on multiple levels. When Desiree asks Flash to identify who wants property on Lincoln Beach he uses the pronoun “they.” “They” could be everyone and no one. In the world of real estate brokers, “they” signals an invisible abstract construction removed from real people, from neighbors with a shared history. Visually, Sayles promotes this idea throughout Sunshine State by placing the real estate factotums alone within the frame or separated by cuts from other characters. Furman Temple also appears alone, for the most part, but he invokes the past and what he has learned from leading a vital existence. His words are evocative. In Furman’s opening monologue, Sayles presents this patriarch in close-up, his eyes closed, his sight compromised because of disease. “My days,” he says, “life was simpler. You knew where you stood. A man was left to make his own way in the world—you didn’t have none of those pressure groups and advocate groups and special interest groups handicap the race.” Furman’s language indicates the culture of his generation. He cleaves to the American myth of the self-made man. He built his small portion of Florida, the Sea-Vue, from the ground up. As Sayles’s camera pulls slowly backward, Furman’s pain registers: “We been zoned and regulated and politically corrected and environmentally sensitized to the point where it’s only your multi-nationals with a dozen lawyers sittin’ around waitin’ like buzzards for something to litigate that can afford to put one brick on top of another.” Furman’s Darwinian take on his world makes an odd shift, moving from the self-made American to a litigious society in which money equals power. Sheer will has no value. Furman refuses to give “give up the ghost” until he has exhausted every penny he has put into social security. Sayles’s dialogue, which rolls by with exceptional ease, is charged with competing ideas. Furman begins speaking in a grouchy in-my-day mode and concludes with a contemporary commentary on social conditions. The relationship between Marly Temple and Jack Meadows also evolves with both verbal and visual precision. Meadows is as lonely as Marly, but he stays in motion while she stays put. Their relationship quickly shifts from antagonistic to friendly. Marly visits Meadows at Plantation Estates, one of the developments his company has created on the island. He stands in front of a beautiful home enhanced by his architectural skills. Even Marly has to acknowledge the quality of the building and the setting. “So you decide what trees live and what ones die,” she asks him. He tells her that that is part of his job. “Kind of like being God,” she says, challenging him once again. Meadows, who appreciates Marly’s quick responses, asks her if she remembers hurricane Elmo. “That’s God,” he says. “I’m just the hired hand.” The estate home Sayles uses in this shot contrasts with the decrepit buildings at Lincoln and Delrona Beach. Of course it stands as a reminder of the distance between those who have capital to invest and those who do not. Marly is surprised by Meadow’s skill. During this sequence, they paddle down a beautiful stream, which Marly shows Meadows after recalling the tragic deaths of her twin brothers, an event that contributed to her father’s bitterness and emotional distance. Meadows shares some of his own history, including his blue-collar roots. Marly takes Meadows to see the Weeki Wachee Girls perform: “I hated to come up. It was like I was meant to live down there. You’re soaring, you know?” Marly’s language reveals the transformative power

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of the water, a place where she actually felt alive. As they talk, mermaids move gracefully behind them, creating competing images within the mise-en-scène that deﬁne Marly’s life: she was comfortable when not on land, site of many bad decisions, yet at peace gliding through the water as a faux mermaid. This brief journey with Meadows takes Marly back into her own story, into her own history. Still, she spends the night with Meadows. The next morning, Marly takes a small bottle of liquor from the mini-bar to combat her hangover and sits on the balcony of his motel room drinking and watching the ocean in early morning sunlight. Marly is alone, upset. Sleeping with Meadows reminds her of the emptiness of her Delrona Beach life. Throughout Sunshine State, Sayles often captures Eddie Falco in unglamorous light, which cuts against her Sopranos image. Ragged and worn, Marly does not need words to communicate her internal condition. From the porch, Marly sees her father walking his dog by the water’s edge. Concern registers on her face; emotion breaks through her hangover. Furman turns toward his house. Marly is there before he arrives. Her night with Meadows has forced Marly to make a choice. Signiﬁcantly, her father, a man she does not seem especially close to, provides the words she needs to hear. Furman recalls changes he witnessed—integration, the loss of civility, the loss of community. Neither example meant the end of life as Furman knew it: “Sometimes you spend a long time worrying about a day, ain’t so bad when it ﬁnally comes.” Marly responds by telling her father she cannot go to work anymore. Furman pauses. Sayles’s camera captures Ralph Waite’s face, his age etched into his skin, his eyes watery, his mood somber. “People used to come to Plantation Island,” he says, “ask where can I stay the night? Where can I get a good meal? Furman Temple’s place, they’d tell em. Right on the beach. You go see Furman, he’ll take care of you.” Sayles’s dialogue zeros in on the essence of small town existence, life before real estate investments, life before an accelerated culture became the norm. Sayles does not give into a romantic vision of an ideal past, however, and his language is straightforward, simple, direct, and realistic. Marly acknowledges what used to be, “I know, Daddy. But what should I do?” Obliquely, Furman tells Marly he trusts her: “I left it in your hands, darling. You’re a sensible girl, if you don’t count marrying that musician. You’ll ﬁgure it out.” She apologizes, and then he truly releases her: “I already been out in the world and done my damage. Now it’s your turn.” Marly knows that she can cannot run the Sea-Vu, that she has to put Delrona Beach behind her. History hangs over this brief conversation—the past has been suffocating Marly, and it is time for her to change. Here, Marly gains her released from Delrona Beach. Desiree takes the opposite tact. After she exposes Flash as a self-interested fraud, Desiree declares, “My Mamma’s not gonna sell her house.” She turns back toward her own history. By selling her mother’s Lincoln Beach property, Desiree would participate in the recontextualizing of the environment. Although she and he mother do not agree on most things, Desiree recognizes her mother’s need to stay where she is, which will help protect a signiﬁcant piece of their personal history and the collective cultural history of Lincoln Beach. Sayles shows only bit players involved in the land grab—Greg, Lester, Flash—and therefore the system driving the purchase remains out of sight, removed from the onscreen narrative. Place, then, is reduced a commodity because there is no historic, intellectual, or emotional connection to the land. In Sunshine State, Sayles’s African American characters stand against the invisible economic interests. His primary white characters, exhausted and defeated, cannot muster the energy to ﬁght, except for Miss Delia.

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Terrell arrives at the Temple home with the cofﬁn he made for Miss Delia’s production of As I Lay Dying, part of his community service sentence for burning the pirate ﬂoat. Like Faulkner’s Cash Bundren, the essence of kindness and faithfulness and a constructive ﬁgure, Terrell committed himself to the job. Furman asks the young man who his father is: “He’s a carpenter, your daddy?” “He works in a hospital. Anesthesiologist,” Terrell responds, substituting Reggie for his own father. Their conversation shifts to swimming and the water. Terrell tells Furman that the undertow at Lincoln Beach prevents him from swimming. Furman’s response, which arrives in two parts, reads like a warning and a sign of hope: “There’s always gonna be one of those. The trick is, you never want to ﬁght it head on. You got to swim parallel to the shore till the pressure eases up. You struggle against that whole wide ocean you’re a gonner.” Terrell mumbles a response. “No matter how strong a man is, no matter how much grit he’s got, try to ﬁght it head on and it will put you under.” Furman’s words explain how to escape a rip-tide, but they contain a deeper meaning. Furman describes the power of invisible forces, like those consuming Plantation Island; he tells Terrell not to give up, to use skill and intelligence to survive. In typical Sayles style, this potent bit of dialogue is followed by a dramatic release. Furman says, “Miss Delia’s off selling my whole life away. You can leave that pine box on the lawn for now. Give the neighbors something to talk about.” Beyond his misanthropic exterior, Furman, now at the end of his life, expresses empathy toward people who need guidance. Unlike the golfers, gods of manipulation, Furman wants to help, even as he faces the loss of everything he built, everything he loved. All the narrative strands Sayles developed for Sunshine State reach convergence in the ﬁnal section of the ﬁlm, where he subjects the prevailing culture and power structure to an incisive but unobtrusive critical analysis. Francine wonders aloud why she continues: “People think that it’s just there, like Christmas or Thanksgiving. They don’t appreciate how difﬁcult it is to invent a tradition.” Her version of history is conﬁgured as entertainment, something found on commercial television. Dr. Lloyd stages a small protest at a building site to protect the past, even though Plantation Estates stands poised to consume the entire island. But the past interferes with the construction operation. As the frontloader rips into the earth, a pile of tangled, brownish human bones are exposed. Protestors, TV cameramen, construction executives, and the work crew look at the human remains. “Chief ” Billy Trucks (Michael Greyeyes), the front-loader operator and an indigenous Floridian, picks up an arrowhead and says, “They say the only bad Indian is a dead Indian.” For many conventional critics, this event seems contrived, an impossible occurrence, a deus ex machina. The discovery of the ancient remains, however, countervails Francine’s faux tradition. History stops the recontextualization of the land. Sayles based his ﬁctional work stoppage on a real event. “In 1980,” writes John Rothchild in Up for Grabs, “workmen unearthed a ﬁeld of bones while excavating a foundation for a Tampa parking garage. The contractors discovered they were digging on the site of the burial ground of Ft. Brooke, a military outpost, refugee camp, and shipping station for thousands of Seminoles to the Far West” (61). Dr. Lloyd’s small group witnesses a victory for preservation. At the Sea-Vu Restaurant Marly and Miss Delia sit across from Greg, who is pleased with the impending real estate sale. Miss Delia asks him what his company plans to do with the property. Greg declares that his company does not want to destroy anything, “Whether it’s an eco-system or a small business.” Miss Delia, full of southern grace, gently responds: “That’s extremely charitable of you. However, in view of the fact that we have no crystal ball

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to inform us on the scope of your corporation’s future activities, I think some sort of continuing participation would be in order. On top of your very generous offer, of course.” Stunned, Greg says, “Continuing—?” The tables have turned. Sayles uses Miss Delia like Mark Twain uses many of his vernacular characters—she is more than she seems. Miss Delia wants an elevator clause, a provision in the contract calling for adjustments based on market variables: “Let’s say that ﬁve years down the line you have transformed our little beachfront into one of those cash-generating monstrosities that grace the coastal areas further to the south—we’d receive a percentage of the gross proceeds for all rentals. Or adjusted gross, if you will, depending on your ability to audit.” Both Greg and Marly are stunned. Miss Delia tells her daughter not to stare at her—“I’ve run a non-proﬁt theater for twenty-ﬁve years.” Greg, the overt face of the real estate system, has been conned by the matriarch of the Temple clan. In the end, the Temples will proﬁt from the sale of the Sea-Vu, their Florida investment. Desiree and Eunice begin to repair the fracture separating their lives. In her mother’s house, Desiree notices Eunice warming Kentucky Fried Chicken in a microwave, and she expresses surprise. Eunice responds directly: “When I was a girl we pulled the feathers off and threw the feet in a pot for soup. Don’t do that anymore either.” The past lies at the core of their conversation. Desiree says, “Mama—if anyone comes to talk to you about selling this house—.” Her mother tells her, “I put all the property in your name.” Desiree’s pregnancy, her expulsion from Lincoln Beach, and her move north no longer matter. Here, Desiree and Eunice become closer without giving in to sentimentality, a common condition in most commercially conﬁgured reconciliation scenes. Theirs is not a teary reunion ending with an eternal hug. Desiree wants to leave, even though she knows from Dr. Lloyd that her mother is ill: “If—if anything should happen, and you’re worried about money to take care of Terrell—.” Eunice says, “Baby—what good is money gonna do for Terrell?” Sayles shoots this sequence in plain, non-intrusive fashion. He ends this mother/daughter conversation on Eunice’s question. She wants to help Terrell, a teenager without a family, without a mother. From Eunice’s perspective taking care of Terrell is her primary job. Sayles’s scene shows how Eunice and Desiree are linked by Lincoln Beach, by their family home, and by a child who needs help and loving support. By the end of the ﬁlm, Terrell, Desiree, and Reggie form an uneasy alliance. In the bar where they shared tequila, Meadows tells Marly that he is off to Puerto Rico. He does not invite her and ends what might have been a solid relationship for both of them. Sayles then shows a mass exodus of the male characters from Plantation Island near the ﬁlm’s conclusion. One after another they pass by the camera: Scotty Duval, on his way to a golﬁng career; Jack Meadows in a Plantation Estates company car; Billy, the front-loader operator, with Steve Tregaskis, who gesticulates wildly; a hauler containing several pieces of heavy equipment; and Smoot, a character that appears throughout the ﬁlm, in his battered pick-up truck with a hand-written sign on the back: Man-eating Alligator. To punctuate the image, Sayles uses Lucinda William’s “Can’t Let Go,” an uptempo rock song. Three of these men were connected to Marly. Only Smoot, an homage, perhaps, to Jeff Goldblum’s Tricycle Man in Nashville, and Chief Billy, whose ﬁrst name links him directly to the Seminole tribe and whose last name recalls one half of the percussion section in The Allman Brothers Band, a southern blues powerhouse, do not know Marly. With these three men gone, Marly is free. Marly has existed like a “ﬁsh out of water.” She cleaved for far too long to the men in

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her life and her existence at the Sea-Vu. In the ﬁlm’s penultimate scene, Sayles features Marly one ﬁnal time in a stylistically dreamy looking sequence. From below, Marly’s image ripples in silvery blue water. She jumps in, shattering the surface, and swims directly at the camera. She is back where she belongs: in the water, her timeless space. Sayles captures the ethereal quality of her freedom by showing her underwater, holding her breath for as long as she can. None of the small stories Sayles developed throughout the screenplay come to a deﬁnitive conclusion, not even Marly’s. All of Sayles’s narrative lines are packed together by the end of the ﬁlm. The multistories ﬁnish without any dramatic conclusions. The lives of these people will continue, some have reached necessary compromises, other have found a home. Stylistically, Sunshine State is unﬂashy, unadorned on purpose. Sayles uses a naturalistic visual style to illustrate how place becomes a commodity. More importantly, Sayles offers a vigorous critique of American popular culture. For example, Buccaneer Days is a ridiculous event ripe with clichéd pirates who walk the plank and land in a plastic swimming pool. This, Sayles suggests, is what happens to history when it is scrubbed clean, made as acceptable as a Disney pageant at the Magic Kingdom. Sayles allows the gods of real estate to close the ﬁlm. The foursome appears in a closed shot, and they discuss the past. Murray says, “Before it was land it was gold.” He goes on to describe a dream: “Ponce de Leon wanders ashore, runs into a native wearing a threepound necklace.... Next thing you know the place is lousy with Spanish—they killed off entire tribes forcing them to look for stuff.” According to Murray, the search for gold was a wasted effort because the gold had washed a shore from Spanish galleons that “were always sinking in the neighborhood. Full of precious metals from Bolivia, Peru—places where they had mines and an inexhaustible supply of Indians to work in them.” Murray then tells his version of Florida history and Florida development. He laments the fact that chasing the dream—locating vast wealth—is gone. Cash suggests the lottery as a stand-in. Murray says state sanctioned scratch cards lack poetry. As Murray address his golf ball, Sayles shows it in close-up, then uses an invisible dissolve to shift the camera into position behind the foursome. Up until this point, the golfers have been framed in medium shots, the camera sitting at a low angle looking up at them. When Sayles moves the camera behind them, he also tracks backward, a nifty technical move. He reveals the foursome standing on a medium in the middle of a four-lane commercial strip. Murray says, “We live in impoverished times.... There’s no history anymore. There are human footprints on the moon.” Bidwell says, “They say there might be gold on the moon.” Murray replies, “There’s a thought. Prospecting in outer space.” One more place to exploit. Murray drives his ball into trafﬁc. It caroms off a sign that says The Sheik Sandwiches, recalling Baby, It’s You, a Sayles picture that also featured Florida. Then the caroming golf ball bounces in front of Sayles himself, a move designed to punctuate the absurd humor at work in the sequence and to underscore the unreality of the golfers. The last words heard are Silent Sam’s: “But what will we do for the Indians?” Sam’s words are as ironic as the image of the Gods of real estate playing gold on a highway overcrowded with cars, shops, and people—the Florida Murray’s vision created. Sunshine State complicates the issue of public preservation and personal choice. Dr. Lloyd signiﬁes the idealism necessary to work for the public good. He wants to preserve his people’s history and he wants to preserve a vanishing way of life, one connected to a special place. As he knows, however, progress transforms culture, and therefore lines of defense are hard to construct. Marly is as connected to Plantation Island as Dr. Lloyd.

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But she has stayed at Delrona Beach for too long, and her contribution lacks cultural signiﬁcance. Marly’s freedom of movement has been distorted by her willingness to stay home in a small town that does nothing for her intellectually, physically, or spiritually, all of elements Lloyd indirectly celebrates when he speaks about Lincoln Beach. Sayles places a diverse collection of characters on Plantation Island, and he focuses on the conﬂicts faced by the historically signiﬁcant Lincoln Beach and the recontextualization of Delrona Beach. Change hangs over both communities, and the invisible forces prompting change complicate the choices people still in these communities must make. Sunshine State suggests that the more diverse a population is, the more difﬁcult choices are to make. Even individual choice has an impact on the larger community. The possibility for positive change seems slim in Sunshine State, which is not to suggest that Sayles’s work is defeatist or cynical. He underscores the dynamic between individual characters and their social circumstances, and he never denies the possibility for individual growth, even when the odds run against his ordinary people. Sayles has pointed out that “[f ]or me, the movies are about how you decide what you believe in and how you go about implementing it” (philadelphiainquirer.com). The fundamental point Sunshine State makes is that individuals, whether embracing large choices like Dr. Lloyd or individual choices like Marly, retain their humanity if they continue to move forward with honest commitment. The arc of Sayles’s screenplay is the assault on Plantation Island, its history, its signiﬁcance, it cultures. On a deeper level, Sayles explores how parallel and isolated communities and people need to pay closer attention to themselves and to each other. Otherwise, someone else will tell people how to think about themselves, their history, and there community. As the end credits roll, Sayles places three pieces on the soundtrack to underline what has happened to Florida. The ﬁrst is an old Irving Berlin and Irving Kaufman collaboration, In Florida Among the Palms, a song used in The Cocoanuts (1929), the Marx Brothers ﬁlm about a Florida land-boom. Then Florida Belongs to You, a song found in the Florida State Archives, produced in the 1950s, which calls people to Florida where warm, sun-ﬁlled dreams turn real. The ﬁnal song leaps into the present. Skeeter Pie, performed by Mason Daring and Duke Levine with lyrics by John Sayles, closes Sunshine State. A rich double-entendre, Skeeter Pie takes the Florida dream into age of Southern Rock. Collectively, these songs highlight Florida’s cultural shifts, and more importantly the on-going project of selling Florida to a new generation.

Casa de los Babys Shopping Tour I started thinking about this as a movie. And one of the main things that I really liked about it is just that there are so few movies about groups of women interacting. There’s a lot about groups of men, whether it’s sports movies or army movies or whatever. Except for “chicks and chains” ﬂicks, which usually don’t have much to do with women—they usually have more to do with machine guns and underwear. —John Sayles, indieWire

Casa de los Babys (2003) lacks the reach of Sunshine State and the narrative design of Limbo. It is also a departure for Sayles’s typical approach to ﬁlmmaking, speciﬁcally screenwriting. Sayles has always established a distinction between his ﬁction writing and his

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ﬁlm scripts. As Sayles told Claiborne Smith, Casa de los Babys started as a long short story that was never published: Yeah, it was a very, very long short story and that’s a problem getting published it’s too long to be a short story and really a bit too short to be a novella. And then I started thinking about this as a movie. And one of the main things that I really liked about it is just that there are so few movies about groups of women interacting. There’s a lot about groups of men, whether it’s sports movies or gang movies or army movies or whatever. Except for “chicks and chains” ﬂicks, which usually don’t have much to do with women—they usually have more to do with machine guns and underwear [indieWire 2].

With a running time of ninety-ﬁve minutes, Casa de los Babys is one of Sayles shortest ﬁlms. Character development, a Sayles Hallmark, is necessarily truncated. By shortening the running time, Sayles forces himself to employ non-ﬁction ﬁlmmaking techniques, and he deliberately leaves the ﬁlm so open-ended that he pushes his narrative beyond the borders of the screen frame. Sayles’s long short story appeared in print for the ﬁrst time in his second short story collection, Dillinger in Hollywood: New and Selected Short Stories, a ten story collection. Nation Books published Dillinger in 2004. Nation Books acquired all of Sayles’s titles, including Pride of the Bimbos, Union Dues, The Anarchists’ Convention and other Stories, Los Gusanos, and Silver City and Other Screenplays, rescuing his older titles from the remainder bin. In the introduction to Dillinger Sayles writes, The stories in this collection reﬂect my infrequent forays into ﬁction writing during the last twenty years or so.... The great thing about ﬁction, as I’ve often said, is that you can be God. If you want the sun to shine or three thousand troops in full combat gear to materialize, you just describe them (and do not have to worry about what they eat for lunch). On the other hand, you’re on your own—no composers, production designers, costumers, cinematographers, or actors to give you ideas and throw their talents into the project [xi].

Casa de los Babys functions as both story and ﬁlm, however. The short story opens on Asunción as she prepares a breakfast of day-old tortillas and an egg, which she took from work in order to feed her younger siblings, Blanca and Eusebio. A maid at a local hotel, Asunción leaves for work before her brother and sister leave for school. Outside their shack, Asunción joins others workers: “There are dozens, then hundreds of people walking through the sandy streets of the colonia, all in the same direction, men and women joined by girls and boys just old enough for work” (114). Sayles describes this wave of people as the “Army of the underpaid”; indeed, they are a collection of “chauffeurs and gardeners and waiters and maids and nannies and street vendors and street vendors and security guards” (114). The short story moves between two distinct groups: six American women and the indigenous people, characters from all sections of society. Movement between these two groups creates natural sequence breaks, normally associated with ﬁlm, allowing separation between the American women and the people who live in the country. Skipper, Nan, Gayle, Leslie, Jennifer, and Eileen ﬁnd themselves thrown together because of a shared purpose, but nothing else connects them, except for their hotel, Posada Santa Marta, the desire to possess a child, and the local people who surround them. Sayles uses a different approach to open the ﬁlm. Mauricio Rubinstein, Sayles’s cin-

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ematographer, ﬁrst captures parts of babies—arms, legs, hands—and then opens up the shot to take in a nursery full of babies in their cribs. A nurse carrying a baby that will not sleep walks through the nursery singing a traditional Spanish lullaby, which functions as an introduction to the narrative: “If you don’t go to sleep, the white monster will eat your hands and feet.” Although this opening is charming, the babies, like land in Limbo and Sunshine State, are commodities, parcels ready for sale. Of course buying anything requires capital. The people who give birth to the babies and the people who care for them cannot keep them or afford them—only people from outside the country can. Casa de los Babys exposes a human marketplace, a manifestation of globalization, albeit it in a benign, nonpejorative fashion. As with Lone Star and Men with Guns, Sayles presents a subtle critique of cultural intrusion without passing judgment. Unlike the short story, Casa de los Babys opens on a marketplace disguised as a nursery, the place the North Americans come to shop. Typically, Sayles is not overt in his visual presentation or his implied criticism. Casa de los Babys is subtle and substantial, even though it is a small story about a Latin American beach town, a maid, a young homeless boy, a hotel owner, an unemployed man, a pregnant teenager who must decide whether or not to keep her child, and a group of women from the north. The narrative covers most of one day and part of the next morning. Like Men with Guns, Casa de los Babys takes place in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country, and therefore Sayles folds cultural and linguistic barriers into his screenplay. The ﬁlm also explores elements located in Men with Guns: cultural and historical complexities, economic stratiﬁcation, cross-cutting narratives, and a central organizing plot devise— in this case, the unfettered desire for a child of one’s own. The ﬁlm’s central metaphor, the “House of the Babies,” is both the nursery seen in the opening sequence and the hotel where the women stay. The hotel’s owner, Señora Muñoz (Rita Moreno), also functions as a baby broker. By extension, then, the women who stay at Posada Santa Marta, are a bit like babies, too—they are in a foreign country, need care, and are never sure what to do with themselves. This subtle effect elevates the subtext of Casa de los Babys from a plot premised on the adoption of young children to a commentary on how the American characters respond to the cultural conditions surrounding them. In The Making of Casa de los Babys, an IFC production included in the Casa de los Babys’s DVD package, Sayles says that once the ﬁlm was cast all he had to do was sit back and watch, acknowledging the acting talent cast for the ﬁlm and the skills of the mostly Spanish crew. Of course, Sayles knows what he wants from his actors, his crew, and his ﬁnal product. Still, Sayles assembled an impressive cast: Marcia Gay Harden (Nan), Maggie Gyllenhaal ( Jennifer), Susan Lynch (Eileen), Mary Steenburgen (Gayle), Lilli Taylor (Leslie), and Daryl Hannah (Skipper). The central sextet, all women from the north who cannot have children of their own, are trapped in a bureaucratic limbo. As they interact, the women reveal their motives for wanting a child, and in so doing each unintentionally suggests how she would function as a mother. Nan, Sayles’s ugly American, is abrasive, suspicious, racist, a petty thief, and a fabricator. Psychologically, Nan is the most intriguing member of the group. Jennifer has wealth but needs a human touch because her husband is strident and overbearing. Eileen, an Irish immigrant now living in Boston, wants the Irish Catholic ideal: a child who will become part of her own extended family. Gayle, a recovering alcoholic, born-again Christian, and the oldest member of the group, believes she has reached a point in her life where she is mature enough to care for a child. Leslie, a tough-talking New Yorker

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who works in publishing, wants to bring up a child by herself, free from male intrusion. Skipper, an exercise and ﬁtness devote, lost three children to infant birth defects. The sextet spends the day wandering around—they go to the beach, to restaurants, to the Mercado—sometimes together, sometimes alone. Each longs for the telephone call that will end their biological suffering by allowing the lucky woman who receives the call to buy a baby, a commodity worth almost anything. Surrounding this core group are local characters that signify the complex realities of the culture in which the women from the north have planted themselves; of course, most of them take little notice of where they are, and therefore their six stories are small pieces within a larger cultural context. In his compelling essay, “The Transamerican Trail to Cerca del Cielo: John Sayles and the Aesthetics of Multilingual Cinema,” Joshua L. Miller underscores the signiﬁcant of setting within Sayles’s non–English language ﬁlms: “Unlike much recent bilingual cinema and literature, Sayles’s ﬁlms are set primarily in rural areas or in small towns. The communities he portrays are not composed of recently relocated immigrants, but the inheritors of long-standing cultural interaction” (123). Casa de los Babys features an intriguing role reversal: the six women are the relocated characters. Some of them have been waiting for more than two months for adoption papers to be processed. Sayles opens the ﬁlm not with images of the women from the north, but instead he focuses attention on the indigenous people. After the opening sequence in the nursery, Sayles shifts to a handheld shot looking down an alley, an obvious image of entrapment. Three children emerge from hiding places where they have spent the night. Immediately they are shooed away by an adult. These children, reminiscent of characters from Luis Buñeul’s Los Olvidados, are unsentimental and they give the ﬁlm a pessimistic undercurrent. Sayles then moves to the colonias high above the city, where Asunción (Vanessa Martinez) prepares breakfast. The opening credits appear over images of workers steaming out of the hills toward the city. On top of these images, Sayles uses soundtrack music to describe the condition of the workers. Roughly translated to “Face to the Wall,” the mournful lyrics explain how difﬁcult it is to get up day after day. This sequence, which visually deﬁnes the separation between the people who live in the colonias or on the street and the sextet of women, concludes with an image of a man cleaning the pool at Posada Santa Marta. Sayles’s opening reveals the multiple layers he will present within the ﬁlm, but he does so without ﬂourish and without presenting any of the primary actresses cast for the ﬁlm, the people most ﬁlmgoers would recognize. Once Sayles’s camera arrives inside Posada Santa Marta, Señora Muñoz stands near a young man sleeping on a bench. She glances at him with disdain; he is just another man looking for work. Clearly, Señora Muñoz cares little for the unemployed, even if they are her fellow countrymen. Moreover, some of the American women, Nan in particular, recognized the indigenous people who are out of work as lazy, indulgent. Diómedes (Bruno Birchir), however, stands in opposition to North American stereotypes of the unemployed. He dresses well, speaks with an educated tongue, and comes off as earnest in his appeal for work. But Señora Muñoz dismisses him—“Nothing is available,” she says. Diómedes ﬁlters through the rest of the ﬁlm, guiding Skipper and Jennifer on a tour of an old fort, asking for work at various places, dreaming of Philadelphia, “the cradle of liberty,” and counting on the state lottery for ﬁnancial salvation. What makes Diómedes intriguing is his ordinariness. He suffers from the backlash of a globalized economy; his country has no work for him. Sayles cuts away from him to Rubén (Héctor Mújica), a waiter at Posada Santa Marta,

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This detailed medium shot from Casa de los Babys (2003) is constructed in open form. Sayles’s mise-en-scène emphasizes what these two women now face—motherhood. Susan Lynch, as Eileen, left, and Marcia Gay Harden, as Nan, are emotional opposites. Eileen is full of emotion and she worries about what kind of a mother she will be. Even her hands suggest her nervous concern. Nan knows what kind of mother she will be, and it shows on her stony face. She will make sure her baby grows up properly. The bag of disposable dippers placed between the two women breaks the frame in half and further separates them physically and emotionally.

as he prepares a table for breakfast. Behind him, Skipper, dressed in a swim suit and wrapped in a towel, passes and offers a reserved greeting. This image is intriguing because the camera remains on Rubén, rather than Daryl Hannah’s Skipper. Visually, Rubén is the dominate ﬁgure within the mise-en-scène. Once Gayle and Leslie arrive for breakfast, the women from the north take over the frame. Still, Sayles never allows his background characters to disappear, to become ciphers. After all, their stories carry as much meaning as the tribulations of the sextet, perhaps more because they exist on the margins both ﬁguratively and literally. Local people are the ﬁrst and last characters seen on screen; therefore, the would-be mothers function inside their stories. Each of the primary female character displays traits that reveal who they are. Sayles also matches his mise-en-scène to each personality, especially when one woman occupies a single shot. Skipper’s appearance is the ﬁrst indication that the women from the north are out of place. She enters the frame from the right and crosses to the left, and then exits the frame. Normally, a character in psychological balance that is connected to the narrative enters from left to right, just as western eyes read a book. Skipper’s entrance suggests something is out of sync with her character; moreover, her position at the rear of the frame, further reducing her presence, hints at an alienation she displays throughout the entire ﬁlm. Critics of Casa de los Babys zeroed in once again on what they describe as Sayles’s lack of visual imagination; rather, Sayles adheres to the cinematic tenants of stylistic realism in this picture. Not only is the narrative straightforward but the ﬁlm’s subtext, the

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globalization of commodities, including children, exists, and therefore Sayles chose not to clutter his visual composition with unnecessary distractions. As a counter example to this criticism, Limbo’s second act demonstrates how Sayles creates a speciﬁc place to visually illustrate a Londonesque-like naturalism. In Casa de los Babys, fate is not described visually, even though chance, the luck of the draw, is a fundamental part of Sayles’s ﬁlm narrative. A compelling example of Sayles’s visual construction can be seen as Nan leaves her lawyer’s ofﬁce. When speaking with the lawyer, Nan places herself in the corner of the room, illustrating her boxed-in condition and internal frustration. When she leaves the ofﬁce, however, Sayles cuts to a long shot of her passing though a corridor. Nan’s quest for adoption papers has been endless; she has been waiting for two months, and she suggests that her husband might have to get involved: “You don’t want my husband to get his teeth into this. George sued the phone company once, and by the time it was over he’d cost them—.” The ofﬁce mise-en-scène reveals Nan’s true position and it functions as an anticipatory setup for the long shot concluding the sequence in which Nan walks toward the camera, passing through an ornate, ofﬁcial looking space. The walls, ceiling, and overhead lights diminish her position within the frame. The tediousness process, exhaustion, and lack of personal control she feels are complimented by this shot. Here, Nan’s search for a baby is overshadowed by the corridor of this governmental building. Nan is almost lost within the frame. A seemingly endless succession of doors, overhead ﬁxtures, and empty space illustrates the system outside her immediate control. Jennifer, the youngest and most fragile of the group, appears alone in a shot outside a restaurant where the women have assembled to eat lunch. Inside, the others brieﬂy talk about her. Gayle expresses sympathy for Jennifer because she and her husband, Henley, “almost broke up.” Leslie displays no support: “Yeah. House in Newport, estate outside D.C., they got a boat bigger than my apartment.” All the conversation inside the restaurant is taken practically word-for-word from Sayles’s original story. The exterior set-up, featuring Jennifer in a medium shot, contrasts with the shot selection Sayles uses inside the restaurant. As the women banter back and forth, Sayles employs quick cuts to connect their words and reactions. Outside, Jennifer stands speaking into her cell phone, trying to bring Henley, who is at home, up-to-date. Behind her the crisp and vibrant colors of a market stand covered by a canopy, a wall marked with grafﬁti, and two Mexican wrestling posters add background life to the shot. In the short story, Sayles creates Henley’s voice—business-like speech, drained of emotion. He asks Jennifer for a “progress report” (144). He belittles her because she has not secured a baby. In the ﬁlm, Sayles relies on Maggie Gyllenhaal to carry the scene. He uses a handheld camera to enhance the actress’s emotional veracity; the shot becomes uncomfortable because Gyllenhaal exposes Jennifer’s emotions. She reaches across her body with her left arm and grasps her right arm, a gesture suggesting her need for contact, comfort, which Henley does not provide— he wants the job ﬁnished. In an attempt to change the subject, Jennifer tells him about a lizard in her room. Henley hangs up on her. Completely realistic, the shot construction illustrates Jennifer’s condition. Because of her wealth, she is separated from the other women—class lines within the sextet are as obvious as the differences between the North American women and the indigenous workers. By placing Jennifer in the frame alone with the wall behind her and the camera positioned in front of her, Sayles features her as both emotionally exhausted (Gyllenhall’s reaction to Henley’s hang-up is especially effective) and trapped. Jennifer has nowhere to go. In the short story, Henley’s aggression is more pronounced. Because Jennifer fails to

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call at two-thirty, he lets her know: “It’s a quarter of three!” Henley’s language indicates that adoption is a business deal, nothing more. Jennifer says, “We are not dealing with commodities here” (145). By removing Henley’s voice in the cinematic narrative, Sayles draws attention to Jennifer’s struggle for emotional stability. She desperately wants a child and seems dedicated to the task. But, because of her emotional ﬂuctuations, Sayles’s screenplay asks if she is actually prepared to raise a child? Or will Henley take over, treating the adoption like a stock transaction? Inside the restaurant the rest of the women also talk about children, both directly and indirectly. Sayles frames each woman in a medium-close shot. He cuts between speakers, at times focusing all attention on one woman. Nan ends up dominating the conversation, moving from syndromes, to childrearing, to capitalism. Her racism is uncontained: “Down here you have to worry about all those syndromes—whether the mother was intoxicated—And drugs—crack and all that.... And then there’s genes.... You have a time bomb ticking and never know.... You get dealt a bad hand you can always train it out of them.... Educate, inﬂuence, discipline—whatever you call it. Raising children. Whatever they carry from their parents—laziness, violence, promiscuity.... You look at a culture, its problems, some of it’s got to be genetic. The people come to the U.S., and in a couple of generations they are more civilized.... Look, we have a capitalistic form of government. If there are going to be winners, then there have to be losers. You don’t want your child to be a loser, do you?”

Nan’s rant begins with her assessment of the host country, a place she loathes, and concludes with home, the United States, a place she mythologizes. The juxtaposition embedded within her speech illustrates Nan’s belief in cultural and social boundaries, and clearly deﬁned borders. Nan’s language is assertive, direct, and oddly masculine, not unlike the language Sayles provides for Henley in the short story. Both Henley and Nan speak like overly aggressive business people, entrepreneurs seeking a sound investment. What Henley and Nan do not understand is that their language, the language of business and discipline, stands in opposition to the care necessary for raising a child successfully. Gayle, an older and reserved mentor for some of the other women, attempts to counter Nan’s perspective. When Gayle appears on screen, for the most part, she is with one of the other women. A recovering alcoholic and a born-again Christian, Gayle is, perhaps, the most unusual member of the baby-buying sextet. She wants to keep everything calm, especially herself. When Sayles does place her alone in the frame, away from the other women, Gayle attends an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. This sequence follows Nan’s march through the corridor of the lawyer’s building. Sayles cuts from Nan to a close-up of a local man who announces, in Spanish, his dependence on alcohol. The camera pulls away from him, pans to the left and pauses on another man who is running the meeting; it then continues to pan left until it locates Gayle. She stands up, and in a reserved voice says, “I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but my name is Gayle and I am an alcoholic.” Unlike the sense of powerlessness produced by the images of Nan in the lawyer’s ofﬁce and in the corridor as she leaves, this shot, which shows Gayle alone, does not suggest displacement. Gayle is not alone even though no one around her understands what she is saying. In the lawyer’s ofﬁce sequence, Nan is cut-off because of the language barrier, among other things. Gayle’s words, on the other hand, appeal to people who do not understand English. Sayles uses these isolation shots to describe each woman in subtle ways. Gayle is a nurturing presence, open and willing to connect. Nan is the opposite, closed off and angry. Sayles’s mise-en-scène illuminates the psychological conditions of these women with unobtrusive creativity.

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Leslie, the one American who speaks Spanish, interacts with the others but because of her urban sensibility always seems to stand apart. Leslie closes the lunch sequence by declaring she will eat the food as it is served and not worry about any gastrointestinal consequences. For the ﬁlm, Sayles adds an additional dialogue exchange for Leslie when all the women go to the beach. Leslie refuses to wear a bathing suit, which draws Nan’s ire. Not wearing a bathing suit, Nan says, is not normal. Biologically, Leslie is capable of having a child. What she does not want is sex with a man. While she is on the beach, Leslie deliberately removes herself from the others, and she stares at the surf. Sayles frames her in a full shot with blue sky as background, an image announcing Leslie’s independence. Leslie’s clothing is plain, uninviting, an attempt to make herself unattractive. Therefore, Nan cannot understand why Reynaldo (Guillermo Iván), a beach boy with an eye for woman, approaches her. He presents himself as a gigolo, asking her to swim, asking Leslie to go clubbing, then asking her to “bone.” Leslie tells Reynaldo that she has “socks older” than him. Even when she is framed alone, Leslie is not helpless, not emotionally distraught, not compensating with exercise. Leslie’s urban sensibility makes her the harshest of the sextet, a city woman who likes repartee and who does not care what other people think about her. Of all the women, Eileen generates the most empathetic response. Because she is a recent immigrant from Ireland, Eileen seems at a disadvantage in the baby quest. Her husband has been laid off, and she earns the family’s primary income. Yet she is in a foreign country trying to adopt a baby. Twice Eileen is shown counting her money inside her room, removed from the others, who all have an economic advantage over her. At each meal,

Susan Lynch’s performance in Casa de los Babys (2003) demonstrates how talented this Irish actress is. Her performance in The Secret of Roan Inish was silent, for the most part, ripe with gestures and movement. As one of the women from the north in Casa de los Babys, Lynch, who plays Eileen, who moved to Boston from her native Ireland, conveys the pain and the hope of a mother waiting to adopt.

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Eileen ﬁgures out a way to save money. At one point, Jennifer notices her eating habits and pays for her dinner. Eileen is comfortable with the others, and her hotel room functions as her sanctuary, a place where she can dream, count her money, and hope. Unlike the conversation Nan has with her lawyer or Jennifer has with Henley, Eileen’s monologue, directed at Asunción, who understands an occasional English word or phrase, is rich with desire and grounded by a mother’s love. In his theoretical reading of this scene, Mark Bould, author of The Cinema of John Sayles, ignores the human impulse at the core of Eileen’s attempt to communicate her willingness to become a mother: “Her desire for a child is expressed as a potent fetishisation of an intimate mother/daughter relationship, perhaps of a kind she herself never experienced among numerous siblings. And it is this ‘human ability’ to fetishise, ‘to project value onto a material object, repress the fact that the projection has taken place, and then interpret the object as the autonomous source of the value’ (Mulvey 1996: 127), that capital itself depends upon” (173). Reducing Eileen’s openness, which Susan Lynch communicates with élan, to fetishisation diminishes Sayles’s humanism. On ﬁlm and in the story, Sayles presents two mothers attempting to communicate across a linguistic barrier. At certain times, the women seem to reach each other, empathic moments that challenge verbal borders. Sayles uses a similar technique in both Lone Star and Men with Guns, albeit to a lesser degree. The humanness at the center of the sequence has to do with character construction. Each woman desires matriarchal responsibility, but Asunción gave her daughter, Esmeralda, to the adoption agency. As Joshua Miller suggests, a “global system that pursues imbalanced and unrepresentative economic gain through willful ignorance of the political and cultural implications courts resentment and reaction” (140), but here the opposite occurs. Asunción and Eileen work to connect. Each dreams an unlikely dream—Asunción imagines Esmeralda’s new life; Eileen images the life her daughter will have. Speculating on what might be allows each woman to escape her social reality for a moment, to indulge in romantic possibility, and to believe that their choices are sound. In the shot story, Eileen is a woman from Boston. Casting Susan Lynch, who played the role of the Selkie woman in The Secret of Roan Inish, contributes an added dimension to the interaction between these women—each has a Catholic background, each understands work, and each is removed from the North American woman. Asunción and Eileen’s dialogue exchange parallels language Sayles used in his original story. In the ﬁlm, of course, emotion is displayed by the actresses; in the story, the narrator describes Eileen’s tears, and Asunción’s hope that her daughter “was chosen by a mother like you” (157). In his DVD commentary, Sayles explains the pleasure and the difﬁculty of shooting a long sequence in which actresses must expose themselves emotionally and maintain a rhythm within the context of the scene. Vanessa Martinez and Susan Lynch physically covey the honest emotion that the story describes from a third-person point-of-view, rendering a mixture of elation and pain that makes this scene far stronger on screen. Sayles’s decision to present each woman within single shots indicates of how enclosed each one feels, even when interacting with the rest of the group. Although they share a common goal, the women are on singular missions; indeed, they are, at some level, in competition with each other. In their sequence, Asunción and Eileen compose and relate what amounts to ﬁctional accounts of their children’s lives. Hope anchors each story. Although they have some points of contact—large families, working backgrounds—Eileen is better off simply because she has made it to America. Her story, set on a snowy day in Boston, ends when she says, “This is ignoring the fact that I’m supposed to work, right? That I’m

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the one with the job.” Reality blunts her reverie, but only slightly. Asunción stops making the bed in order to sit and listen to the Irish woman’s story. Sayles shoots her in proﬁle in order to conceal her immediate emotional response. Eileen, on the other hand, faces the camera, exposing her feelings directly to Asunción and Sayles’s camera. Asunción does not understand her, but she intuits the signiﬁcance of her words. Asunción’s story is harsher than Eileen’s. Combined, her impoverished condition and coaxing by locals nuns helped her decide to give Esmeralda up for adaptation. Asunción tells Eileen in Spanish that she always selects a “new” mother when groups arrive from the north and stay at the hotel; she selects a “good mother” and pretends the woman is Esmeralda’s mother. Eileen, of course, is a “good one.” The story Eileen spins might come true; Asunción’s fantasy will not. In this sequence, Sayles seldom positions the two women within the frame together. When Eileen speaks, Asunción appears in the mirror behind her. When Asunción speaks, Eileen is almost always outside the frame. Sayles uses separate shots to illustrate the distance between these characters, a visual trope found throughout Casa de los Babys. In tears, Asunción exits Eileen’s room after telling her that she hopes Esmeralda has a mother like Eileen. Unable to understand Asunción’s language, Eileen explains that she did not understand any of her words. “I’m sorry,” she says, as Asunción leaves the room. At moments in this scene, the two women seem to share a connection, absent a common language. In truth, each cleaves to a sustaining dream, something that keeps each mother going. The visual and linguistic separation Sayles establishes within the scene signiﬁes how these two people, who seem so emotionally intertwined, are separated by language, social position, and economic opportunity. Casa de los Babys separates and singles out speciﬁc characters to indicate the complexity of the lives of all the individuals featured in the ﬁlm, not simply the North American women. The stories of the six women seeking children seem to take primacy within the narrative. However, Sayles surrounds the women with locals who complicate their adoption attempts: Señora Muñoz, proprietor of La Posada Santa Marta; Búho ( Juan Carlos Vives), her son and handyman who would rather read Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and talk about a socialistic overthrow than work; Ernesto (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.), the local lawyer who manages the adoption process; Tito (Ignacio de Anda), a child of the streets, and his two buddies; Celia (Martha Higareda), the ﬁfteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy woman (Tony Marcin) who carries Reynaldo’s baby; and Diómedes, who wants to win the lottery so he can take his family to Philadelphia, where his dreams reside. Each of these ancillary characters serves the screenplay and at times challenges the women from the north. The connection between Señora Muñoz and Ernesto is complicated, for he seems to want to help with the adoptions, yet at the same time, the longer the women stay, the more money Muñoz makes. Indeed, when he has had enough of Nan, he calls Señora Muñoz to make sure Nan’s bill is paid in full; moreover, he asks her how much longer she wants Nan to stay. In the story, Sayles makes their connection explicit: “The rate the Ministry has set is a joke, and the little that Señora Muñoz shares with him for strongly suggesting that clients stay at her posada—“(153). In the ﬁlm, however, their relationship is implied. Both Muñoz and Ernesto need the women from the north in order to make money. Búho, the faux revolutionary, countervails their capitalistic agendas, at least until he needs beer money. In Sayles’s short story, Búho’s feelings about the “yanqui bastards” and his mother’s willingness to house them is direct: “She is so fucking proud

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about the location and the sparkling-clean lobby ... but no pride in race, no pride in country, and it’s that attitude, that internalized inferiority complex that Fanon wrote about from Algeria but that applies here in spades, that keeps us at each other’s throats instead of confronting the real enemy” (139). Of course, Búho is no political psychiatrist, the Fanonian ideal, he is a stationary revolutionary, more comfortable after a few beers, and he is an inept handyman. On screen, Sayles has Búho appear a few more times than he does in the story—once at a restaurant where he and his friends drunkenly argue about his anti-imperialist sentiments, and at the end of the ﬁlm when his mother sees him sleeping off his beery night in a chair near where she ﬁrst saw Diómedes. While Búho comes off as a fatuous revolutionary, by invoking Fanon he is able to comment on the “economic reality, inequality, and enormous disparities in lifestyles” that he sees around him (The Wretched of the Earth 5). Fanon, of course, argued for cultural autonomy, cultural independence, conditions that countervail a global economic system. Like Búho, Celia is dominated by her mother. In her case, however, it is far more understandable because of her age. What is telling, though, is how her mother ignores her. Speaking with a social worker, she dismisses the possibility of an abortion for Celia. The camera lingers on Celia as her mother speaks, and her face indicates that an abortion would be her choice, if she had a say in the matter. When her mother establishes adoption arrangements, Celia is not part of the conversation—her mother treats her as if she does not exist. In the one scene she shares with Reynaldo, Celia never mentions their baby; indeed, she is an isolated teenager, a powerless child. Often, Sayles isolates Celia to illustrate how alone she is. The last time she appears on screen she rubs her stomach while looking at herself in a mirror; in her hand she holds a magazine featuring a woman about her age with her muscular mid-riff exposed. Celia, of course, is pregnant, and this concluding shot suggests her immaturity, but it also suggests she is a dreamer, like many of the characters in the ﬁlm. More important, Sayles uses Celia to show that teen pregnancy does not recognize economic class. Tito and Diómedes are dreamers, too. Sayles created Diómedes speciﬁcally for the ﬁlm; he is not part of the short story. Tito’s character appears in both narratives; in the story, though, he is called Pito, and his two friends are identiﬁed as the Garza brothers. In both narratives, they inhale spray paint, an intoxicant that takes them away from their street existence. Diómedes dreams of winning the lottery—he needs money to pay for an airline ticket and a counterfeit passport. During the concluding sequence of the ﬁlm, he watches a televised lottery program through a barred window. Needless to say, luck fails him. Tito ends his night gazing at the night sky as meteors cross-cross the heavens, his face smudged with traces of the gold paint, his right hand clutching the children’s book Eileen bought for him at the market. Two dreams, one fuelled by paint fumes, the other by ridiculous odds; two lives, one educated, the other illiterate. Tito and Diómedes are affected by economics, social conditions, and need to survive. In the monograph published for the 48th Thessalonki International Film Festival, which honored Sayles, Hector Apostolopoulos, writing about Casa de los Babys, suggests that the difference between the two worlds depicted in the ﬁlm—the American women, and the “other” society composed of the ancillary characters—creates a ﬂaw within Sayles’s narrative: “His treatment of the local society consists of ﬁve different subplots which are not fully developed, nor are they free of the superﬁciality of a well-meaning, but essentially uninvolved and alienated outsider” (177). Sayles uses the people around the sextet to comment on how chance functions in life. Tito and his companions, for example, are

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abandoned children, and therefore any of the American women, individual ﬂaws notwithstanding, would provide a better life for an adopted baby than a life on the street. Many of the “other” characters are economically disadvantaged, but Sayles is not a heavy-handed political ﬁlmmaker and does not valorize them because of their social status. The scene featuring Búho and his friends signiﬁes how difﬁcult it is to establish real social change. Maurizio Rubinstein’s camera swirls around the three drunken friends as they argue about the American presence in their country. Búho announces that they hurt their country “economically, psychologically, and politically.” Yet Sayles’s visual design indicates that this argument is old, one that has happened again and again. Búho, of course, is doing nothing for his country—talk is cheap. The American women, even those who do not want to be there, such as Nan, add something to the economy. Moreover, they have a capacity to save an orphaned child. Celia exempliﬁes a neglected child, albeit one with a comfortable life. Collectively, the ancillary characters add to the larger issues Sayles addresses in Casa de los Babys: How do people become who they are? How do people live? How does someone succeed when others have no chance from an early age? How do luck and chance factor into an individual’s life? Taken together, both the Americans and the “other” characters push these questions. Sayles closes the ﬁlm with a thematic montage underscoring the alienation of many of his characters as he juxtaposes some of them with television images promoting luck and chance as essential elements of success. Sayles focuses on a horoscope program and the week’s lottery selection. Here Sayles’s ﬁlmmaking skills are in evidence, and while the images he uses are realistic, they are also poetic: the mediated images on television programs are at a vast distance from the lives Sayles’s characters lead. At the conclusion of Casa de los Babys, Sayles does not reveal what will happen to any of his characters; instead, he invites an open interpretation, but hints contained within the ﬁlm’s mise-en-scène indicate that most of the characters will not achieve their dreams; indeed, that luck, chance, and fate conspire to shatter dreams. The sequence itself is a complicated piece of ﬁlmmaking, combining cinematography, sound, and editing. After Tito and his friends have inhaled spray paint fumes, Sayles cuts to an image of Don Mercurio (Felipe Fernández del Paso, the ﬁlm’s Production Designer), the horoscope presenter. In his DVD commentary, Sayles discusses the rhythm he strives to construct as an editor, and the pace of this sequence illustrates what he wants to accomplish and how his editing skills have evolved since Return of the Secaucus Seven. He opens with Don Mercurio, then cuts to “the Lucky Lady herself,” an attractive woman who selects the numbered balls after they roll through an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraception. Sayles links the two television images with an establishing shot. Seen through a protective gate, the televisions are inside an electronics store, consumer items most of the inhabitants of the town cannot afford. The programs, though, attract a street crowd, which includes Diómedes clutching his lottery ticket, his passport to the future. This portion of Casa de los Babys concludes the single day that occupies the bulk of the ﬁlm’s narrative. Sayles cuts between Diómedes and the lottery program. Don Mercurio is occasionally heard in voice-over. Sayles’s edits are quick but not rushed. As the tension builds around the lottery numbers, Sayles inserts a non-diegetic portion of his soundtrack, Canción de Orefo, the theme from Marcel Camus’s Orfeu Negro (1959), Black Orphus, which, among other things, helped introduce Latin American music to North America. As Sayles indicates in his commentary, the music he selected, performed by Los Zaﬁros, with lyrics sung by a Cuban vocalist in Portuguese, changes the tone and enhances the rhythm of his ﬁnal montage. Sayles selected Canción

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de Orefo before editing the sequence because, as he says, it was the right length, was ripe with emotion, and was wistful. Within this concluding sequence, Sayles uses the camera to focus on his individual characters—always alone in the frame—and to suggest that even though they are seen individually, they have been on a journey together on this single day. He begins with an overhead shot of Gayle kneeling next to her bed praying; using a lap dissolve, he connects her with Eileen, sitting next to her bed staring at what is left of her money. Sayles has the camera rise from the other side of the bed, effectively taking attention away from the cash and focusing on Eileen’s predicament. Her image gives way to Skipper on the ﬂoor of her room doing sit-ups. Around her are various pieces of workout equipment—hand weights, stretching bands—and a backpack-like baby carrier, captured by the camera as it moves away from her. Next, Sayles shows an adoption ofﬁcial working on a document titled “Solicitud de Adopción,” to which she attaches photos of a baby. Señora Muñoz leaves her ofﬁce, and she passes Búho passed out in a chair; she does not conceal her disgust with her son. Don Mercurio reappears on the screen, talking about the mysteries of the cosmos. Asunción sleeps with her head on the table inside her colonia shack; her food practically untouched, an indication of her physical and emotional exhaustion. Another dissolve reveals Celia standing before her bedroom mirror wishing her mid-section was as tight as a model’s. Sayles transitions again using both the lottery program and the horoscope show, which fades into Leslie sitting up on her hotel room bed bathed in the light from a television, suggesting she is watching Don Mercurio. Sayles’s camera moves from the rightside of the frame and glides across Jennifer, reading a book titled First-Time Parents. The ﬁnal image is of Nan. Using a low-angle shot, Sayles shows her standing above an open case as she examines a child’s doll, looking at its legs and up under its dress—her expression indicating that something is wrong with the toy; the lighting in this brief shot is eerie, different than any of the other women, as the primary lighting source comes from the open case, creating a shadow on the wall behind her, illustrating, once again, the multiple issues Nan always deals with. In the short story, Nan wants to bleach the doll in order to “bring the right color out” (167). Sayles closes the sequence with competing visuals and words that underscore life’s inscrutability and the nature of luck. Television images from the lottery show and the horoscope program blend as Don Mercurio says, “There are forces in life we can neither explain nor control” at the moment the lottery balls turn against Diómedes. The adoption ofﬁcial stands between two cribs with forms in each hand; her gestures suggest she does not know which baby matches which form, one more hint that chance can inﬂuence existence. Sayles cuts to an image of Diómedes holding his lottery ticket, and then the camera pans across the winning numbers seen on the television screen. Don Mercurio says, “You have unlimited potential; life offers as many opportunities as there are stars in the sky.” Diómedes tosses his losing ticket into a pile of other useless tickets, which the wind then blows down the street; dejected, he walks into the night alone. The concluding images of this ambitious sequence are of Tito and his two friends, now signiﬁcantly stoned from hufﬁng paint. They walk along a beautiful shoreline at night where working ﬁshing boats are moored; his two friends crawl under a dock while Tito stays sitting on the beach, still clutching his book, his face marked by gold paint, his spacey eyes focused in the night sky dappled with a million stars and a luminous quarter moon punctuated by gold and silver meteors. Tito drops backward onto the beach in his intoxicated bliss. Sayles’s camera elevates slightly and then the sequence fades to black. Sayles ends his short story with the interior thoughts of Doña Mercedes, one of the

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nurses who care for the babies before adoption. She hovers over a baby that will leave tomorrow, saying, ‘Who knows, mi pequeña, what is coming for you tomorrow? Maybe something wonderful.” Casa de los Babys concludes on a similar open note: what will happen next? The next morning, a cab rushes up to the entrance of the baby hospital, and Eileen exits and dashes from the backseat and up the stairs. Her dream has been fulﬁlled. The camera pans slowly to the right of the frame, where Tito tries in vain to sell his book to people rushing to work. Inside, Eileen pauses when she sees Nan sitting on a couch with two bags of disposable dippers next to her and the baby doll, now wrapped in plastic, on her lap. Nan’s gestures and words indicate her anger and her desire to exit the country as fast as possible. Eileen is genuinely surprised that she has been selected. Nan takes credit for everything, saying to Eileen that she lit a ﬁre under her lawyer and “put in a good word for you too.” Eileen looks away from Nan, down and to the left of the frame. Nan waits for her reward, often looking toward the nursery door. Full of emotion, Eileen, so passionate about having an adopted child, mutters, “In two minutes my life will never be the same.” And then she begins to weep. Nan, however, maintains her stony resolve. Eileen looks up and says, “Her name is going to be Esmeralda.” Nan does not react, which suggests her disgust with the name. Sayles cuts to the nursery. Doña Mercedes, in the foreground, holds one of the babies; behind her is a younger nurse with the other child. Doña Mercedes says, “Who knows what lies ahead for you, mi pequeña. Maybe a wonderful life,” an exact replication from the short story. Together the nurses walk toward the open door. Sayles uses slow-motion to focus on them as they walk through the doorway, the camera at a slightly elevated angle. Before they pass through the doorway, Sayles freezes the image, and the closing credits begin to roll. Although Sayles adds some hope at the conclusion of the ﬁlm—Eileen and Asunción connecting as mothers, for instance—chance still lingers in this last image, which is meant to be as confounding as the conclusion of Limbo. One of the babies will land in Eileen’s hands, and, it is presumed, have a life anchored by a dedicated and loving mother. The other, of course, will become Nan’s and she has announced how her child will be trained. Casa de los Babys did not perform especially well for Sayles at the box ofﬁce, returning about $500,000 domestically in the ﬁrst year of release. Critics found the ﬁlm to be slight, not among his best work. Still, the ﬁlm offers glimpses of the unintended effects of global economics, class-consciousness, matriarchal loss, the politics of adoption, and American entitlement. It does all this with efﬁciency, solid storytelling, and by combining stylistic realism with a progressive sensibility. As with all of Sayles’s ﬁlms, Casa de los Babys presents a world teeming with individual stories that elude easy theoretical classiﬁcation. Working in Mexico for a second time, Sayles showed his willingness to bring his previously unpublished short story to life as a ﬁlm. Within a year, Sayles would take another unusual chance, as he attempted to revive a dormant American ﬁlm genre, overt political cinema, in the time of George W. Bush.

8

Human Geography: Business-asUsual Politics, Stagolee’s Blues Redux, and a Commitment to Independence Silver City Postcards from Underground At the time we started to make it, the political conversation in the United States was kind of non-existent. There was a lot of tension and intimidation against anybody critical of what was going on, and a lot of [Silver City] came out of just my feelings about what’s happening in the mainstream media in the last 10 or 15 years. That combination of intimidation and the fact that the mainstream media is owned by corporations who are looking at the bottom line, and who are a lot more worried about their numbers than telling the truth. It has meant that nobody can rely on the mainstream media to have any idea of what’s going on anymore. I mean, when the Gulf War started, you know, the Iraqi War started, I had to watch the BBC. There just was nothing on American television that was telling you anything about what was going on. —John Sayles, Seven Oaks

John Sayles has written about America since 1975, when he ﬁrst published “I-80 Nebraska” in The Atlantic Monthly. Since then, Sayles’s work has relentlessly examined American culture. His sharp social analysis, couched in social realism, covers broad territory, including race, class, history, memory, ideology, and politics. Silver City (2004), Sayles’s ﬁfteenth feature, his most overtly political ﬁlm, adds corporate media entrenchment to the list by exposing how corporate inﬂuence poisons politics and smothers conventional media outlets. Just before the release of the ﬁlm, Sayles participated in MoveOn.org’s 10 Weeks campaign, a collection of weekly political commercials presented by well-known directors and actors, including Matt Damon, Rob Reiner, Richard Linklater, Scarlett Johanssen, Al Franken, Martin Sheen, Margaret Cho, Darren Aronofsky, and Allison Anders. The goal of these weekly installments was to unseat President George W. Bush. Sayles’s commercial featured regular people discussing four years under Bush. Likewise, many well known artists used their celebrity to work against a repeat of the 258

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Bush/Cheney presidency. Bruce Springsteen helped spearhead the Vote for Change Tour, which included Keb’ Mo’, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Bright Eyes, and My Morning Jacket. Of course, this powerful line-up failed to challenge entrenched right-wing authority. Still, this unprecedented collection of talent worked together for change, rather than give in to the cynical politics of self-interest. Silver City is about the benign yet malignant power of self-interest, manifest in the character of Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson), ersatz rancher, media tycoon, and mine owner with a large disrespect for democratic government. Benteen stands at the corrupt apex of a triangle formed by unrestrained capitalism, wealth-based politics, and extreme personal proﬁt. In the introduction to Silver City and Other Screenplays, Sayles writes about working as a meatpacker in the mid–1970s, when shop inspections were common and serious. His language hints at what Benteen represents without speciﬁcally identifying him: So years later when I start to read things about the fast-food business, start to see items in the paper about accidents and illegal immigrants getting hurt and killed in packing houses and construction sites, it feels like we’re moving backwards. What gives? And then digging into the whole mythic creation of competitiveness and deregulation, of the super-patriotic captains of industry exporting jobs and importing Third World wages and working conditions—and the mainstream media treating it like a phenomenon, like a forest ﬁre caused by lightning or a heavy snowfall—it seemed like a clear call to make a ﬁlm that connected a few dots. Yes, Shit Happens, but a lot of it happens thanks to highly organized campaigns of disinformation and inﬂuence-buying [3].

Benteen’s system generates disinformation and purchases political power. In a manner, he signiﬁes the “phenomenon” of deregulation. In a metonymic sense, within Silver City’s narrative, Benteen equals corruption. Most intriguing, Benteen speaks on screen twice. Silver City, then, is not a Michael Moore–like polemic about corporate evil. The ﬁlm is Sayles’s ﬁfth large scale ensemble look at a geographic portion of contemporary America: City of Hope was set in rundown Hudson City, a dying small city in New Jersey; Lone Star, set in South West Texas, a border community threaded through by two cultures; Limbo, set in Port Henry, Alaska, a town poised to become the gateway to a wilderness theme park; Sunshine State, set in Plantation Island, Florida, an overlooked ocean front community ripe for a real estate update; and Silver City, set in Colorado, a state full of postcard perfect backdrops. Each of these ﬁlms examines political corruption and its impact on ordinary citizens, people so far removed from power that they take hypocrisy for granted. Limbo, Sunshine State, and Silver City also contain messages about the destruction of the physical world, an environmentalist impulse that complicates the choices characters make. Like the other ﬁlms, Silver City combines additional elements from recognizable genres— it is a murder mystery, a political ﬁlm, a newspaper movie, a contemporary western, and a satire. Critics were not receptive to Silver City, but Sayles’s story of illegal aliens, media moguls, washed-up journalists, political operatives, and the Rocky Mountain landscape is a narrative about human failing, weak government, ineffective media, and the limits of power, issues that should be part of the civic conversation. “Like so much of the American old left,” writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in The Chicago Reader commenting on Sayles, “he’s an aesthetic reactionary who doesn’t trust a plot or character he hasn’t shaken hands with many times before” (2). Rosenbaum claims he has grown tired of Sayles’s penchant for recycling “tried-and-true plot turns of a Raymond Chandler mystery” (2). But Silver City addresses how manufactured images, such as a man ﬁshing in Colorado, corrupt thinking. The ﬁlm’s narrative is constructed around four title cards: Richard

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Pilager Cares About Colorado; Richard Pilager Cares About the Family; Richard Pilager Cares About the American Worker; Richard Pilager Cares About You. The cards appear in black and white, direct statements designed for easy consumption—sound bites that reﬂect how ideas are communicated in an accelerated age. The title cards function as brief introductions to commercials, small prefaces designed to grab a viewer. In Silver City, however, each title card also introduces a complicating episode within Sayles’s screenplay, part of the complete story that contradicts each sound bite. While Sayles’s politics, which Rosenbaum says he agrees with, are clearly left-leaning, his narrative is not as simple and formulaic as his critics suggest. Silver City begins with Richard “Dickie” Pilager (Chris Cooper), a candidate for Governor of Colorado, making a television commercial touting his environmental platform at Arapajo Lake, Colorado. His language connects to the ﬁrst title card—he tells his television audience how much being outdoors means to him: “I always turn to Nature when I need to sort things out in my mind, to make sense of the world. But our environment is under siege—.” In real time, Dickie ruminates on the language he is supposed to use. “Under siege, under ﬁre, under attack—?” he says to no one in particular. Right away, Sayles establishes the fracture between the mediated, manipulated world of television and the behind-the-scene reality of a fumbling candidate dressed up for image recognition. Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss), his campaign manager, corrects him as he closes a television deal via cell phone: “It’s not under anything, it’s endangered. So buy ten of the twenty second spots and put a hold on a dozen more—.” Raven is a pro, fast on his feet, and willing to make snap decisions. Dickie continues to struggle with his lines as an aid hands him a ﬁshing pole, an essential prop. Dickie casts his line into the lake, but he hooks something, something large—a dead body. Raven evacuates the candidate, now visibly angry: “Somebody’s messing with us, Chuck—You ﬁnd out who it is, you cut em off at the knees! Raven starts to clean up the mess, and Silver City kicks into gear. The opening scene is a satirical send-up of the relationship between George W. Bush and Karl Rove, commonly referred to as Bush’s “brain.” Cooper mimics Bush’s lackadaisical approach perfectly, and Dreyfuss both looks and sounds like a political operative who lacks camera appeal. In Silver City, Dickie is the unimaginative pawn of a powerful political machine he thinks he understands. Silver City picks up where Sunshine State left off— land developers, corporate interests, and politicians collude to control whatever they can. What makes Silver City different, however, is how unappealing most of the characters are. Even the worst characters in Sunshine State seemed human. Silver City is about exploitation and pure greed. The manic gestures and convoluted speech of Dickie Pilager masks the dark core of corruption that Sayles suggests lies at the heart of Bush’s America. Worse, he suggests corrupt ideology can be packaged, exported, and consumed without any critical analysis from the American media. The critics who dismissed this picture focused on Dickie. According to A.O. Scott, “Dickie is an obvious and unkind (if also, at this point, somewhat dated) caricature of President Bush” (NYT 17 September). Rosenbaum goes further: Dickie Pilager—the front-runner and, for the story’s purposes, the only candidate—is meant to be a dead ringer for George Bush. Sayles clearly sees this character as a clueless, born-again frat boy, a puppet who’s continually at a loss for words—the closest thing this movie has to a running gag. To underscore the resemblance to Bush, Sayles sticks in Pilager’s father, a wizened pro from the Senate. If Sayles had persuaded me he knew anything about Bush, his background, or his entourage that isn’t already well-known, I might

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have felt more like laughing. He doesn’t even seem to understand that Bush uses his tortured syntax to his advantage, acknowledging it to roars of approval, as he did during his convention acceptance speech [www.chireader.com/2004].

That Dickie is a simulacrum for Bush is never disguised; more to the point, Sayles uses Dickie as a caricature, a fatuous pawn of Benteen’s corporate thrust—total control over the beautiful western landscape. Sayles’s ﬁlm asks an essential question: Why is a clown like Dickie being considered for public ofﬁce? Oddly, both Scott and Rosenbaum where swept up by the obvious, and neither pays much attention to Sayles’s deeper message: skeptical and discerning citizens are necessary to countervail the political climate created by empty media promotions and crippled news gathering agencies. In Silver City, sound bites mean substance. Most popular criticism ignores the parallel structure embedded within Sayles’s screenplay. Danny O’Brien (Danny Huston) and Dickie Pilager are a mismatched pair throughout the ﬁlm. Although they never share screen time, each character displays traits reminiscent of the other. Each has a boyish ﬁrst name. Each attempts to rebound from a bad experience. Each has an individual conversation with Wes Benteen, and he dispenses fatherly advice to both Dickie and Danny. Pilager is not evil, but he is rather dim, and Sayles plays up the candidate’s inability to speak from the opening of the ﬁlm. O’Brien, on the other hand, is too smart, too sassy for his own good. He sees himself as a marginalized individual who was wronged by a corrupt system. Dickie, too, has been marginalized; in his case, personal indulgence separated him from family, but he returned because he needed a structured system to support him, to run his campaign, to tell him what to say, to tell him how to behave spiritually, and, most important, what to think. Danny rekindles his passion for journalistic muckraking. The obvious distinction between these men is class, social position. Pilager has money, and therefore, he can avoid trouble. Once he ﬁnds his way into a problem, O’Brien cannot pull himself out. By the conclusion of Silver City, both Danny and Dickie experience signiﬁcant transformations. Danny O’Brien, former journalist turned private investigator for the See-More Detective Agency, occupies the center of Silver City. O’Brien functions as a Saylesian guideﬁgure, the everyman character moving from one narrative episode to the next. During the course of the ﬁlm, O’Brien experiences a renewal, as he gains knowledge by collecting information and “connecting the dots,” the work of a good investigative journalist as well as a detective. Making connections, which requires perseverance and imagination, is a theme Sayles visually establishes in the opening credits. Sweeping bright, white lines crisscross the frame containing pixilated images that are akin to terrible television reception. Margo Timmins’s ethereal voice utters “Hard rock miner,” the opening line from “Mining for Gold,” a tune written by the Canadian songwriter James Gordon and recorded by the Cowboy Junkies. Behind the lyrics, white noise from a television intrudes. At times, out-of-focus images are visible. Lines continue to snake across the screen. Bits of dialogue are recognizable: “his lack of political experience”; “Christian values organizations”; “freedom from cultural tyranny and the new age demigods”; “that precious word freedom.” At the conclusion of this short credit sequence, a phone rings in the background, the white noise vanishes, the song ceases, and the screen turns black. The lines darting around the frame suggest missed connections—these tracers lead nowhere. “Mining for Gold” is about silicosis, a lung disease resulting from hard rock mining. Working in a mine and uncovering nothing—in fact, poisoning yourself instead—represents the work O’Brien will do throughout the ﬁlm. He digs for the truth, makes connections, and in the end has noth-

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ing to show for his labor. Like the hard rock miner, he too digs for gold that does not exist, and lasting toxic pollution will be the legacy of his efforts. Casting Danny Huston, director John Huston’s son, as Danny O’Brien seems an unusual choice for Sayles. But Silver City’s linkage with Chinatown, one of the best ﬁlms to emerge from the 1970s, Hollywood’s last golden age, adds an intriguing subtext to the ﬁlm. O’Brien countervails Noah Cross, played by the elder Huston, however. Cross, one of American cinema’s most complicated villains, exists without guilty, without moral ﬁber. John Huston himself, although well regarded within the Hollywood industry, was an independent thinker; moreover, John Huston understood ﬁlm noir better than most Hollywood ﬁlm directors. The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, and Key Largo are three examples of his ﬁlm noir work. Huston managed the ﬁlm style with a classic sensibility, but he also understood what ﬁlm noir could do from a narrative perspective. Danny Huston lacks his father’s screen presence; in fact, he seems too easy going, a threat to no one, which nicely matches his everyman role in this ﬁlm. Like so many actors and actresses who commit to working with Sayles, Huston wanted to be part of a Sayles production. Casting Huston magniﬁed the message Sayles wanted to convey: whatever loose connections exists between Silver City and the world of detective-searchers, such as Sam Spade or Philip Marlow, the ability of these ﬁgures to achieve some justice has evaporated. Nothing Danny O’Brien does can help the change the situation he has uncovered; in a sense, he shares more with J.J. Gittes than he does with any of the hard-boiled ﬁgures from the American detective literary canon. In Silver City’s media guide (and throughout his DVD commentary), Sayles stresses the linkage with Chandler and John Huston’s ﬁlm work, both as a director and as an actor: “In the tradition of the great ﬁlm noirs, from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown, Danny’s investigation inexorably pulls him deeper and deeper into a complex web of inﬂuence and corruption, here involving high stakes lobbyists, media conglomerates, environmental plunderers, and undocumented migrant workers” (Media Guide). Ironically, O’Brien is hired as “muscle” by Pilager’s campaign manager—he is supposed to tell a group of suspects that they are being watched. There is nothing tough about O’Brien, and when he tells a suspect that he or she is being watched, none of them react with concern. When Silver City opens, O’Brien is ﬁnished. He works for Grace Seymour (Mary Kay Place), the friendly, personable owners of the See-More Detective Agency. Sayles immediately establishes O’Brien as distinct from the other characters by dressing him in dark colors, a key visual indicator that does not change for the entire picture. Sayles establishes the connection with Chinatown via O’Brien’s wisecracking style, which mimics Chinatown’s J.J. Gittes ( Jack Nicholson), albeit at a lower frequency. Mort Seymour (David Clennon), Grace’s husband, an aged real estate developer, leaves his wife’s ofﬁce, and as he walks by, O’Brien mutters, “Mort the Mogul. He’s had the big one on the hook since the day I met him.” Grace, standing in the doorway of her ofﬁce, hears the comment. O’Brien’s inability to access the situation in front of him hints at a fundamental character ﬂaw. Grace explains the situation facing O’Brien: “I have a client in my ofﬁce who has brought a lot of business to this ﬁrm over the years. I need you to be on your best be—.” Danny interrupts: “I promise not to pee on your carpet, Grace.” Like Gittes, O’Brien believes he is in control, above the rabble. As the ﬁlm narrative unfolds, O’Brien’s past emerges and complicates his position as investigator. As a journalist, his passion blinded him to the realities of a story he was covering, and he was set-up by a savvy political group and then dismissed from his newspaper job with cause. After that, O’Brien dumped his

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Danny Huston, son of the legendary ﬁlm director John Huston, plays Danny O’Brien, a failed investigative journalist turned gumshoe in Silver City (2004). O’Brien wanders across the Colorado landscape collecting stories about a powerful political family, the Pilagers, and their powerful benefactor, Wes Benteen. Dickie Pilager and Benteen profess an abiding love for the American wilderness. In reality, neither man care what happens to the land as long as it turns a proﬁt. O’Brien, always dressed in black, stands out against a barren landscape, which signiﬁes the toll Benteen’s corporate operations have taken.

idealism into the dustbin of history. All he needs is money, and he does not care who signs his checks. See-More Detective Agency is as good as any other place. As Sliver City’s narrative arc builds, O’Brien will change, he will revive his passion for the truth; indeed, he will see more, but ironically, he cannot communicate what learns because he has nowhere to tell his story. From Sayles’s perspective, O’Brien’s dilemma is a synecdoche for the general condition of the American public under Bush. At ﬁrst, O’Brien does not care what happens, and then he starts to see, starts to add things up, and he realizes the price of ignoring what is going on around him. Like many Raymond Chandler narratives, Silver City features a protagonist who is a jaded detective. Early on, though, what separates O’Brien is the fact that he does not seek the truth; rather, his mission is to deny what has happened. Chuck Raven wants to spin a story to ameliorate the Arapaho Lake incident; he does not want Dickie Pilager’s legacy to become unfortunate history: “These things get stuck in people’s minds, distracts them from the message. Gerald Ford falling down the stairs, Carter whacking that rabbit with his paddle. I don’t want my candidate remembered—.” O’Brien completes the sentence: “—as the guy who hooked a stiff in Arapaho Lake.” Further, Raven suggests the dead man might have been planted by a political enemy. He hands O’Brien a list of names and instructs him to confront them—“Let them know they’re being watched. Don’t be subtle.” The list contains three names: Cliff Castleton (Miguel Ferrer), Casey Lyle (Ralph Waite), and Madeleine Pilager (Daryl Hannah). Raven gives one ﬁnal

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command: “A good stiff warning but nothing actionable. And the press, of course, never hear a whisper of this.” Once a dedicated journalist, O’Brien now seems willing do anything. What O’Brien learns during this assignment will change him, and reconnect him with his abandoned values. In a conversation with Lisa Selin Davis for Independent: Film and Video Monthly, Sayles explained O’Brien’s conversion in larger historical terms by connecting the political climate under George W. Bush’s rule with the 1960’s: “A lot of the people I know who got involved politically in the sixties just woke up politically. It was a reaction to hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of a society that says we believe in these things but then does exactly the opposite” (39). Because Danny Huston possesses an appealing affability as an actor, he is easy to accept as someone who has simply decided to shrug his shoulders at the world and get on with the rest of his life; yet, O’Brien never fully accepts his role as messenger for Raven. Raven wants to place the blame for the dead man in the lake on Dickie’s political opponents; he is, in other words, using a man’s death to help his candidate. O’Brien, too, makes light of the situation: “Who’d hold a grudge against Dickie Pilager? Unless it’s like some hazing incident from his fraternity days.” Quickly, Sayles has established a culture in which life has little value. Still, Danny assures Grace that she can trust him: “I’ll work it high and low. Find out how the deceased got into the lake, lean on those people on his shit list, see if there’s any connection.” The ﬁnal portion of O’Brien’s statement will become the ﬁlm’s pivot point. Once he starts making connections, O’Brien’s stake in the case will shift, and his journalistic sensitivity, the drive to locate the truth, will focus his search. Immediately following the exchange between Grace and Danny at the See-More Detective Ofﬁce, Sayles cuts to Dickie standing on the steps of the Capitol. If O’Brien displayed too much conﬁdence in his interaction with his boss, then Dickie displays none. Dickie stands on the steps of the Capitol alone; below him stand a collection of journalists. Sayles cuts between Dickie’s point-of-view and the journalists to indicate the separation between the candidate and the reporters, but also to show how confused the journalists are as Dickie attempts to speak with conﬁdent coherence: “We have to get our priorities straight. Education is a priority. Affordable housing for our working people is a priority. Our economy is a priority. The environmental—the whole environmental— arena—that’s a big priority. Building new roads and maintaining the present—keeping the infrastructure in place, where it belongs, that’s a priority.” Nora Allardyce (Maria Bello), once O’Brien’s girlfriend and a working reporter, asks Dickie for a clariﬁcation: “What isn’t a priority?” Clearly confused, he relies on a strained analogy about front-burners and back-burners on a stove-top. Then he says, “And that’s where your other organizations, your church people and your—organizations formed to help these things, will be happy to pitch in if only government would get out of their way.” The reporters are dumfounded, collectively attempting to ﬁgure out what Pilager is trying to say. Chuck Raven appears and pulls his candidate away, admonishing him to never “get caught out in the open like that again.” Dickie expresses his concern about Nora who keeps bringing up his DWIs and “all this stuff from ten years ago.” Raven assures him that “something is in the works,” an indication of the power of his invisible political machine. Unlike Dickie, O’Brien knows how to use words, but he suffers from solipsism. After work he returns to his apartment and discovers that Debbie, his most recent girlfriend, has left. He scours the entire apartment looking for her. Finally, he looks at the wall calendar, and the markings indicate the preparations Debbie has made leading up to that day’s date, marked D-Day.

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This piece of evidence suggests Danny’s observational skills might be as weak as Dickie’s ability to speak in public, unless he is at work. Before working at a See-More, O’Brien was a journalist, a writer who went after hard stories and challenged reining political power. While working for the Mountain Monitor, O’Brien and his editor, Mitch Paine (Tim Roth), pursued a local politician, Jerry Skaggs, involved in a kickback scheme. Because Mitch failed to check all of O’Brien’s sources, the story was challenged, and O’Brien lost his job, even though the entire thing was a set-up designed to bring O’Brien down. Mitch, though, never lost his faith in corrupt politicians, and he remained in journalism, running an alternative web publication. After being ﬁred, O’Brien blamed himself, fell into a miserable funk, and pushed Nora away, preferring to live alone in exile. Unlike Dickie, O’Brien reﬂects on his life and his choices throughout the ﬁlm. O’Brien believes in his own failings. Dickie, on the other hand, will believe in anything, especially when the right people tell him what he needs to know. Because he needs help to uncover information about the people on Raven’s list, O’Brien reconnects with Mitch and his new staff, all young, all tech-savvy. Karen (Thora Birch), one of Mitch’s employees, produces a collection of graphics on her computer screen titled “Greed Incorporated—The Pilager Dynasty.” The Pilager fortune, based on agricultural waste, balances on their connection with Wes Benteen, who owns everything: Benteen Realty, Benteen Medical Associates, Gold Mine Communications, BenAgra, Bentel Stadium, and the Bentel Corporation. Mitch also connects Benteen to local slaughter house: “He used blacks and Chicanos to bust the union in his slaughterhouses and then he ﬁred half of them and brought in migrants without papers and has never once been hit on by the immigration service.” In other words, Benteen represents centralized power. Benteen also owns Dickie. As an investor, Dickie did not have much success. Like George W. Bush, Dickie fancies himself a wildcatter, and like the former president, Dickie was a failure when attempting to run his own business. Dickie, Karen says, invested “his inheritance into Silver City, a ghost town with an abandoned mine that turns out to have been abandoned for good reason. Who bails him out by purchasing it at six million above its original value?” On Karen’s computer screen is an image of Dickie shaking hands with Benteen. The money was used to fund Dickie’s father’s senatorial campaign. Benteen bought a Senator to relax federal regulations for portions of his empire, and he picked up the man’s son in the process. Dickie, however, is unaware of what goes on around him, as Mitch explains: “There’s not a corrupt bone in Dickie Pilager’s body. He’s just—what— user friendly. Guys like Wes Benteen and Chuck Raven say whatever they think will get them what they want. Dickie’s a true believer.” Silver City chronicles Dickie’s educational curve. What Dickie must learn to do is to say what he has been told to say. The puerile ﬁgure seen at the opening of the ﬁlm is trying to think for himself, to be his own man, to live up to the American ideal of the lone individual. But Dickie only grows when he sticks to the words on the speech monitor. Sayles draws on George W. Bush’s personal history in order to create Dickie. Before becoming president, Bush survived poor investments thanks to ﬁnancial saviors. As Joe Conason points out in his detailed account of Bush’s journey to the White House, “Notes on a Native Son: The George Bush Success Story,” the Bush narrative is about “a privileged young man who grew up in proximity to money and political power” who became attractive to wealthy men and lobbyists (40). Dickie has Wes Benteen, a stand-in for massive corporate interests, to help him understand why he, Richard Pilager, is a special man. While riding horses along the Colorado foothills, Benteen asks Dickie what he sees. A

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literalist, Dickie responds, “Uh—mountains?” Benteen tells him what he should see: “a big sign that says ‘No Americans Allowed.’ ” Confused, Dickie needs an explanation. Benteen tells Dickie that most of the west is “under lock and key,” contained by the “Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, National Parks, and the state.” Dickie believes in small government, and he has unarticulated populist feelings. Dickie likes to talk about the “people,” a species Benteen loathes. Benteen tells Dickie that those who see the “big picture” will succeed, not those who are told what to do. For Benteen the big picture equals privatization: The land was meant for the citizens, not for the damn pencil pushers in Washington.... Son, we got resources here you wouldn’t believe, untapped resources. And you and your dad are the point men in the ﬁght to liberate those resources for the American people. Aspen, Vail, that ain’t shit compared to what I could build if they opened this up to somebody with some ideas, with some knowhow. We got rivers, lakes, forest—and that’s just what’s on top of the ground.... And the people won’t get it done, not by a long sight. They’ll get distracted worrying about some postcard idea of the Rockies, some blackfooted ferret or endangered tumbleweed. But if a man of vision were to come along.

Dickie, of course, thinks he is a man of vision. Benteen’s monologue is typical antigovernment cant. He desires a country where nothing can restrict what he wants to accomplish. Sayles, of course, has a different take on opening things up: “But to a certain extent, regulation is what government is supposed to do. Regulation is what we ask government to do. It’s why we formed a government in the ﬁrst place, to protect us against harmful people” (Davis 39). Like George W. Bush, Dickie is willing to go along with any vision that speaks to him. Benteen ends the sequence by telling Dickie that “we’ll make a cowboy out of you.” Everyone close to Dickie knows the candidate is someone to be molded, and that manipulating him does not take much effort. Even Senator Jud Pilager (Michael Murphy) knows his son’s shortcomings too well—not interested in reading, no head for policy, and “a fucking disaster when he goes off the script.” Silver City’s central characters move in contradictory directions. Dickie Pilager rises as a candidate, and Danny O’Brien descends into the earth for illumination. Unlike Dickie, no one accuses O’Brien of stupidity. On two signiﬁcant occasions, O’Brien enters the underground, and comes away with acquired knowledge. First, he locates Casey Lyle, the second name on Raven’s list, working at an old gold mill and exhibition mine, giving tours and offering his version of local mining history. Lyle explains the aftermath of mineshafts cut into a mountain without any regulatory oversight—water ﬁlling all the old tunnels, building up pressure, and then exploding out of the mountain for days, costing equipment and lives, doing irreversible environmental damage: “We think we can wound this planet, we think we can cut corners and stick the money in our pockets and just walk away from it. But some day the bill comes due. It’s only a matter of time.” Inside the mine, underground, Lyle tells O’Brien about Benteen’s power and how he uses Senator Pilager. Here, O’Brien gains knowledge about what he is up against. Lyle helps to shift O’Brien’s thinking. He starts to “connect the dots,” to see a story emerging from the stories he has been picking up from the people he is supposed to intimidate. Only by traveling underground, by going off the script Raven has subtly prepared for him, does O’Brien start to see again. The second underground experience is a better visual indicator of one of Sayles’s themes—surface images often conceal the truth. In the foothills above Silver City, once Dickie’s wildcatting property and now site of Mort Seymour’s real estate development, O’Brien investigates an abandoned mine opening. Accompanied by Lupe (Alma Delﬁna),

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his translator, and Fito (Aaron Vieyra) and Raﬁ (Hugo E. Carbajal), two illegal immigrants who worked with Lázaro Huerta, the dead man Dickie hooked at Arapaho Lake, O’Brien enters the driftmouth to see where Huerta’s body was dumped after an accident at one of Benteen’s slaughterhouses. Fito and Raﬁ, who were forced to carry the corpse to the mine shaft, refuse to enter the driftmouth with him. O’Brien ventures in alone; immediately, he hears rushing water, an aural connection to Casey Lyle’s warning about water building up within the mountain. O’Brien slips and falls into the water, ﬁnding himself in an underground chamber ﬁlled with barrels stenciled with the word toxic and marked with skull and crossbones insignias bobbing in the rushing water. In this underworld, O’Brien discovers a truth he did not expect to ﬁnd: workers connected to Benteen have been using the old Silver City mine as a dump-site for toxic material. O’Brien witnesses the reach of Benteen’s empire, a matrix of companies, land holdings, and illegal activity operating with impunity. What started as hack work for a political handler turns into a story ﬁt for a skilled investigative journalist. When O’Brien exits the mine, he knows the truth about Huerta’s death and Benteen’s winner-take-all ethos. O’Brien’s journey in Silver City matches the classic monomyth paradigm, but Sayles does not allow his hero to share what he knows— he cannot make the world above ground better by sharing his knowledge. Sayles cuts to a shot of Carbonville, Colorado, a small mountain town, where a Day of the Dead parade is in progress. O’Brien’s fascination with the death of the illegal worker functions as a red herring of sorts. Silver City is a whodunit movie that is not about the mystery; rather, it is about the unseen centralized system behind the pollution, the development, and the human suffering that are all bound to Huerta’s death, a manifestation of Benteen’s business practices. Silver City is ripe with images of Colorado’s stunning landscape. Under the beautiful surface, however, lies pollutants people cannot see; worse, most ignore what is happening around them. Shifting from the toxic underworld to the Day of the Dead parade illustrates that escape from Benteen’s corporate corruption is impossible. Sayles uses an open-form for the parade, suggesting that death—the poison underground— has reached Colorado’s beautiful surface geography; for balance, he uses a closed-form to underscore O’Brien’s powerlessness after he confronts Vince Esparza (Luis Saguar), one of Benteen’s henchmen, at the parade. Esparza delivers undocumented migrants to work as Benteen’s ﬁeld pickers and slaughterhouse workers. Lázaro Huerta, the dead man, worked in the slaughterhouse cleaning the skinning machine, an incredibly dangerous job in a shop where safe working conditions were non-existent. Lázaro Huerta fell to his death. Esparza, aware of the Silver City mine, forced Fito and Raﬁ to deposit the corpse inside the driftmouth. O’Brien is no match for Esparza, however. Once again, O’Brien shows that he is too sure of himself, a trait that did not serve him well as a journalist, too sure that what he knows will help him. Sayles’s narrative underlines the end result of corruption ignored, and his carefully balanced use of open and closed forms enhances the dramatic action of this sequence. O’Brien confronts Vince Esparza at the Day of the Dead parade because he knows Esparza’s involvement in Lázaro Huerta’s death. O’Brien challenges the drunken overseer on the street. Sayles frames the open-form shot of the two characters symmetrically, placing each ﬁgure on one side of the frame. Behind them is a white pickup truck designed to look like a skull. Death, symbolized by the skull, is the dominant visual element within the mise-en-scène. Esparza leads O’Brien into an alley removed from the main street as a brass band plays a dirge in the background. Here, Sayles shifts to a closedform, emphasizing Esparza’s threatening presence. “You the one been stirring up all the

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shit?” Esparza asks. O’Brien, assuming he is in control, reveals his real goal: “I’ve got nothing against you. It’s the people above you—the ones who had you dump the barrels in the mine. They knew about Lázaro, didn’t th—.” Esparza slams O’Brien against a wall and jams a gun up under his chin. Almost as quickly Sheriff Joe Skaggs ( James Gammon) and his deputy Dave Davis (Benjamin Kroger), a bumbling rookie, appear on the scene. Davis shots and kills Esparza. Nonplussed, O’Brien says, “He wasn’t going to shoot your deputy.” Skaggs, a veteran lawman, manages the situation, declaring, as he looks at Esparza’s corpse, “He’s got that wanted for questioning, killed-while-resisting-arrest look about him.” Although meant to release tension from the dramatic confrontation in the alleyway, Skaggs’s remark is one more example of the ubiquitous culture of corruption swirling around all of these characters. O’Brien knows he has put all the pieces of the larger story into place, but he is an outsider, a ﬁgure far removed from centralized power. In the series of movies Sayles has made about the American landscape, from City of Hope to Silver City, he has stressed that money and power driver the American economic system. Like Limbo, Silver City examines both the human and the environmental cost of unregulated consumption. What sets Silver City apart, however, is the focus placed on politics and how a machine fueled by unregulated money and smart operatives can promote even the most inept candidate. O’Brien comes to understand that Benteen wants to transform nature, history, and place for proﬁt. What Benteen needs, of course, is the political capital to realize his desire. Beyond his old money, Senator Jud Pilager wanted a political identity, and Benteen’s money helped him achieve that goal. Dickie was an easier sell. The narrative arc of Silver City describes Dickie’s transformation from bumbler to insider, albeit with Chuck Raven’s assistance and without changing himself intellectually. Benteen describes Dickie to O’Brien at the senior Pilager’s fundraiser for his son: “They used to advertise the quality of the product—tastes great, whitens your teeth, shaves close, rides like a dream—now what do they pitch? America’s Number One soft drink. Best selling mid-sized utility vehicle. It isn’t buy the product, it’s join the club.” Benteen nods in Dickie’s direction, and a pointof-view shot shows a collection of guests standing in line to shake the candidate’s hand. Benteen continues, “You make people feel part of a winner, they’ll follow you anywhere. Are you a winner, son?” Benteen’s question is the demarcation point between O’Brien and Dickie; in the end, O’Brien is seen as a loser to the people in power and Dickie as a winner, for he is ready to become governor. Morally, their positions are reversed. In Silver City, winners make token appearances—they occupy inside positions within the larger economic framework, and therefore have more control. Benteen, for instance, owns the landscape itself, and he wants more. In Sunshine State, real estate groups vie for land. By contrast, no one in Silver City is rooted to the land in the way the Temples and the Stokes are—these are people with real ties to a place. What O’Brien fails to realize, then, is that he is an insigniﬁcant character, functioning on a stage Benteen controls. Benteen seldom shares the screen with more than one person; in fact, he appears in two signiﬁcant scenes—one outdoors, which is shot in open-form, and the other inside, which is shot in closed-form. The ﬁrst example is his slow horse ride with Pilager. The landscape around them is federal property Benteen wants to develop, and therefore the mise-en-scène reﬂects his goal. Here, Sayles clearly places Benteen in charge; he convinces the neophyte politician what he should think. The second scene is the fund-raiser at Jud Pilager’s house. O’Brien, an uninvited guest, recognizes Benteen and decides to speak with him, ostensibly about the Colorado Prospectors, Benteen’s football team. Their exchange parallels the

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conversation between Dickie and Benteen. O’Brien, of course, wants to be more cagy in his approach than Dickie, but Benteen, wary of strangers, immediately puts O’Brien on the defensive when he asks him why he is a fan of a losing football team. O’Brien says, “Well—you could always pull for the underdog.” Coolly, Benteen replies: “Americans don’t have the patience for underdogs that they used to.” Benteen’s exchange with Dickie and O’Brien deﬁnes his dog-eat-dog philosophy, and each dialogue shows how Sayles is using his primary characters: Dickie accepts whatever Benteen says. O’Brien, who receives a pat on the back and a “good boy” from Benteen before he leaves him, is left to ponder the man’s power. Sayles uses Colorado’s postcard-like landscape throughout the ﬁlm for ironic effect: Benteen’s invisible hand leaves ﬁngerprint stains everywhere. On the surface, things look pristine, inviting. Only those touched directly by Benteen’s reach or those willing to “connect the dots,” like O’Brien, realize where they actually live. Early in his career, Sayles often remarked to interviewers that cynicism was something he worked against, and by extension, all of his work, including ﬁction, journalism, and ﬁlm, function as anodyne against cynicism. Silver City, however, balances on the triumph of cynicism. Benteen is a ﬁgure completely devoid of integrity, the end result of unfettered capitalism. For him, everything is for sale, proﬁt equals winning. In order to help vested interests succeed, Chuck Raven, who has ties with Benteen, makes Dickie Pilager into a down-home goodold-boy that people will follow, ignoring the truth of his character. Like the landscape itself, Dickie presents a solid American image, but he, too, is polluted by the invisible system that works to turn him into a credible political persona, just one more consumable product for an uncritical public. Quietly, Sayles places some of the blame for Benteen’s power at the door of the mainstream media. Critics of Silver City were quick to point out the fact that O’Brien is a detective, but most ignored the fact that he was a journalist. The best journalists work like detectives, exposing corruption, speaking truth to power. Mitch, O’Brien’s friend and former editor, inhabits space outside of mainstream control. Nora Allardyce is the ﬁlm’s primary example of a mainstream journalist. And she is compromised from the beginning of the ﬁlm, even though Dickie says she is out to get him. Allardyce lives with and is engaged to Chandler Tyson (Billy Zane), a lobbyist linked to multiple other characters. Like some characters in the ﬁlm, Tyson’s name is signiﬁcant. Sayles fuses Raymond Chandler’s surname with the corporate imprint of one of America’s largest chicken manufactures. Chandler Tyson, though, is all business. Within Silver City’s corrupt political culture, Tyson is a charming and slimy operative who associates with winners at any cost for his own proﬁt. Tyson connects himself to Mort Seymour’s Silver City project, Colorado’s Development Agency, the Pilager campaign, and Chuck Raven. By extension, of course, he is linked to O’Brien. The ﬁrst time O’Brien and Tyson appear on screen together, they are in a restaurant where many of these characters hold individual meetings. Tyson moves between all of them. That Nora Allardyce lives with him indicates how blind mainstream journalism has become. Investigative reporting, the work Allardyce and O’Brien used to engage, has been pushed to the margins, to places like Mitch’s website. Like the rest of the reporters featured in the ﬁlm, Nora often looks as confused as Pilager sounds. Only Mitch and his staff are aware of Pilager’s afﬁliation with Benteen. At the end of the ﬁlm, Nora pleads with Leo, her editor (Michael Shalhoub), for permission to look into Pilager’s “statistics,” rather than listening to his recycled talking points. Ironically, she is asking Leo to do her job. He dismisses the request and scurries into his newsroom ofﬁce

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while his staff stands watching him. Nora asks her colleague Marcy (Amie Mackenzie) why the staff is standing around the newsroom. Marcy replies: “We’ve been sold to Gold Mine Publishing. That Bentel owns.” None of the conventional journalists in the ﬁlm mention Benteen at all, and by the end of the ﬁlm, he owns them. Chandler Tyson exempliﬁes how Sayles uses a single character to make connections with a number of other players, a device he has used in most of his ﬁlm projects. Benteen, though, is something new for Sayles. Benteen buys, sells, and controls everything with a powerful, unseen hand. At the end of the ﬁlm, Nora’s colleagues worry about being ﬁred, illustrating Benteen’s reach. Nora’s romantic association with the charming Tyson is questionable. More insidious, however, is the lack of journalistic response to people in high places, a condition that threads through the ﬁlm. Benteen’s ownership of another portion of the mainstream media insures Pilager’s success. No cries of protest rise up from the journalists. Most of the newsroom workers seem more too afraid to protest. Bentel owns everything—construction, television outlets, newspapers, branches of the medical industry, food processing—and therefore his conglomerate controls the economic existence of almost all the characters in Silver City. Taking over the Denver Defender silences even the weak opposition against Dickie Pilager; indeed, this was what Chuck Raven meant when he told Dickie that there was “something in the works.” Marcy Allardyce describes how Bentel operates: “They’ll say nobody will be let go, but when they bought the Sentinel they cut thirty jobs in the ﬁrst month.” The names Sayles uses for each paper sound nostalgic, echoes of what the fourth estate used to be; that is, standing guard against powerful interests. Benteen’s ability to buy up the opposition functions on at least two levels for Sayles. Obviously, Benteen’s control of capital means he has the ability to buy anything. While Silver City employs the Saylesian narrative trope of interconnectedness, Benteen’s empire, the Bentel Corporation, binds not only every character in the ﬁlm but every setting as well. Unlike Limbo and Sunshine State, Silver City suggests one person can control the landscape. Benteen is a less talkative Murray Silver. In Limbo, Alaska’s physical reality remains dominant. Likewise, Sunshine State’s Florida, which is consumed by developers, uses Lincoln Beach as a place where development can be confronted and where social and economic history can prevail. Silver City offers no such possibilities. The Bentel Corporation functions without restraint. Sayles’s capitalistic critique is grounded by a far more insidious reality: the loss of democratic process. Because Bentel owns the public’s mouthpiece—both daily newspapers—the old separation between politics and the press has been usurped. Nora Allardyce’s position as part of an undemanding press corps, her romantic connection to Chandler Tyson, and her position as someone caught up in the sweep of Benteen’s power underline the mainstream media’s lack of agency. All of Benteen’s machinations are cast in bright Colorado sunlight. O’Brien, as noted, gains his knowledge underground. Sayles, however, countervails the classic hero’s journey by not allowing O’Brien to share his fresh understanding, which is in keeping with the noirish aspects of the ﬁlm. Sayles’s references to Raymond Chandler embedded in Silver City recall how Chandler’s hero, Phillip Marlow, never experienced traditional heroic success because the world around him, a contemporary Los Angeles cityscape, was morally bankrupt. Los Angeles is often described as essential to Chandler’s narratives. Marlow moves across the city’s terrain, exposing himself to marginalized people as well as the wealthy and powerful. Unlike a Sherlock Holmes mystery, Marlow’s work is not an exercise in deductive reasoning; rather, his quests are episodic encounters full of odd twists and turns. O’Brien travels similar terrain. While Chandleresque traces are apparent in

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Silver City, Sayles allows O’Brien to regain himself, to reconnect with the person he used to be. Marlow, on the other hand, usually returns to his apartment, his whiskey, and his books with his sense of moral exhaustion intact. None of the episodes presented in Silver City are inconsequential. Everything is connected. The opening credits and O’Brien’s apartment wall, where he begins to build a case against Benteen in ink, reinforce how necessary it is to understand the connections between people, places, and, in this case, corporations. Chandler Tyson, who connects himself to money and power, is curious about Nora’s feelings for O’Brien, a man he sees as a naïve loser. Nora tells Chandler about O’Brien’s intensity: “He’d be working on a story and he’d get so wrapped up in it he’d, like, Magic Marker all of the names and important facts on the wall in the living room and then—you know—try to connect the dots.” She goes on, “The landlord was not thrilled, but Danny always painted it over. He thought—this was when we were at the Monitor when it was still political—he thought journalists should change things, not just report.” Tyson ﬁnds this admission silly. And his response is telling: “When I was press liaison for Fred Loomis we had a slogan on the door—‘Don’t Tell Us How to Stage the News and We Won’t Tell You How to Report It.’ ” As Sayles reminded Charles Demers of Seven Oaks Magazine, that phrase adorned the “wall in the press shack during the Reagan White House,” and reporters who questioned the administration were labeled “advocacy journalists” (www.sevenoaksmag.com 2). Sayles identiﬁes this point in American political history as the birth of confrontational sound bite news. Tyson explains his version of things to Nora: power, he says, is like a locomotive, “either hop on board or it runs right over you.” Tyson believes O’Brien “laid down on the tracks.” Tyson is, perhaps, the most cynical character in the ﬁlm, and his relationship with Nora Allardyce highlights corruption’s ubiquity. Although his quest is doomed from the start, O’Brien does not stop once he understands the implications of the story he is constructing. Because he is better suited for journalism than he is for detective work, it is telling that O’Brien’s story is never recorded, never written down, except in Magic Marker on a wall in his apartment. As Sayles understands, the sound bite is how news is communicated. A large, complex and highly demanding story will not reach readers. Many things spurred Sayles to create this highly partisan political narrative—hanging chads in Florida, intimidation of black voters in the 2000 election, and the run-up to the Iraq war. While O’Brien’s story does not represent any one of these things, the fact that his story will not live is signiﬁcant. If people lack information, then informed decisions are impossible. As Lisa Selin Davis suggests this in her article Revolutionary Road: Silver City also explores the corporate ownership of the mass media. The main characters are journalists who have lost their motivation, and either given up or sold out. Without the mass media to help us wade through the barrage of conﬂicting information, we’re rendered simply comers, and not citizens. “These things that are not very good for most American people are not natural phenomena—they’re not like gravity,” Sayles said. “Somebody got together and planned them, usually with a lot of money and a lot of disinformation and a very organized campaign.” In the absence of a critical media willing to dismantle these campaigns, Sayles hopes Silver City will inspire Americans to become more skeptical and discerning, and to take action [39].

Danny O’Brien returns to his position as a skeptical journalist at the conclusion of Silver City, but he is not empowered to make change; in fact, because of his efforts, he is pushed even closer to the margins to his friend Mitch and online journalism.

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O’Brien does have one opportunity to tell the story he has cobbled together, but he does it inside the Sheriff ’s interrogation room after Vince Esparza has been killed. O’Brien, seated at a bare table and clearly frustrated, spells out all he knows to Sheriff Skaggs, the brother of the man O’Brien investigated for political kick-backs while he worked at the Denver Monitor: “They didn’t clean up the cyanide waste, they just dumped it into an old mine. Esparza was working for Bentel then, my guys said he told them he dumped something there before. Only it’s ﬂooded now, ﬂooding more every day, and somehow Huerta’s body got swept away by it, pushed out through the mountain into one of the streams that feeds the lake—this is sounding crazy, isn’t it?”

Tellingly, O’Brien does not trust his own story. The Sheriff, of course, agrees with O’Brien’s assessment. Here, O’Brien sounds as frustrated as J.J. Gittes does at the conclusion of Chinatown—he has ﬁgured everything out, but the level of criminality is so staggering no one will believe him. The information he received from Casey Lyle informs O’Brien’s theory about how Huerta’s body ended up in Arapaho Lake. Skaggs pokes holes in O’Brien’s story: “Mr. Quiñones and Mr. López [Fito and Raﬁ] have been debriefed by the INS. According to them they were working at BenAgra Packing with a certain Lázaro Huerta, also an undocumented alien, until one day he chose not to show up for work. That’s the last they saw of him.... They’re back on a plane to see their families within twenty-four hours, courtesy of the United States government. Unless, of course, you decide to include that crock of shit you just told me in your ofﬁcial statement. In which case they’d be accessories to wrongful death, at least, possibly murder.”

O’Brien, who believes Skaggs was following him and therefore had the INS pick-up Fito and Raﬁ, realizes his story is breaking down, except for the slaughterhouse, which Skaggs smothers with dexterity: “The slaughterhouse operates within guidelines that have been set by law. All we’ve got is failure to report an accident and illegal burial, which begins and ends with Vince Esparza. Doesn’t it?” The interrogation room is an ideal setting for what is being communicated within the scene. O’Brien is powerless—he has nowhere to go, he is trapped inside a system much larger than the individuals who function inside its boundaries. O’Brien mounts one ﬁnal challenge, directed at Skaggs himself. Referring to Vince Esparza, O’Brien points out what he sees as a ﬂaw in Skaggs’s logic: “You called his name. You were trying to ﬁnd him—you called his name out.” Skaggs blocks this assumption too: “Your buddy in the hospital, had us on the lookout. ‘Vehicular homicide.’ ” The Sheriff refers to Tony Guerra (Sal Lopez), a chef O’Brien met while trying to identify Lázaro Huerta. Guerra worked for O’Brien, until Esparza almost killed him. O’Brien realizes that he has nowhere to turn. His two primary witnesses have been deported. Tony Guerra can only identify Esparza, who is dead. Sayles’s mise-en-scène reinforces O’Brien’s entrapment. Although he possesses the complete story about Huerta’s death, Esparza’s culpability, and the larger connection to Benteen, O’Brien lacks the hard evidence necessary to prove his case. Both his detective work and his journalistic drive are overwhelmed by a corrupt, powerful system. Sequestered in a barroom with a glass of whiskey in front of him, a defeated Danny O’Brien, wearing clothes stained with Esparza’s blood, stares at nothing while an ad for Dickie Pilager, sponsored by “Citizens for Frontier Values,” plays on a television in the

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background. The scene is designed to recall the conclusion of a Raymond Chandler novel, with the stylistic look of ﬁlm noir. Behind O’Brien ﬁgures are visible but buried in the shadows—a visual reminder of what O’Brien has been up against in his quest for the truth. At the back of the frame venetian blinds keep most of the external light from the room. The image places O’Brien in the underground world again. Chuck Raven appears to remind O’Brien to stay away from the campaign, describing Huerta’s death in crass economic terms: “What, murder by deregulation? That kind of thinking went out in the last century.... The point is that without a smoking gun all you’ve got is an opportunity to fuck up your sorry excuse of a life even more than—.” O’Brien responds angrily: “People like you think you got everything covered, you think nobody cares enough to ﬁght back—but some day your shit’s gonna catch up with you.” Raven’s use of the word deregulation is signiﬁcant. Benteen, of course, believes regulations strangle progress. Murder by deregulation connects Huerta with the loss of union representation at the slaughterhouse. Using illegal workers like Huerta and forcing them to live in fear means increased proﬁts. For the poor and the underrepresented, politics, which they know nothing about, can have a profound effect on their lives. Dismantling governmental controls, a position embraced by right-wing thinkers, can produce deleterious results. “Deregulation,” Sayles told The Independent, “is portrayed as ‘Let’s get bureaucracy out of the way.’ But to a certain extent, regulation is what government is supposed to do. Regulation is what we ask government to do. It’s why we formed a government in the ﬁrst place, to protect us against harmful people” (39). In Silver City, those who do the most harm come out on top. After Raven exits, Grace Seymour enters the bar and confesses to O’Brien that she has to support her husband; she has to protect his Silver City real estate scheme. The diegetic music playing in the background is the third Cowboy Junkies song used in the ﬁlm, “Blue Moon Revisited,” and Margo Timmins’s voice adds a haunting melancholy to the image. Mort Seymour, Garce admits, is connected to the Pilagers (and therefore to Benteen). Further, she explains to O’Brien where he went wrong: “I’m a detective. You’re an investigator. And the ﬁrst rule is, don’t go ﬁnding more than you’re looking for.” Here, Grace admits that her clients pay for limited vision, uncovering what they want uncovered, not the truth. An investigator, on the other hand, uses imagination in an attempt to see beyond the obvious, just as a journalist does. O’Brien, then, functions more like a reporter as he connects all the players in the elaborate mosaic that leads to Benteen. In the end, however, all he is left with is an envelope of money Grace places on the bar. She calls it severance pay; O’Brien ﬁrst calls it “hush money” and then “travel expenses.” Like Casey Lyle in his abandoned mine, O’Brien knows the Pilagers have nothing to fear from him. He, too, has been defeated in public and in private. O’Brien uses Grace’s money to pay for Lázaro Huerta’s return to Mexico and for his funeral. While O’Brien sinks to a fresh professional low, Dickie Pilager’s campaign takes on new life, even though it is an exercise in style, devoid of content. By the conclusion of Silver City, Dickie is on message, displaying home-spun optimism draped in red, white, and blue and blessed by God. Dickie has not changed, of course, his packaging has. What was left of the mainstream media has been subsumed, and now everything is entertainment, which Dickie enjoys. Only Mitch’s website remains; he and his workers, though knowledgeable and tech-savvy, are outliers in dress, politics, and philosophy, and therefore their message will not reach traditional voters. The montage sequence that closes the ﬁlm shows the failure to unveil or question political campaign propaganda. The images Sayles creates show a major political ﬁgure lying to his constitutes with a broad smile on his face.

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Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper) sounds and acts like George W. Bush. Released in 2004, an election year, Silver City was criticized for trafﬁcking in weak presidential satire. Cooper’s work is impeccable; he must have immersed himself in Bush outtakes. Sayles’s intention was larger than a single election, however. Silver City functions as a paean to an environment under toxic assault, a crime ﬁlm, and a newspaper picture. It also shows how even the most ridiculous people can be reconﬁgured as serious candidates, provided the language is scripted and the pictures look good.

Sayles brings the narrative full-circle, and a reﬁned Dickie Pilager speaks from Arapaho Lake, surrounded by a tight semi-circle of uniformed state troopers, male and female, all dressed in crisply pressed uniforms, and high school students in their marching band uniforms. Both groups are stacked on tiers behind him. This new campaign spot is the centerpiece of Sayles’s montage. Weaving through this pageant are response shots from many of the characters O’Brien encountered during his investigation. As Huerta’s body is placed on a truck for shipment home, O’Brien tells Nora that he has to “repaint the living room,” which means the names and the links he wrote on his apartment wall will be lost forever. Outside the website ofﬁce building, Karen and a co-worker discover a handwritten map left for Mitch. “Silver City,” Karen says. “Somebody left us a treasure map.” Mitch had told O’Brien that people contact him in secret all the time, and that he then plants a seed in the mind of his readers by publishing what he discovers. The map traces a path from Carbonville to the Silver City driftmouth, where the cyanide containers are and where Lázaro Huerta’s body was dumped. Sayles’s screenplay suggests that this independent, non-afﬁliated media outlet can still confront those in power. Dickie’s speech captures all the information he has received while on his own transformative journey:

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I promise to respect and support our American traditions—our right to bear arms—our right to the freedoms of religious worship and expression—so fundamental to our liberty. I promise to support a smaller, more efﬁcient government—No longer must the Big Brother of the social welfare system dictate our daily lives—intruding, impeding, regulating the very air that we breathe. What I’m talking about, my fellow citizens, comes down to that precious word—“Freedom.” The freedom enjoyed by those bold individuals who came to the wild frontier and built the west we love so dearly, those steadfast men and women whose spirit of daring and conquest inspires us to this day; the freedom from fear of those who envy our good fortune, who scorn our democratic institutions, freedom from the cultural tyranny of the special interest groups and New Age demagogues who would seek to deny us the harvest of our God-given bounty under the false banner of environmental correctness, the freedom to seek health, happiness, and, yes, fortune in this glorious mountain state of ours. That is the freedom I promise you my fellow citizens. But let not a man be judged by the promises he makes but by the works he leaves behind. May God bless you all!

The speech is ripe with populist bromides, and it appeals to American individualism and unfettered capitalism. The sentence before the blessing, a rhetorical ﬂourish used by both major political parties, stamps the speech with the understated satire Sayles has used throughout the entire screenplay. Promises get candidates elected; the residue left behind gets to the truth. Punctuating Dickie’s speech are images that wrap the narrative in connecting tissue: Chuck Raven managing two cells phones; Cliff Castleton gulping PeptoBismol; Mort Seymour driving a Silver City realty sign into the lifeless ground while a survey crew works in the background; Wes Benteen and his new football coach shake hands as sportswriters and television news people record the event; Mitch and Karen walk toward the Silver City driftmouth, which has been sealed with cement blocks; Maddy Pilager sends an arrow into the center of a “Pilager for Governor” poster; Casey Lyle shows a group of tourists how to pan for gold; and at a bus stop in Vail, Colorado, a group of Hispanic workers board the bus back to Carbonville. Pieces of Dickie’s speech were heard during the opening credits, but now his language is polished and coupled with images designed to promote the American individualism. Sayles’s edits countervail Dickie’s language, however, hinting at the reality behind political rhetoric. When Dickie’s speech comes to its rousing end, “American the Beautiful” swells in the background, capping the patriotic appeal; the conclusion is accented by applause and cheers. And then a dead ﬁsh breaks the surface of Arapahos Lake—death intrudes on Dickie Pilager again. Like the deus ex machina used at the conclusion of Sunshine State, Sayles may have based this ﬁnal image on a real situation—the Klamath River die-off of more than 70,000 salmon. While not as extreme as the toxic dumping lying beneath the Silver City development property, the Klamath case highlights the abuse of power common to the Bush/Cheney administration; moreover, it was a story that faded from public view, like so many others connected Bush’s administration. Vice President Cheney personally intervened when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) stopped deliveries of irrigation water to the Klamath River region in Northern California. Although the Klamath area was emerging from a severe drought in 2001, the Bureau was enforcing a scientiﬁc study warning against water diversions to farmers, which would harm endangered salmon and suckerﬁsh, according to the study. Cheney urged the Interior Department to seek a report from the National Academy of Sciences on the biological justiﬁcation for the BLM decision, and he called on the Academy to clear the way. When the Academy ruled against the BLM study, the Department of the Interior, then headed by Gale Norton, an

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unabashed pro-business secretary, restored water deliveries to farmers in the Klamath River Valley. Soon, thousands of dead Chinook salmon littered the lower reaches of the river, the end result of an explosion of pathogens that attacked the ﬁsh. Land management ofﬁces from both California and Oregon blamed the massive die-off on federal water policies. Whether Sayles was aware of this story or not, it vividly illustrates the point he makes throughout Silver City, which is the belief that exposing hypocrisy, even within a ﬁctional context, might eventually encourage people to turn away from their own narrow self-interests. Of course, the Klamath story did not make national news, becoming, instead, ﬁller for some syndicated newspapers—just one more story about political malfeasance tied to corporate interests. Before Danny O’Brien entered the Silver City driftmouth, Fito, an illegal worker Tony Guerra identiﬁed as a connection to Vince Esparza and Lázaro Huerta, says, “Hay fantasmas ahí dentro”—Ghosts exist within the abandoned mineshaft—and he refuses to enter. Indeed, the ghosts of the past are contained inside the neglected mine. Sayles’s screenplay containes several references to how the past can inform the present, a theme Sayles has explored since the beginning of his independent ﬁlmmaking career. Casey Lyle, for example, describes an abounded mining operation hidden inside what looks like a solid mountain: “What you are looking at is honeycombed with hundreds, maybe thousands, of mineshafts. When you stop pumping the water out, over time those holes ﬁll up, top to bottom, till there’s nowhere to go.” The water inside the driftmouth moved Huerta’s body down the mountain and into Arapaho Lake where Dickie hooked it. Pilager has assumed a gubernatorial look, and he is all but elected at the conclusion of the ﬁlm. Background sound used in the bar sequence offers poll number that guarantee Pilager’s eventual victory. Captured in an extreme long-shot, dead ﬁsh, the ghosts of the past, cover the surface of Arapaho Lake as Silver City ends. The dead ﬁsh suggest the triumph of truth. Still, with characters like Chuck Raven ready to respond to anything, the hope contained within this image is balanced by the invisible power of those who control the messages manufactured for mass consumption. Sayles’s ﬁnal shot, an extreme long crane shot, captures a portion the Colorado Rockies that has been used throughout the ﬁlm. In the foreground, however, Arapaho Lake is littered with dead ﬁsh. As always, Dickie has no idea what is going on behind him. As Mason Daring’s version of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic/America the Beautiful,” performed by Joanne Osborne, fades out, the closing credits begin. Driving drums change the tone of the non-diegetic soundtrack, and the opening guitar riff hints at the aggression found in “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” The guitar player drops away from the establishing chord structure, and a sonic dipping noise is created to enhance the lyrics that follow. Steve Earle, musician, writer, and political activist, composed “Amerika v. 6.0” for another ﬁlm just before 9/11. The producers of the picture believed the song was too political, too aggressive, and decided not to use it in their ﬁlm project. Sayles, according to his DVD commentary, heard the song on an album and immediately wanted to use it in Silver City. The lyrics of “Amerika v. 6.0” are an ideal match for Silver City, the perfect counterpoint to the spare, haunting mining song that opened the ﬁlm. Earle’s lyrics address lost idealism. Two old friends who saw themselves as revolutionaries are now content with cheating on their taxes, the only protest left for them. Doctors on Wall Street perform ﬁnancial surgery for their own proﬁt; accountants run HMOs and play God by allocating small numbers of pills to dying patients, which is justiﬁed by the fact that “everyone

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will die,” as Earle’s lyrics announce. His voice adds to the song’s content, growling out lyrics meant to startle listeners out of complacence. Earle’s narrator admits that what he is deﬁning is not exactly democratic, but in an us versus them world it is what has to be done. In this song, maintaining economic power is fundamental, and Earle’s subtext hints at a Malthusian solution for citizens who threaten the well-being of those satisﬁed with the American Dream. The ﬁnal lines of “Amerika v. 6.0” expose the emptiness of the Bush promise. Earle’s progressive politics stream through all of his work, and this song, which Sayles calls the last act of the ﬁlm, spotlights the politics that drive Silver City. Dickie Pilager and Danny O’Brien are each damaged when Silver City opens. It is taken for granted that Dickie, because of his class position, will remain the goof he is, but his handlers know how to manage him. O’Brien needs a reawakening, which Sayles visualizes at one point in the ﬁlm. Startled awake by a dream of Lázaro Huerta’s dead body ﬂoating in water, Danny O’Brien is ﬁrst greeted by Reverend Tubbs’s Holy Hour playing on television. Tubbs (Dennis Berkfeldt) serves Dickie as his spiritual advisor. His television sermon is about the rapture, the ﬁnal judgment day—“and the dead shall rise and walk upon the earth and the wicked and righteous shall be judged alike.” O’Brien walks toward the wall where he has assembled the names of people involved in this case. A vertical list occupies the center space and is connected by small arrows pointing downward: Wes Benteen is at the top, followed by Senator Jud Pilager, and below him is Dickie Pilager’s name. Below Dickie’s name is Lázaro Huerta’s name, which is circled. Below the circle is Cliff Castleton’s name. On the right-side are Chuck Raven and Maddy Pilager’s names; an arrow connects Castleton and Raven. Two arrows sweep from Maddy’s name to link her with her father and brother. Casey Lyle’s name is in the left side of the center column, and arrows connect him with Jud and Dickie Pilager. Danny writes Vincent Esparza on the wall below Lyle’s name; he puts a question mark next to it and then brackets it in parentheses. He steps back, then he moves forward and draws a sweeping arrow from Esparza’s name up to Wes Benteen’s name. He has described the entire scheme for himself. As O’Brien completes the arrow, Tubbs can be heard saying “we need to discern a pattern. We need to connect.” O’Brien has made all the necessary connections, but his information is useless. On the DVD commentary for Silver City, Maggie Renzi remarks that while on the ﬁlm shoot, the crew referred to Danny O’Brien the “American voter.” From that perspective, O’Brien’s work throughout the ﬁlm—ﬁrst, working for a wage just to get by; then, working to gain knowledge—removes him from the world of a detective: He learns the price of private proﬁtability and its powerful connection to politics. As Sayles told David Brancaccio of Now, There’s always been, you know, bought politicians. But it is being institutionalized now to an extent that we haven’t seen for a long, long time. The ability of corporate America to run this government and that and that “one man, one vote” is a joke in most places. Candidates get in because they have a lot of ﬁnancial backing. They are not getting that backing from the people. They either have that own wealth themselves or wealthy people, usually corporate interests, put them in, and that’s who their constituency is (www.pbs.org/now/transcript 332).

At the conclusion of Silver City, O’Brien and Nora ﬂirt with the possibility of getting back together; clearly, as played by Huston and Bello, the attraction is evident on screen. The dead have risen to the surface of Arapaho Lake, and Dickie Pilager needs more help. Silver City became part of the 2004 campaign. Sayles, Renzi, Steve Earle, and Michael

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Murphy, among others, went on a bus tour to promote the ﬁlm and to work against the re-election of George W. Bush. That campaign failed. Now Silver City stands as a Saylesian genre blend with a splashes of satire sprinkled throughout the narrative. In addition, Silver City is a reminder of the Bush presidency and the destructive impulses at the core of his administration. Silver City provides a lesson in how to prevent similar horrors from happening again. Of course, the proximity of money to political power cannot be ignored— no matter who occupies the White House. Silver City shows how easy it is to rig the American political game. Televisions spewing “information” are embedded within Silver City’s overall mise-en-scène, representing how today’s political apparatchiks manufacture narratives that are consumed without analysis. Power does what it wants. Working against systemic inﬂuence, Sayles and Renzi set about ﬁlming Silver City without funding in place. As Sayles told Lisa Selin Davis, “About two weeks into it, Maggie came to me and said, ‘I’m sick of this—scrapping and begging for money. I think we actually have enough money if we liquidate everything’ ” (38–39). Working through their production company, Anarchists’ Convention, they funded the ﬁve million dollar ﬁlm using some of the proﬁts gained from Girlﬁght, Karyn Kusama’s 2000 ﬁlm, which Sayles and Renzi produced. Silver City might be the “same old lefty claptrap,” but it does what few ﬁlms dared to do in the post–911 world—it spoke truth to power. Sayles illuminated what few wanted to see: how America’s idealistic belief in a democracy has become compromised by capitalistic practices that promote dollars over human development, ceding power and control to those who can pay. Many of Sayles’s pictures draw on real life. On one level, Silver City was an obvious broadside against the Bush administration. Sayles had a number of large projects he could not afford to make, including a Scottish period ﬁlm involving Robert Carlyle. He continued to work on Hollywood screenplays, particularly Jurassic Park IV, and smaller productions, such as Carlisle School, a sports ﬁlm detailing the Jim Thorpe/Coach “Pop” Warner era at the Carlisle Indian School for producers Mark Ciardi and Gordon Grey. The story Sayles was working on for himself, though, was a period piece from 1950 about the early days of rock ’n’ roll—indeed, before the term rock ’n’ roll existed. Set in an African American milieu, the picture would explore the transition from piano-based acoustic blues to blues dominated by the electric guitar. When Sayles spoke with Seven Oaks: A Magazine of Politics, Culture, and Resistance, in fall 2004, the ﬁlm did not have a title.

Honeydripper Blues Evolution Movies are visceral as well as intellectual. Unless you give someone a CD to listen to while reading a book, you don’t have the same experience you do with a ﬁlm, which allows you to use music in incredible ways. In a movie, you have this whole thing you can do— rhythm is the spine of the story. I use music sparingly, though, and this is the reason some people come out of my ﬁlms saying, “What was that?” We don’t have wall-to-wall orchestral movie-music telling them how to feel. In doing that, I do lose some people, but it’s really important to use music to support the story. —John Sayles, The Believer

Music has always been an integral component of John Sayles’s ﬁlms. Soundtracks, whether used as a diegetic or non-diegetic portion of the overall ﬁlm narrative, are expensive, but Sayles has ﬁgured out ways to incorporate music without extending the small budgets he

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and his production team face every time they embark on a new project. Only Baby It’s You, the Paramount ﬁasco, featured a budget large enough to purchase the rights to popular songs. Since Return of the Secaucus Seven, which featured J.T., a struggling folksinger, Sayles has used musicians as characters in many of his ﬁlms, including Baby It’s You, The Brother From Another Planet, Matewan, City of Hope, Passion Fish, Limbo, and Sunshine State. Sayles ﬁlmed three music videos for Bruce Springsteen, Glory Days, Born in the USA, and I’m on Fire, all from 1985’s Born in the USA album—all short ﬁlms that capture Springsteen’s ability to render complete narratives within a conﬁned lyrical space. Sayles has written lyrics for songs used in his own ﬁlms as well as Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys. In the DVD additional feature, The Making of Silver City, Mason Daring, Sayles’s musical collaborator since Return of the Secaucus Seven, paid Sayles’s a high compliment by quoting Duke Levine, a guitarist featured on many of Daring’s soundtracks for Sayles’s ﬁlms: “John,” Levine said, “could produce music.” Honeydripper (2007) details how musical genres evolve, how culture inﬂuences sound, and how blues and rhythm and blues met to form rock ’n’ roll. Speaking with David Gritten of The Daily Telegraph in May 2008, Sayles discussed his early education in music, mentioning Louis Jordan, Hank Williams, Ruth Brown, Charles Brown, and Joe Liggins and The Honeydrippers as performers who emerged after the conclusion of the second world war and before the advent of rock ’n’ roll: “My feeling is, the music had to get faster and louder because life was getting faster and louder. That acoustic harmonica the old blues guys used to play—that was the sound of a train. But by 1950, people were traveling around in their Rocket 88s. Some were in planes. Life had changed” (www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3673033). In Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, Levon Helm, drummer for The Band, describes where he is from, and his response is telling: “Near Memphis. Cotton country; rice country. The most interesting thing is probably the music. Bluegrass or country music, if it mixes there with rhythm and it dances, then you’ve got a combination of all those different kinds of music.” Scorsese, the interviewer, asks Helm what that music is called, and he says, “rock ’n’ roll.” Helm underlines how musical styles and genres inﬂuence and change each other. In interviews promoting Honeydripper, Sayles describes sensing how different music was while traveling with his family to visit relatives in the south. Once they dropped below the Mason-Dixon Line, the songs on the radio took on a different ﬂavor, much closer to Helm’s description than what Sayles heard on the radio at home in Schenectady, New York. Honeydripper presents music as a protean force that connects people viscerally and intellectually. Passion Fish used music as a binding agent, linking people to a speciﬁc place, the Louisiana bayou region. Harmony, Alabama, Honeydripper’s setting, exists somewhere in the American south, cradle of the blues, a prototypical American art form. Naming the town Harmony works both ironically and realistically for Sayles. Typically, Sayles avoids naming exact geographic locations, but here he wants to call attention to a place associated with a variety of musical genres. Sayles shot much of the picture in Georgiana, Alabama, Hank Williams’ birthplace. Historical research, a Saylesian trait, makes his stories come to ﬁlmic life, and Honeydripper is no exception. Tellingly, the blues has avoided commercialization, resisting the corporate interference that could dilute its legacy. Jonathan Rosenbaum lamented how close Sayles’s ﬁlm work came to reality starting with Men With Guns and coming to a head in Silver City. Honeydripper, though, met with the approval of this native of Florence, Alabama; in fact, he calls Honeydripper one of his favorite Sayles ﬁlms, albeit with certain qualiﬁcations, including a complete misreading of Pos-

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sum, the ﬁlm’s essential bluesman. Although Sayles’s narrative might seem mythic, a musicfable, it is grounded in fact. “The ﬁlms I make,” Sayles told Gritten, “evolve from something I know a little about, but want to know more about. And I wanted to know more about this era of music. Based partially on a short story titled “Keeping Time,” originally published in Rolling Stone, Honeydripper creates a place where blues, rhythm and blues, and rock ’n’ roll meet; it also borrows from the legend of Guitar Slim, famous for “The Things That I Used to Do.” In addition, Sayles uses the long-enduring African American song passed from the oral tradition to the public domain, “Stagolee,” as the foundation for a portion of Honeydripper. According to Cecil Brown, author of Stagollee Shot Billy, which traces many cultural facets of the ballad over time, “Carl Sandberg loved singing “Stagolee,” and writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Howard Odum, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin have used the song as a model for short stories, poems, and plays. Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet arranged and performed versions of it” (2). Jazz singers, including Cab Calloway, Jim Dorsey, and Peggy Lee; bluesmen, from Champion Jack Dupree to Mississippi John Hurt; soul singers, such as James Brown, Fats Domino, and Wilson Pickett; and contemporary musicians like Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and the Clash have all covered versions of “Stagolee,” albeit adding their own titles, lyrics, and embellishments. Sayles used the song, in part, because it exits in the public domain, and therefore required no money for access to the song’s rights. Blues musician Keb’ Mo’, who plays Possum, the guitar man that connects Tyrone

“The blues is my history, my culture,” Keb’ Mo’, American musician, activist, and actor, told an interviewer. In Honeydripper, John Sayles’s sixteenth feature, the singer plays Possum, a spirit seen by Sonny and Pinetop, musicians from two distinct eras.

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Pinetop Perkins (Danny Glover) to his past, and Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) to his future, reworked the traditional ballad for the ﬁlm. Stagolee, an archetypical destructive character, anchors the core of Honeydripper, for Pinetop participated in his own version of the Stagolee legend—he, too, killed a young rival in a barroom. However, Sayles does not does not dwell on the “bad man” aspect of the Stagolee ballad, which ﬁxes Stagolee as a coldblooded killer; rather, it is the Stagolee who addresses his jailer that intrigues Sayles: “Jailer, O Jailer/ I just can’t sleep; for the ghost of Billy Lyons/ Round my bed does mourn and weep.” Memory haunts “Pinetop.” And Honeydripper is as much about Pinetop’s separation, transition, and reincorporation as it is about the movement away from acoustic blues into the electronic propulsion of rock ’n’ roll. Possum, then, functions as a griot, a storyteller who promotes awareness via music. As a blues storyteller, Possum makes both Pinetop and Sonny aware of things each character needs to know. Because he is a ghost, Possum carries a trickster’s power—he changes the course of the narrative and he transforms people’s lives. Signiﬁcantly, Possum only communicates with other musicians. The ﬁrst time he appears on screen, Possum captures Sonny’s attention with his guitar work. Dick Pope, Sayles’s cinematographer and director Mike Leigh’s long-time collaborator, uses a combination of shots to illustrate Sonny’s arrival in Harmony, Alabama. A crane shot shows Sonny, carrying a guitar case and an army-issued dufﬂe bag, walking through an inactive railroad yard. Sayles cuts to a slow pan, capturing the period beauty of Harmony, tracking Sonny as he attempts to decide where he is—that is, the white side or the black side of town. As Sonny walks into town, faint traces of a slide guitar accent his movements. The camera follows him past the Alabama Grill, where the white proprietor eyes this new arrival with suspicion, and on to the corner of the block, marked by a green and brown striped awning. Pope’s camera pans around Sonny as a blues guitar riff becomes part of the diegetic soundtrack. Behind Sonny, Possum, wearing a dark fedora, a cream-colored suit, and dark glasses, sits in a straight-backed chair picking his guitar. Possum sings, “Somebody slept in the railroad yard,” and he accents the line by playing a cord on his guitar. His right hand is adorned with ﬁnger picks and in his left he has a bottle-neck ﬁnger slide. Sonny seems only mildly surprised that Possum just appeared. Sonny approaches the blind bluesman and compliments him on the quality of his playing, and then he asks, “What side of the tracks am I on?” Possum responds, “The wrong side of the tracks for you,” underscoring Sonny’s mistake by running the slide down the neck of his guitar. What follows is an introduction to Harmony’s black community, all communicated as a talking-blues tune, which Possum annotates with his guitar work: SONNY: What’s you doing here then? POSSUM: White folks look right through me. ’Sides, how much mischief is an old blind spook like me ’gonna get up to? SONNY: Where do people go for music around here? POSSUM: There’s a couple of little places just outside of town at the crossroads. SONNY: Is it a long walk? POSSUM: You in a hurry? SONNY: How old is that box you playin’, Pops? POSSUM: Second one ever made. The devil got the ﬁrst one. How about yours? SONNY: Band new. Made it myself. POSSUM: Ooo, wee. Band new, made it his’self. Hot dog. SONNY: That’s right. So these clubs? POSSUM: Old Toussaint, he runs Ace of Spades. They don’t have no live music in

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Sayles sprinkles this dialogue with blues references—the crossroads, the devil, and the guitar being obvious allusions to Robert Johnson’s legend. Possum also speaks of his own invisibility, but unlike Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, he displays no anger; rather, he indicates a wry awareness of the power invisibility gives him. Finally, Possum hints at Pinetop’s mysterious past, the story that implicates him with the murder of another man. Keb’ Mo’s musicianship embellishes his portion of this exchange. His exceptional guitar improvisations call attention to the delta blues tradition. Keb’ Mo’ himself also connects Sayles’s character to the legendary Robert Johnson. Collaborating with Martin Scorsese on the director’s documentary, The Blues, Keb’ Mo’, a creative consultant and a musical contributor for the documentary, cites Robert Johnson as a major inﬂuence on his career as a musician. For Sayles, Possum embodies the trickster spirit. The blind bluesman uses clever language and double-meanings to instigate change. Unlike Sonny, Possum and Tyrone “Pinetop” Purvis do not have a friendly encounter. Sayles’s subtle sequence construction indicates the tension that exists between these two men. Sayles uses the same corner in Harmony. Tyrone, Maceo (Charles S. Dutton), his partner and friend, and China Doll (Yaya DaCosta), his step-daughter, cross Main Street on their way to do errands for the Guitar Sam show at the Honeydripper Lounge. Unlike the Sonny and Possum sequence, Sayles uses edits to punctuate this meeting. Maceo and China Doll leave Tyrone on the corner, directly under the same green and brown striped awning. The camera shows Tyrone looking around the street, searching for likely places to hang posters for the show. From behind him, Possum’s distinctive guitar calls for attention. Like Sonny, Pinetop had just looked at this portion of the street and Possum was not there. The street had been full of white shoppers, depicted in open form. When Possum and Tyrone speak, however, Sayles uses tight framing on both characters, effectively closing down the screen frame so no one else intrudes upon their conversation. Possum plays and sings: It was early Friday evening And the hounds began to bark Stagolee and Billy Lyons Was squabbling in the dark Stagolee told Billy Lyons What do you think about that? Thought you’d take all my money And you spits in my Stetson Hat

The song bothers Tyrone, and he says, “I hate that damn song.” Playfully Possum asks, “How you been keepin,’ Tyrone?” Sayles’s cuts separate these characters, which contradicts the connection established in the Sonny and Possum sequence. In that sequence, Sayles used a mobile camera to link Possum and Sonny. Possum, of course, is a guitar player, and Pinetop has a history with six-string musicians. Possum comments about China Doll and then about the show: “I hear you’re puttin’ on a guitar-man out at your place. Tyrone asks him where

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he heard that, and Possum says “the breeze.” Like the conversation between Sonny and Possum, this dialogue is sprinkled with blues allusions. “You better be careful, Tyrone,” Possum warns. “You know what those guitar players are like.” Tyrone leaves the scene, and Possum returns to his traditional rendition of Stagolee, concluding with “poor Billy up and died.” Possum will not allow Pinetop to forget his past, and therefore their relationship is tense. Sayles’s edits establish the distance between the two, suggesting, perhaps, that Possum is a simulacrum for the man Pinetop killed. Traditionally, the Stagolee ﬁgure is a rounder, a criminal, a loafer, or a drinking man. He murders Billy Lyons for a bottle of booze, a Stetson hat, or a gambling debt, among other things. In Keb’ Mo’s version, however, Billy Lyons is also at fault; this change allows Sayles to present Pinetop’s connection to the Stagolee legend from a different perspective. Tyrone Purvis is an independent man with a secret past. His history suggests danger, but he is not the “bad man” described in most versions of Stagolee, and therefore Sayles’s character can be seen as a challenge to common deﬁnitions. Pinetop is also Sayles’s piano man, a character haunted by his past yet resistant to the future, which Sonny Blake signiﬁes. Moreover, Pinetop killed a young guitar player in a roadhouse knife ﬁght. Sayles plays on the conﬂict between electriﬁed guitar music and boogie-woogie piano. “There is tension and harmony in almost every song,” Sayles writes in the Honeydripper press kit, and wars are fought within music without a word being uttered. One of these battles for dominance that was waged in the early ’50s was between the guitar and the piano” (3). Further, Sayles suggests that Chuck Berry’s mobility, his signature duck-walk, liberated music and established a new form. Pinetop has to come to terms with musical modernity—will it help him, or will it hurt him? Will he change with the times, or will he remain in the past? “Keeping Time,” Sayles’s short story that inspired Honeydripper, plays with the theme of identity and the libratory quality of live music. Mike, the drummer in the story who has been playing music for too long, assembles his drum kit in an old grange hall converted into a “club” with “a makeshift bar, plywood sheet laid on shipping pallets for a stage” (79). An old janitor, even older than Mike, engages the drummer in conversation about the past, music, and his own life: “I used to be Guitar Slim. One of the original Guitar Slims.” The janitor describes his career as a guitar player, particularly at the end of the swing era, when horn players dominated the bandstand, as a “polite” Charlie Christian-type performer. Jump bands allowed him more time on stage; he hooked his instrument into a small ampliﬁer, and this gig served as his ticket to New Orleans and boogie-woogie music, a form “folks was calling rock and roll” (85). But the guitar was still “second ﬁddle,” and the janitor had to restrain his talent, “holdin it back like a jockey that got a bet on a different horse” (85). One night, he replaces the saxophone player, the man who jolted the roadhouse crowds with his playing by exchanging ﬁery solos with the piano player. “My whole body is shaking like my heart is still wired to that guitar,” he tells Mike. “I’d been ﬂoating in the womb for eight—nine years and that night I was born” (87). The janitor says rock ’n’ roll was “outlaw music—you had to go ﬁnd it” (87), and therefore he was able to pretend he was Guitar Slim, along with half a dozen other musicians. Mike beats on his drum kit while the janitor tells his story, sometimes hitting familiar rock tunes, sometimes keeping time behind the older man’s story. Clearly, Sayles’s janitor has ties to Sonny. A few lines of dialogue from the story are relocated into the screenplay: “Something new comes along, how it always does” (89); “some musician put his hand to murder, nine time out of ten it’s the drummer did it” (91); and a signiﬁcant

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exchange between the guitar player and a patron that underlines issues of identity—“You is a lie, boy. I known Slim since he’s drinkin’ Mama’s milk and you ain’t him.” The janitor (Sonny in the ﬁlm) responds, “That’s Delta Slim you talkin’ about. I’m Texas Guitar Slim” (88). Both the ﬁlm and the short story explore identity as deﬁned by history and storytelling. Further, each presents a glimpse into the musical shifts that lead to what is popularly known as rock ’n’ roll. Honeydripper does not place Sonny Blake at the core of its narrative, at least not until the conclusion of the ﬁlm; indeed, what is inside his guitar case remains a mystery for twothirds of the ﬁlm. He calls himself a guitar player, but most of the music Sayles features in the ﬁlm is acoustic. Dr. Mable John, playing Bertha Mae, is the ﬁrst performer featured in Honeydripper, singing “No Matter How She Done It,” a slow blues complimented by harmonica and piano. Pinetop plays piano. His club is empty. The Ace of Spades, the rival roadhouse, is full of life; music from the bar’s jukebox ﬁlls the rural Alabama night. Pinetop leaves the piano and talks with Slick (Vondie Curtis-Hall) at the bar. Bertha Mae, the woman Slick has lived with for years, segues into “Don’t Leave Me Here,” a song that addresses the condition of the Honeydripper. The exceptional quality of the performers and the songs notwithstanding, people, especially young people, will not venture into Pinetop’s club. The Ace of Spades, with its modern jukebox, attracts the younger crowd willing to spend money. Slick and Bertha Mae are well dressed, people who are used to a night out. The drunken Stokely (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), a near-do-well Pinetop allows in his bar, looks as if he has been drinking all day and he angers Slick with his comments about his relationship with Bertha Mae. He is a typical Honeydripper customer. Sayles establishes the end of an era in this sequence. The Korean War had begun, the Army was integrated, and the speed of life had accelerated. Acoustic blues did not match the age. Pinetop tells Bertha Mae that for Saturday night, her night, he has made other plans. When Bertha Mae and Slick arrive at the entrance of their home, she remarks about the sound of a passing train: “That’s a terrible sound, like a soul being carried away from this earth.” Indeed, the train whistle produces a strange lonely sound, and it marks a transitional point in the ﬁlm. Bertha Mae will not see the sunrise; in a sense, she predicts her own death and a musical shift. The train, which runs from Kansas City to New Orleans, locations essential to the evolution of African American music, carries a stranger to Harmony, Alabama. Sayles cuts from the medium shot of Bertha Mae to what he jokingly calls his “Sergio Leone shot,” a mild echo of Charles Bronson arriving at a train station in Once Upon a Time in the West. Spaces between the passing train cars reveal a man standing next to the tracks framed by an army issue dufﬂe bag and a guitar case. After the train passes, Sonny Blake approaches Shack Thomas (Daryl Edwards), a Pullman Porter standing on the platform of the tiny train station. Sonny asks Shack if there is a place nearby where he can sleep, and he asks the porter where he is. Shack tells him to use the switchman’s shed and points toward the Harmony sign. Sonny responds, “Name like that sound like a good place for a musician.” Shack counters with a warning: “Only night I ever been in jail was a town called Liberty. Sun come up, you see where you landed.” Shack walks away and leaves Sonny with one more warning: “Best be out that shed by ﬁrst light.” This exchange is structured as a series of single shots and two-shots. Once Shack exits, though, Sayles cuts to a long shot of Sonny alone on the platform, gazing into the empty night. Behind him the train tracks disappear into the dark. Sonny looks bewildered standing alone next to the long, empty tracks. The image of the lonely traveling bluesman is a common

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trope found in the lyrics of Robert Johnson. Shack’s implicit warning adds to the sense that Sonny might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music, Greil Marcus remarks about the blues perspective that believes “this is the way the world is, and there’s nothing you or anybody can do about it” (171); in other words, the hard reality of existence. Sonny, however, is not lonely or alienated; he knows he is a guitar player and a signer. Like the revamped Stagolee of Possum’s songs, Sayles’s traveling guitar man is not a blues archetype, not a Robert Johnson ﬁgure. Instead, Sonny makes old stories new by charging them with electric current. “The rock and roll, this hurt the blues pretty bad,” says Muddy Waters in Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues (255). While Waters popularity sank for a short time after rock ’n’ roll claimed younger audiences, the blues never vanished. Sonny Blake’s purpose in Honeydripper is to bring an essential American art form to a new audience. At the conclusion of Deep Blues, Palmer quotes Leo Smith, a composer and trumpet player usually associated with avant-garde jazz who was raised by his stepfather Alec Wallace, a Delta bluesman: “Growing up in that environment made me feel that whatever I play relates to a gigantic ﬁeld of feeling. To me, the blues is a literary and musical form and also a basic philosophy. When I get ready to study the mystical aspect of black people, I go to the blues, then I feel I am in touch with the root of black people” (276 –277). For Sayles Sonny is a transitional ﬁgure existing between the blues and rock ’n’ roll. The music he performs at the end of the ﬁlm is a hard driving, blues-based form of rock ’n’ roll. Sonny, who served as a radio repairman in the Army, is on a different path than that taken by traditional blues musicians. In the summer of 1944, according to Robert Palmer, Time magazine estimated “that since the beginning of the decade 50,000 black people had left Mississippi for the North” (7). Sonny’s journey is in the opposite direction: he travels south and experiences the rural culture that helped fuel the blues. The image of the young musician alone is repeated throughout the ﬁrst half of Honeydripper. Sayles uses this construction to reinforce Sonny’s individuality and to parallel Sonny with Possum and Pinetop; they too appear alone in many shots. The most prominent examples of Sonny alone within the frame occur in the daylight after he sleeps in the Switchman’s shack. Sayles’s crane shot of the rail yard, Sonny’s walk through Harmony, and his conversation with Possum all feature him alone. When he meets Possum for the ﬁrst time, however, Sayles connects them visually with a handheld sequence. When Sonny appears in the doorway of the Honeydripper Lounge he stands alone, but Sayles connects him with Pinetop and Maceo via edits. Still, Sonny lacks connection to any community. Pinetop is suspicious of the young man, but he offers him breakfast. In the kitchen, Sayles cuts between China Doll and Sonny, showing their separation, but he uses a few twoshots to illustrate the interest the young people have for each other. Pinetop enters the space as Sonny and China Doll are talking about music; he declares that music is an afﬂiction, not a portable skill. Pinetop directs Sonny to the cotton ﬁelds three miles west of town. Alone again, Sonny will encounter the ignominy of being a young black man in the rural south—four years before Brown v Board of Education of Topeka. On the road out of town, Sayles frames Sonny in a long shot as he walks toward the cotton ﬁeld; he inhabits the left-side of the frame, but he appears insigniﬁcant because most of the frame is ﬁlled with the empty landscape. Sayles pans to the right where Sheriff Pugh (Stacy Keach) sits inside his police car. Pugh starts his car and moves toward Sonny, telling him, ﬁnally, to get into the car. On the DVD commentary, Sayles refers to August Wilson’s play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which contains a warning: African American

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males without a job should not go out walking during cotton harvest because the county, represented by the sheriff, always needs men to pick. Individual males would be charged with vagrancy and forced to work until the harvest was complete. Sonny is an ideal candidate for Sheriff Pugh’s work team. Pugh charges him, takes him to a cotton farm, convicts him, and he goes to work. Some critics took offense with Sayles’s use of cotton ﬁeld imagery, especially in the opening credits sequence. But Honeydripper does not open with images commonly found in ﬁlms that trafﬁc in American Civil War mythology. Sayles uses the cotton harvest to his advantage—it draws a disparate collection of people to Harmony. Dex (Kel Mitchell), a slick dresser from Memphis, and Ham (Eric Abrams), a ﬁeld hand from Mississippi, become antagonists before they depart the truck carrying them to the cotton ﬁeld. Dex is too well dressed for ﬁeldwork; Ham is dressed in old-fashioned overalls and a toby hangs from his neck. Sayles pits city sophistication against country superstition. Cotton picking draws Dex and Ham together, but it does not unify them. Near the end of the ﬁlm, the pair prepares to ﬁght inside the Honeydripper Lounge. There, however, it is the music that pulled them to a place. Indeed, the unifying power of a new musical form and, more important, an exceptionally skilled performer, attract these two foes to the lounge. Still, they are prepared to ﬁght, as they were at the cotton ﬁeld. Both the cotton ﬁeld and the music are aspects of African American culture that Sayles uses to add detail and depth to his narrative. In a blog-post on the Honeydripper website, ﬁlmmaker Charles Burnett closes his positive summary of the ﬁlm by touching on how Sayles deals with race: Another thing that I really appreciated about Honeydripper is that it is a story about people who are in a situation where people with power can determine if one lives or dies. The cause of the tension is the perpetual injustice from the legacy of slavery. There are a lot of issues that are not focused on but are clearly visible in the atmosphere. Race is an ongoing issue that good people are not afraid to tackle. John Sayles’s ﬁlms are out front on that issue.

Burnett, also a serious, realistic ﬁlmmaker, makes Honeydripper sound more dramatic than it truly is. Sayles’s picture borders on the realistic, as Patrick Z. McGavin pointed out in an early review of the ﬁlm: Working in a milieu more dreamed about than fully created, Sayles gently upbraids the mythology and poetry of southern blues, rifﬁng on the legend of Robert Johnson, or the cultural transformation brought on by the electric guitar. Playing off the tradition of oral storytelling indigenous to American black southern culture, Sayles locates conﬂict through behavior and personality, such as Tyrone’s loyal lieutenant Maceo, or his religiously inclined wife [screendaily.com/honeydripper].

Like Burnett, McGavin recognizes more at the core of Honeydripper than most mainstream critics. For example, Stephen Holden focuses on Sayles’s dialogue: “He is so uncomfortable writing dialogue in an old-time Southern argot that the conversations in Honeydripper rarely settle into the easy, colorfully idiomatic ﬂow that has always been the hallmark of Southern speech” (B13). Holden never mentions Sayles’s use of Stagolee, African American history, or the musical mélange threading through the ﬁlm that culminates in Sonny’s rock ’n’ roll performance. Burnett credits Sayles’s atmosphere, and McGavin calls it a milieu dreamed rather than copied. Each touches upon the deceptive nature of Sayles’s style of realism. According to Sayles, Possum is the “spirit of the music,” a character “in the tradition

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of magical realism” (theithacajournal.com). Possum’s language is elusive, ripe with multiple meanings, not unlike a song. His presence is part of a larger construction, however. When Pinetop, Maceo, and China Doll arrive in Harmony to place posters for the Guitar Sam concert at the Honeydripper Lounge, Sayles reveals small pieces of history through mise-en-scène construction and dialogue. Maceo and China Doll must pause for whites as they enter the front of Skinner’s Hardware store. A sign at the top of the frame points toward the “colored entrance.” In the same sequence, Shack speaks to a group of black men on the store’s loading dock. He invokes “Mr. Randolph,” the labor organizer and civil rights activist, but Pinetop interrupts, calling the speech “the gospel according to A. Philip Randolph.” Shack is attempting to recruit men to join the army, which President Truman desegregated because of Randolph’s work. Pinetop, though, voices dissent: “Black folks shootin’ yellow folks to keep white folks happy?” In a brief sequence, Sayles touches on the legacy of the blues, speciﬁcally the Stagolee ﬁgure, the condition of African Americans in the Jim Crow south, and A. Philip Randolph, one of the most visible spokesmen for African American civil rights. While Possum stands as the spirit of the music at the center of his narrative, Sayles infuses all of Honeydripper with small touches that deﬁne place, time, and culture. Perhaps the most vivid example of how Sayles creates a ﬁlmic environment that borrows from history yet functions as ﬁction occurs when Pinetop explains how a slave learned to play the piano. Sitting and playing his upright piano, Pinetop, who knows Guitar Sam

Pinetop Perkins (Danny Glover) plays the blues as he faces the closing of the Honeydripper, his rural Alabama club. Glover worked to promote the ﬁlm and its message about American blues music. Here he recites how a slave was introduced to the piano and made the instrument his.

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never made the train to Harmony, sings “Going Down Slow,” St. Louis Jimmy Oden’s most enduring song. Fittingly, “Going Down Slow” is about a death, and Pinetop believes he has lost the Honeydripper because Guitar Sam did not show. He begins to tell Maceo a story of the ﬁrst house slave, a man who knew all the African instruments and who had “music in his head and heart.” The slave would stand there “with a tray of white people’s food” and watch as the master played a minuet. One day he ﬁnds the house empty, sits at the piano, spreads his hands and ﬁgures as the master did, and says to himself, “Lord, help me. I could do some damage with this thing.” The story, of course, reaches back to the birth of Pinetop’s music, music played on a piano. Pinetop moves away from the piano and kicks the guitar case Sonny left behind. Inside Maceo ﬁnds a guitar “without a hole.” Without announcing what has transpired, Sayles presents the next instrument that will do “some damage,” Sonny’s handcrafted guitar. Maceo immediately understands that the guitar runs on electricity, power source for a new era. Guitar Sam is based on a real character, Eddie “Guitar Slim” Jones. Sayles, renowned for his period research, uncovered Jones’s history and ﬁctionalized it: I heard about this rock ’n’ roll legend about Guitar Slim. And it turned out not to be a legend. He was known for a couple of things: he was an electric guitar player in the New Orleans area; he had this long extension cord—and because the clubs in NOLA were close to each other, he could cross the street—and could play in the doorway of two or three clubs and do this pied piper thing and draw people into the street. He was also known for missing gigs, with a combination of partying and overbooking, so Earl King spent a couple of years being Guitar Slim.... So a lot of guys—club owners—would approach a musician and say, “tonight, you are Guitar Slim” [theithacajournal.com].

Born in Greenwood, Mississippi, Eddie Jones shares characteristics with Sonny Blake, Sayles’s guitar master. Jones worked as a teenager in cotton ﬁelds. At night he would sing and dance in local juke joints. Jones escaped into the army, serving in World War II. After completing his service, Jones made his way to New Orleans, where he worked in clubs and bars. Will Warren, a New Orleans bandleader, introduced Jones to the electric guitar. T-Bone Walker was an early inﬂuence on Jones. By 1950 Jones had adopted the stage name Guitar Slim along with a wild stage persona that combined bright-colored suits, dyed hair to match, guitar distortion, and a long cord connecting his guitar to his ampliﬁer, which allowed him a great deal of motion, so much so he was known to wander into the street and stop trafﬁc without missing a lick. Guitar Slim was also known for his passionate excesses. In Honeydripper, Shack asks Matt, another porter, if Guitar Sam boarded the train. Matt tells him that the guitar player is in the hospital in Little Rock: “You know those music folks, whatever he was doing, he must have been doing too much of it.” Although he experienced one major hit, “The Things That I used to Do,” a song credited with shaping rock ’n’ roll, Eddie “Guitar Slim” Jones, died because of complications related to pneumonia brought on by alcoholism at the age of thirty-three. Sonny Blake, while not a Guitar Slim facsimile, is animated by characteristics gleaned from the real ﬁgure—his clothes, his stage presence, including his distinctive guitar, his ampliﬁer cord, which affords unrestrained movement, and his walk outside of the Honeydripper Lounge, where he clambers on top of a parked car as the crowd surrounds him. Sayles waits until the end of the ﬁlm to release Sonny and his guitar. As his name suggests, Sonny represents the coming of something new—rock ’n’ roll. Honeydripper, though, praises the roots of rock music, including gospel, blues, and rhythm and blues.

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Gary Clark, Jr., an Austin, Texas, blues guitarist, stars in Honeydripper as Sonny Blake. Sonny ﬁlls in for Guitar Sam, the man who was supposed to save the Honeydripper Lounge with his electric guitar. Ted Crocker, a Florida-based luthier, designed the guitar Clark uses in the ﬁlm. “Have the body look kind of like one of those Bo Diddley early guitars,” Sayles told Crooker, “something geometrical that you could make very easily without being a ﬁnish carpenter” (Watson 7). Clark played his songs live on the set.

Sonny Blake’s music is the future, which is where Sayles wants his picture to end. Honeydripper is not a rock ’n’ roll ﬁlm; it is a picture that deals with the impermanence of musical genres but it also celebrates early inﬂuences and their legacy within a speciﬁc musical form. Sonny may be a young man, as his name suggests, but he possesses intuitive knowledge of the past. The band he plays with at the conclusion of the ﬁlm includes the harmonica player who accompanied Bertha Mae at the beginning of the ﬁlm. His uncanny ability to play with a group of musicians with such ease and understanding recalls James Baldwin’s protagonist in “Sonny’s Blues.” His surname indicates his expressiveness and creativity, which is illustrated by his performance of “China Doll,” a song he says he wrote that afternoon. When Sonny Blake is in jail along with the other “vagrants” sentenced to pick cotton for the county, he begins to sing “Midnight Special,” a blues standard made popular by Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. His fellow inmates are impressed with Sonny’s rendition, and he tells them that he is a singer, a guitar player, and that one day he will be on the radio. Most of the men laugh, and then remind Sonny that the Sheriff controls his fate, just like the narrator of “Midnight Special.” One again Sayles uses a blues standard to link the past, the present, and the future. As Sayles told Luke Z. Fenchel of The Ithaca Journal, He’s [Sonny] going to be that generation that understands the road, but also understands recording. (theithacajournal).

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If Possum is the spirit of Honeydripper, then Tyrone “Pinetop” Purvis is the heart. In various interviews, Danny Glover declared that Sayles’s screenplay captured his attention immediately and he wanted to be part of the production from the beginning. Sayles’s Pinetop functions like Few Clothes, the character James Earl Jones portrayed in Matewan. Tyrone’s independence cuts against the grain of time and place. Jim Crow laws suppressed blacks, but Pinetop does not accept the limitations imposed by the dominate culture. Like James Earl Jones, Glover has a physical presence that enhances his characters. Sheriff Pugh tells Sonny to “take your hat off ” when he confronts him on an empty rural road. Sayles calls this the “heaviest line” in the ﬁlm: “that wasn’t because he was the sheriff but rather because he was white” (theithacajournal). The interplay between Pugh and Purvis, however, suggests an incongruous respect. Pinetop understands the rules, knowledge gain by experience, but he never stands down in Pugh’s presence, even when he asks for a favor with hat-in-hand. Tyrone’s focus is the Honeydripper Lounge, the club that connects him to his own itinerant past, to his musical legacy. The Honeydripper is dying because of the anachronistic acts, which Pinetop continues to book. He refuses to accept modernity, yet he knows he must change. Tyrone also must keep his family—his wife Delilah (Lisa Grey Hamilton), his stepdaughter China Doll, and Maceo, his partner—together, no matter the cost. When the ﬁlm opens, however, he has reached the point of no return—he will do anything to keep his roadhouse and his family, including stealing money, electricity, and booze. He even makes a pact with the devil, Sheriff Pugh. Pinetop believes in the music that has deﬁned his life and the culture of his people. Early in the ﬁlm, Pinetop makes choices to protect the Honeydripper—stealing an Ace of Spade’s liquor delivery, tapping into the local electric line, dismissing Bertha Mae, and announcing an appearance by Guitar Sam. These choices illustrate his independence. “Tyrone is a guy who has a certain status as the guy who runs the club,” Sayles explained to Melanie Haupt of The Austin Chronicle. “He’s an African-American man in the Deep South in the 1950’s who’s his own man, and that is what he is ﬁghting to save.... Somehow he senses that it’s important not just to him but also that it’s important to his community that there is someone like him and Maceo who are outside the white people’s sphere and seem to be their own men” (austinchronicle.com). What makes Pinetop intriguing is that he is not taking to the road, traditionally the best place to be for most bluesmen. Pinetop wants to remain part of the Harmony, Alabama, community. Sayles’s Pinetop challenges the Stagolee myth and the freedom of the open road. Keeping music alive requires lying, cheating, and stealing. Still, Tyrone Purvis remains a sympathetic character. As Haupt points out, “Sayles troubles the binaries of the everyday, revealing them as simply rhetorical inventions rather than concrete realities” (austinchronicle.com). Delilah struggles for most of the ﬁlm with a singular choice: blues culture or the church? The tension between the blues and the African-American church is in evidence in many blues songs, especially Robert Johnson’s. He, of course, famously sold his soul to the devil. Sayles does not use anything that extreme in his ﬁlm, but he does place Pinetop in competition with Reverend Cutlip (Albert Hall). For much of the ﬁlm, Cutlip has Delilah’s ear. Early on she tells Tyrone about the meeting she attended and the people who found God. Tyrone, drink in hand, bitterly reminds her that all the sinners are inside The Ace of Spades. Sayles juxtaposes two tent meetings with the secular music world at signiﬁcant points in the ﬁlm. Revered Cutlip delivers a sermon about the “highway of life” and the “highway to heaven,” declaiming that loved ones must be left behind because “you are either with the lord or you are with the devil—ain’t no in-

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between.” At the end of the speech, Sayles cuts to Sonny in jail. The second tent meeting is set against Guitar Sam’s appearance at the Honeydripper. In this sequence, Delilah almost makes it to the make-shift alter. But Delilah chooses Tyrone and the life inside the Honeydripper Lounge. Pinetop is human, and he is full of ﬂaws, but he anchors Sayles’s narrative, for he is the reason Possum hunts Harmony. By performing with Sonny, Pinetop takes the blues into a new phase by the end of Honeydripper. Moreover, he becomes comfortable with the transition to electric music. Possum is willing to leave Harmony once a new musical legacy has been established. Usually a Sayles ﬁlm features a ﬁgure that functions as an audience guide. Honeydripper uses a similar trope, but the guides hardly speak. Sayles opens his ﬁlm with the sound of a diddly-bow, an American string instrument of African origin, and then fades from black to show Scratch (Nagee Clay) attempting to play the primitive instrument. Lonnie (Absalom Adams), his friend, moves his ﬁngers across a keyboard drawn on a plank board. They are on the porch of an old cotton shack. Scratch just begins to establish a rhythm when Lonnie says, “That ain’t no kind of music.” Scratch says, “At least I make a sound.” Signiﬁcantly, the diddley-bow was an instrument many blues guitar players began playing as children. Like a blues guitar, it is played with a slide. Sayles’s opening image looks romantic, fable-like, but it establishes the tension that will exist between the two instruments and the men who play them for the entire ﬁlm. More important, Lonnie and Scratch take to the “road” to reach the Honeydripper Lounge. A harmonica track plays over the top of their journey, which passes through cotton ﬁelds, a bi-racial military base, a wooded area near a lake, and ﬁnally across a picturesque bridge. They reach the Honeydripper after dark, and inside they hear Bertha Mae singing the blues with Pinetop on the piano. The non-diegetic harmonica gives way to a diegetic performance. Lonnie and Scratch appear at essential moments throughout the rest of the picture. Like them, Sayles’s audience will pass through a sampling of musical performances—blues, rhythm and blues, spiritual, and ﬁnally rock ’n’ roll. Reunited near the cotton shack at the end of the ﬁlm, they “play” a tune that begins with a boogie-woogie piano riff, an obvious nod toward Pinetop, and then features a guitar solo played on a wooden facsimile of Sonny’s handcrafted instrument. Scratch and Lonnie moved through musical genres, high moments, low moments, and they witness Pinetop’s triumph—everything, in other words, that the audience experiences. Honeydripper, like all of Sayles’s ﬁlms, looks like a modest piece of ﬁlmmaking. Stylistically and technically the picture never overwhelms. At odds with his style is the claim the ﬁlm makes: inside the battered Honeydripper Lounge Sayles creates, as David Denby calls it, “his version of the birth of rock ’n’ roll” (81). Place, as Denby indicates, is essential in every Sayles ﬁlm. The ramble that opens Honeydripper is signiﬁcant because it moves from a tarpaper shack, though cotton ﬁelds, both negative images for African Americans, past the integrated army base, into idyllic woodland, which hints at limitless freedom, to the Honeydripper, a place that countervails the oppression of the cotton ﬁeld. Indeed, the lounge will become an essential place when Sonny takes the stage. The promise of a stellar musical performance draws members of the disparate communities from in and around Harmony, Alabama—women from town, itinerant cotton pickers, Sheriff Pugh, young people, old people, Possum, and Scratch and Lonnie—everyone except the people attending the tent revival. Dressed in his gold jacket, Sonny Blake and his guitar bind these people to the music and to each other. Pinetop breaks up the possible ﬁght between Dex and Ham, with some help from Possum, telling the combatants that they are in his

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house where there will be “no ﬁghting, no killing.” Pinetop wants no “dismal nonsense,” which could lead to a “pitiful song written about you two killing each other.” The Honeydripper Lounge has become a home by the end of the ﬁlm. Sonny takes his joyous music outside the lounge, playing “The Music Keeps Rollin’ On,” a song composed by Sayles and Mason Daring, which sums up the narrative course of Sayles’s ﬁlm. Small details make Honeydripper an incredibly rich ﬁlm. The ﬁlm cost $5 million dollars to produce; it generated $238,000 in domestic receipts. Most critics dismissed the ﬁlm. At the Atlanta Film Festival (April 19–28, 2007), John Sayles and Maggie Renzi received the Ossie Davis Award. Named after the late actor and social activist, the award recognizes creative excellence and dynamic contributions to the art of cinema; moreover, the recipient must typify Davis’s commitment to human dignity and social justice. Working with producer Ira Deutchman, Sayles and Renzi promoted the ﬁlm in a brand new way by re-conceptualizing marketing and distribution. Deutchman and producer Will Packer (Stomp the Yard) teamed with Clark Atlanta University to create a ﬁlm distribution and marketing course for historically black colleges and universities across the country. Students under the direction Professor Charles W. Richardson Jr., and led by industry professionals, were charged with developing and implementing grassroots market campaigns in support of Sayles’s ﬁlm. Honeydripper was scheduled for a national release in February 2008—February being Black History Month. Maggie Renzi spoke to Film Publicity Help, an on-line resource for independent ﬁlmmakers, and she commented on working with black colleges and universities: “It’s been a disappointing response, frankly, from the HBCUs. They have issues and problems of their own, including, of course, a constant struggle for funding. The response has been lackluster” (ﬁlmpublicityhelp.wordpress.com). Still, the do-it-yourself approach to distribution opened fresh possibilities for Anarchists’ Convention. The production company established connections with The Blues Foundation, the Black and Hispanic Achievers Association, and several ﬁlm festivals across the country. First Friday growth, the vaunted opening weekend gross, did not mean makeor-break for Sayles and Renzi. It was just a detail within a much more creative distribution plan. At the 2009 Toronto Film Festival, Jon Reiss, a digital ﬁlmmaker, served as part of a panel assembled by the Independent Film Project, and he called upon ﬁlmmakers to create a new production position, “Producer of Distribution and Marketing,” because “you have to think of distribution and marketing as integral to the actual ﬁlm” (indiewire.com). Sayles and Renzi were far out in front with this idea. “I feel like we’ve done what a normal distribution company doesn’t do,” Renzi told Film Publicity Help, “which is to really ﬁgure out who is the ideal team here” (ﬁlmpublicityhelp.worldpress.com). Sayles and Danny Glover promoted the ﬁlm whenever and wherever possible. The production company worked with four sets of publicists, one on the east coast and one on the west coast; a music publicist; and one charged with reaching an African-American urban audience. An extraordinarily user friendly website was established, and it included the Honeydripper Grassroots Marketing Package, which encourage groups or organizations to screen Honeydripper; in return, the sponsor would receive a 5% cut of the box ofﬁce gross receipts. One other unusual promotional device was the Honeydripper All-Star Band, which assembled performers from the ﬁlm, including Henderson Huggins (Tyrone Purvis’s piano double), Arthur Lee Williams (Metalmouth Simms), Dr. Mable John (Bertha Mae Spivey), Eddie Shaw (Time Trenier), and Gary Clark Jr. (Sonny Blake). The All-Stars performed at the Chicago Blues Festival, the River-to-River Festival in New York City, Bumber-

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shoot in Seattle, the Long Beach Arts Festival, and the Monterey Jazz Festival. Sayles and Renzi were able to take these creative, unorthodox approaches because they ﬁnanced Honeydripper with their own money. Speaking to John Anderson of the New York Times, Sayles stated, once again, what he has to do in order to hold complete control of his work: “For instance, I wrote ten pages of a screenplay for somebody yesterday morning, so I’m almost always, unless I’m shooting, writing something, which is how I make a living. And how I ﬁnanced the last couple of ﬁlms. But it’s just part of the job and always has been. About 80% of the job is publicity and fund-raising. It’s not my interest, but if you want to make another ﬁlm, you have to deal with it” (8). Honeydripper received two NAACP Image Award Nominations in 2008: Best Writing in a Motion Picture and Outstanding Independent or Foreign Film. Honeydripper won in the outstanding ﬁlm category. Like all Sayles projects, Honeydripper was fuel by a passion to tell stories about people and, in this case, the inﬂuence of African American music. By common commercial standards, the ﬁlm failed. Honeydripper, though, resonates with hope and harmony, traits Sayles instills in all of his ﬁlms.

Contributing More First, be disciplined and always be honest with yourself in knowing what you want to do. Some of it is just an emotional or gut feeling mixed with an intellectual understanding of what you’re trying to achieve. Second, when you’re on the set, you really have to know what you are trying to accomplish on that day. Whatever comes up that day, you never lose sight of “What’s the point of this scene?” or “What’s the point of this day?” Third is just do it until you get it right. Hold on to your vision even to the point that someone is offering you money but is asking for a few changes to be made. You can go into these situations with an open mind and listen, but you must know where your line is and absolutely not cross that line. —John Sayles, The Believer

Film is a collaborative art. As Louis Giannetti observes, “Film is a more complex medium than the traditional arts because movies synthesize many language systems simultaneously, bombarding the spectator with literally hundreds of symbolic ideas and emotions at the same time, some of them overt, others subliminal” (Understanding Movies 468). The process of making a ﬁlm is difﬁcult, expensive, and long. There are no easy decisions in ﬁlmmaking. For the most part, audiences take movies for granted, inviting the look of a ﬁlm to wash over them without much engagement. How movies are made, or who makes movies are no longer essential elements to know. Most viewers do not know who directed a movie, edited a movie, or wrote a movie. Even John Sayles was not immune to this condition: “I didn’t even know that people made movies until I was in college. I just went to them, and it was not a John Ford movie, it was a John Wayne movie” (Zucker 343). Now, after completing sixteen of his own feature ﬁlms, Sayles knows ﬁlmmaking. Writing, planning, directing, and editing, combined with the collaboration of a cast and crew, somehow blend to realize a personal cinematic vision. A seventeenth feature is in the works. Although a movie set is far from being a democracy, Sayles makes every effort to keep his ﬁlm crew operating as a cohesive, relatively democratic unit. As he wrote in 1987, “Getting people to work with rather than in spite of each other can be difﬁcult, and whenever possible we try to appeal to people’s sense of collaborating on a shared project rather than retreat behind the safe formula of rank” (Thinking in Pictures 105). Sayles is committed to independent ﬁlmmaking, unlike most of his contemporaries.

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Asked in an interview about his reputation as the champion of independent ﬁlmmaking, Sayles responded, “I hope it means that my independence from the studio structure is not just physical, but aesthetic. I hope that with my work I can encourage other people to make ﬁlms on their own without the pressure of the studio telling them to change the story or cast somebody who’s an untalented schmuck” (Hickenlooper 309). Sayles presents his stories his way, without outside interference. Although Sayles has proﬁted from Hollywood’s budgets by writing scripts and doctoring screenplays, when it comes to his own work, he does not function well under the aegis of a studio. Sayles wants to put his own vision on the screen—like any original ﬁlmmaker—and not a corporate vision beholden to test audiences and ratings boards. Screening Sayles’s ﬁlm work from Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) through Honeydripper (2008) is to witness the rapid and astonishing growth of an independent ﬁlm artist, a rarity in the American cinema where so much depends on the marketplace and the promotion that the studios provide. Movies demand money; money determines images. Many ﬁlmmakers who establish themselves through exciting work—Quentin Tarantino, Nick Gomez, Robert Rodriguez, Leslie Harris, Hal Hartley, for example—look to studios for ﬁnancial help to make their movies. Only Jim Jarmusch, who retains his negatives, is as inﬂuential and as original as Sayles. Unlike the work of many of his independent peers, all of Sayles’s ﬁlms are marked by language. “Talk is cheap,” he explains, “and action is expensive” (Thinking in Pictures 6). Sayles creates talking prose, capturing the essence of people through their speech, which makes them rich, believable characters. He is intrigued by people who keep going in the face of long odds and uncertainty. Many critics wrongly suggest that he celebrates “outsiders” or “losers,” weak words used to classify ordinary people, those who are not physically perfect, wealthy, or connected. Sayles’s characters seem exceptional because few ﬁlms revolve around the lives of regular people. As Louis Giannetti correctly points out in his review of Matewan, “There are few American ﬁlmmakers who demonstrate such decency and compassion toward ordinary people, people who would be astonished at the suggestion that a movie could be made about their lives. That’s Sayles’s greatest strength as an artist—he can see the poetry in our souls” (“John Sayles’ Ordinary People” 10). For the most part, contemporary directors lack the ability and perhaps the desire to explore regular people. Sayles’s blue-collar ties show through in his characters. He is one of the few contemporary directors (or ﬁction writers, for that matter) concerned with issues of class and work. Sayles can capture the speech of a lawyer or a mechanic, a bayou ﬁshing guide or a soap opera star, a faculty housewife or a big-city mayor, a Spanish speaking street kid or a ghostly bluesman with impeccable precision. A Sayles script delivers honest, concrete language, created for real characters, a stylistic trait that attracts quality actors to his lowbudget productions. Ever since Return of the Secaucus Seven, Sayles’s talents as a ﬁlm director have been overlooked and often belittled, especially by critics who do not care for screen narratives that weave political, social, economic, and historical threads into cinematic fabric. Sayles’s complex narratives are accented by his visual style, which tends to change from ﬁlm to ﬁlm. Long shots, camera movement, handheld medium shots, and long takes have become Sayles’s visual trademarks. He wants audiences to see and hear. Sayles’s subject matter is eclectic, and therefore he deﬁes popular critical labels. After seventeen ﬁlms, speciﬁc elements can be identiﬁed as essentially Saylesian: social divisions, communities, race, gender, class, and money, for instance. From sports to food to music,

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Sayles knows how to present small, carefully researched details to add regional ﬂavor and a sense of place to his work. For example, his musical interests move from rock ’n’ roll to urban blues to folk. He uses music to enliven and deﬁne his ﬁlms, not merely to manipulate emotions. Music helps Sayles enhance his ideas without telling his audiences how to think; it establishes mood, reveals character, and enriches emotion. The tension that exists between an individual and the community comes through in all of Sayles’s ﬁlm work. Often, his ﬁlm narratives explore how difﬁcult, and perhaps undesirable, it is to ﬁt into prescribed social groups. For example, at the conclusion of The Brother from Another Planet, we see the Brother, who has been liberated from slavery, standing alone in front of a chain-link fence. Although the Brother has discovered a community of his own, he stands alone next to the industrial fence, which signiﬁes an uncomfortable truth—when it comes to race there is still work to do. The image exempliﬁes the binary constructions Sayles uses in all of his ﬁlms; nothing is as simple as it ﬁrst looks. City of Hope magniﬁes the troubling reality of urban tribes, often rife with ethnic or work related tensions; only when characters break from their insular groups do they achieve autonomy, although usually at great expense. Passion Fish, too, comes to an ambiguous, uncertain ﬁnish: Are May-Alice and Chantelle, two women who have spent considerable time with each other throughout the ﬁlm, truly friends? Lone Star also raises questions about where and how people from different cultures and races can and cannot mix. Rather than exclusively bringing people together, Sayles’s ﬁlms also focus on how people are cut off from different ethnic groups, different cultures, and different ideas. What lasts are Sayles’s characters, who range from college friends on the cusp of thirty to a black extraterrestrial to an amorous Louisiana blacksmith to the hard-bitten “Tire King” of Ciudad León to the ghost of the blues. In each case, the details Sayles employs to embellish his creations—the games they play, the food they eat, the music they listen to—describe them and enhance his ﬁlms. Before his actors arrive on set, Sayles provides them with short biographies of their characters. The mosaic he has created is impressive: His characters look, act, and sound like people. His stories are always multilayered, full of familiar sounding voices. Sayles’s ability to pick up the peculiarities of speech is extraordinarily. Negative criticism has been directed at Sayles’s presumed visual limitations. Return of the Secaucus Seven, for example, is technically raw, not an unusual trait for debut ﬁlms. Yet in a 1996 poll conducted by Filmmaker: The Magazine of Independent Film, Sayles’s Return of the Secaucus Seven was voted the ﬁfth most important independent ﬁlm of all time. Moreover, in 1997, the ﬁlm was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically signiﬁcant. Sayles works within his budget, yet he creates rich visual compositions that are not meant to overwhelm; rather, his compositions are examples of heightened reality. Sayles is not interested in visual pyrotechnics to enhance the form of his work. He knows that stylistic virtuosity can interfere with the complicated pulse of his narratives. His visual compositions vary from ﬁlm to ﬁlm, but Sayles has become an assured ﬁlmmaker, as Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, and Lone Star, and Honeydripper clearly prove. Ironically, when Sayles deliberately adjusted his visual style for City of Hope, using a relentless Steadicam, he was taken to task by some critics because he tried to be visually innovative. Sayles’s rationale for the relentless motion was to visually articulate the tenuous condition of our cities, to stress the interconnectedness of Hudson City’s citizens, and to underscore the collective nature of urban life. Critics of his ﬁlms always appreciate what

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his characters say, but they want more visual stimulation, the stylistic dazzle mainstream ﬁlmmakers dream about. Sayles remains productive and committed. His output to this point in his career has been astounding, a fertility unmatched by almost any other independent or commercial ﬁlmmaker. He has accomplished all his own work outside of Hollywood and its celebrity machine. Sayles continues to tell stories about the lives of ordinary people. He appears uninterested in fame for himself, unspoiled by his stature as America’s premier independent ﬁlmmaker, not to mention ace rewrite man. Speaking with Shelley Levitt, Sayles deﬁned his own sense of reward: “Every time out, people like your movie or they don’t like your movie.... It makes a lot of money or it doesn’t. I don’t take any of that personally. For me, it’s such a triumph just to get a movie ﬁnanced and made, that the very existence of these movies is success enough” (90).

Filmography Principal characters: Rosanna Arquette ( Jill); Vincent Spano (Sheik); Joanna Merlin (Mrs. Rosen); Jack Davidson (Dr. Rosen); William Raymond (Mr. Ripeppi); Matthew Modine (Steve); Robert Downey, Jr. (Stewart).

Films Return of the Secaucus Seven 1980 Libra Films. Producers: William Aydelott and Jeffrey Nelson, for Salsipuedes Films. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Cinematography: Austin de Besche. Music: Mason Daring. Songs: Adam Le Fevre. Running time: 106 minutes. Principal characters: Mark Arnott ( Jeff ); Gordon Clapp (Chip); Maggie Cousineau-Arndt (Frances); Adam Le Favre ( J.T.); Bruce MacDonald (Mike); Jean Passanante (Irene); Maggie Renzi (Katie); David Strathairn (Ron); Karen Trott (Maura); John Sayles (Howie).

The Brother from Another Planet 1984 Cinecom International. Producers: Peggy Rajski and Maggie Renzi, for A-Train Films. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Cinematography: Ernest Dickerson. Production design: Nora Chavooshian. Art director: Steve Lineweaver. Music: Mason Daring. Running time: 110 minutes. Principal characters: Joe Morton (The Brother); Darryl Edwards (Fly); Steve James (Odell); Leonard Jackson (Smokey); Bill Cobbs (Walter); Maggie Renzi (Noreen); Tom Wright (Sam); Dee Dee Bridgewater (Malverne Davis); Caroline Aaron (Randy Sue Carter); Jamie Tirelli (Hector); John Sayles, David Strathairn (Bounty Hunters); Fisher Stevens (Cardsharp Magician).

Lianna 1983 United Artist Classics. Producers: Jeffrey Nelson and Maggie Renzi, for Winwood Company. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Cinematography: Austin de Besche. Art director: Jeanne McDonnell. Music: Mason Daring. Running time: 110 minutes. Principal characters: Linda Grifﬁths (Lianna); Jane Hallaren (Ruth); John DeVries (Dick); Jo Henderson (Sandy); Jessica Wight MacDonald (Theda); Jesse Solomon (Spencer); John Sayles ( Jerry); Maggie Renzi (Sheila); Stephen Mendillo (Bob).

Matewan 1987 Cinecom Entertainment Group. Producers: Peggy Rajski and Maggie Renzi, for Red Dog Films. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: Sonya Polonsky. Cinematography: Haskell Wexler. Production design: Nora Chavooshian. Art director: Dan Bishop. Costume design: Cynthia Flynt. Music: Mason Daring. Running time: 132 minutes. Principal characters: Chris Cooper ( Joe Kenehan); Will Oldham (Danny Radnor); Jace Alexander (Hillard); Ken Jenkins (Sephus Purcell); Bob Gunton (C.E. Lively); Gary McCleery (Ludie); Kevin Tighe (Hickey); Gordon Clapp (Griggs); Mary McDonnell (Elma Radnor); James Earl Jones (“Few Clothes” Johnson); James Kizer (Tolbert); Michael Preston (Ellix); Jo Henderson (Mrs.

Baby, It’s You 1983 Paramount Pictures. Producers: Amy Robinson and Grifﬁn Dunne, for Double Play Productions. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: Sonya Polonsky. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus. Story: Amy Robinson. Music: Joel Dorn. Songs: The Supremes, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, Frank Sinatra, Bobby Vinton, The Shirelles. Running time: 105 minutes.

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Filmography

Elkins); Nancy Mette (Bridey Mae); Joe Grifasi (Fausto); Ronnie Stapleton (Stennis); David Strathairn (Sid Hatﬁeld); Ida Williams (Mrs. Knights); Maggie Renzi (Rosaria); Thomas A. Carlin (Turley); Tom Wright (Tom); Josh Mostel (Mayor Cabell Testerman); Davide Ferrario (Gianni); John Sayles (Hardshell Preacher).

Eight Men Out 1988 Orion Pictures. Producers: Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford, for Sanford/Pillsbury Productions. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Tintori. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Story: Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof. Production design: Nora Chavooshian. Art director: Dan Bishop. Costume design: Cynthia Flynt. Music: Mason Daring. Running time: 120 minutes. Principal characters: John Cusak (Buck Weaver); Don Harvey (Swede Risberg); John Mahoney (Kid Gleason); James Read (Lefty Williams); Michael Rooker (Chick Gandil); Charlie Sheen (Hap Felsch); David Strathairn (Eddie Cicotte); D.B. Sweeney (“Shoeless” Joe Jackson); John Sayles (Ring Lardner); Studs Terkel (Hugh Fullerton); Christopher Lloyd (Bill Burns); Clifton James (Charles Comiskey); Jace Alexander (Dickie Kerr); Gordon Clapp (Ray Schalk); Bill Irwin (Eddie Collins); Richard Edson (Billy Maharg); Kevin Tighe (Sport Sullivan); Maggie Renzi (Rose Cicotte); Stephen Mendillo (Monk); Tay Strathairn (Bucky).

City of Hope 1991 Samuel Goldwyn Company. Producers: Sarah Green and Maggie Renzi, for Esperanza Films. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Dan Bishop and Dianna Freas. Costume design: John Dunn. Art director: Chas. B. Plummer. Music: Mason Daring. Executive producer: John Sloss. Running time: 129 minutes. Principal characters: Vincent Spano (Nick); Joe Morton (Wynn); Tony LoBianco ( Joe); Anthony John Denison (Rizzo); Barbara Williams (Angela); John Sayles (Carl); Bill Raymond (Les); Angela Bassett (Reesha); Josh Mostel (Mad Anthony); Jace Alexander (Bobby); Todd Graff (Zip); David Strathairn (Asteroid); Kevin Tighe (O’Brien); Daryl Edwards (Franklin); Ray Aranha (Former Mayor); Stephen Mendillo (Yoyo).

Cinematography: Roger Deakins. Production design: Dan Bishop and Dianna Freas. Costume design: Cynthia Flynt. Music: Mason Daring. Executive producer: John Sloss. Running time: 138 minutes. Principal characters: Mary McDonnell (MayAlice); Alfre Woodard (Chantelle); David Strathairn (Rennie); Vondie Curtis-Hall (Sugar); Maggie Renzi (Louise); Angela Bassett (Dawn/Rhonda); Sheila Kelley (Kim); Nancy Mette (Nina); Tom Wright (Luther); Leo Burmester (Reeves).

The Secret of Roan Inish 1995 First Look Pictures. Producers: Sarah Green and Maggie Renzi, for Skerry Movies Corporation. Associate Producer: R. Paul Miller. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Cinematography: Haskell Wexler. Production designer: Adrian Smith. Costume design: Consolata Boyle. Music: Mason Daring. Executive producer: John Sloss. Running time: 103 minutes. Principal characters: Jeni Courtney (Fiona); Eileen Colgan (Tess); Mick Lally (Hugh); Richard Sheridan (Eamon); John Lynch (Tadhg); Cillian Byrne ( Jamie); Susan Lynch (Nuala).

Lone Star 1996 Castle Rock Entertainment. Producers: R. Paul Miller and Maggie Renzi, for Rio Dulce Productions. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Cinematography: Stuart Dryburgh. Production designer: Dan Bishop. Costume design: Shay Cunliffe. Music: Mason Daring. Songs: Patsy Montana, Walter Jacobs, Lucinda Williams, Little Willie John, Big Joe Turner, Freddie Fender, Conjunto Bernal. Executive producer: John Sloss. Running time: 137 minutes. Principal characters: Chris Cooper (Sam Deeds); Elizabeth Peña (Pilar Cruz); Joe Morton (Delmore Payne); Kris Kristofferson (Charley Wade); Clifton James (Hollis); Stephen Mendillo (Cliff ); Stephen J. Lang (Mikey); Richard Coca (Enrique); Miriam Colon (Mercedes Cruz); Matthew McConaughey (Buddy Deeds); Eddie Robinson (Chet); Ron Canada (Otis); Gabriel Casseus (Young Otis); Leo Burmester (Cody); Tony Amendola (Chucho Montoya); Gordon Tootoosis (Wesley Birdsong); Frances McDormand (Bunny); Gilbert R. Cuellar, Jr. (Eladio Cruz); Tay Strathairn (Young Sam).

Passion Fish 1992

Men with Guns (Hombres Armados) 1997

Miramax. Producers: Sarah Green and Maggie Renzi, for Atchafalaya Films. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles.

Sony Pictures Classics. Producers: R. Paul Miller and Maggie Renzi, for Anarchists’ Convention Inc. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay:

Filmography John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Cinematography: Slavomir Idziak. Title photography: Luis González Palma. Production designer: Felipe Fernández Del Paso. Costume designer: Mayes C. Rubeo. Casting director: Lizzie Curry Martinez. Music: Mason Daring. Executive producers: John Sloss, Doug Sayles, Jody Patton, and Lou Gonda. English subtitles: Helen Milsted Eisenman. Running time: 126 minutes. Principal characters: Federico Luppi (Dr. Fuentes); Damián Delgado (Domingo, the Soldier); Dan Rivera González (Conejo, the Boy); Damián Alcazar (Padre Portillo, the Priest); Mandy Patinkin (Andrew); Kathryn Grody (Harriet); Tania Cruz (Graciela, the Mute Girl); Iguandili López (Mother); Nandi Luna Ramírez (Daughter); Rafael de Quevedo (General); Carmen Madrid (Angela Fuentes); Esteban Soberanes (Raul, Angela’s Fiancé); Roberto Sosa (Bravo); Dionisios (Salt Man); Lolo Navarro (Blind Woman); Maggie Renzi (Tourist by Pool); David Villalpando (Gum Person); Oscar García Ortega (Sergeant); Guadalupe Xocua (Modelo Woman); Celeste Cornelio Sánchez (Raped Girl); Nazario Montiel (Guerrilla).

Limbo 1999 Production Company: Green/Renzi. Producer: Maggie Renzi. Associate Producer: Sarah Connors. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Cinematographer: Haskell Wexler. Original Music: Mason Daring. Casting: Lizzie Martinez. Production design: Gemma Jackson. Art direction: Keith Neely. Costume design: Shay Cunliffe. Running time: 126 minutes. Principal actors: David Strathairn ( Jumpin’ Joe Gastineau); Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (Donna De Angelo); Kris Kristofferson (Smilin’ Jack Johannson); Vanessa Martinez (Noelle De Angelo); Casey Siemasko Bobby Gastineau); Kathryn Grody (Frankie); Leo Burmester (Harmon King); and Michael Laskin (Albright).

Sunshine State 2002 Production Company: Anarchists’ Convention Films. Producer: Maggie Renzi. Associate Producer: Nancy Schafer. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Cinematographer: Patrick Cady. Original Music: Mason Daring. Casting: John Hubbard, Ros Hubbard. Production design: Mark Ricker. Art direction: Shawn Carroll. Costume design: Mayes C. Rubeo. Running time: 141 minutes. Principal Actors: Alan King (Murray Silver); James McDonald (Reggie Perry); Angela Bassett (Desiree Perry); Mary Alice (Eunice Stokes); Edie Falco (Marly Temple); Jane Alexander (Delia Temple); Ralph Waite (Furman Temple);

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Mary Steenburgen (Francine Pinkney); Gordon Clapp (Earl Pinkney); Timothy Hutton ( Jack Meadows); Miguel Ferrer (Lester); Perry Lang (Greg); Bill Cobb (Doctor Lloyd); Alex Lewis (Terrell); Richard Edson (Steve Tregaskis); and Michael Greyeyes (Billy Trucks).

Casa de los Babys 2003 Production Company: IFC Films, Springall Pictures, Blue Magic Pictures. Producers: Alejandro Springall, Lemore Syran. Associate Producer: Melissa Marr. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Based on the short story “Casa de los Babys.” Cinematography: Mauricio Rubinstein. Original Music: Mason Daring. Production design: Felipe Fernández del Paso. Costume design: Mayes C. Rubeo. Running time: 95 minutes. Principal Actors: Vanessa Martinez (Asunción); Maggie Gyllenhaal ( Jennifer); Susan Lynch (Eileen); Mary Steenburgen (Gayle); Marcia Gay Harden (Nan); Daryl Hannah (Skipper); Lilli Taylor (Leslie); Rita Moreno (Señora Muñoz); Bruno Bichir (Diómedes); and Juan Carlos Vives (Búho).

Silver City 2004 Production Company: Anarchists’ Convention Films. Producer: Maggie Renzi; Co-Producer: Robert Lansing Parker. Associate Producers: Suzanne Ceresko, Same Tedesco. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Cinematography: Haskell Wexler: Original Music: Mason Daring. Casting: John Hubbard and Roz Hubbard; Production design: Toby Corbett; Set decoration: Alice Baker; Costume design: Shay Cunliffe. Running time: 128 minutes. Principal Actors: Chris Cooper (Dickie Pilager); Richard Dreyfuss (Chuck Raven); Danny Huston (Danny O’Brien); James Gammon (Sheriff Joe Skaggs); Tim Roth (Mitch Paine); Mary Kay Place (Grace Seymour); Maria Bello (Nora Allardyce); Miguel Ferrer (Cliff Castleton); Billy Zane (Chandler Tyson); Michael Murphy (Senator Judson Pilager); Daryl Hannah (Maddy Pilager); Thora Birch (Karen Cross); Luis Saguar (Vince Esparza); Sal Lopez (Tony Guerra); Alma Delﬁna (Lupe Montoya); and Kris Kristofferson (Wes Benteen).

Honeydripper 2007 Production Companies: Anarchists’ Convention Films and Honeydripper Films. Producer: Maggie Renzi. Associate Producers: Ira Deutchman, Susan Kirr, Mark Wynns. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Inspired by the short story “Keeping Time.” Cinematography: Dick Pope; Original Music: Mason Daring. Running time: 124 minutes.

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Principal Actors: Danny Glover (Tyrone ‘Pinetop’ Purvis); Charles S. Dutton (Maceo); Gary Clark Jr. (Sonny Blake); Stacy Keach (Sheriff Pugh); Albert Hall (Reverand Cutlip); Lisa Gay Hamilton (Delilah); Yaya DaCosta (China Doll); Vondie Curtis-Hall (Slick); Dr. Mable John (Bertha Mae); Mary Steenburgen (Amanda Winship); Darly Edwards (Shack Thomas); Sean Patrick Williams (Dex); Eric L. Abrams (Han); Tom Wright (Cool Breeze); and Keb’ Mo’ (Possum).

Amigo (Baryo) 2010 Production company: Anarchists’ Convention Films. Producer: Maggie Renzi. Director: John Sayles. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editor: John Sayles. Cinematography: Lee Meily. Original Music: Mason Daring. Running Time: TBA. Principal Actors: Chris Cooper (Col. Hardacre); DJ Qualls (Zeke); Garret Dillahunt (Lt. Compton); Yul Vazquez (Padre Hidalgo); Joel Torre (Rafael); and Irma Adlawan ( Josefa).

Screenplays Piranha 1978 Producer: John Davidson, for New World Pictures. Executive producer: Roger Corman. Director: Joe Dante. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editors: Mark Goldblatt, Joe Dante. Cinematography: Jamie Anderson. Art direction: Bill and Kerry Mellin. Music: Pino Donaggio. Special effects: John Berg. Running time: 92 minutes. Principal characters: Bradford Dillman (Paul Grogan); Heather Menzies (Maggie McKeown); Kevin McCarthy (Dr. Robert Hoak); Keenan Wynn ( Jack); Dick Miller (Buck Gardner); Barbara Steele (Dr. Mengers).

The Lady in Red 1979 Producer: Julie Corman, for New World Pictures. Director: Lewis Teague. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editors: Larry Block, Ron Medico, Lewis Teague. Cinematography: Daniel Lacambre. Production design: Philip Thomas. Set decoration: Keith Hein. Music: James Horner. Sound: Anthony Santa Croce. Running time: 93 minutes. Principal characters: Pamela Sue Martin (Polly Franklin); Robert Conrad ( John Dillinger); Louise Fletcher (Anna Sage); Robert Hogan ( Jake Langle); Laurie Heineman (Rose Shimkus); Glen Withrow (Eddie); Rod Gist (Pinetop); Peter Hobbs (Pops Geissler); Christopher Lloyd (Frognose); Dick Miller (Patrick); Nancy Anne Parsons (Tiny Alice); Alan Vint (Melvin Purvis).

Battle Beyond the Stars 1980 Producer: Ed Carlin, for New World Pictures. Executive producer: Roger Corman. Director: Jimmy T. Murakami. Screenplay: John Sayles. Editors: Allan Holtzman, Bob Kizer. Cinematography: Daniel Lacambre. Set decoration: John Zabrucky. Music: James Horner. Miniature photography: C. Comisky. Miniature design: Mary Schallock. Running time: 104 minutes. Principal characters: Richard Thomas (Shad); Darlanne Fluegel (Nanelia); Robert Vaughn (Gelt); John Saxon (Sador); George Peppard (Cowboy); Sybil Danning (St. Exmin); Sam Jaffe (Dr. Hephaestus); Morgan Woodward (Cayman); Steve Davis (Quopeg); Earl Boen, John McGowans (Nestor #1 and #2); Larry Meyers, Laura Cody (Kelvin); Lynne Carlin (Nell); Terrence McNally (Gar); Ansley Carlin (Wok).

Alligator 1980 Producer: Brandon Chase, for BLC. Executive producer: Robert S. Bremson. Director: Lewis Teague. Screenplay: John Sayles. Cinematography: Joseph Mangine. Running time: 92 minutes. Principal characters: Robert Forster (David Madison); Dean Jagger (Slade); Perry Lang (Kelly); Bart Braverman (Newspaper Reporter); Robin Riker (Marisa); Henry Silva (Colonel Brock); Michael Gazzo (Chief of Police); Jack Carter (Mayor).

The Howling 1981 Production: Michael Finell, Jack Conrad, for Avco Embassy. Director: Joe Dante. Screenplay: John Sayles, with Terence H. Winkless. Cinematography: John Hora. Editors: Mark Goldblatt, Joe Dante. Art direction: Robert A. Burns. Special effects: Roger George. Special make-up: Rob Bottin. Music: Pino Donagio. Sound: Ken King. Running time: 91 minutes. Principal Characters: Dee Wallace (Karen White); Patrick Macnee (Dr. George Waggner); Dennis Dugan (Chris); Christopher Stone (William [Bill] Neill); Belinda Balaski (Terry Fisher); Kevin McCarthy (Fred Francis); John Carradine (Eric Kenton); Slim Pickens (Sam Newﬁeld); Elisabeth Brooks (Marsha); Robert Picardo (Eddie); Margie Impert (Donna); Dick Miller (Bookstore Owner).

The Challenge 1982 Production: Robert L. Rosen, Ron Beekman, for CBS Theatrical Films Group; released by Embassy Pictures. Director: John Frankenheimer. Screenplay: John Sayles, with Richard Maxwell. Cinematography: Kozo Okazaki. Editor: John

Filmography W. Wheeler. Art direction: Yoshiyuki Ishida. Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Running time: 106 minutes. Principal characters: Scott Glenn (Rick); Toshiro Mifune (Toru Yoshida); Donna Kei Benz (Akiko); Atsuo Nakamura (Hideo); Calvin Jung (Ando); Clyde Kusatsu (Go); Sab Shimono (Toshio as an adult); Kiyoaki Nagai (Kubo); Kenta Fukasaku ( Jiro); Shogo Shimada (Father of Yoshida); Yoshio Inaba (Instructor); Seiji Miyaguchi (Old Man); Miiko Taka (Yoshida’s Wife).

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute 1983 Production: Mirra Bank, for Ordinary Lives, Inc.; released by ABC Video; TC Films International. Directors: Mirra Bank, Ellen Hovde, Mufﬁe Meyer. Screenplay: John Sayles, with Susan Rice (based on short stories by Grace Paley). Principal characters: Ellen Barkin (Virginia); David Strathairn ( Jerry); Ron McLarty ( John); Sudie Bond (Mrs. Raftery); Lynn Milgrim (Faith); Jeffrey DeMunn (Ricardo); Zvees Schooler (Pa); Eda Reiss Merin (Ma); Fay Bernardi (Mrs. Hegel-Shtein); Maria Tucci (Alexandra); Kevin Bacon (Dennis); John Wardwell (Doc); Lou Criscuolo (George).

Clan of the Cave Bear 1986 Production: Jon Peters, Peter Guber, for Decade-Jones; released by Warner Bros. Producer: Gerald I. Isenberg. Director: Michael Chapman. Screenplay: John Sayles (based on the novel by Jean M. Auel). Cinematography: Jan De Bont. Editor: Wendy Green Briemont. Production design: Anthony Masters. Art design: Guy Comtois, Richard Wilcox. Set design: Kimberly Richardson. Costume design: Kelly Kimball. Special effects: Gene Grigg, Michael Clifford. Makeup: Michael G. Westmore, Michele Burke. Music: Alan Silvestri. Running time: 98 minutes. Principal characters: Daryl Hannah (Ayla); Pamela Reed (Iza); James Remar (Creb); Thomas G. Waites (Broud); John Doolittle (Brun); Curtis Armstrong (Goov); Martin Doyle (Grod); Adel C. Hammoud (Vorn); Tony Montanaro (Zoug); Mike Muscat (Dorv); John Wardlow (Droog); Paul Carafotes (Brug); Janne Mortil (Ovra); Lycia Naff (Uba); Rory L. Crowley (Durc); Colin Doyle (Young Boy).

Wild Thing 1987 Producers: David Calloway, Nicholas Clermont, for Atlantic Releasing Corp. Executive producers: Thomas Coleman, Michael Rosenblatt. Director: Max Reid. Screenplay: John Sayles. Cinematography: René Verzier. Editors: Battle Davis, Steven Rosenblum. Music: George S. Clinton.

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Sound: Henri Blondeau. Production designer: Ross Schorer. Costume designer: Paul-Andre Guerin. Special effects: Jacques Godbout. Running time: 92 minutes. Principal characters: Rob Knepper (Wild Thing); Kathleen Quinlan ( Jane); Robert Davi (Chopper); Maury Chaykin (Trask); Betty Buckley (Leah); Guillaume Lemay-Thivierge (Wild Thing, 10 yrs); Clark Johnson (Winston); Sean Hewitt (Father Quinn); Terry Abner (Rasheed); Summer Francks (Lisa); Sean Levy (Paul); Robert Bednarski (Free/ Wild Thing, 3 yrs); Neil Afﬂeck (Detective Walt); Tyrone Benskin (Detective Maury).

Breaking In 1989 Producer: Harry Gittes, for Samuel Goldwyn Company. Executive producers: Andrew Meyer, Sarah Ryan Black. Director: Bill Forsyth. Screenplay: John Sayles. Cinematography: Michael Coulter. Editor: Michael Ellis. Music: Michael Gibbs. Sound: Les Lupin. Production designer: Adrienne Atkinson, John Willett. Special effects: Larry L. Fuentes. Costume design: Louise Frogley. Running time: 91 minutes. Principal characters: Burt Reynolds (Ernie); Casey Siemaszko (Mike); Sheila Kelly (Carrie); Lorraine Toussaint (Delphine); Albert Salmi ( Johnny Scat); Harry Carey, Jr. (Shoes); Maury Chaykin (Tucci); David Frishberg (Nightclub Singer); John Baldwin (Sam the Apostle); Eddie Driscoll (Paul the Apostle); Stephen Tobolowsky (D.A.); Richard Key Jones (Lou); Walter Shane (Boss); Tom Laswell (Bud).

Men of War 1994 Producer: Arthur Goldblatt, Andrew Pfeffer, for Grandview Avenue Pictures; released by Dimension Films. Director: Perry Lang. Screenplay: John Sayles (Original Title: A Safe Place), with Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris. Cinematography: Ronn Schmidt. Editor: Jeffrey Reiner. Line producer: Jason Clark. Costume designer: Ileane Meltzer. Music: Gerald Gouriet. Production design: Steve Spence, Jim Newport. Casting: Risa Bramon Garcia. Make-up effects: Mony Monsano. Executive producer: Moshe Diamant, Stan Rogow. Story: Stan Rogow. Running time: 103 minutes. Principal characters: Dolph Lundgren (Nick Gunner); Charlotte Lewis (Loki); B.D. Wong (Po); Jimmy G (Anthony John Denison); Ocker (Tom Guinee) Nolan (Don Harvey); Tiny “Zeus” Lister, Jr. (Blades); Tom Wright ( Jamaal); Catherine Bell (Grace); Trevor Goddard (Keefer); Kevin Tighe (Merrick); Perry Lang (Lyle).

The Spiderwick Chronicles 2008 Production Company: Paramount. Director Mark Waters. Screenplay: Karey Kirkpatrick,

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David Berenbaum and John Sayles. Based on the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. Running time: 96 minutes. Principal Actors: Freddie Highmore ( Jared/ Simon); Sarah Bolger (Mallory); Mary-Louise Parker (Helen); David Strathairn (Arthur); Joan Plowright (Lucinda).

A Cold Case 2011 (expected) Production Company: Universal. Director: Mark Romanek. Screenplay, John Sayles and Eric Roth. Based on the book by Philip Gourevitch. Starring Tom Hanks.

Teleplays A Perfect Match 1980 Production: CBS/Lorimar. Director: MelDamski. Teleplay: John Sayles. Cast: Bonnie Bartlett ( Judge Greenburg); Michael Brandon (Steve Triandos); Collen Dewhurst (Meg Larson); Charles Durning (Bill Larson); Marilyn Kagan (Lisa); Linda Kelsey (Miranda McLloyd); Lisa Lucas ( Julie Larson).

Unnatural Causes 1986 Production: NBC/Image Entertainment. Director: Lamont Johnson. Teleplay: John Sayles. Cast: Patti LaBelle ( Jeanette Thompson); Marie McCann (Phillipa); John Ritter (Frank Coleman); John Sayles (Lloyd); John Vargas (Fernando ‘Nando Sanchez); Alfre Woodard (Maude DeVictor).

Shannon’s Deal 1989, 1990 Broadcast History: 1989, Pilot; April 1990 – May 1990, Series. Producer: Stan Rogow. Director: Lewis Teague. Teleplay, episodes 1 and 4: John Sayles. Music: Wynton Marsalis. Legal Consultant: Alan Dershowitz. Cast: Jamey Sheridan ( Jack Shannon); Elizabeth Peña (Lucy Acosta); Jenny Lewis (Neala Shannon); Richard Edson (Wilmer Slade); Miguel Ferrer (D.A. Todd Spurrier); Martin Ferrero (Lou Gondolf ); Ralph Waite ( Jack Shannon’s Father); Michelle Joyner (Country and Western Singer).

Scar Tissue 2010 Production Company: HBO. Screenplay: John Sayles. Adapted from Anthony Kiedis’s and Larry Soloman’s autobiography.

Bibliography The Primary Sources, all by John Sayles, are listed in chronological order, since the ﬁlms are discussed that way in the text. Secondary Sources are listed alphabetically. _____, director, screenwriter, and editor, Casa de los Babys. IFC Films. Springall Pictures, 2003. _____, director, screenwriter, and editor, Silver City. Anarchists’ Convention Inc., 2004. _____, director, screenwriter, and editor, Honeydripper. Anarchists’ Convention Inc., Honeydripper Films, 2007. _____, director, screenwriter, and editor, Amigo (Baryo). Anarchists’ Convention Inc., 2010.

Primary Sources Films Sayles, John, director, screenwriter, editor, and actor. Return of the Secaucus Seven. Salsipuedes Productions, 1980. _____, director, screenwriter, editor, and actor. Lianna. Winwood Production Company, 1983. _____, director and screenwriter. Baby, It’s You. With Vincent Spano, Rosanna Arquette. Paramount Films production in association with Double Play Productions, 1983. _____, director, screenwriter, editor, and actor. The Brother from Another Planet. A-Train Films, 1984. _____, director, screenwriter, and actor. Matewan. Red Dog Films, 1987. _____, director, screenwriter, and actor. Eight Men Out. Sanford/Pillsbury Productions, 1988. _____, director, screenwriter, editor, and actor. City of Hope. Esperanza Films, 1991. _____, director, screenwriter, and editor. Passion Fish. Atchafalaya Films Production, 1993. _____, director, screenwriter, and editor. The Secret of Roan Inish. Skerry Movies, 1995. _____, director, screenwriter, and editor. Lone Star. Rio Dulce Productions, 1996. _____, director, screenwriter, and editor. Men with Guns (Hombres Armados). Anarchists’ Convention Inc., 1997. _____, director, screenwriter, and editor. Limbo. Anarchists’ Convention Inc., 1999. _____, director, screenwriter, and editor, Sunshine State. Anarchists’ Convention Inc., 2002.

Novels Sayles, John. Pride of the Bimbos. New York: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1975. _____. Union Dues. New York: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1977. _____. Los Gusanos. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. _____. A Moment in the Sun. New York: McSweeney’s, to be published in 2011.

Short Stories Sayles, John. The Anarchists’ Convention. New York: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1979. _____. “The Halfway Diner.” The Atlantic Monthly 259 ( June 1987): 59–68. _____. “Dillinger in Hollywood.” Triquarterly, Spring 1980. _____. “Treasure.” Esquire 109 (March 1988): 168–80. _____. “Peeling.” The Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1993): 69–74. _____. “Keeping Time.” Rolling Stone 9 (Dec. 1993), 48–52, 82–84. _____. “Above the Line.” Premiere, September 1994.

303

304

Bibliography

_____. Dillinger in Hollywood. New York: Nation Books: 2004.

Nonﬁction Sayles, John. Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1987. _____. Sayles on Sayles. Ed. Gavin Smith. New York: Faber and Faber, 1998.

Essays and Reviews Sayles, John. “At the Republican Convention.” The New Republic 2, 9 (Aug. 1980): 20 –25. _____. “Goldman, Biro, and Nyuk-Nyuk-Nyuk.” Review of Adventures in the Screen Trade, by William Goldman. Film Comment 19 (May/ June 1983): 72–73. _____. “Pregame Jitters.” Esquire 105 ( June 1986): 55–57. _____. “Cassavetes’s Sources Seemed to Be Our Own Doubting Lives.” The New York Times 12 May 1991. _____. “The Big Picture.” Mother Jones Magazine Interactive (May/June 1996): On Line. Internet. Available http://bsd.mojones.com _____. “Chicago Guy: Nelson Algren.” Conjunctions. “Tributes: American Writers on American Writers.” Ed. Martine Bellen, Lee Smith, and Bradford Morrow. Annandale-onHudson, N.Y.: Bard College, Fall 1997. _____. “East Timor Enters Reconstruction Era: A Work in Progress.” The Austin Chronicle 19 May 2000 (auschron.com/issues).

Published Screenplays Sayles, John. “Lone Star.” Scenario 2:2 (Summer 1996): 6 –49. Published script. _____. Men with Guns & Lone Star. London: Farber and Farber, 1998. _____. Silver City and Other Screenplays Volume 1. New York: Nation Books, 2004.

Studio Screenplays Sayles, John, screenwriter. Piranha, directed by Joe Dante. New World Pictures, 1978. _____. The Lady in Red, directed by Lewis Teague. New World Pictures, 1979. _____. Battle Beyond the Stars, directed by Jimmy T. Murakami. New World Pictures, 1980. _____, with Frank Ray Perilli. Alligator, directed by Lewis Teague. BLC, 1980. _____, with Terence H. Winkless. The Howling, directed by Joe Dante. AVCO-Embassy, 1981.

_____, with Richard Maxwell. The Challenge, directed by John Frankenheimer. CBS Entertainment, 1982. _____, with Susan Rice (based on short stories by Grace Paley). Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, directed by Mirra Bank, Ellen Hovde, and Mufﬁe Meyer. TC Films International, 1983. _____. Clan of the Cave Bear (based on the novel by Jean M. Auel), directed by Michael Chapman. Warner Bros., 1986. _____. Wild Thing, directed by Max Reid. Clermont Pictures, 1987. _____. Breaking In, directed by Bill Forsyth. Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1989. _____. Men of War, directed by Perry Lang. GrandView Avenue Pictures, 1994.

Script Work Sayles, John. Apollo 13, directed by Ron Howard. Universal Pictures, 1995. _____. The Quick and the Dead, directed by Sam Raimi. TriStar Pictures, 1995. _____, with Steven Soderbergh. Mimic, directed by Guillermo Del Toro. Dimension Films, 1997.

Screenplays Written but Never Filmed Sayles, John. Night Skies, 1980. _____. Blood of the Lamb, 1981. _____. Terror of Loch Ness, 1982.

Scripts Commissioned Sayles, John. “Bob Merriman, the American Leader of the International Brigade.” For TriStar. _____. SS Indianapolis, 1991. For Jonathan Demme. _____. The Fifth Child, 1996. For Maggie Renzi and Paul Miller. _____. Tom Mix Died for Your Sins, 1996. For Sydney Pollack. _____. Brother Termite, 1997; in process. For James Cameron. _____. Gold of Exodus: The Discovery of the True Mount Sinai, 1998; in process. For Castle Rock.

Music Videos: Director Born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen and the EStreet Band, 1985. Glory Days, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, 1985.

Bibliography I’m on Fire, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, 1985. Mountainview, with Marta Renzi. Music program for PBS, 1989.

Teleplays Sayles, John, writer. A Perfect Match, directed by Mel Damski. CBS, 1980. _____. Unnatural Causes, directed by Lamont Johnson. NBC, 1986. _____. Shannon’s Deal, directed by Lewis Teague. NBC, 1989. _____. Shannon’s Deal, two episodes; series run: 1990. _____. Scar Tissue, HBO, 2010.

Unproduced Television Work Sayles, John. Pilots for The Brother from Another Planet as a television show. _____. Adaption of Peter Mathiessen’s Killing Mr. Watson. For TNT.

Plays Sayles, John. New Hope for the Dead. Produced Off Off Broadway, 1981. _____. Turnbuckle. Produced Off Off Broadway, 1981.

Secondary Sources Abby, Edward. Beyond the Wall. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1979. American Cinematographer 64 (April 1983): 85– 86, 88. John Sayles interview. Anderson, John. “Down South, Singing the Indie Blues.” The New York Times December 2, 2007, 8. Andrews, Terry L. Review of The Brother from Another Planet. Magill’s Cinema Annual 1985. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1985. Angell, Roger. “No, But I Saw the Game.” The New Yorker 31 July 1989, 41–56. Ansen, David. With Katrine Ames. “Doing What Comes Naturally.” Newsweek 11 April 1983, 78–79. Ardolino, Frank. “Ceremonies of Innocence and Experience in Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, and Eight Men Out.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 18 (1990): 43–51. Asinof, Eliot. Eight Men Out. 1963. New York: Henry Holt, 1987. _____. “John Sayles Interview.” Directors Guild Magazine (December 1997/January 1998). On

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Line. Internet. (http://www.dga.org/magazi ne/v22-5/john_sayles.html ) Atkinson, Michael. “The 26th Annual Baltimore Film Festival.” Review of The Secret of Roan Inish. City Paper 5 April 1995, 25. Aufderheide, Patricia. “Filmmaking as Storytelling: An Interview with John Sayles.” Cineaste 15 (1987): 12–15. _____. “Journals: Sayles in Harlem.” Film Comment (March/April 1984): 4, 6. Auster, Al, and Leonard Quart. The Cineaste Interviews. Chicago: Lake View, 1983. Barra, Allen. “Hollywood Keeps Striking Out on Real-Life Baseball.” New York Times 28 April 1991, 13H, 21H. Barrett, Laura. “The Space of Ambiguity: Representations of Nature in Limbo.” Sayles Talk: New Perspectives on Filmmaker John Sayles. Dianne Carson and Heidi Kenga, eds. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Barzun, Jacques. God’s Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love Spiced with a Few Harsh Words. Boston: Little, Brown, 1954. Bazin, Andre. “An Aesthetic of Reality.” What Is Cinema? Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, pp. 16 –40. Beale, Lewis. “He’s the Lone Wolf Behind Lone Star.” Daily News 19 June 1996, 38. Berra, John. Declarations of Independence: American Cineam and the Partiality of Independent Production. Chicago: Intellect Books, 2008. Black, Louis. “Page Two: The Moment Belongs to Music.” The Austin Chronicle, 18 January 2008 (austinchronicle.com). Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. 2d ed. New York: Continuum, 1993. Bonetti, Kay. The American Audio Prose Library, 1982. John Sayles interview. Bould, Mark. The Cinema of John Sayles: Lone Star. London: Wallﬂower Press, 2009. Bourjaily, Vance. “A Revivalist of Realism.” The New York Times Book Review 1 April 1979, 15, 33. Blackwelder, Rob. “Sayles-ing to the Sunshine State.” SplicedWire. 13 June 2007. Brancaccio, David. Now. Transcript 6 August 2004 (pbs.org). Broeske, Pat H. Review of The Howling. Magill’s Cinema Annual 1982. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1982. Brown, Cecil. Stagolee Shot Billy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Canby, Vincent. “Film View: Mixed Adventures.” The New York Times 21 June 1981, II 17. _____. “Long in the Tooth.” Review of Alligator. The New York Times 5 June 1981, C8.

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_____. “Lycanthropophilia.” Review of The Howling. The New York Times 13 March 1981, C10. _____. “Of Shaggy Dogs and Logarithms.” Review of Breaking In. The New York Times 9 Oct. 1989, C18. Carnes, Mark C., general editor. With eds. Ted Mico, John Miller-Monzon, and David Rubel. Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. _____, ed. “A Conversation Between Eric Foner and John Sayles.” Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. New York: Henry Holt, 1995, pp. 11–28. Caro, Mark. “Telling Stories: John Sayles Reveals What Makes Him So Independent-minded.” Chicago Tribune 2 April 1998, 5:4. Carr, Jay. “Sayles’ Lone Star Shines with Mystery.” The Boston Globe 28 June 1996, 45, 52. Carson, Dianne. John Sayles Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississsippi, 1999. _____. and Heidi Kenaga, eds. Sayles Talk: New Perspectives on Filmmaker John Sayles. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Carson, Gerald. “The Saloon.” American Heritage: The Magazine of History (April 1963): 25. Castle Rock Entertainment. “Lone Star, Production Notes.” Beverly Hills, Calif., 1996. The Charlie Rose Show. PBS talk show. WNET, New York. 15 March 1995. _____. WNET, New York. 26 June 1996. Chute, David. “John Sayles: Designated Writer.” Film Comment (May–June 1981): 54 –59. Clark, John. “Filmographies.” Premiere (Sept. 1991): 120. Clarke, Doug. “Sympathy for the Poor Devils.” The Cleveland Edition 22 Sept. 1988, 18. Conason, Joe. “Notes on a Native Son: The George W. Bush Success Story.” Harper’s Magazine February 2000, 39–43. Connors, Joanna. “Irish Family’s Tales Take Sea, Saw Trail in Myth.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer 31 March 1995, 6, 7. Cooper, Carol. “Soldier’s Story Salute.” Film Comment (Nov./Dec. 1984): 17–19. Crouch, Stanley. “New Films Plumb True Depth of the Melting Pot.” Daily News 26 June 1996, 27. Crowdus, Gary, and Leonard Quart. “Where the Hope Is: An Interview with John Sayles.” Cineaste 18:4 (1991): 4 –7, 61. Daring, Mason. Lone Star. With Duke Levine, Tim Jackson, Larry Luddecke, Mike Turk, and Evan Harlen. Daring Records, CD3023, 1996. _____. The Secret of Roan Inish Soundtrack. With Cormac Breatnach, Maire Breatnach, Roan Browne, and Gerald Foley. Daring Records, CD3015, 1995.

Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues: The Roots, the Music, the People. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Davis, Lisa Selin. “Revolutionary Road: John Sayles’s Rise From Meatpacking to Silver City.” Independent: Film and Video Monthly, September 2004: 36 –39. Davis, Thulani. “Blue-Collar Auteur.” American Film ( June 1991): 19–22, 49–50. Davis, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack. “Forget the Alamo: Reading the Ethics of Style in John Sayles’s Lone Star.” Style: Vol. 32, No. 3 Fall 1998: 471–485. Dekoven, Marianne. “To Bury and Praise: John Sayles on the Death of the Sixties.” Minnesota Review 30:3 (1988): 129–47. Demers, Charles. “Independent, not Bushleague: A Conversation with John Sayles.” Seven Oaks: A Magazine of Politics, Culture & Resistance, October 19, 2004. (http://www. sevenoaksmag.com/features/35_feat1.html). Demyanenko, Alex. “One Man Out.” Village View 1–7 Nov. 1991, 22–35. Denby, David. “Rock of Ages.” The New Yorker 7 January 2008, 80 –81. De Witt, Karen. “Ideas & Trends: Incest as a Selling Point.” The New York Times 30 Marck 1997, E6. “Dialogue on Film: John Sayles.” American Film 11 (May 1986): 13–15. John Sayles interview. di Caprio, Lisa. “Liberal Lesbianism.” Jump Cut 29 (1984): 45. Dominguez, Robert. “‘Guns’ Maker Sayles Aims for Originality.” Daily News 4 March 1998, 38–39. Dowell, Pat. “The Secret of Roan Inish.” Morning Edition. NPR.WITF, Harrisburg. 17 February 1995. Dreifus, Claudia. “The Progressive Interview: John Sayles.” The Progressive (Nov. 1991): 30–33. Dubofsky, Melvyn. “Matewan.” Labor History 31 (1990): 488–90. Dyer, Richard. “Rejecting Straight Ideals: Gays in Film.” Jump Cut: Hollywood, Politics, and Counter-Cinema. Edited by Peter Steven. New York: Praeger, 1985. Ebert, Roger. Roger Ebert’s Video Companion. Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews and McMeel, 1993. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Vintage, 1972. Embry, Marcus. “A Postcolonial Tale of Complicity: The “Angle of History” and Men with Guns. Discourse, 21.2 Spring 1999, 163–180. Epel, Naomi. Writers Dreaming. New York: Vintage, 1993, pp. 221–28. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

Bibliography Farber, Stephen. “Five Horsemen After the Apocalypse.” Film Comment 21:4 (1985): 32– 35. Felperin, Leslie. “Walking Alone.” Sight and Sound (Sept. 1996): 22–24. Fenchel, Luke Z. “Honeydripper Director Talkes About Rock’s Ingredients.” Ithaca Journal. 5 April 2008 (theithacajournal.com). Ferrante, Anthony J. “The Independent Spirit.” Scr(i)pt 2:4 ( July/Aug. 1996): 6 –9. “Filmmaker.” The New Yorker 23 March 1981, 30 –31. Fuchs, Cynthia. “What hasn’t been sanitized and homogenized?” Morphizm.com 13 June 2007. Getlin, Josh. “John Sayles, Novelist, Seeks a Binding Agreement.” The Los Angeles Times 26 May 2009 (latimes.com /la-et-john-sayles262009.story). Giamatti, A. Bartlett. Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games. New York: Summit, 1989. Giannetti, Louis. “John Sayles’ Ordinary People.” The Cleveland Edition 15 Oct. 1987, 10. _____. Understanding Movies. 7th ed. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996. _____, and Scott Eyman. Flashback: A Brief History of Film. 2d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991. Giardina, Denise. “Union, Mines, and Mountains.” Christianity and Crisis 47 (1987): 443– 45. Goldman, Francisco. The Long Night of White Chickens. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992. Goodman, Mark. “Sports Today: John Sayles Interview.” Z Magazine (October 1988): 71–74. Gottlieb, Stanley. Review of City of Hope. Magill’s Cinema Annual 1992. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1992. Gould, Stephen Jay. Introduction to Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof. xv–xviii. New York: Henry Holt, 1987. Grady, Pam. “Florida Rumble.” Reel.com 10 February 2006. Grant, Kim, Paige R. Penland and Elaine Merrill, eds. Lonely Planet: Florida. Oakland: Lonely Planet Publications, 2003. Green, Jane. “Interview: John Sayles and Maggie Renzi on Hand-Picking a Marketing/Distribution Team for Honeydripper.” Film Publicity Help (ﬁlmpublicityhelp.worldpress. com) 18 March 2008. Gritten, David. “Sayles’ Little ‘Secret’: A Film for Children.” Los Angeles Times 30 July 1993, F12, 20. Grunwald, Michael. The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

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Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Haupt, Melanie. “The Evolution of American Music and Southern Race Relations in Honeydripper.” The Austin Chronicle, 1 February 2008 (austinchronicle.com). Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Hickenlooper, George. Reel Conversations: Candid Interviews with Film’s Foremost Directors and Critics. New York: Citadel Press, 1991. Hinson, Hal. “Lone Star: Stagnant Sayles.” Washington Post 12 July 1996, F6. Hodel, Martha Bryson. “Mining Matewan’s Past.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer 8 April 1993, C4. Holden, Stephen. “In a Departure, John Sayles Turns a Myth into a Hit in ‘Roan Inish.’ ” The New York Times 5 March 1995, H13, 21. _____. “Real Men, an Endangered Species on Film.” The New York Times 7 July 1996, H9. _____. “Casa de los Babys.” The New York Times 19 July 2007, B5. _____. “Way Down in Harmony, With Mythic Blues Again. The New York Times 28 December 2007, B13. Holmlund, Christine. “When Is a Lesbian Not a Lesbian? The Lesbian Continuum and the Mainstream Femme Film.” Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory 25–26 (1991): 145–78. Honeydripper Press Kit. Falco, Ink. New York, New York. Howe, Desson. “John Sayles’s Bright Star.” Review of Lone Star. Washington Post 12 July 1996, “Weekend,” 39, 41. Jacobs, Diane. Hollywood Renaissance. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1977. James, Caryn. “Passion Fish Nourishes the Grown Ups.” New York Times 24 January 1993, H11. Johnson, Mary. “Proﬁle: John Sayles.” Creative Screenwriting 3:1 (summer 1996): 5–12. Johnson, Sharon. “John Sayles Remains an Outsider.” Harrisburg Patriot News 8 Sept. 1996. Johnson, Timothy. “Review: Return of the Secaucus Seven.” Magill’s Cinema Annual 1983. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1983. Johnston, Trevor. “Sayles Talk.” Sight and Sound (Sept. 1993): 26 –29. Jones, Suzi. “Regionalization: A Rhetorical Strategy.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 13 (1976): 107. Julavits, Heidi, Ed Park, and Vendela Vida, eds. The Believer (March/April 2009): Vol. 7 No.3. Kael, Pauline. “Field of Dreams.” The New Yorker 1 May 1989, 76 –77.

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_____. Movie Love: Complete Reviews, 1988 – 1991. New York: Dutton, 1991. Kaufman, Anthony. “Lone Gun: A Conversation with John Sayles. indieWire, 6 March 1998 (indiewire.com/article/lone_gun_a_conversa tion_with_john_sayles/). Kauffmann, Stanley. Review of Lianna. New Republic 188 (14 March 1983): 24 –25. Kawin, Bruce. “The Funhouse and The Howling.” American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. Champaign-Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1987. Kelley, R.S., “The John Sayles Border Stop.” On Line. Internet. 21 April 1997. Available http:// www~scf.usc.edu/~rskelley/ﬁlm/ﬁlm.html. Kemp, Philip. Review of Passion Fish. Sight and Sound, Sept. 1993, 51–52. Kenan, Randall. “Miami Vice.” The Nation 24 June 1991, 856 –58. Kennedy, Harlan. “Irish Cinema: Idyll & Ideology.” Film Comment (May–June 1994): 24, 35–40. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest, 1981. Kipen, David. “‘Roan Inish’ Is Latest Product of Saylesmanship.” Los Angeles Daily News, rpt. The Cleveland Plain Dealer 31 March 1995, 6, 7. Klawans, Stuart. “Films.” Review of Lone Star. The Nation 29 July/5 Aug. 1996, 34 –36. Kontovrakis, Konstantinos and Despina Mouzaki eds., John Sayles. Greece: Hellenic Ministry of Culture, 2007. (48th Thessaloniki International Film Festival) Laermer, Richard. “John Sayles, an Interview.” Films in Review 36 (Feb. 1985): 105–6. Lardner, Ring, Jr. “Foul Ball.” American Film ( July/August 1988): 45–49. Lawson, Steve. “John Sayles: A Man for All Media.” New York Times Magazine 17 April 1983, 108–18. Levitt, Shelley. “Bio: John Sayles.” People 8 March 1993, 86 –90. Linﬁeld, Susan. “Studs Terkel: World Serious.” American Film ( July/August 1988): 48. Lippy, Tod. “A Talk with John Sayles.” Scenario 2: 2 (summer 1996): 50 –53, 192–96. Lopate, Phillip. “With Pen in Hand, They Direct Movies.” New York Times 16 Aug. 1992, H7–13. Lurie, Alison. Don’t Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children’s Literature. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. Magowan, Kim. “Blood Only Means What You Let It: Incest and Miscegenation in John Sayles’s Lone Star.” Film Quarterly (2003), Vol. 57, no. 1: 20 –31. Maltin, Leonard. “Writers Guild Foundation Career Achievement Award.” Interview. On Line. Internet. 13 February 1998. Available http://www.wga.org/pr/0298/sayles.html

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Index Abbey, Edward 227–228 Academy Award Nominations 2, 12, 196 Alexander, Jace 97, 120, 142 Alexander, Jane 232 Algren, Nelson 10, 66, 115 Alligator (1980) 10, 24, 29, 30, 31 Altman, Robert 53, 120, 131, 215, 219, 231 American Beach 231, 236 American Video Award 4 The Anarchists’ Convention and Other Stories 9, 38, 245 Anarchists’ Convention Films 1, 13, 278 Anderson, John 117, 293 Anderson, Sherwood 41 Andrews, Terry L. 77 Angell, Roger 116, 126 Apollo 13 (1995) 2, 10, 35, 36, 174 Apostolopoulos, Hector 254 Ardolino, Frank 125 Arquette, Rosanna 4, 67 Asinof, Eliot 14, 114, 115, 122, 123, 230 Atkinson, Michael 170 The Atlantic Monthly 8, 9, 258 Atlantic Monthly Press 8 Auel, Jean M. 33, 34 Aufderheide, Pat 77 Baby It’s You (1983) 54, 108, 65–75, 110, 162, 192, 279 Bacon, Kevin 33 Baldwin, James 7, 280, 289 Ballhaus, Michael 72–74, 81 Baron, Cynthia 50 Barrett, Laura 216, 223, 226, 227 Barzun, Jacques 114 Baseball (1994) 12 Baseball in literature 114 “The Baseball Movie” 113–124 Bassett, Angela 4, 130, 152, 231

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) 22–24 Bazin, André 42, 153 The Believer 278, 293 Bello, Maria 264, 277 Bergman, Ingmar 7, 144, 211, 215 Berra, John 4 Berry, Chuck 283 The Big Chill (1983) 53 Birch, Thora 265 The Birds (1963) 18 Bishop, Dan 4 Black Mama, White Mama (1972) 180, 197 The Black Sox 117 Bogle, Donald 90 Bould, Mark 252 Bourjaily, Vance 5 Brady, Upton 8 Brancaccio, David 277 Breaking In (1989) 35, 36 Bridgewater, Dee Dee 89 Broeske, Pat 39 The Brother from Another Planet (1984) 11, 75–91, 98, 108, 162, 164, 195, 279, 295 Brown, Cecil 280 Buñuel, Luis 247 Burmester, Leo 155, 194, 216 Burnett, Charles 286 Burns, Ken 12 Bush, George W. 257–260, 264 –266, 274, 275, 277 Cady, Patrick 230 Cameron, James 14, 36 Camus, Marcel 255 Canada, Ron 178 Canby, Vincent 5, 30 Cannes International Film Festival 215 Carroll, Hamilton 204, 205 Carson, Dianne 106 Carson, Gerald, III 88

311

Casa de los Babys (2003) 1, 6, 244 –257 Cassavetes, John 42 Casseus, Gabriel 179 Castle Rock Entertainment 174, 176, 197 The Challenge (1982) 10, 31–33 Chandler, Raymond 182, 259, 263, 269, 270, 273 Chaplin, Charlie 84, 85 The Charlie Rose Show 157, 164, 170 Chavooshian, Nora 4, 79, 105, 108, 109, 125 Cheever, John 164 Cheney, Dick 259, 275 “Children of the Silver Screen” 1 Chinatown (1974) 196, 262, 272 Chute, David 21 Cineaste Magazine 38, 54, 63, 93, 183, 214, 218, 224, 225 Cinematography 22, 78–83, 92, 95–101, 116, 119–121, 130, 132, 136, 140 –143, 153–155, 159–171, 187–197, 199–212, 216 –227, 233–244, 247–252, 256 –257, 263–276, 281–292, 294 Citizen Kane (1941) 16, 88, 196 City of Hope (1991) 2, 3, 6, 10, 11, 128–144, 146, 170, 176, 188, 200, 226, 229, 259, 279, 295 Clan of the Cave Bear (1986) 33 Clapp, Gordon 4, 7, 53, 105, 106, 120, 233 Clarke, Doug 119 Clarke, Gary, Jr. 281, 289, 292 Cobbs, Bill 77, 234 Colgan, Eileen 172 Colon, Miriam 179, 194 –196 Columbia Pictures 55 Comiskey, Charles Albert 115, 116, 123, 124, 127 Conason, Joe 265 Conrad, Joseph 211

312 Cooper, Carol 81 Cooper, Chris 4, 94, 101–103, 133, 177, 178, 189, 191, 194, 195, 260, 274 Coover, Robert 164 Coppola, Francis Ford 14 Corman, Roger 1, 14, 16, 19, 25, 29, 49 Courtney, Jeni 159, 169, 171 Cowboy Junkies 273, 261 Crane, Stephen 5 Creative Screenwriting 66, 76 Crowdus, Gary 139 Curtis-Hall, Vondie 149, 155, 156, 284 DaCosta, Yaya 282 Dante, Joe 12, 14, 15, 19, 25 Daring, Mason 4, 50, 53, 68, 109, 125, 129, 149, 171, 192, 193, 212, 244 Davis, Lisa Selin 264, 271, 278 Davis, Thulani 10, 130, 132 Deakins, Roger 153 DeLillo, Don 10 Demers, Charles 271 Demme, Jonathan 4, 11, 14, 224 Denby, David 291 Denison, Anthony John 36 Deutchman, Ira 292 DeVries, Jon 56 Di Caprio, Lisa 56 Dickerson, Ernest 76, 78, 81, 82, 83, 92 Dillinger in Hollywood 6, 13, 245 Directors Guild of America 77 Doel, Francis 14 Dreifus, Claudia 6 –8 Dreyfuss, Richard 260 Dryburgh, Stuart 188, 191 Dubofsky, Melvyn 95 Dunne, Grifﬁn 66 Dutton, Charles S. 282 Dwan, Allan 21 Dyer, Richard 61 Earle, Steve 276, 277 Ebert, Roger 116 Edson, Richard 123, 232 Edwards, Daryl 77, 87, 88, 284 Eggers, Dave 4 Eight Men Out (1988) 2, 6, 11, 14, 91, 113–128, 134, 142, 143, 170, 176, 231 Ellison, Ralph 84, 89, 282 Embry, Marcus 212 Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1983) 11, 32, 33 Esquire 229 Eyman, Scott 113 Falco, Edie 231, 233, 240 Fanon, Frantz 253, 254 Fasion, Frank 138

Index Faulkner, William 7, 176, 207, 232, 241 Feminism 44 –46, 54 –56 Fenchel, Luke Z. 289 Fender, Freddie 192 Ferrer, Miguel 4, 235, 263 Field of Dreams (1989) 114, 118 Film Comment 15, 146, 157, 165 Film noir 130 –133 Filmmaker 295 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 114, 119 Flagler, Henry 231 Flynt, Cynthia 4, 109, 125 Foner, Eric 66, 93, 115 Ford, John 110 Forsyth, Bill 35 Frankenheimer, John 10 Fry, Rosalie K. 158 Fullerton, Hugh 122, 127 Gammon, James 268 Getlin, Josh 4 Giamatti, A. Bartlett 114 Giannetti, Louis 113, 293, 294 Giardina, Denise 108 Girlﬁght (2000) 2, 12, 13 Glazer, Brian 35, 36 Glover, Danny 281, 287, 290, 292 “Golden State” 8 Goldman, Francisco 200 Goldman, William 9 Goodman, John 12 Gottlieb, Sidney 133 Gould, Stephen Jay 114, 115 Gray, Sheri 205 The Great Train Robbery (1903) 197 Green, Sarah 4, 143, 163, 173, 215 Gridlock’d (1997) 12 Grifﬁths, Linda 56, 57 Gritten, David 173, 279, 280 Grody, Kathryn 204, 218 Grunwald, Michael 232 Guerrero, Ed 91 Los Gusanos (1991) 4, 9, 228 Gyllenhaal, Maggie 246, 249 Hall, Radclyffe 62 Hallaren, Jane 57 Hamilton, Lisa Grey 290 Hammett, Dashiell 182, 183 Hammond, John 110 Hanks, Tom 35, 36 Hannah, Daryl 4, 34, 246, 248, 263 Hard Choices (1986) 11 Harden, Marcia Gray 246, 248 HarperCollins 10 Harryhausen, Ray 231 Haskell, Molly 44, 58, 153 Hatﬁeld, Sid 94 Haupt, Melanie 290 Hiaasen, Carl 229

Hickenlooper, George 6, 162 High Noon (1952) 97 Hinson, Hal 191 Holden, Stephen 173, 197, 232, 286 Holmlund, Christine 59 Honeydripper (2007) 1, 3, 11, 162, 294, 278–293, 295 Howard, Ron 35, 36, 174 Howells, William Dean 58 The Howling (1981) 10, 11, 24, 25, 29, 30 Hubbard, John 171, 172 Hubbard, Ros 171, 172 Huston, Danny 261, 262, 264, 277 Huston, John 165, 262 Hutton, Timothy 235 “I-80 Nebraska, m.490 –m.205” 8, 258 Ian McLellan Hunter Award 13 Idziak, Slawomir 211, 212 Independent Film Channel 13 Independent Spirit Awards 12 Indiewire 212, 244 Invisible Man 89 Irish Cinema 165, 172 James, Clifton 115, 177, 194, 230 Jarmusch, Jim 156, 294 Jason and the Argonauts (1963) 231, 236 Jaws (1975) 14, 16, 18, 30 John, Dr. Mable 284, 292 John Steinbeck Award 13 Johnson, Mary 169 Johnson, Robert 281, 282, 285, 290 Johnson, Timothy 53 Jones, James Earl 4, 99, 102, 290 Jones, Suzi 150 Joyce, James 165 Kael, Pauline 3, 35, 118 Karten, Terry 10 Kasden, Lawrence 53 Kauffmann, Stanley 57 Kaufman, Anthony 212 Kawin, Bruce 26 Keach, Stacy 285 Keaton, Buster 76, 85 Keb’ Mo’ (Kevin Moore) 259, 280, 283 “Keeping Time” 280, 283 Kelly, Gene 1 Kelly, Sheila 152 Kenan, Randall 9 Kennedy, Harlen 9, 165 Kennedy, William 164 Kerouac, Jack 219 Kieslowski, Krzysztof 211

313

Index King, Alan 230 King, Stephen 16 Kipen, David 10 Klawans, Stuart 3, 201 Kristofferson, Kris 4, 177, 197, 219, 227, 259 Kusama, Karyn 13 The Ladd Company 55 The Lady in Red (1979) 20, 21, 29 Lally, Mick 159, 169, 172 Lang, Perry 235 Lang, Stephen J. 131, 177, 194, 219 Lardner, Ring 116, 120, 122 Lardner, Ring, Jr. 116 Lee, Spike 40, 76, 81, 140 LeFevre, Adam 7, 41 Leigh, Mike 281 Lerner, Michael 115, 127 Levitt, Shelly 296 Lianna (1983) 54 –65, 67, 87, 144 Library of Congress Film Registry 53, 295 Limbo (1999) 6, 214 –228, 244, 270, 279 Lippy, Todd 37, 153, 176, 187 Little, Brown and Company 8 Little Vegas (1990) 11 Lloyd, Christopher 4, 123 Loach, Ken 45 London, Jack 5 Lone Star (1996) 2, 6, 9, 162, 175–198, 234, 259, 295 Lopate, Phillip 138 Los Angeles Film Critics Award 52 Los Angeles Times 173 Luppi, Federico 199 Lurie, Allison 162 Lynch, John 160, 172 Lynch, Susan 160, 161, 246, 248, 251 MacArthur Foundation 12, 75 MacDonald, Bruce 7 “Magic Realism” 2, 10, 158, 164, 170 Magowan, Kim 185 Malcolm X (1992) 12 Maltin, Leonard 11 Mantell, Michael 4, 78 Marcus, Greil 285 Marney, Angela 56 Márquez, Gabriel García 10, 164 Marsalis, Wynton 11 Martínez, Vanessa 180, 215, 221, 247 Marx Brothers 120, 244 Maslin, Janet 201 Mast, Gerald 2, 14, 19, 77, 84 Mastrantonio, Mary Elizabeth 215

Matewan (1987) 2, 6, 11, 91, 93–113, 128, 142, 143, 156, 166, 170, 176, 290 Matewan Massacre 93–96, 112 Mathnet (1992) 12 Matinee ((1993) 12 McCarthy, Kevin 17 McConaughey, Matthew 177, 189 McDaniels, James 231 McDonnell, Mary 4, 105, 144, 151, 156 McDormand, Francis 194, 196, 181 McGavin, Patrick Z. 286 McNeil, Brian 9 McQueen, Steve 156 McSweeney’s Press 4 Men of War (1994) 36 Men with Guns/Hombres Armados (1998) 2, 197–214, 216, 231 Mendillo, Stephen 4, 127, 177, 194 Mette, Nancy 4, 105, 152 Meyer, Russ 22 Miller, Dick 12, 17 Miller, Joshua L. 247, 252 Miller, Laura 191, 201 Miller, Marvin 114 Miller, R. Paul 4, 173, 176 Mimic (1997) 2 Miramax 176 Molyneaux, Gerry 7, 29, 34, 49, 199, 211 A Moment in the Sun 4 Monaco, James 101 Moore, Michael 266, 278 Moreno, Rita 246 Morton, Joe 4, 76, 82, 84 –86, 89, 130, 178, 194 Mostel, Josh 4 Moyers, Bill 228 The Mummy (1999) 174 Murakami, Jimmy T. 22–23 Murphy, Michael 266, 278 My Life’s in Turnaround (1993) 12 My Mexican Shivah (2007) 2, 13 NAACP Image Award 293 Nashville (1975) 53 The Nation 3 Nation Books 13, 245 National Book Award 5 National Book Critics Circle Award 5, 14 Neff, Renfreu 202 Nelson, Jeffery 7, 43 Neville, Aaron 142 New Hope for the Dead 10 The New Republic 9 New World Pictures 1, 14- 24, 38

The New York Times 197 The New Yorker 116 Newsweek 67 Next Wave Films 13 Nicholson, Jack 262 Night Skies 55 Norman, Martin 104 O. Henry Award 7 O’Brien, Tom 118 Oldham, Will 94, 101, 103–105 Orion Pictures 115, 116 Osborne, David 40, 53 Ossie Davis Award 13, 292 Packer, George 6 Paley, Grace 11, 32 Pally, Marcia 61 Palmer, Robert 285 Papagianni, Lilly 234 Paramount Pictures 54, 279 Paredes, Americo 185, 187 Parody 14 –24, 25–32, 79 Passion Fish (1994) 1, 2, 3, 12, 144 –157, 162, 164, 173, 191, 279, 295 Patinkin, Mandy 204 Peckinpah, Sam 197 “Peeling” 13 Peña, Elizabeth 4, 179, 194, 195 A Perfect Match (1980) 11 Persona (1966) 145 Personal Best (1982) 59 Piranha (1978) 1, 9, 10, 11, 14 – 16, 18, 19, 20, 27, 30, 175, 215 Pizer, Donald 224 Place, Mary Kay 262 Poe, Edgar Allan 14, 79 Polonsky, Sonya 66, 72, 111 Pope, Dick 281 Popkin, Daniel 63 Premiere 113 Pribram, E. Deidre 47, 35, 47 Pride of the Bimbos (1975) 8, 245 Production 1, 2, 11–13 Quart, Leonard 138, 139, 141 The Quick and the Dead (1995) 36 Rajski, Peggy 4, 77 Ratner, Megan 192 Raymond, Bill 139 Rea, Steven 35 Reagan, Ronald 50, 80, 91, 93, 96, 102, 129, 143 Realism 40, 42, 45, 153, 214 Reed, Lou 69 Reid, Max 34 Reiss, Jon 292 Renzi, Maggie 1–7, 14, 41, 54 77, 91, 143, 158, 162, 164, 171, 173, 176, 205, 215, 277, 278, 292, 293

314 Renzi, Marta 91 Resnais, Alain 60 Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) 3–5, 11, 37–54, 64, 72, 162, 255, 279, 204 Reynolds, Burt 35 Rich, Frank 10 Richardson, Richard 116, 119, 133, 140, 153 Rizzo, Cindy 61 Robinson, Amy 66 Robinson, Eddie 178, 196 Rodriquez, Ralph 201 Rodriquez, Rene 228, 229 Rose, Charlie 162, 163, 175 Rosen, David 43, 54 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 259– 261, 279 Rosenstone, Robert 198, 201 Roth, Tim 265 Rothchild, John 241 Rothstein, Arnold 115, 120 Rove, Karl 260 Rubinstein, Mauricio 245 Russo, Vito 55, 56 Ryan, Susan 200, 201 Rymer, Russ 236 Sanford-Pillsbury Productions 115 Santitos (1999) 2, 13 Sarris, Andrew 3, 13, 15, 117, 146, 153, 157 Sayles, John 5–14, 293–296; and acting 15, 39, 105; as an actor 11, 27, 77, 90, 116, 135, 136; and character sheets 108, 193, 194; and dialogue 35, 100, 250; and editing 97, 125, 193, 219; and history 93–97, 123; and mise-en-scène 97, 166, 190, 221, 248, 262; and music 109, 110, 125, 136, 149, 244, 278–279, 283, 288; and “psychological realism” 99; and storytelling 1, 2, 5, 100, 131, 134, 166, 170, 220, 241, 245, 247; and visual style 3, 40, 42, 45, 74, 81, 97, 99, 100, 101, 120, 130, 133, 146, 147, 153, 164, 166, 168, 170, 215, 216, 247, 256; and writing 42, 100, 129, 245 Scenario 175 Schlesinger, Tom 15 Schnabel, Tom 212 Scobey, David 125, 127, 128 Scorsese, Martin 14, 72, 116, 130, 279, 282 Scott, A.O. 260, 261 The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) 2, 3, 157–174, 176, 201, 251, 252, 295

Index Secret of Ron Mor Skerry 157–160 “Selkie Legend” 158 Seven Oaks 258, 271 Seven Samurai (1954) 23 Shannon’s Deal (1990) 10 Shapiro, Barbara Hewson 4, 86, 87 Sheridan, Richard 171 Siemaszko, Casey 35, 222 Silver City (2004) 13, 258–279 Sinatra, Frank 67–69, 71, 72 Skerry Movies Corp. 157, 158 Sloss, John 4 Smith, Claiborne 245 Smith, Gavin 50, 83, 107, 133, 190 Smith, Greg M. 128, 135, 188 Soap operas 144, 145, 152, 153 Some Time in the Sun 4 Somebody in Boots (1935) 10 Something Wild (1986) 1 Sony Pictures Classics 2, 215 Sound 68, 171 Spano, Vincent 4, 67, 69, 132, 136 Spielberg, Steven 10, 53 Springall, Alejandro 13 Springsteen, Bruce 4, 10, 70, 71, 91–93, 226, 259; and Born in the U.S.A. 10, 92; and Glory Days 4, 10, 92; and I’m on Fire 10, 92 Sragow, Michael 3 Star Wars (1977) 22 Steele, Barbara 20 Steenburgen, Mary 233, 246 Stempel, Tom 39 Steinbeck, John 66, 70, 91; Award 13 Stone, Oliver 40, 116 Stone, Robert 10 Straight Talk (1992) Strathairn, David 4, 7, 41, 53, 65, 77, 86, 87, 90, 96, 106, 117, 126, 131, 149–151, 156, 178, 215, 227 Strathairn, Tay 180 Sunshine State (2002) 1, 6, 162, 214 –216, 228–244, 259, 268, 270, 279 Takemine, Go 11 Tanner, Alain 42 Taylor, Lilli 246 Teague, Lewis 20, 29 Television 6, 11, 12 Terkel, Studs 113, 116 Them! (1954) 19 Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan (1987) 2, 9, 14, 51, 70, 94 Thompson, Cliff 80, 81, 155 Thompson, David 16

Tierney, Lawrence 142 Tighe, Kevin 4, 36, 105, 106, 120, 127, 136, 142 Timmins, Margo 261, 273 Tintori, John 125 Touch of Evil (1958) 196 “Treasure” 229, 233 Turim, Maureen 158, 165 Turnbuckle (1981) 10 Turner, Ted 174, 176 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) 7, 66, 242 20th Century–Fox 66 Twitchell, James 16, 19, 26 Union Dues (1977) 5, 8, 75, 93, 245 Unionism 93–96, 101–103, 109–112 Unnatural Causes (1986) 5, 10 Untamagira (1990) 10 Untermyer, Louis 94 Urban politics 128–131, 142– 143 Van Zandt, Steve 92 Visual composition (deﬁned) 191–192 Wadhams, Wayne 68 Waite, Ralph 4, 232, 240, 263 Waits, Tom 219, 220 The Washington Post 191 The Well of Loneliness (1928) 62 West, Dennis 184, 186, 218, 219, 220, 224 West, Joan 184, 186, 218, 219, 220, 224 Wexler, Haskell 4, 98, 99, 100, 105, 166, 170, 216, 222, 226, 227 Wild Thing (1987) 34 Williams, Jeanne 94 Williams, John Alexander 96 Williams, Lucinda 242 Williams, Marco 77 Williams College 7 Wilson, August 285 The Wolf Man (1941) 25, 26, 28 Woodard, Alfre 144, 151, 155, 157 Wright, Tom 4, 36, 77, 87, 138, 155, 237, 238 Writers Guild Foundation 6, 14; and Ian McLellan Hunter Award 13 “The Year of the Woman” 144 Yeats, William Butler 165 Yntema, Peggy 8 Zane, Billy 269 Zinn, Howard 95