Riley Womack

We are connected whether we want to be or not: to family, to neighbors, to those who came before, and to those who will live with what we leave behind.

Faulkner goes on: “All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” The past keeps its hand on our shoulder. Our choices are never solitary.

The worst part about living in New York is the simple fact that I am unable to be there today and vote with my fellow Texans. I miss my dear Lone Star State every day, and will be joyous when they are able to elect officials who will adequately represent them.

They have made it harder to vote, they have defunded public education under the guise of “parental freedom,” and faith in our institutions—from state government to our universities—has been steadily eroded.

For thirty years, under statewide Republican leadership, Texas has chased its myths and capital at all costs, and in doing so has divorced Texans—whom I love so much, and whom I am lucky to count myself one—from their better angels.

The film is the finest evocation of Faulkner’s line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” John Sayles builds a palimpsest of the borderlands’ hardscrabble histories, showing how intimately its cultures are entwined—so that any attempt to keep old stories buried risks disturbing them again.

Lone Star (1996): No Wild and Aberrant Star The driving force of Lone Star isn’t the suspense of discovery, but the moral weight of what’s already known—and what people choose to do with it.

Yesterday was Texas Independence Day. Today is Election Day. Last year for @brightwalldarkroom.com I wrote about Texas and Texans in LONE STAR, a film which is perhaps more relevant now than it was when it premiered thirty years ago.

well I quite literally just finished this book, so if Frank is writing about the adaptation that means I should probably watch it

For @bwdr.bsky.social’s “What Is to be Done?” issue, I wrote about HIGH NOON—a film whose political voltage still hums in our own time. The film is a parable of civic abandonment, the fragility of conscience, and what happens when good people wait for someone else to act.

Many thanks to the folks over at @bwdr.bsky.social for letting me go long on John Sayles’s earnest investigation deep in the heart of Texas. So let’s hit the trail.

A face that reveals a lifetime of regret. A man realizing too late what he’s done, what he’s lost.