They say that you would be able to never go home again, but in fact, it seems harder to ever fully leave. No matter how far you progress, how radically your environment shifts, you carry the place you’re from with you, like a talisman or a chronic disease. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker Richard Linklater has been related to Austin, Texas, since the release of his breakthrough feature, Slacker, in 1990, and despite the occasional flirtation with Hollywood, he’s never really left. But his recent documentary Hometown Prison takes him back to the East Texas city of Huntsville where he spent his youth, and reveals how its influence is threaded through his entire 40-year profession.
Hometown Prison is an element of an omnibus documentary project called God Save Texas, inspired by Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name, which brings three native Texans back to the cities wherein they were raised. The Price of Oil takes Alex Stapleton to Houston, where she explores the toll the fossil fuel industry has taken on the city’s Black community, and Iliana Sosa’s La Frontera takes her to her parents’ home in El Paso, where changes in U.S. policy have severed its once-thriving connection to the neighboring Mexican city of Juárez. (Linklater’s installment airs on HBO tonight, Stapleton’s and Sosa’s tomorrow; all three might be available to stream on Max.) The three movies cover dark episodes in the state’s history, and its present: the nearly 1,000 people put to death in Huntsville’s execution chamber; the line from slavery to segregation to environmental racism; the brutal mistreatment of Mexican migrants and the deadly border policies which might be still in place. They’re all personal movies in their very own ways, and they work collectively to broaden the understanding of a state too easily related to its most extreme right-wing elements. Despite the state’s current deep-red condition, though, its prized independent streak has historically swung to the left in addition to to the right, and its future may not necessarily appear like its past.
In Hometown Prison, Linklater argues that there are few elements of life in Huntsville not touched in a technique or one other by the presence of the state penitentiary that houses 1 / 4 of the city’s population, and he makes the point by starting near home. One of his mother’s husbands was a guard at the prison (and later inspired a personality in Boyhood), and his next-door neighbor and former highschool teammate wound up being executed on death row. Simply going through his highschool yearbook connects him to a classmate who worked on the prison’s “tiedown team,” spending hours with the condemned prisoners as they waited for death. That was until he witnessed the 1998 execution of Karla Faye Tucker—which, despite her jailhouse conversion to Christianity and apparent reform after being indicted for murder, was championed by the state’s then-governor, George W. Bush—turned him against capital punishment endlessly.
Linklater’s a part of God Save Texas is the most discursive by far; at one point, he visits his old house and commiserates with the current owner about what a bitch its lawn is to mow. (By contrast, Stapleton is at pains to convert even the most personal of details into an easily digestible symbol; when she drops in on her great-aunt’s Sunday gathering, she describes her house as “a monument to represent the pride of our elders.”) But it’s saved from navel-gazing by the undeniable fact that Linklater is way more taken with other people than he’s in himself. When he cuts away to indicate how his time on the highschool football team inspired his movie Everybody Wants Some!!, it’s just for example how tied he stays to a spot he hasn’t lived in for greater than 40 years, in ways in which, even in his mid-60s, he’s still discovering.
God Save Texas resurfaces some staggeringly awful elements of Texas’ past. When a historian shows Sosa the floor plans for the buildings where Mexicans crossing into El Paso in the early 20th century were grouped to be sprayed with disinfectant before entering the U.S., I initially dismissed their passing resemblance to Nazi death camps as an idle thought—until he revealed that the chemical those employees were sprayed with was Zyklon B. But where a lot of that past has been buried or obscured or just stricken from the curriculum, the state’s history as the most enthusiastic user of the death penalty is one its government and many individual Texans embrace and even have fun. (As of January, Texas has executed 586 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The second-ranked state, Oklahoma, has killed 123.) One figure in the documentary recalls driving past the prison in the hours before an execution and feeling encouraged that so many had shown as much as protest, until they realize they were demonstrating in favor of the execution.
Linklater opposes the death penalty, as he makes clear from Hometown Prison’s opening moments. But that doesn’t prevent him from feeling implicated in Huntsville’s ongoing legacy. He may live in a solidly blue city now, but Texas remains to be his state, just as Huntsville was his home. That feeling of belonging carries with it a way of responsibility, whether it’s wanted or not—nevertheless it also carries the knowledge that Texas is more diverse and more complicated than its government or its gerrymandered electoral maps reflect. God won’t save Texas, but there’s a likelihood that Texans can.
Credit : slate.com
