Wonder and Kent discuss the three part episodic documentary God Save Texas, which focuses on prisons, oil refineries, and the border, underlining the harms caused by each of these foundational institutions in a state which is a bell weather for the rest of the country. The series is based on work by and features writer, Lawrence Wright, whose untimed natal chart is described in the episode. Emerging themes include compelling first-person narrative as a way into complex story telling by rooting the audience within the life of one family or community, how capitalism underwrites the laws in the US, environmental racism and its impact, and who is harmed by these policies. Astrologically these themes relate to Saturn Pluto, and the 1st and 4th houses, the “bad houses”, ie; the 6th, 8th, and 12th.
Distribution: Streaming on HBO
Part 1: Home State Prison
Director: Richard Linklater
Run Time: 87 minutes
Distribution: HBO
Part 2: The Price of Oil
Director: Alex Stapleton
Run Time: 56 minutes
Part 3: La Frontera
Director: Iliana Sosa
Run Time: 56 minutes
Astrological data: Wright’s birth date and birthplace were taken from IMDB
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.479] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of stories. This season, we're looking at documentaries from Sundance 2024. So in today's episode, we're going to be looking at a three-part anthology series called God Save Texas. So episode one, called Home State Prison, was directed by Richard Linklater. Episode two, called The Price of Oil, was directed by Alex Stapleton. And episode three, titled La Frontera, was directed by Iliana Sosa. So this is a part of the Sundance premieres section, and it's actually going to be premiering on HBO and HBO Max on February 27th and 28th. I think by the 28th, all the episodes will be available on all the platforms. So, this is episode number six of five of our section on deconstructing dominant power structures. And it's six of five because this one came in a little late. We actually had a chance to see this last night while we're in the midst of production. Screeners were not made available during the festival and it wasn't online, but we did actually get a chance to get a hold of the screener to include it within our Sundance coverage. So, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to read through the synopsis.
[00:01:25.167] Wonder Bright: Yes. God Save Texas. Three directors offer their unique and personal perspectives on their home state of Texas, creating vivid portraits of the state that mirror the United States past, present, and future. Inspired by the book, God Save Texas; a journey into the soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright. Episode 1, Hometown Prison. Huntsville, Texas sits at the heart of an expansive prison industrial complex. Yet for many residents, these prisons exist in another realm, disconnected from their lives. Richard Linklater revisits his hometown to explore its diverse inhabitants, painting a vibrant portrait that encapsulates the criminal justice system of Texas. Episode 2, The Price of Oil. As the world's energy capital, Houston is a city that manufactures both its prominence and demise. Alex Stapleton explores the industry's impact on her family, who arrived as enslaved people in the 1830s, built thriving communities, and now must cope with the human costs of Texas' biggest moneymaker. Episode 3, La Frontera. Iliana Sosa examines how “nepantla,” an embrace of in-betweenness, characterizes relations to both her Mexican heritage and her hometown of El Paso, Texas, an exploration revealing how the city's humanity and unique hybridity catalyzed unity, nurturing healing in the aftermath of a devastating mass shooting in 2019.
[00:02:59.551] Kent Bye: So yeah, this is around three and a half hours worth of content that we had a chance to see. And each of the episodes is really doing a deep dive into a subsection of a culture of Texas. But also, since we are including it in the Deconstructing Power Systems that is addressing some larger power structures in each of these episodes, the first one's really diving into the prison industrial complex and critiquing capital punishment within the context of Texas, which has executed way more people than anywhere else in the United States. And then the second episode, it dives deep into a lot of how there's a disparity between who's really profiting from the oil business within Texas and people who are living around Houston are actually facing a lot of environmental impacts, especially in these neighborhoods where there's a lot of black and brown people who are living. So you see the racial injustices around the environmental impacts for the oil industry.
[00:03:58.199] Wonder Bright: So yeah, so it's a deep dive into environmental racism as it affects and impacts a particular portion of the population in Texas, specifically around the oil industry. So much like the first episode and the third one that you're about to talk about, All of these are fractal observations of communities in Texas, but in the sense that they're fractal, are communities that represent communities all across the United States and really the planet currently. But they seem to operate at an accelerated rate in Texas, which I think is, Lawrence Wright, the man who wrote the book that this series is based on, is really examining in the series.
[00:04:44.901] Kent Bye: Yeah, so there was a book that was written by Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas, A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State. And I actually watched a couple of interviews with him. He recounts the story of how he was writing for The New Yorker, but yet he was living in Austin, Texas. And so he had the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, come to him and say, can you explain to me Texas, what's happening there? And just hearing him speak a little bit, he was actually saying that California and Texas kind of create this polarity of the top 10 cities. Just in terms of the largest cities in the United States, three of the largest cities are in California and the other three are in Texas, and number 11 is actually Austin, Texas. Lawrence Wright is saying, you really got to look at what's happening in Texas because 10% of all of children in the United States are in Texas, and you have this growing population so that you're actually getting more electors that are being increased, whereas California is stagnated in terms of how much growth is happening there. People are actually leaving California to go into places like Texas. And so, you have this dynamic where it's really at the frontier of a lot of where the future of politics is going in the United States. And so he was writing this book to kind of, like, investigate his home state through a lot of these different lenses. So Lawrence Wright ends up making an appearance in each of these different episodes as he's had some degree of collaboration with each of these directors, or at least he's appearing on screen in conversation and dialogue with them. And then the third episode is Iliana Sosa, who is living on this border town. So she's really looking at kind of the dual nature. Well, she grew up in the border town. Yeah, she grew up in the border town of El Paso, which is right next to Juarez.
[00:06:29.339] Wonder Bright: Yeah, the two cities actually share the border. So if you're standing in a certain location in El Paso, if you can't see the wall, Juarez looks as if it's part of El Paso and vice versa.
[00:06:42.669] Kent Bye: Yeah, so there's a lot of investigation between the more fluid nature of the cities of El Paso and Juarez are actually very comfortable with this kind of hybridity.
[00:06:54.322] Wonder Bright: Well, the populations of the cities seem to be comfortable with it. The city itself, like the structure, is more comfortable with the border, it seems like.
[00:07:04.033] Kent Bye: Well, one of the things that they said in that third episode was that the further away you get from the border, the less you understand the nature of what it's like to be in that border town. So, I guess the point I took away is that the people who are in that city are actually much more comfortable with that kind of fluidity between these two cities because there's a lot of people that were traditionally going back and forth, and there's a lot of bilingual speakers, and a lot of culture that's blending the American culture with Mexican culture. So, each of these films, I originally thought to look at how, by having Richard Linklater, who's a white man talking about some of the racial injustices of the prison industrial complex of Huntsville, which has a lot of prisons.
[00:07:47.048] Wonder Bright: Where he's from.
[00:07:48.009] Kent Bye: Where he grew up. Yeah. And then Alex Stapleton is a black woman who's talking about a lot of the racial injustices and when it comes to how the oil industry is polluting and impacting the health of certain populations for where she grew up. And then Iliana Sosa is looking at some of the larger border politics that come into play when it comes to the boundaries between the United States and Mexico that is happening there in El Paso and Juarez. Each of these stories seems very situated into the lived experiences of each of these filmmakers to be able to tell the major power dynamics that are happening in the context of each of these three episodes.
[00:08:27.236] Wonder Bright: Yeah, originally when we started talking about how we wanted to structure it, and which section it would go into, because we'd already completed all the sections except for the final one, and it's obviously not AI and tech, we had a sort of a disagreement about where it might land because you correctly identified that one of the main features of these three features is that we're introduced to these places through the first-person experience of the directors who are in the films, engaged with all the people that they interview, and we get to meet their families, and we are introduced to the history of each location through the first-person personal experience of the director. And so you made this argument that this is really a film that might go really well in our section on identity because it's so much about the identity of these directors and through their first-person identification with their hometowns we meet their hometown and through that hometown we then are introduced to these really complicated systems of oppression. So that's where I made my play that, you know, this is about God save Texas in terms of, like, there's a problem here in Texas, and we need to look at what it was. However, as you argued for a first-person identity location for these films, I was really struck by how well that narrative worked for me watching these films, because it was something that I noticed as we were watching it, like initially, I'm thinking, Why are we like spending so much time with Richard Linklater and his family of origin? And then I really like this guy now in a way that I've enjoyed some of his films for sure, but he really wasn't on my radar. I didn't have a personal connection to him. And now I really am interested in Richard Linklater. And part of it is because of the way that he breaks down his passion for Huntsville, Texas, and how he explores it through the framework of people that he went to high school with, played football with, based his films on. And so we're introduced to Texas, first of all, through somebody that a lot of us already have an awareness of. And his is the first film that we watch in this series. And also, as you mentioned, we're also introduced to Lawrence Wright, who wrote the books that this series is based on. He speaks with each of the directors from this first-person position of like how much he cares about Texas and how interested he is in each of the individual director's personal relationship with their Texas and how that matches with what he's been talking about in the book. And so as each director explores this theme from Wright's book, in their own way, right? Like to really go into it through their own family and their own first-person perspective, we're really introduced into these macrocosms of Texas that then appear as these microcosms of the United States. So we're introduced to this overarching structure of problems that we're facing in the United States, but we're introduced to it through this first-person perspective and through this 4th House perspective of the families of these directors. And it becomes this very personal journey that I found myself as an American, like, experiencing my own sense of identity as an American through these places and these people that are presented to us. So, I think your argument for it being a first-person identity expression is really, really valid. And I still want to put it into the second section where we are deconstructing dominant power systems because each of these stories is about how their families and the people in their hometowns are, you know, under pressure from dominant systems of power and what is happening in those families of origin. So, ultimately, it really fits well within that canon. And here's where I want to say a little bit about Lawrence Wright, because he was born August 2nd in 1947, which is right when Saturn and Pluto are about to conjoin for that epoch, which I think Tarnas says happens between, you know, the 15 degree orb of Saturn and Pluto is between 46 and 48.
[00:12:48.942] Kent Bye: Yeah, he says it's from... So the 15-degree Tarnassian orbs for when the Saturn-Pluto conjunction is really in effect is from June 1946 to September 1948. And this is after World War II, and so you have this beginning of the Cold War. We have the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that was happening there in 46 to 48, and then in the 1980s, and then January 2020 was the latest one. And we've talked about that specific conjunction in a lot of these other episodes within this.
[00:13:19.361] Wonder Bright: Right. So it's sort of fitting that we get to do this episode at the end of this section, because we started out with Saturn Pluto as a way of talking about how a main theme that emerged this year was a renewed focus in deconstructing systems of power and several films that really were able to do that in some very unique and powerful ways. And so we're ending that with someone whose books were used to create these three works. And the person whose book it’s based on was born during a Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and his Sun is actually conjunct that Saturn-Pluto conjunction. So this is somebody who is uniquely qualified from an astrological nail perspective to think about these things in a way that is really concentrated, like a high dose of energy. And because it's his Sun, Leo, his Sun is in Leo conjunct that Saturn Pluto conjunction, there’s also this way in which that deconstruction of power is a part of his own creative spirit. And it might be worth mentioning at this point that Lawrence Wright also wrote Going Clear, which is a book that really breaks down, like, what Scientology is. And it is such a good book. My mom and I listened to the audio version of it on a long distance road trip that we went on and it was completely riveting. And his ability to really deconstruct systems of power and how they operate and to bring in all these facts and figures and create a big context and throughout the heart of it tell a compelling story is extraordinary. So it was interesting to discover that he was the locus of this film and also that, although he's there as the first-person that the directors talk to in each of the episodes to kind of, like, tie all of the films in this series together, the directors themselves are really empowered to go forth and create their own expression of it. I haven't read God Save Texas But the reviews on Amazon and just the way that people talk about it, it's clear that Lawrence Wright does speak from a first-person perspective in that book in a way that I don't recall him doing in Going Clear at all. So I think these films were a way of bringing that first-person perspective that he had brought to the book into the documentaries, but I think it was a really smart move to use other directors who put themselves as a first-person narrative voice in these films rather than having Lawrence, right, because So many of the themes that these films explore are impacting people of color and immigrants. And so it's really important to have people who can speak from those populations from a first-person perspective.
[00:16:17.990] Kent Bye: I was just going to also throw in there that Lawrence Wright wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book on 9-11 called Looming Tower. 9-11 was also a Saturn Pluto opposition. And so he is writing about Al-Qaeda and 9-11. And so there's a kind of an archetypal resonance there from even covering that as a topic as well. And, you know, I think in terms of each of these filmmakers that are making these films, you had mentioned that they're all really passionate about Texas and I think they are, but I think they also each have their internal conflicts with trying to reckon these larger power dynamics that are happening in Texas that makes it such a complicated topic. And I think that's what also makes it so interesting is that there are so many very distinct cultural and power dynamics that are at play here in Texas. Texas being the state that is all about law and order, so let's be the leader of how many people they execute. This real punitive approach towards justice, even though they inevitably have been executing people who have been completely innocent. And then you have all the different aspects of the wealth inequities for who's actually really profiting from the oil industry, and then who's really receiving the most damage from all of the environmental pollution that's happening. That's really unpacked in the second episode. And in the third episode, really looking at the power dynamics around this larger debates around immigration and this more 12th House experience of migrants and refugees, but also the split and dual nature of people living in these two worlds, these kind of liminal spaces and the ways that families are often disconnected and more of this 4th House experience of not able to actually go see family face-to-face. And so the first film is a lot about the 12th House experience of prisons and the 8th House of the capital punishment and the 9th House legal context within Texas that has, you know, led to that and a lot of the impact and trauma of the capital punishment and all the different people that are impacted by that. And then in the second episode, looking at these issues of identity and how there are marginalized communities that are really at the edge of a lot of these oil refineries and these 2nd House disparities of where the money's going, who's profiting from that, and more of the 6th House health implications of the different types of diseases and health that have resulted from this type of environmental pollution. So yeah, I think there's this kind of tension between, you know, real reverence for Texas and not wanting to leave the home, but at the same time, really trying to critically analyze some of these dynamics of the Texas culture that they're breaking down each of these systems of power in each of these episodes.
[00:18:56.690] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I certainly didn't mean to suggest that the directors came in just credulous and loving, and the whole point of them being able to invite us in with their first-person perspective is that we were able to identify with them and with their families and friends and, like, all the people that they met in their hometowns as they began to unpack these often very difficult stories. So having that first-person perspective gave us a way into stories that if they weren't told from that first-person perspective would be a lot harder to witness in a way because then it just becomes statistics and a number and I think it's just very human to want someone to like take our hand and, like, make us aware of things. You know, it's like if you go to a foreign country, you want to stay in the home of someone who actually lives there rather than just, you know, use your guidebook and rely on guides from hostels. You know, it actually makes a really big difference when you go and you stay in the home of somebody in a foreign country. And so that was sort of like the experience here for me. Something that I thought about when I was thinking about how to talk about the astrological signatures of this story showed something to me about the overarching themes of it, which is that, as we've just been discussing, you have this first-person Identity, like one person's story is pulling us through, but we're also meeting their 4th House family and maybe 3rd House neighbors in all of the films, so all of the films have that at their core, 1st House, 3rd House, 4th House themes, where we're being introduced to a community, 4th House, 3rd House through the 1st House personage of the director. And then as we enter that community and we feel safe, we're in the home of a trusted person in a foreign land. we then are introduced to all of the bad Houses. We're introduced to the topic of 12th House in almost all of the films. In the first film, it's a literal thing because we're talking about imprisonment, which is a 12th House expression. But 12th House is always about exile. So on one level or another, all three of these films are dealing with 12th House themes because In the first film about imprisonment, we're looking at prisons. In the second film, which is about environmental racism, we're understanding the ways in which Black communities were seduced into tracts of land before those tracts of land were then subject to being built up by major corporations around those tracts of land. So, in Houston, which is where we see the story, Alex Stapleton introduced us to her family who live in this Black neighborhood in Houston. And her family's been in Houston for four or five generations, and her grandmother has owned a property there for many generations. And her grandmother bought that property really proudly because it was like the first time Black communities had been welcomed to buy and own land. and they had these beautiful streets and it was this sort of like beautiful suburban paradise with grocery stores on every corner and then come to find out the land just outside of these areas was going to be developed and then was consequently developed and they created these huge oil refineries just outside of these homes. So over the multiple generations that her family has been living in this Houston neighborhood, they're being choked out by the industry. And so we have this 12th House expression where these families are actually designed, by design. being given these neighborhoods, that then, once they're already there, the industries around them are built up. So there's a way in which the whole communities have been exiled to live in this tract of land that no one else is going to ever want. And then in the third film where we're talking about these border towns of El Paso and Juarez, we're looking at the impossible position that immigrants from Mexico and Central and South American countries face when they hit the border of Texas. And we learn about all the ways in which an immigrant is seen as an exile in this country. Literally, we call them illegal aliens. Well, I don't call them that, but that is how we think of them. And it's hard to think of a more 12th House name for a human being than to call them an alien. And so as we're thinking about this experience of immigrants coming into the United States, it's really hard not to think of it as a 12th House expression. And that third film by Iliana Sosa really gets to the heart of what that's like from a first-person perspective. And then there's other things that get brought up, you know, in the second film where we're talking about environmental racism, we're obviously going to be talking about 6th House illness, because one of the impacts of environmental racism is that these communities of color in the United States are then subject to illnesses that occur when you live close to chemical plants. And it is just horrifying to listen to her family members talk about how their health has been imperiled by living in these exiled communities. And yet their 4th House center of home and family and ancestry is so tied up in these plots of land and their financial matters are so tied up in these plots of land that they can't leave them. They don't want to leave them, but they also, like, financially, no one's going to buy these properties from them. Like, what are they going to leave with? How are they going to leave? They're really like stuck there in a way that is heartbreaking. So then we get the 6th House thing. And with the first film, we also get a healthy dose of 8th House because when we're talking about imprisonment in Texas, we're also talking about capital punishment and people dying. So we've got the full range here of 12th House, 8th House, and 6th House. These are all the bad Houses, but they're being brought to us through the vehicle of 1st House directors, first-person personal experiences, and their 4th House association and attachment to their hometowns and to their family and their ancestries that live there.
[00:25:37.673] Kent Bye: And that is a great explication of astrology as a narrative theory. Which I've been struggling to get Wonder on board with that as an idea. I think it's a really good explication. And I think about another of the bad Houses could be the 2nd House, which is often referred to as someone's individual resources and money. And I feel like capitalism is kind of like the subtext to all of these different films, where the first one is the prison industrial complex is very profit driven. So there's an incentive to keep people in there and to expand the ways that these prisons are impacting the communities. And so there's a momentum with these prison systems that are already vitalizing some of these communities. And if you eradicated all those prisons, then it would decimate some of these communities for how their local economies are so much dependent upon some of these businesses. So then you have, in the second film, really diving into the inequities of who's really benefiting from the oil industry. Well, there's a lot of breaking down of how it's really been a lot of white men who've been in power when it comes to these oil companies, and that even though there's around 13% of the population that's black, that only 6% of the workers within that oil industry, and even less when it comes to the executive and C-levels. There's hardly any diversity that is represented there. which means that there's also a lot of inequities for who's actually benefiting from these oil companies. In the last film, there's less about the economics. There is one storyline around a stadium that is advocating for a number of business owners to be built and displacing a number of homes, but I feel like there's larger storylines around these themes around wanting to have very strict controls over who gets in and who does not get in into the United States. And there's a lot more of the topic of these border towns that get highly politicized. They emphasize how many people are there in El Paso, covering that as an issue. But there's also in that third film, a lot of racism that's being driven by these politics of the border and with Trump in power at the time, In August 2019, there was actually a hate crime shooting that happened at Walmart there in El Paso where someone had actually driven down from Dallas to then do a racially targeted shooting. So a lot of the film was also kind of unpacking the trauma of that 8th House experience of death and being targeted by the larger political dynamics that were happening in the culture and that it really was hitting people quite personally when it comes to that event and how that was changing them. Yeah, lots of different threads of the bad Houses and also this deconstructing of these larger dynamics of the power systems and the power structures for each of the film in their own way, trying to break down and unpack each of the different component parts of that power system.
[00:28:40.305] Wonder Bright: And I just want to go back to your idea of me having broken down a way of thinking about astrology as a narrative theory. Because I think what I did, if I understand you correctly, is, I said that they used 1st House and 4th House to situate us so that we could be comfortable talking about the bad Houses. And that that actually is a way of thinking about breaking down story in a way that would be useful for creators to think about how they could then go about telling their own stories.
[00:29:15.646] Kent Bye: Yeah. And also just as we start to break down the different components of each of these stories, in a lot of ways, each of these films are very distinct and different in the types of stories that are being told. But yet when we look at it through the lens of these archetypal domains of human experience or these astrological houses, then you start to see more of the parallels of how each of them are covering different topics of these domains of the human experience, and they're playing out differently in these different situated locations. So there's an idea from feminist philosophy called situated knowledges, which is, given the person's location, and not only geographic space, but also in the systems of power, then you start to break down a story in a unique way. For me, it was very striking to see Richard Linklater, who's breaking down all of the dynamics of what prisons were like in his hometown. When we look at some of these other stories that were told at Sundance in this 12th House experience, they had such a different flavor to them because they were much more grounded in the direct embodied experience of the injustices of the prison system. Whereas Richard Linklater's were looking at it from the outside and still breaking down a lot of those dynamics. But the way that he was telling that story is a lot different than how other 12th House films around prisons were telling that story. Not only his stepfather and his classmates and civil rights lawyers for how to tell the overall story from all these different situated knowledges and all these different perspectives. And so you get a a little bit different feel than some of the other films at Sundance this year that were exploring the 12th House themes of prisons.
[00:30:54.361] Wonder Bright: What's interesting though about Linklater's contribution to this series is that because he is a storyteller and he's famous for it, and a lot of us have seen his films, his episode actually featured scenes from his films where he has located a lot of the stories in Texas. Or he's located a lot of his characters based on the themes that this series is exploring, and specifically the series around prison systems. So I actually haven't seen Boyhood and now I really want to because they show a sequence where it's clear that the father figure in that film is a prison guard. And that, of course, comes from his own direct first-person experience because his stepdad was a prison guard. So, what's interesting about that in connection to his placement in this film, is that although on the one hand we could say because he's not feeling the brunt of this himself, it's been a big part of his life and his ongoing search for meaning in his life. All of his stories he's showing us have come back to this vital thread, which in many ways just kind of underscores the idea that until all of us are free, none of us are free. And a lot of the people that he interviews in Huntsville are the college students that go to school there. And they're talking about how removed this place is from them and yet how they're aware of it at the same time because there's this siren that goes off every time something happens. So shift change. Yeah, but they're guessing, you know, these students are guessing what's happening as they tell you, like they're saying, Oh, it's a shift change. And then this happens. Oh, I think that's what it is. But I don't really know. And they're clearly creeped out by the sound of that foghorn. And it's having an impact on everyone who lives there, whether they are forced to examine it or not. And the fact that Linklater himself has been revisiting that original source for material his whole life is just really striking to me.
[00:33:10.438] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And if you think about God Save Texas in the context of some sort of remedial measure, then who would you prescribe this film series to?
[00:33:20.066] Wonder Bright: Well, I definitely want to call out the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, given that Lawrence Wright is the author whose work this series is based on. And this idea that there may be actually something uniquely American about the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and Americans have operated from this space of being a dominant power system, and that that is really in flux now in a way that is being stretched to breaking point, this film offers a really powerful lens to look at that complex and to understand it on both a macro and a micro level.
[00:34:03.186] Kent Bye: I was just looking up some presidential birthdays and it's very striking to me to how many presidents we've had that are born during that period. Wonder Bright: Really? Who? Kent Bye: Well, we have Bill Clinton, August 19th, 1946. Then we have George W. Bush, July 6th, 1946. Then we have Donald Trump, July 14th, 1946. So there's a lot of past presidents that have been born during that Saturn-Pluto complex that have been in power for quite a long time. Biden's born in 1942, and then Obama's born in 1961. But there's just a number of different leaders that we've had that have been born during that time. Just kind of like a nice little factoid that I'll probably edit out. But anyway, just thought I'd share.
[00:34:46.097] Wonder Bright: I don't know. I think it's worth... I think it buttresses my argument. I would say leave it in, Kent. You're supporting my argument.
[00:34:57.586] Kent Bye: So yeah, when I think about what I want to bear witness to in this film series of each of these different episodes, I think it's just each of the different directors of each of the episodes, they tell so much of their own personal story, both Richard Linklater, Alex Stapleton, and Iliana Sosa. They're really weaving in their own personal narratives to be able to tell this larger narrative, and how each of them are connected to Texas in this very specific way, and how each of their relationships are able to unfold these stories in a way that really allows them to tell this larger story. Even though they're focusing in on the personal, they're able to really zoom out and focus in on the collective as well. And I really appreciated how each of their unique voices were able to do that. And I do think there is quite a lot of their own identity that's in there and how there does seem to be this larger sense of what is the Texas identity. You know, like, the subtitle of Lawrence Wright's book God Save Texas is: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State. That to me is trying to get to, like, what is the essence of Texas? What is the essence of what it means to be a Texan? And I feel like this film is each of these directors trying to reckon with these inner conflicts of what they love about living in Texas that is their home and they will always be connected to that 4th House experience of how living in a place will shape who you become. Each of them are recognizing that, but at the same time, they're reckoning with these larger systems of power that they're trying to deconstruct. And I think that, you know, We were debating around whether it was Identity or whether it was Deconstructing Systems of Power. I think at the end of the day, they are trying to, the best they can, describe these systems of power and all those relational dynamics, but also start to break it down in terms of how that has impacted their own lives as well as the lives of their families.
[00:36:51.670] Wonder Bright: Well, and I actually think that's why it's so successful and potent, because until we deconstruct it from that first-person perspective, it's very hard to understand why it matters at all. And so really being invited into people's homes to understand how people are impacted from that first-person perspective, is a really powerful way of navigating these stories. And to piggyback on what you're saying, for me as an American, and I'm watching them talk about their hometowns, and because this is such a fractal representation of the United States, like, even the title God Save Texas, I'm used to hearing God Save America. And, like, why does America need saving? Well, God Save Texas is actually going to answer that question for you. And I just kept thinking about how when I lived in England, I hadn't understood until I lived abroad that I was an American, and that I was going to have to return here. Like, I was never going to really be able to live somewhere else because this is just where I belong. And there's something really powerful about claiming that for yourself. And I feel like this film, even though Texas isn't my home state, it really got to the heart of something very essential about being an American, and being from a country that is really diverse, and really contested. And this film breaks down something at the heart of that that left me at times sad and afraid, but ultimately left me reconnected with my experience of being an American and why I came home.
[00:38:47.460] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, that was a discussion of God Save Texas, which is going to be showing on HBO on February 27th and 28th, and all of them are going to be streaming on max on February 27th. And so you can check them all out there. And yeah, that's all we have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the story all the way down podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast and please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider signing up for the newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you so much.
