Lone star: This kind of Texas

The Texas depicted in 100+ years of cowboy movies is as vast and complex as its landscape, and there's two distinct kinds of modern Texas, and they're both equally true. 

There's the one seen in Blood Simple, which is still as true today as it was when the Coen Brothers made the film in 1984. It's a Texas where everybody is just stumbling around in the dark, and if you're weak, you'll get left behind, or buried in an open field. Secrets can disappear beneath that giant sky, and the world is a confusing and uncaring place, and you better deal with it, or it'll eat you up.

As Visser says right at the very start of the film, in Russia, everyone pulls for everyone else - 'that's the theory, anyway' - but he doesn't know Russia. He knows Texas, and down there, you're on your own.

Then there is the Texas of Lone Star, and while John Sayles' 1996 masterpiece is set just down the road from Blood Simple, it takes place in a whole other world. It's a Texas where nothing stays buried forever, and where family ties are inescapable. It's a Texas where the past is all around you - sometimes just a camera pan away - and the future is there too.

Lone Star is a brilliant film about universal truths - even if you've never set foot in that land and its big, big sky, the story is so fundamentally human that it's recognisable to all. That sense of community and

history which means you're never really on your own.

There are plenty of modern novels and films that offer another view altogether of Texas - the East Texas of Joe R Lansdale's stories is a whole other thing altogether - and they're also equally true. It's a big state, it's got room for multitudes.