A New HBO Docuseries Excavates Texas’ Dark Past—and the Hopes for Its Future

They say that you can never go home again, but in truth, it seems harder to ever fully leave. No matter how far you move, 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 associated with 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 new documentary Hometown Prison takes him back to the East Texas city of Huntsville where he spent his formative years, and reveals how its influence is threaded through his entire 40-year career.

Hometown Prison is part 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 in which 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 will be available to stream on Max.) The three films 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 that are still in place. They’re all personal films in their own ways, and they work collectively to broaden the understanding of a state too easily associated with 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 as well as to the right, and its future may not necessarily look like its past.

In Hometown Prison, Linklater argues that there are few aspects of life in Huntsville not touched in one way or another by the presence of the state penitentiary that houses a quarter of the city’s population, and he makes the point by starting close to home. One of his mother’s husbands was a guard at the prison (and later inspired a character in Boyhood), and his next-door neighbor and former high school teammate wound up being executed on death row. Simply going through his high school 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 forever.

Linklater’s 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 fact that Linklater is far more interested in other people than he is in himself. When he cuts away to show how his time on the high school football team inspired his movie Everybody Wants Some!!, it’s just to illustrate how tied he remains to a place he hasn’t lived in for more than 40 years, in ways that, even in his mid-60s, he’s still discovering.

God Save Texas resurfaces some staggeringly awful aspects of Texas’ past. When a historian shows Sosa the floor plans for the buildings where Mexicans crossing into El Paso in the early 20^th 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 workers were sprayed with was Zyklon B. But where so much of that past has been buried or obscured or simply 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 celebrate. (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 up to 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 is still his state, just as Huntsville was his home. That feeling of belonging carries with it a sense of responsibility, whether it’s wanted or not—but it also carries the knowledge that Texas is more diverse and more complicated than its government or its gerrymandered electoral maps reflect. God might not save Texas, but there’s a chance that Texans can.