Never Seen It #230: Paris, Texas

There will be no safety zone! I can guarantee you the safety zone will be eliminated! Eradicated! You will all be extradited—to the blog of no return! It's a navigation to nowhere! If you think that's going to be fun—you've got another thing coming! I may be watching 400 movies I've never seen before, but, believe me, I know what the hell I'm talking about! I'm not crazy! And don't say I didn't warn you! I warned you! I warned all of you!

Paris, Texas

1984

Wim Wenders

We have two takes this week. Thanks to Catherine for taking me up on my offer to write something after she said that this was one of her favorite movies. If there's a movie coming up on the Film Club schedule that you like or have something to say about, send it over! I'd love to publish it!

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Catherine

To me, Paris, Texas feels more like a song or a poem, offering the release that I imagine must come from hitting rock bottom and surrendering to oblivion.

Its dusty neon package backdropped by the American west, a faded beacon of opportunity and rebirth with diminishing returns, conjures an angst that I haven't earned, but savor nonetheless. It's what is (somewhat derogatorily) referred to as a "vibes movie," but these vibes have a lot to say. Listen to the vibes.

Whenever I watch Paris, Texas, I think about being in love with the idea of America and being disgusted by its reality. The endless highways and harsh, beckoning neon ads make me feel small and lost and almost taunted, and I have to shout out Robby Müller, because it's not often that cinematography grabs my attention and evokes as much emotion as the plot, characters, etc.

The story itself is just bizarre enough to keep you puzzled, which I enjoy. I like to think of it more as a fairytale rather than a one-for-one representation of real life, so I don't get too caught up in questions like what the fuck were eighteen-year-old Nastassja Kinski and 50+-year-old Harry Dean Stanton doing together to begin with? I understand that might not work for everyone, but the messages and lessons their relationship offers are too important to dismiss: the resentment he carries for his father who never accepted his mother as she was, the unwieldy nature of love turning to fear turning to obsession turning to rage until you destroy the pedestal you placed someone on, and the big question for me—can we root for a person like Travis? Does he deserve a happy ending? It's clear he's been nothing but selfish, neglectful, and abusive until we meet him. 

I don't think we need to like Travis to be hopeful in this scenario. He's trying to make things right, which is more important for the people around him whose lives he destroyed, and that's who the happy ending will serve. Travis will return to the wilderness and likely wander aimlessly for the rest of his life, at least with some of the bridges behind him repaired.

"The dust has come to stay. You may stay or pass on through or whatever." This movie sticks with me like that desert dust, in pockets, soles, and under my nails long after encountering it.

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Joe

Note how the most important conversation happens through one-way glass. She can't see him, he turns away anyway, she turns the light off so she can see him, then she sits on the ground facing away. When she finally gets up, he's gone. During this choreography, truths are revealed, great pain ripple between them, and a connection is remade and again severed.

One of the pieces I read about this movie—which was beguiling enough to require some extracurricular reading, as many of the best movies are—argued that, when the truth about what happened between Travis and Jane is finally told, the resolution is "much smaller and more ordinary" than you might imagine it to be. Much respect to A. A. Dowd, one of the best film critics of my generation, but he's dead wrong here.

There is nothing ordinary about love or loss. When you're in the moment, and you are on that wavelength with someone whom you care that deeply about, and you're wringing yourself dry of deep, dark emotions, raw from exposing your true self, there is nothing more important. Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski were able to capture that, in all its uncomfortable glory. There was a bond, and that bond was so vivid and burning and uncomfortable that they could barely stand to face each other.

I suppose in this way, I have been thinking about Paris, Texas in the same way I was thinking about The Piano. I go through these phases where I see patterns in themes across entertainments that I enjoy. Of course this film is about How We Communicate too. How could it not? A mute man stumbles out of the desert and doesn't speak for the film's first 26 minutes. When he finally speaks, what is he trying to say? This is the same question I asked when Holly Hunter played the piano on the beach. It's the same question I ask myself when there is laughter in my home, or silence, or great piercing screams. How are we communicating?

Paris, Texas does a great job in portraying the act of communication, or lack thereof. It is not instructional, though, on the right way to communicate (if there is a right way, of course). The blog has been making the case for almost two decades that the "right" way to live is to be open and honest and giving with your true self, make it known, process your emotions out loud. Travis does not do so here. As already mentioned, he is silent for great swaths of the film. When he finally starts speaking, he is guarded with his words. And the great big secret is left unsaid for most of the film, until that final turned-away peep show dialogue.

I'll say that I felt it to be gripping that the mystery of "what happened" was left on the table for so long. There wouldn't be a film if Travis wrote all his worries on a blog, after all. It is our task as audience to wait it out, watch as the characters maneuver around each other, attempting to figure out a way to exist without proving their existence. There is absolutely no attention paid, mind you, to Hunter's adopted parents (his biological aunt and uncle), who are last seen begging Hunter to come home after he skips town with Travis (his biological dad). Paris, Texas is wholly uninterested in their story, as fucked up as that is. We barely know what happened between Travis and Jane, and we still don't know what happened with Walt and Anne. Maybe Paris, Texas is attempting to tell us that life is unsatisfying in this way. That we spend our whole lives like Travis in the desert, seemingly fixated on reaching a destination, but ultimately just wandering until we disappear.

I suppose this sort of thing makes me uncomfortable, the act of wandering, of not knowing, of stumbling around life's desert in search of who knows what. I think if Paris, Texas were hyperfocused on making me feel this way throughout, then it'd be a tough movie to watch. Instead, the film zooms outward, taking in the grand scenery of the American West. This is a beautiful film. It is lonely and desolate and large, and in that way it proves powerfully and tragically beautiful. Travis is stuck in his own head, which is claustrophobic, but that juxtaposes with the wide expanses that act as his backdrop. He cannot escape himself, but can't he see how big the world is, like we can on the screen? We want to tell him, but we can't, for we the audience are mute, just like him.

Speaking of patterns from other entertainments that I've recently watched, here's Ry Cooder yet again with a worldly sound for my ears. Ask me on December 31st, 2024 if I've ever heard of Ry Cooder or Wim Wenders, and I'll tell you no, but these two just keep popping up. Cooder's been an essential part of two aYoBS albums on PoYB this year, one of which was Buena Vista Social Club, whose documentary was made by Wim Wenders. Just as the cinematography and setting are essential to the tragedy of Travis Henderson, so too is Cooder's soundtrack. Its slide guitar is haunting, basically the ghost of Blind Willie Johnson, and it makes you wonder if Travis is a ghost too, a spirit haunting the people around him. I don't think it's a coincidence that Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith both expressed that this was their favorite movie and that they—both suicide victims—found immense empathy for Travis.

I've seen this described as a road trip movie, and not just because Wenders up to that point had been mostly known for his "Road Movie" trilogy of films. Paris, Texas is actually two road trip movies in one, first with the trip home for two brothers, and the other for a father and son looking to complete their family. I usually love road trip films. I love how the journey itself shapes the character on that journey and tells us so much about them and changes them in so way. That doesn't happen in Paris, Texas, which is by design. We learn a little about Travis, but not much. Mostly, we learn that he is doomed to wander forever. If a road trip doesn't have a destination, then it's not a road trip. 

I keep talking around this, but let's address it head-on: something about Paris, Texas was off-putting for me. Not in a way that made me dislike the film, but more so in a way that made experience the emotion of discomfort. I mostly felt like the film was trying to say something important, but couldn't quite get there. I'm still dismissive of the theory that "the relationship troubles between Travis and Jane were revealed as banal," because that's not true. I think it's more that Travis was always searching, and the film attempted to copy him by continually searching as well. The script wasn't even finished when they started filming; many of the scenes were informed by how the actors felt about the characters and which direction they should be taken. So I'm not making this shit up.

But again, this is probably the whole point. Life is not tidy. You will often be denied the truth. I don't want to admit it, but we spend most of our lives wandering in the desert, looking for ways to connect with others, to communicate with the people around us, but a lot of the time we fail and end up mute. If there's discomfort here, the discomfort is with myself. The film ably and beautifully captured exactly what it wanted to capture. I'm glad I watched it.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: I have no idea what Dogville is about, but I'm assuming Group A is going to let me know if there are any dogs in it.