Wim Wenders (1984)
Wim Wenders’s famous film means a lot to plenty of cineastes and, perhaps, to plenty of people who feel it speaks to their personal experience of separation and loss. Shot by Wenders’s frequent collaborator Robby Müller, Paris, Texas is often visually impressive. On the soundtrack, Ry Cooder’s guitar music is almost invasively effective. Harry Dean Stanton, in his first lead role at the age of fifty-eight, gives a fine performance. Yet I found the film unmoving and increasingly artificial – arty-ficial may be a better word.
From the start of his cinema career, Wenders showed a penchant for road movies. His first six features include Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976), now known as his ‘Road Movie Trilogy’. The last of those three films includes the much-quoted line ‘The Americans have colonised our unconscious’, and Wenders’s fascination with the mythic power of American popular culture was a recurring theme in his work. The Road Movie Trilogy pictures are set, mostly or wholly, in West Germany, which enables Wenders to show American cultural osmosis at work in his native land as well as in his film-making. When America is the setting, as it is in Paris, Texas, the effect is inevitably different. The title, although it’s the name of a real place, implies confusion between continental Europe and the US: mentions of Paris in the film, written by Sam Shepard and L M Kit Carson, usually involve a character’s mistakenly assuming a reference to the French capital. The director’s intrigued outsider’s eye promises to complement and enlarge this cultural collision but Wenders’s aestheticising European perspective so dominates that he alienises America – from Texas to California, where a good part of the action takes place. Even allowing that estrangement is central to the story, the people in it come across as unreal strangers in a strange land.
The best part of the film is the start, when the distinctive imagery is still a novelty. The protagonist, Travis Henderson (Stanton), walking alone in the vastness of the West Texas desert, cuts an extraordinary (and memorable) figure in his shabby suit and tie, topped off with a red baseball cap. Although he’s thirsty and tired, Travis walks with purpose until he stumbles into an isolated bar, where he collapses. A doctor who examines Travis can’t get a word out of him but finds a telephone number in his pocket, and calls it. The call is answered, in Los Angeles, by Walt Henderson (Dean Stockwell), Travis’s younger brother. Travis has been missing for four years, presumed dead by Walt and his wife Anne (Aurore Clément). Walt sets off immediately for Texas. He arrives to learn from his brother’s doctor (Bernhard Wicki) that Travis has wandered off from the clinic where he was treated. Walt, in his hired car, tracks him down.
The early scenes between Travis and Walt work well. Travis remains mute and his oddness plays against the relative normality of Walt, increasingly exasperated by his brother’s silence. It’s a highlight when Walt, after crossly asking how long he’s going to keep the act up, carries on chuntering and doesn’t catch Travis’s first word, which arrives about half an hour into the film. The word is Paris. Travis shows Walt a photo of what’s apparently waste ground – a piece of land in Paris, Texas that he purchased, believing he was conceived in the town. This is where Travis says he wants to go. Instead, after a couple of false starts, he and Walt head back to the latter’s home. Following Travis’s disappearance and that of his estranged wife Jane, Walt and Anne took over the care of Hunter (Hunter Carson), Jane and Travis’s only child. Now seven years old, Hunter remembers little of his birth parents. He treats Anne and Walt as, and calls them, mom and dad.
Once Travis joins the household, he and Hunter soon develop a strong bond. Anne tells Travis that Jane has recently been in touch: Hunter’s mother, says Anne, travels to Houston, Texas on the same date each month to make a deposit in a bank account for her son. Travis determines to see Jane again; he gets money (from Walt) to buy a car so that he can drive to Houston in time for Jane’s next visit. He tells Hunter that he’s leaving Los Angeles, the boy wants to go with Travis and they set off on the road together without further ado. When they eventually arrive in Houston, Hunter, who has seen home movies in which his mother appears, recognises Jane (Nastassja Kinski) leaving the bank. He and Travis follow her car to Jane’s place of work – a club where male clients sit in booths partitioned by one-way mirrors and equipped with phones; the club’s strippers, of whom Jane is one, sit on the dark side of the mirror showing clients whatever they ask to see. Travis wants only to talk to Jane and avoids looking in the mirror. Puzzled by the halting conversation, she starts to remove her top but Travis tells her to stop. After talking for a while more, he glimpses her and leaves.
Paris, Texas clearly isn’t aiming for thoroughgoing realism but it nevertheless depends on the credibility and motivation of its characters. If you don’t believe, on a realistic level, what they’re doing, it distances you from the people on the screen and gives increased salience to other aspects of what you’re watching. Harry Dean Stanton is beautifully expressive, especially in his eyes and his movement, but you admire the actor without being absorbed by the man – or, rather, the conception – that he’s playing. The best acting in the film after Stanton’s comes from Dean Stockwell but he has a frustrating role. Walt runs a company designing and posting billboard material in the Hollywood area. This symbolic line of work is a means to an end – a dialogue between Walt and Travis on a high platform in front of the billboard and its latest advertisement, which dwarfs them both. When Travis and Hunter disappear to Houston, Walt and his wife virtually disappear from the film; they’re not seen again after learning through a phone call that Hunter is with Travis. Because the story’s destination requires that a father and son go in search of the one’s wife and the other’s mother, the distress of the abandoned Walt and Anne, who have no children of their own, counts for nothing.
The West Texas desert at the start is the most under-populated location but almost everywhere else in the America of this film is short of human beings – and particularly of Americans. The doctor who first looks after Travis is played by an Austrian, who speaks heavily accented English. Even though Aurore Clément really is French, she occasionally suggests an Anglophone actor pretending to be. Both she and Bernhard Wicki come over as superfluous reminders that Wim Wenders isn’t American either. Nastassja Kinski, though her face tends to show only what you suspect the director has asked her to show, makes a good job of her Texan drawl but her presence also has the effect of stressing the foreignness of Wenders’s cast. Hunter Carson stands out for different reasons. The son of L M Kit Carson and Karen Black, he’s a highly capable child actor but often a knowing one. It’s hardly his fault, though, that the behaviour of his namesake in the film is particularly hard to accept. Hunter is believably drawn to Travis as a novelty and because of his father’s eccentric charm. It’s incredible that the boy never shows any sign of missing his de facto parents or any other part of home, even when Hunter is cooped up alone in a Houston hotel room while Travis returns to the club for a more extended session with Jane.
By this stage in the film, you remark Wenders’s designs more than you engage with his characters. When the action moves to Houston, you notice primarily that Travis and Hunter both wear red shirts and Jane drives a red car. Even in the long second exchange between Travis and Jane, and although Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski compel attention, they’re upstaged by the ingenious camerawork showing their heads and faces in the one-way mirror. In this, the climax to Paris, Texas, Travis tells the story of his and Jane’s life together and the events that led up to his fugue state at the start of the film. In doing so, he refers to himself and Jane not in the first and second person but as a man and the much younger woman he married and with whom he had a child. The woman suffered from post-natal depression; the man, who suspected her of infidelity, became an abusive alcoholic. One night, in their trailer, he tied her and their child to a stove. He woke to find their home on fire and his family gone. Jane now knows whose voice she’s hearing (it’s a wonder she didn’t during Travis’s first monologue) and what he’s talking about. When Travis tells her that Hunter is in Houston and where, Jane makes her way to the hotel and is reunited with her son. Seeing them embrace, Travis gets in his car and drives off. Aficionados of Paris, Texas love this finale for its mythic completeness. I guess there’s no arguing with that.
4 August 2022
