The lonely poetry of Paris, Texas
Chris Forrester rhapsodizes about the overwhelming emotionality and breathtaking imagery of Wenders’s 1984 masterpiece.
When Wim Wenders — then known for his contributions to the New German Cinema, in particular a string of road films through which he formed a close collaborative relationship with legendary cinematographer Robby Müller — set out to direct his first* American feature, he did so with intent to “tell a story about America.” That film, Paris, Texas (1984), was co-written by Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970, another stellar film about the American landscape) co-scribe Sam Shepard and newcomer L.M. Kit Carson (whose sole prior screenplay credit was for the 1983 remake of Godard’s Breathless) and suggests a divided national identity in both name and premise: a lovelorn loner (Harry Dean Stanton, in a performance of such quiet majesty that words can hardly do it justice) wanders the countryside after suffering an at-first-unspecified loss that we’ll slowly come to understand as he pieces himself back together and crawls back toward the life he left behind. When we meet him, wandering the West Texan desert, we’re privy to little more than his wary demeanor and tattered clothes, but we come to know that his name is Travis and he’s been missed by a brother and son who assumed him dead in his four-year absence.
[*I’ll clarify here that Wenders’s true American-set debut was 1982’s Francis Ford Coppola-produced Hammett, but some reports suggest that as much as 70% of the final film was reshot by someone other than Wenders, possibly Coppola himself.]
That premise has plenty in common with the other films of Wenders’s oeuvre (Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move, Kings of the Road, and The American Friend are all also road movies about bridging physical and emotional distances) and with the broader tradition of European art film character dramas, but it also harkens back to the American New Hollywood movement and films like Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969), Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson, 1970), The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich, 1971), Badlands (Malick, 1973), and other richly drawn character studies about people navigating American cultural and geographical landscapes. Likewise, the title may refer to a sense of transnationality (Paris, Texas, as if part of a list) or a singular place (Paris, Texas, USA); neither Paris, France or Paris, USA is shown in the film. The eschewed cultural specificity of both title and premise — and a marked simplicity of plot — allows Wenders to situate his characters and the story that carries them to and fro within the vast landscapes that had drawn him to the American Southwest in the first place, and in doing so he’s made one of the great films about heartbreak and loneliness, a patient and ultimately overwhelming character study that expands the topography of hardened emotional scar tissue onto the craggy expanses of West Texas.
A lone man wanders the West Texas desert
The most barren of those landscapes gives the film its iconic opening images — of dry, sandy desert backdropped by cotton clouds in an azure sky, speckled with towering bluffs, and wandered by a lone man in tattered suit and red cap — but even as Travis is found by his estranged brother and brought back to Los Angeles and the son he abandoned, and the film departs from unpopulated expanses for a time, emptiness remains a defining motif. Lensed by Robby Müller in his eighth and finest collaboration with Wenders, a key pleasure of Paris, Texas is the visual poetry of its images, each a painterly expression of a distinctly American loneliness. Wenders was a great lover and frequent maker of road movies, and the road trip(s) that give this film its narrative shape allow it to collect images of classical Americana: gas stations bathed in the green glow of fluorescent lights, small-town sunsets awash in the light of a fiery sky, car taillights blazing in dusky blueness, phone booths backdropped by neon store signs, towering highway interchanges. And each lonely image evinces a deep emptiness that reverberates through the film like an unshakeable melancholy.
If oldness is a central aesthetic feature that might recur in the kinds of European films with which Paris, Texas shares a common conceptual and stylistic basis, then emptiness is the American counterpart that fills its void here. Characters wander not through historic city centers and centuries-old churches, but through empty wilderness, across great rivers of highways, and up suburban streets. The look is less one of age-old elegance or monumental history, but of American decay and loneliness, of a society where interpersonal bonds are impermanent at best, a man can run away from his family and be all but forgotten, and the land is so empty and endless as to allow it. As Travis puts it late in the film, he fled into “a deep, vast country where nobody knew him.” And though the film has by now shown us its last glimpses of barren desert, we understand the omnipresent loneliness of its open spaces, a key aesthetic feature that links the film’s topographical and emotional landscapes.
But so, too, is separation; the film’s defining image (if you know it, you know it; if not, I ought not to be the one to tell you what it is) collides empty spaces through a plane of separation, and so articulates a sense of division that can be felt elsewhere. As in the sequence where Travis tries to walk his son home from school but can only do so from across the street, empty spaces become undefined barriers of their own, to other figures both seen and unseen; even the desert that surrounds Travis when we first meet him separates him from his past, his brother, his son, and the rest of the world, whether we can see them or not.
A regular character in Wenders’s cinema: the road
Seven of Wenders’s features might be characterized as road movies, with a majority centered around the late ’70s/early ’80s; so devout was his love of the genre that he named the production company he founded in 1977 Road Movies Filmproduktion (later truncated to Road Movies). Paris, Texas is neither the first nor the last, nor the first to set foot in America or the one to span the greatest stretches of asphalt, but it is the best and purest, gorgeously distilling the genre’s potential into a drama as epic and scenic as it is intimate. For all the magnitude of the performances — I’d be remiss not to mention Nastassja Kinski, who turns in a shattering outing as the film nears its emotional summit — what’s truly eternal about Paris, Texas are its images. Müller shot nearly all of Wenders’s features from his debut through his unjustly maligned 1991 epic Until the End of the World, and his gorgeously saturated images became as much a part of the filmmaker’s creative identity as his propensity for road movies and affinity for chronicles of familial bonding and dissolution. Here, in what is, full stop, one of the most breathtaking movies ever made, their gorgeous lighting and cavernous melancholia affords the film space for its quietly towering emotions, for the vast aches of the human heart, for men on the run to get so lost as to find themselves again.
A new 4K restoration of Paris, Texas screens Dec. 7 at IU Cinema for its 40th anniversary as part of the International Art House Series. Tissues recommended.