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Paris, Texas (1984)

German Existentialists Invade Texas

As Paris, Texas begins, ghostly chords echo softly while the camera travels high above a rocky desert. Discordant, hollow, and unearthly, the music sounds like air rubbing the lip of a dusty soda bottle. Look closely at the red sands, and you might mistake this desert for Mars.

The camera moves across barren mountaintops. Ry Cooder's guitar strings twang, the notes expressing desolate, aching loss. In the distance, we see a lone figure trudging through rocks and sand. The guitar notes become more insistent, riffing on the oldest blues theme, loneliness.

The main character of Paris, Texas is Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), a wanderer who is unable to remember his past. Although Travis wears jeans and a baseball cap, his wispy beard and gaunt cheeks resemble the features of the vultures following him more than visage of any fellow human being. When he finally encounters civilization--a run-down shack in the middle of the Texas desert--he looks for water; finding none, he locates a freezer, shoves a fistful of ice cubes into his mouth, and collapses from fatigue. He wakes up to the sinister voice of a German doctor, who insinuatingly wonders what Travis has done to get himself into this condition. Wenders films a stunning close-up of Travis on the examining table. The pale light that shines on Travis' head resembles a halo, and his scruffy beard and glazed eyes suggest a plaster Jesus on the cross. That Texas heat will crucify you every time.

But suddenly one wonders: what is a German doctor doing in the middle of Texas? And what is a German film director doing in an American desert?

Wim Wenders, the German director, is capturing the existential solitude that is unique to the American landscape, but let's deal with the doctor first. The German doctor in the film is emblematic of the deracinated beings that appear throughout the movie--people who have cut their lives off at the root, and moved on. The jaded doctor, seemingly on the lamb himself (from what, one wonders), assumes that Travis has run away from some kind of trouble with the law. As the film progresses, we learn that Travis has indeed run away from something in his past, but it has nothing to do with the police.

When Travis's brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell) comes to pick him up, we learn that the two haven't seen each other in a very long time. Travis doesn't remember Walt, and the rest of the movie becomes a kind of puzzle in which Travis tries to piece together the fragments of the life he has left behind. As Walt, Dean Stockwell turns in a stunning performance as he struggles to reconnect Travis with his past life: Walt and his French wife have adopted Travis's child (Hunter Carson); to give Travis back his life, they must give up the child they have come to love.

As we watch Travis struggle to remember what he has tried to forget, Wenders shows us what it must feel like to have amnesia: no place feels like your home, so you never stop moving. No person you meet feels like family, so you never stop to talk. Your own brother is a stranger who has no more claim on you than any other person on earth. Why should you trust him when he tells you that he knows you, but describes a life and a world that are completely alien to you? He tells you that he remembers you, and tells you stories, but you have no idea what he is talking about. So you keep going, hoping that sooner or later you will recognize someone or something, but you never do. The landscape lies in front of you like an invitation, so you head for the horizon to lose yourself in the emptiness of sand dunes, railroad tracks, and open fields.

Like Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red, both Wenders' Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire are about struggles of communication, about the human process of connecting to and understanding both the past and one's fellow beings. While Wings of Desire, Wenders' later film, posits that such connections are possible, Paris, Texas has a darker vision: it suggests that although humans may indeed connect through an exchange of trust and feeling, once those ties are severed, each person is plunged into a sea of solitude. Human beings are capable of doing the extraordinary--of uniting their souls--but they are also capable of rending such ties so violently that the potential for further human contact is permanently damaged.

If you read poetry, and if these themes sound familiar, then Wenders' films might remind you of the work of T.S. Eliot and other modernists. Eliot's verse, written in the dislocated vernacular of a country reeling from war, diagnoses the modern condition as one of fragmentation and alienation. In "The Waste Land," for instance, Eliot writes:

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison


Yeats once expressed the tragedy of mortality by writing that his heart was "sick with desire/ and fastened to a dying animal." In "The Waste Land," Eliot pushes the stakes one step higher by suggesting that we are trapped not only within our mortal bodies, but also within our minds. Because we look for a way out of our prisons, out of our individual consciousnesses, we confirm the walls of those prisons, and lock ourselves within the boundaries of our fleeting identities. For Eliot, the possibility of true connections between people are nearly impossible--the very act of imagining a union with another person merely confirms one's solitude. Still, even Eliot concedes that such attempts at union represent the only possibility of escape:

Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed

What is the "daring surrender" that Eliot writes about? It could be the rash act of love, which may represent our only hope for survival. It could also be a surrender of the self through a kind of Hinduistic faith in the unity of all things. By giving up the individual self, man can transcend his limitations and find the unity in the universe.

Similarly, in Paris, Texas, it is only after Travis lets go of his past, and goes through a liminal experience (his journey through the desert), that he can begin to repair the threads of his tattered existence. By forgetting who he was and what he has done, Travis has prepared himself to begin life again, and to do right what he has done wrong before.

He sets off to find his lost life. He and his son attempt to find the missing link in their family--Jane (Nastassja Kinski, who turns in a luminous performance), Travis's wife and Hunter's mother. When Travis finally finds her, it is at a strip club, where she works. In a stunning scene, we find that Jane acts the part of the therapist with her customers, not the part of the whore. She attempts to talk to them, to let them know that they are not alone, and hence to ease the loneliness that has brought them there.

Jane speaks through a one-way mirror--she can't see her customers. When she looks out at the person she talks to, she sees herself--or someone she imagines is there (Travis, perhaps). When Travis speaks to her, he sees his own reflection superimposed on Jane. In an unbelievably intense, twenty minute scene of dialogue, the two lost lovers try to recover the past, but the glass between them symbolizes the barriers that still divide them. This piece of glass keeps them apart, but it also brings them together, for only on its surface do we see their superimposed faces merge, as if in a kiss.

At one point in the film, Travis pulls out a picture of a plot of land in Paris, Texas, which he had bought some years before. The picture at first seems like evidence of a con job--as if Travis had wasted money on a prospector's dream. But this postcard, and the tract of land it shows, is pregnant with meaning: Travis was conceived in Paris, Texas, so it signifies a now-lost moment of union that belonged to an earlier generation. Travis seems irresistibly drawn to Paris, Texas because it is a remnant of a perfect place and a life in which good things happened. Wim Wenders' film is about an attempted journey from a troubled present towards a mythical past. That the journey fails is not so much a surprise as a precondition of the trip: the past towards which Travis moves is the very key that locks him in his existential prison. There is only a picture of a piece of land that reminds him that people were happy, once. The film teaches us that dreams may be the only destinations towards which we travel, even though we buck the ride every inch of the way.

6/18/99

© Matthew K. Gold 1999-2001

Paris, Texas (1984)
Directed by Wim Wenders
Written by Sam Shepard
Adapted by L.M. Kit Carson
Starring Harry Dean Stanton (Travis), Dean Stockwell (Walt), Nastassja Kinski (Jane), Hunter Carson (Hunter), Aurore Clément (Anne)
Music by Ry Cooder
Director of Photography, Robby Müller
Executive Producer, Chris Sievernich
Produced by Don Guest