Place Without A Name
by LAURA HOOBERMAN
Paris, Texas
dir. Wim Wenders
147 minutes
My anxiety about the future is only exceeded by the insurmountable fear that the past will return in a grotesque wave, vast and immitigable. I would like to believe in a general inconsequentiality that would allow for the course of my progress to be cut, when I want it to be, so that another course may begin anew.
I want some malleable theory of structuring experience to counter Joan Didion’s terrifying assertion in “Goodbye to All That” that “some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
It is perhaps for this reason in part that Wim Wenders’ 1984 masterpiece Paris, Texas affects me so deeply. It is a film that seeks to revive an immutable past so as to rectify a fractured present. The focus of Paris, Texas wavers between what was and what is slowly and gracefully. The past emerges anecdotally or through photographs or film reels. The past becomes a significant presence in Paris, Texas. That the film ends well is enough to temporarily stint my neurotic disdain for the unshakeable nature of the past. That its plot progresses in a manner trance-like, quiet and beautiful is enough to still the part of my mind that produces these monumental anxieties in the first place.
We meet Travis, the ravaged, quasi-mute protagonist of Paris, Texas, as he emerges from the basin of a canyon into a small town saloon. He walks with too much purpose for us to assume him merely a wanderer; a ludicrously ill-fitting suit worn with torn sandals gives him the impression of a quiet insanity. The suit and his face look equally worn, tarnished with wrinkles and gray-brown soot. He picks a handful of ice from the ice machine into dirt-browned hands, brings his hands to his mouth, swallows the ice, and falls plank-like to the floor.
For the first stretch of Paris, Texas, Travis remains silent. To the questions of the plump doctor with a throaty German accent called upon to rouse him, Travis is blank, wide-eyed, hazy. His brother is summoned from Los Angeles to retrieve him, and the two share an uneasy journey to the West Coast from the Texas-Mexico border. Walt plies Travis with questions regarding his four-year lapse from society and contact, and Travis stares back at him blankly.
An explanation of those missing four years is never supplied beyond Travis’ brief statement later on that he was in Mexico. He demonstrates throughout the film a compulsive desire to disappear, to fade away as much as one can manage while harboring still both body and mind. He seems to be alive only incidentally, so tormented by a past brokenness that he fails to function in his present reality.
It is jarring when we learn that he has a son, had a wife. The only connection he seems to have to the family he once had is a small series of old photographs that he carries with him in a plastic bag.
Travis' attempts to relate to people seem often impossibly strained. The chasm between Travis and his brother as they drive to the coast together feels painful and blatant, their relationship marked by emptiness, silence and an unknowing of one another. The soundtrack is sparse, silence punctuated with soft, twanging guitar. Mountains and open expanses of land frame their rental car.
Travis and Walt are shot often through windows or as reflections in motel mirrors, or sitting parallel to one another in awkward silence at roadside diners. Walt pushes for the fastest routes, while Travis twice attempts to escape in order to walk alone again without discernible destination. His drive with Walt represents a slow revival, during which Travis acquires better-fitting clothing and learns again to eat, to speak. We discover that he long ago bought a plot of land in Paris, Texas, but throughout the course of the film, neither he nor we ever go there.
This initial portion of the film, much like a proper road trip, appears not to have any real destination. Wenders demonstrates a clear and profound affection for the American landscape, and the visual dimension of the film is enough to sustain interest through a plot that slowly and languidly unwinds.
Travis can be read as a strange perversion of the American cowboy, stony and dusty and bound intrinsically to the land. His journey with Walt features such sparse dialogue and interaction as to draw one’s attention to the dusty, dream-like, expansive Americana entirely foreign to me and my New England born-and-bred sensibilities. That they end up in Los Angeles does, for an instant, seem discomfiting, accidental, nearly impossible. Such disparate locales should be separated by more than distance, miles, land.
Wenders imparts upon the American landscape the sort of grandiose love that can only exist within people not from here. His vision is never at risk of collapsing into regionalism, nor of tidying itself into suburbia, nor affecting experiential bias. For a wandering narrative, the middle expanse of the United States is an optimal locale into which to drop one’s perpetually malcontented, wavering characters.
Wenders draws Travis in a story as winding and unfixed as Travis’ inner-mechanisms. In the process, he celebrates the seeming boundlessness of the American rural panorama with as much dedication and aesthetic sensibility as the Beats, but with a steadiness that feels more genuine and proves much less annoying.
Travis is reunited with his son Hunter when they arrive in Los Angeles. The two suffer a brief period of awkwardness and distance before Hunter’s anger seems to quietly subside. Watching a homemade film reel from years prior, Hunter smiles at his three year old self in his father’s lap at the wheel of a pick-up truck. Travis watches his estranged wife Jane dancing and laughing with buoyant curls, and he puts his head in his hands as his body visibly trembles. Shortly after, Hunter and Travis drive back to Texas to find Jane.
That the destination of the film should be a person, not a place, is befitting of a narrative that watches the movements of a chronic drifter. When Travis does find Jane, she is working at a peep booth in Houston. He speaks to her on a telephone and through a one-way mirror. He recounts to her the intensity of their dissolution. He apologizes for a relationship marked by violence, alcohol and jealousy, for a marriage that literally went up in flames. He describes running from their trailer, from the fire she’d started within it, and never turning back.
He speaks slowly, clearly and for much longer than we’ve seen him speak so far. Everything he says is all that we’ve wanted him to say throughout the entire film; we come to understand him, the breadth of his brokenness, and by watching her face fall while he speaks, we understand her, too.
Speaking to her through glass keeps her unattainable, a ghost still, as intangible as his memory of her. Watching their obstructed intimacy, I remembered the photograph he kept of her, and how he had, on their road trip, given the picture to Hunter to keep. It initially seemed to me that he carried the image to remind himself of her, but I think perhaps that a photograph was as much of her as he could handle. In giving the picture to Hunter, he relinquishes his only vestige of his marriage, a memory that has taken on a huge, impossibly painful form. It becomes clear, in that moment, that he will reunite Hunter with Jane and then he will leave again.
His leaving is the only possible outcome. Travis’ innate compulsion to flee from his life does not seem to indicate a desire for new beginnings, but rather a need to try to wander away from himself, his identity and history. And after reuniting Hunter and Jane, leaving is the only measure that ensures he will not break up his family again. It is his way of maintaining boundaries in his life; after having, temporarily, drudged up a painful past, he can now push it back to where it belongs and create a new foundation for a positive future for the family he loves but cannot be part of.
It is a bittersweet, soft sort of ending. After watching a film that moves back and forth through the southwest, that wavers between two different realities (that of then and of now), the conclusion of Paris, Texas feels finite and contained and satisfyingly tidy. There is symmetry in our leaving Travis alone again, as we found him, this time in the blue light of a parking lot walking toward somewhere. Hunter and Jane embrace in a hotel room. The simple chords of the twanging guitar that have followed us through the film lead us out.
It is comforting to exist temporarily in a universe that embodies some rule of life that all roads lead home. Travis' alienation and aimlessness seem inconsequential after he rebuilds a family for his son. In a film with such emptiness and scarcity, there is no greater intimacy.
Laura Hooberman is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Greenpoint. She last wrote in these pages about Last Tango in Paris. You can find her website here.
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