Discovering Paris, Texas

The film opens quest-like with a vast landscape. A man in a red cap alone in the desert. One of many marvelous shots to come, it is a visual feast.

Avery and Carter were visiting us in mid-December. As usual, Carter and I spoke of films for a moment. I mentioned to him that I had recently watched a YouTube video by this guy featuring “the 100 best shots of all time.” I can think of several iconic shots from older films like Dr. Strangelove, Casablanca and Citizen Kane that do not appear. The 10-minute video is still worth watching. I recognized maybe 80 out of the 100 shots shown.

Of note, the video wins points in my book for beginning and ending with a shot from Barry Lyndon. Deservedly so, it is the most beautiful movie ever shot. He even chooses the Barry Lyndon soundtrack for the introduction. There is plenty of Kubrick, Malick, Tarkovsky, and lots of shots from this film I had no idea about.

The musical choices are wonderful for this presentation, Wagner heartrendingly supports the first set of images. Bach and Tchaikovsky come along later. It was great (and unexpected) to see the final shot from Melancholia, a truly fantastic moment. Woody Allen’s distinctive bridge shot from Manhattan is there. I guess he’s not fully canceled yet. Good to see.

The top ten shots were a strong suggestion. The video ends with Barry Lyndon, as I said, and there must be another four or five shots from that film sprinkled throughout. Oddly enough for a video that contains so much Kubrick there’s not a single shot from Dr. Strangelove. Weird. But two of the top ten shots were from a film called Paris, Texas that I had never even heard of before.

I was sharing that with Carter and he was contextualizing the 1984 film for me. It won the Cannes Film Festival in 1985. I should have known that. I know that about a lot of other movies. The only explanation I can think of is that this was a time when I was engulfed with my personal spiritual quest and was preparing for India, so I did not have much focus and attention directed toward the film world or the world in general, really.

Anyway, come Christmas Carter gifted me the Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, which was a pretty cool gift. I watched it a couple of times during the cold weather of January and a third time that month with Jennifer. She enjoyed it. I was doing my OCD thing I do when I come upon something of high artistic value. Seeing it three times within a month leads me to some conclusions.

First of all, I only watched the two and half hour film from start to finish in one sitting with Jennifer. The other two times it was an hour here, a half hour there. It is easy to watch this movie in either mode. This is one of the most pliable films I’ve ever seen. For example, I watched part of it early one morning only to discover there is literally not a bad time of day to watch this movie. Paris, Texas is timeless in the sense that anytime is a good time to watch it.

Carter did it again. First, Blood Meridian and now this. Shit from the mid-80’s I should have already known but I was far away from everything. Both are marvelous experiences to discover in my 60’s.

The Silent Man (Travis) has managed to pass out in a small south Texas town that actually has access to a doctor. Greens, blues, reds are all important uses of color throughout the film.

Travis's brother Walt has to fly from LA to nowhere Texas. This film was obviously shot before they put up "No Smoking" signs in passenger flights. How did I not know about this movie?!

Travis walks when he is not passed out. Texas remains vast.

One of many postcard moments in the film. Great shot. Travis and Walt find a place to stay the night. Travis still hasn't said a word.

Paris, Texas has a story you could summarize in three sentences, and none of them would sound particularly interesting. Man walks out of desert. Man searches for lost family. Man facilitates reunion then leaves. It's the execution—the how rather than the what—that makes this film matter.

One thing it is not is in a hurry. On first viewing, that can feel like a problem. The pace is slow, sometimes almost stubbornly so, and for long stretches very little happens in the usual narrative sense. What kept me watching and, indeed with some anticipation, is the sheer beauty of the thing. This is eye-candy cinema of the highest order. The cinematography alone puts it in rare company, Barry Lyndon rare, the kind of film where you sometimes forget to follow the story because you’re too busy looking.

The opening hour is a bold move. Travis doesn’t speak for roughly the first twenty minutes, and when he finally does, all he says is “Paris.” Not France, we come find out, but Texas. That tells you almost everything you need to know, even if you don’t know it yet. He doesn’t eat anything to begin with. He sleeps (naps, actually) only twice during the entire film. He wanders like someone who has misplaced not just his memory but his metabolism.

Harry Dean Stanton gives a performance of enormous range without ever raising his voice, without anger, without frustration, without emotional fireworks. It’s quiet, controlled, mysterious. He absorbs rather than reacts, and the film lets that be enough. One of the great tragedy’s of this film is that his performance wasn’t nominated for an Oscar. It is easily the finest of his career.

The film quickly takes on a mythic quality. The mystery surrounding Travis and his habits. Questing through the desert wilderness. His journey back to civilization. His undefined emptiness. He is a man searching not only for purpose but for his very identity. In rather bizarre moment, he is walking on a bridge over a major multi-lane thoroughfare. We don’t really know why. He just likes to walk.

Off-camera we can hear him approaching a guy who is screaming an existential warning out into the traffic itself. He is identified in the closing credit simply as the “screaming man.” The encounter that feels less realistic than archetypal. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the story except the fact that nay traveler is going to meet strange people along the way. Moments like that give the film a strange, almost timeless quality, as if it’s drifting between realism and parable without committing to either.

What we hear of he screaming man’s diatribe is relatively brief and only an attentive hearing on subsequent viewings can make the first part of it as Travis draws nearer through automobile noise: “You will all be caught with your diapers down! That is a promise! I make you this promise on my mother's head! For right here, today. Standing on the very head of my mother, which is now on God's green earth, which everybody who wasn't born in a fucking sewer ought to know and understand to the very marrow of their bones! They will invade you in your beds, they will snatch you from your hot tubs, they will pluck you right out of your fancy sports cars! There is nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in this God forsaken valley. I'm talking about from the range of my voice, right here clear out to the goddamn Mohjave Desert and beyond that, clear out past Barstows and everywhere else in the valley all the way to Arizona. None of that area will be called the safety zone! There will be no safety zone! I can guarantee you the safety zone will be eliminated. Eradicated. You will all be extradited to the land of no return! It's a navigation to nowhere. And if you think that's going to be fun, you've got another think coming. I may be a slime-bucket, but believe me: I know what the hell I am talking about. I am not crazy. And don't say I didn't warn you! I warned you! I warned all of you!”

The scene is a humorous explosion of rage in an otherwise subdued film. I wonder about its significance. It could have been completely cut without affecting the story at all. But I think it was a surprise and a turning point on Travis’s quest. This moment is about as far a contrast as you can get compared with the film’s opening sequence of him walking through the vast Texas desert lands.

I think Travis experiences this contrast. He is fully back in civilization but there is something absurd about it all. More absurd than his isolation in Mexico, which lasted four years. This comes before the important sequence when Walt (Dean Stockwell) shows Travis (with Hunter) the super 8 home movies he made of a slightly younger, cleaned-up Travis and Hunter as a 3 year-old with his young estranged wife/mother Jane. This is a wonderfully shot and performed sequence that makes the slow pace worth it. Perhaps the screaming man’s existential slap in the face reflects the beginnings of Travis’s resolve to find Jane, which emerge after he sees the way his small family used to be, in fading color.

Fantastically composed shot featuring red but notice the green and blue in the background.

Another postcard shot. Travis has started talking by now.

Ditto.

The marvelous "super 8" home movies sequence. Travis and Jane from four years ago.

Just as he quested through the desert, now Travis is confronted by total domination of humanity and a mad man screaming half-coherent sentences into the mindlessly roar of traffic.

Travis and Hunter eating lunch. The kid decides to go with the dad to find his mother.

Color matters here, and it matters a lot. The film is literally startling in its use of color. Red, green, and blue dominate specific scenes. Travis’s red cap, the bright red bedspreads in the motel room Walt takes him to, the raw heat of the desert. Red feels exposed, unprotected. The landscapes are often framed against vast blue skies, calm and indifferent, creating a constant tension between ground and horizon. By the time we reach the peep show, blue dominates, glass, neon, distance, mediation. And then there are moments of strange, almost mischievous mixing, like the cool blue light of the peep show lobby punctuated by a cigarette vending machine glowing with two bright green lights inside. Green, life and renewal, trapped inside a machine selling slow death. It’s beautiful, and a little funny, and a little sad.

Ry Cooder’s music does something similar. At first it feels like it’s mostly that recurring wailing bluesy acoustic guitar theme, and that theme does take up the bulk of the score. It serves as an emotional and psychological anchor for the viewer. Whenever it returns, you know where you are emotionally, even as the plot withholds details from what is, structurally, a pretty standard melodrama—man seeks lost love, reunites child with mother, drives off into the sunset. The story is nothing special. Cooder makes you feel like it is.

Listen more closely and you realize Cooder is doing much more. There are many different pieces, often used only once, subtle, restrained, never underlining emotion. The restraint makes the main theme stronger when it reappears. Silence and repetition are part of the composition.

Hunter (Hunter Carter), the child is the emotional hinge of the film, but not because he’s treated as a symbol of innocence. He’s treated like a small adult. He complains about the smell of Travis’s drinking and then he helps his father stagger to an abandoned couch in the middle of nowhere without drama or moral commentary. He’s open-minded, welcoming, adaptive. He is with his drunk dad. They are seeking his lost mother. Let’s do this. That openness feels less like childhood naïveté and more like emotional competence.

The final thirty minutes of the film are as good as anything in cinema. Not counting the super 8 images, Nastassja Kinski (Jane) appears late, in roughly the last fifth of the film, and completely changes its gravity. There are not many films where the appearance of a major actor has had such an impact as Kinski does in this film. Brando in Apocalypse Now, comes to mind. There are probably others but her presence suddenly shifts the whole film and over the span of a few minutes explains absolutely everything in the two hours it took to get here.

She wears bright colors and has an obvious youthful vibe. She’s also guarded, intelligent, damaged, functional. The peep show scenes are devastating in their simplicity. A one-way mirror, microphones, two people finally speaking honestly while physically separated. They find one another without being able to be with one another. Stanton wanted to do his monologue in one continuous take. But, no one ever says he actually did what we see in the film in a single take. Probably just most of it. Kinski surprises with her tears and slip into melancholic memory. Her brief responding monologue is as extraordinary as his. This is truly great cinema.

Jane makes small finger gestures in the booth, thumbs touching fingers, fingers moving through hair. Later, when Hunter reunites with his mother, he makes the same gestures. This is not accidental. It’s behavior passing through the body rather than through words. Jane never sees it. It isn’t acknowledged. It just exists. It suggests that Hunter may be more like his mother than his father, temperamentally and emotionally, and that Travis understands this by the end. He doesn’t redeem himself. He clarifies his role and then steps away. He knows who he is now and it is harrowingly beautiful.

The quest includes calls on pay telephones and dinosaurs.

After two hours, the film changes completely the moment Nastassja Kinski appears.

The first peep show encounter is an important introduction to the viewer regarding the circumstances and situations with the one-way mirror inside a peep show room.

Travis gets drunk afterwards. Hunter sits in his orange sweatshirt on the car outside the door. He can't stand the smell of alcohol. He helps his staggering dad to a sofa later.

The final 20 minutes or so of the film are some of the best cinema you will ever see. Outstanding performances all around.

I’d give Paris, Texas a solid 8. It is a very good film rewarding repeat viewings. It is cinematically a 10, and its final half hour flirts with the upper limits of what cinema can do. Most of it is an interesting, quirky 7. Extraordinary stuff applied to ordinary material, which I suppose is part of the point but it’s not my thing here.

The story itself is touching and genuinely simple. Take away Müller's cinematography, Stanton's and Kinski’s performances, the slow, dliberate pacing, and you're left with a tale you've seen versions of a dozen times. The film doesn't transcend its story through complexity—it transcends through craft.

It kinda feels like a Terrance Malick movie, with all its aspirations and disappointments, as contemporary now as it ever did, save for the pay phones and the constant public cigarette smoking. Mediated intimacy, distance, people talking through glass and devices, families rearranged by necessity rather than ideology. None of that has aged.

Films that inspire this level of sustained thought without demanding to be canonized are often the ones that age the best. Director Wim Wenders gave us one of those select films that feels less like it was made and more like it was found. Like someone discovered a reel of America dreaming about itself, half awake, half ashamed, still unbearably beautiful.

The camera just stays on Kinski as she listens to Stanton and wells up two tears which run down her face, her nostrils dilating. She realizes that the story Travis is telling her is the story of their complex, failed marriage.