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At face value, the screen story, about a dysfunctional family, is weak. The plot is not really credible. The lead character (Travis) is an older man who in the first ten minutes of the film wonders alone in the desert like a horse with no name, seemingly suffering from severe trauma. But Travis' later behavior and the behavior of other characters in the film are not believable, given this opening gambit.

However, if we discard our need to interpret behavior rationally, then the film works, either as a dream or, more generically, as a parable of modern day America, from the viewpoint of a European film director. The characters and their journey through the film's story are symbolic of American culture as a whole, with its ever-present loneliness, urban alienation, emotional separation, and general rootlessness.

"Paris, Texas" is a memorable art house film about the modern American experience. Like other art house films, the story is not necessarily to be taken literally. Instead, the story provides narrative support for the visuals, the music, and other film elements, the combination of which imparts some broader or deeper social message than could be conveyed by story alone.

The strong silent type that make for great lovers, but no one we would actually want to live with.

Wenders also benefited from an economical script by Sam Sheppard and L.M. Kit Carson, which in its simplicity has more in common with the American literary tradition than with the discursive and involved dialogue of European cinema. The characters speak little of their feelings or desires, and Wenders clearly revelled in the space and freedom which this script afforded him.

The isolation of the characters is instead reflected vividly in the barren Texan landscape, photographed in broad cinemascope by the director of photography Rob Müller. Müller and Wenders worked hard on the film's visual style, studying the paintings of Edward Hopper and other chroniclers of day-to-day American life to give the film an authentically American feel. This attention to detail enables the tone established in the opening sequences to carry from the Texan desert and into the urban and interior scenes: rich, vivid colours set against faded surroundings creating a warm yet muted tone in keeping with the film's bittersweet themes. Ry Cooder's magnificent score is the epitome of Americana, a history lesson in American music from a master of the genre. Without it, much of the film's impact would be lost, for it takes the story out of the abstract and places it into a tradition, embedding Travis and his fellow protagonists in a tangible reality, and so making them real. On another level, it also enables the film itself to draw on the rich history of American cinema to lend substance to its themes. In the Texan context, Travis's child-like innocence and dogged persistence seems to place him almost alongside the cowboy heroes of the films of John Ford and Sergio Leone: a man with no name, arriving in town on a mission, and returning to the Texan desert once it is complete.

Travis's attempts to put right what he once made wrong. His silent Texan wanderer persona is not bent on revenge or justice, but on making amends. When he buys an empty lot in the tiny town of Paris that he remembered as a child, we are shown an image of modern America: of ordinary people struggling to put down roots in a land that has no history. Paris, Texas is not a famous capital city with centuries of life behind it, but a strip of scrubland in the middle of nowhere, with no past to define it and only a name on a deed of ownership to mark it out from the desert to which it once belonged.




''Paris, Texas'' begins so beautifully and so laconically that when, about three-quarters of the way through, it begins to talk more and say less, the great temptation is to yell at it to shut up. If it were a hitchhiker, you'd stop the car and tell it to get out.

The film is wonderful and funny and full of real emotion as it details the means by which Travis and the boy become reconciled. Then it goes flying out the car window when father and son decide to take off for Texas in search of Jane (Nastassja Kinski), Hunter's long-lost mother. Everything suddenly becomes both too explicit and too symbolic. It's not giving anything away to reveal that what the movie - rather tardily - seems to be all about is the difficulty in communication between men and women, nor that the sequences in which this is demonstrated are awful.


In Paris, Texas the journey of Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) is one that atones for his past as a flawed, obsessively jealous and violent male. His act of atonement is to bring together his young son Hunter (Hunter Carson) and his ex-wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), to re-form the family unit from which he must by necessity remove himself, driving off into a darkness that parallels the desert that he emerged from at the start of the film.

Before long, we discover his name, Travis, and that, for the previous four years, he’s dropped out of society. Wenders, at least at first, presents Travis as a romanticized figure by casting him against epic backdrops and giving his past a distinct air of mystery, but each shred of information that’s revealed about him seems to deflate that myth somewhat. The process through which the audience and the characters on screen guess at his interior thoughts provides much of the tension in the first half of the movie. As the people that Travis has left behind become more firmly defined and the pain he’s running from becomes more evident, though, it becomes increasingly difficult to see the heroic individualism that makes the man some sort of living legend. By the end of Paris, Texas, Wenders has made Travis achingly human. His flaws and his failures are made clear, and his story takes on tragic, yet intimate, dimensions.

From the wide open blue skies of Paris, Texas’ opening shots, the film promises a potential escape from the heartache, baggage and claustrophobia of the modern world. As skyscrapers begin to dominate the frame in the second half of the movie, it instead presents a crushing reality that few Westerns were willing to face head on.


Rather than the intrapsychic or neurotic conflicts of the relatively structured personality of an earlier era, the variety of psychic suffering characteristic of our postmodern condition seems to be the sense of fragmentation, estrangement, and emptiness of what Lasch (1979) has called “the narcissistic personality of our time.

Labels: Recortes, Wim Wenders