Paris, Texas: a European in the American West

Paris, Texas (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984)

Like so many deserving classics of the 1980s, Paris, Texas is a film that ought to be watched more than once, with each viewing yielding more detail, more insight and colour. Of course, this is not true of every film in the period. If David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) first offered me clarity with its midnight-noir plot, this has since been lost to uncertainties and cloudiness; if Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead Trilogy (1981 – 1992) once repulsed, it now confirms itself as a masterwork of the genre. However, like with any relationship between a film and its audience, so much has to been given for something to be returned. 

Unlike other filmmakers of the German New Wave, Wim Wenders grasped Hollywood (and, more specifically, “America”) more fully than his peers – the movement had initially been focused on the rejection of America’s easy-viewing, “escapist” pictures – confidently migrating his style across the Atlantic. However, it would be a mistake to suggest Paris, Texas announced this bench-mark. His quixotic trilogy of road movies – comprised of Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976) – is peppered with the iconography of Denis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1972). These are sketches Paris, Texas would later paint over (only roughly keeping to the lines), again concerned with oddballs and twenty-somethings musing on their wayward journeys. In other mediums America is also given to his European witness, particular with celluloid photography, which had long demonstrated his enchantment over its wilderness (one collection is suitably titled ‘Places, Strange and Quiet’).

Wenders’ filmography would find its greatest expression in Harry Dean Stanton’s portrayal of Travis Henderson in Paris, Texas. It is an ode to the American Western, the road pilgrimage, and the Wolffian premise of ‘God’s Lonely Man.’ But it is fundamentally the story of a father and child being reunited, and how their love is eventually reclaimed. Ultimately, the maternal triumphs in Paris, Texas – Nastassja Kinski’s Jane Henderson is left spinning with her son, Hunter, in the final scenes – but Wenders’ film is a male journey, fraught with self-evaluation on its yellow brick road. Wenders’ film only loosely resonates with the Spielbergian “family movie,” before turning to shadier elements of domestic violence, depression, and prostitution. Its brilliance comes not only from the measure of this balance, but also its passion to invent something new.

Paris, Texas, like the ‘road trilogy,’ would prove to be a small stepping-stone towards Wenders’ later pictures: in Until the End of the World (1991), the road (quite literally) takes off into galactic space.