Paris, Texas

I make no bones about my preference for well-scripted, well-crafted Hollywood films that create something poetic and profound within the limitations of the traditional three-act structure over movies that are improvised by cast and director or "discovered" as they're made or somehow spring forth from the mind of a great Auteur as he shoots. I've always believed when it comes to cinema, the best work starts with a well-conceived story. There are, of course, hundreds of exceptions to this. Perhaps the film most challenging to this belief for me was Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. The history of how this uniquely powerful picture came together is both well-documented and vague. The film has the most unusual writing credits: Written by Sam Shepard, Adaptation by L.M. Kit Carson. When I first saw those titles, I asked myself, adaptation of what? The screenplay? The question did not linger in my mind very long, as the movie quickly put me under its spell, and I became fascinated by the characters and the landscapes I was seeing, even though my first viewing, and most subsequent viewings, were not off film on the giant screen of a cinema but off laserdisc on relatively small standard-definition televisions. No matter. Robby Müller's vast American Southwest landscapes and hauntingly lit interiors, the hypnotic Ry Cooder slide guitar score, and the mesmerizing, near-silent performance of Harry Dean Stanton pulled me out of my seat, quieted my ADD brain, and affected some kind of permanent change in my psyche that I still can't fully explain.

Stanton plays a mysterious, seemingly mute drifter named Travis, who walks out of the West Texas desert into the outskirts of civilization, where he abruptly loses consciousness. When a doctor examines him and finds a phone number in his wallet, he calls the number and gets Travis's brother Walt Henderson (Dean Stockwell), who had presumed Travis was dead after not hearing from him for four years. Walt comes to get Travis, and they drive back to LA, where Walt and his wife live with Travis' son, Hunter (Hunter Carson). The boy hasn't seen his father or his mother, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), for several years. Walt and his French wife, Anne (Aurore Clément), have been raising Hunter as their own child and have grown to love him deeply, and Travis's reappearance upends the family life these three people were living. The movie starts out as a road picture about two estranged brothers trying to reconnect, though one does not speak and barely registers what the other is saying. When the two reach Walt's home in the LA suburbs, the movie transitions into an unusual domestic drama about a boy trying to reconnect with his mysterious, near-wordless father and a married couple trying to deal with the possible loss of the boy they've been raising as their son. At the halfway point, the film doubles back and becomes a different road picture, this time with the father and his young son driving back to Texas to try to reconnect with their estranged wife and mother.

In a way, all of Wim Wenders movies are road pictures—his production company is even called Road Movies—but this one is unlike any film that fits that genre. It is an elegiac meditation on the frailty (and the power) of human connection and a moving character study that explores issues of family, masculinity, identity, regret, and the very meaning of life without being even the least bit pretentious. Wenders had spent a good deal of time traveling around the United States and shot some of his 1974 road picture Alice in the Cities in New York. He longed to make a quintessentially American story and teamed up with perhaps the most ruggedly American of American playwrights, Sam Shepard. Wenders started out by adapting Shepard's Motel Chronicles, a collection of prose and poems in manuscript form, but neither man was happy with the results, so they developed a new story based on ideas, characters, and themes Shepard had explored in these stories. What started out as a film about two brothers, one who has mysteriously lost his memory, reconnecting on the road, transformed into a meditation on the nature of relationships between men and women. Their screenplay grew in many directions as they wrote and traveled together. One day, they'd be enthusiastic about the direction their script was taking; the next, they'd realize that what they were writing was cliché and not at all the film they wanted to make.

With limited funding, they started shooting with a completed script that neither fully believed in. The director, who is also a documentarian, almost always shoots his films in sequence to enable the movie he sets out to make to transform into the movie it wants to be, as the realities of casting and shooting change the course of each picture's narrative and themes. Most great filmmakers approach their productions this way to one degree or another, but in this case, Wenders really had no idea where the story he and Shepard had concocted would take them. By the time the first act had been completed, Shepard had left the project to co-star in and revise the screenplay for Country with Jessica Lange. It's unclear when actor, documentarian, and screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson took over to help Wenders determine what would happen in the second and third acts. Carson was certainly on board before the camera rolled because his son Hunter was set to play Travis's son in the movie. Yet Shepard continued to write dialogue for the new scenes, most notably contributing the key, lengthy monologue Travis delivers near the end of the picture once Wenders and Carson figured out where the story would end.

This seems an unusual and ill-advised way to write a movie, but I can't argue with the results. What is most profound is that we only come to fully understand the character of Travis that we meet at the beginning of the movie—the strange, withered, bearded amnesiac who walks out of the desert unable to speak and almost totally unaware of his former life—after we experience who he is at the end. Everything comes together perfectly, as if the entire film was building to an inevitable conclusion. At 147 minutes, Paris, Texas is not a short film, but the length and the unusual narrative structure create the feeling of reliving a memory more than being told a story. By the time we're with Travis and Jane back in Texas, the earlier scenes of Travis and Walt almost feel like memories of the last time we saw the film (even on first viewing) rather than the first part of the movie we're currently watching.

This distinctly American picture was funded entirely with European money, and it possesses a unique combination of authentically American settings, characters, and traits and a distinctly foreign fascination with this, which most people from the US might not even pay attention to. The vase Southwest streets, highways, and railroad tracks that seem to stretch to infinity; the tiny little towns that often seem to be populated by less than ten people; the glowing neon signs, billboards, diners, and truckstops that litter the landscape—these are all details that a typical American would never view as beautiful or even interesting, but the way Wenders and Müller photograph everything endows these rundown, often tacky or gaudy monuments to the ass-end of capitalism with an otherworldly grandeur. Perhaps the process of finding the film as they shot it added to the ability of these German artists to take their time and find the exact right locations for the mood and vibe they wanted to capture. Or, maybe they just shot what they saw wherever they went. Paris, Texas has the feel of a production that was made in pieces as the filmmakers obtained money from different sources to complete different sections, but that is apparently not the case. It was a low-budget film, but not one that stopped and started as funds became available.

There are many accounts of what filming this picture was like. Hunter Carlson's mother, actress Karen Black, traveled with the production as they shot, as did future iconic film directors Claire Denis and Allison Anders, who served as assistant director and production assistant, respectively. Both women credit Wenders and this experience in particular as profoundly affecting their future work. All three women describe the crew as being somewhat baffled by Wenders' approach to shooting, with him and Carson writing and rewriting new scenes at night with Shepard dictating dialogue over the phone, then showing up with brand new pages at the beginning of the next day, explaining to cast and crew what they'd be shooting an why. Meanwhile, producer Don Guest, who had served as a production manager for many prominent, sometimes erratic, directors of the period, including Sam Peckinpah, Peter Bogdanovich, Philip Kaufman, and Michelangelo Antonioni, kept the financiers from freaking out.

Paris, Texas, was made with a small crew on a slim budget, and its visuals are all captured with a single camera on a tripod or mounted on a car. Rarely is a dolly employed, and none of the vistas are shot with cranes, jibs, or other special camera mounts. The simple yet incredibly distinctive photography by Müller, who had shot most of Wenders' prior pictures, is perhaps the film's most striking aspect. The colors are intense and sometimes garish, leading to endless interpretations by film writers and fans regarding the meanings of the various color choices. Müller had just started to work in the US, shooting Saint Jack and They All Laughed for Peter Bogdanovich as well as Jerry Schatzberg's 1980 film Honeysuckle Rose. In 1984, he shot four features, including Joan Micklin Silver's HBO movie Finnegan Begin Again. One of those '84 movies was Repo Man, one of the most distinctive-looking films of the entire decade. It was on that film that Müller met Harry Dean Stanton. While Stanton hadn't always enjoyed the experience of making Repo Man, he loved working with Müller. Stanton also knew Sam Shepard, with whom he'd shared many late-night conversations about life, acting, and storytelling. Both Shepard and Müller felt Travis had to be played by Stanton and brought him to Wenders' attention. After making over 100 films, the one-two punch of Repo Man and Paris, Texas took Harry Dean Stanton from a "that-guy" actor to Harry Fucking Dean Stanton. Of Travis, he said, "After all these years, I finally got the part I wanted to play."

Stanton's chemistry with nine-year-old first-time actor Hunter Carson resonates in the most organic ways. The fictional Hunter is naturally wary of his mysterious father and, at first, keeps him at arm's length. Travis seems to implicitly understand this impulse, not wanting to push Hunter to do anything that makes him feel uncomfortable. In their early scenes, Travis displays childlike behaviors, which soon put Hunter at ease and win him over. Carson gives one of the most genuine and touching kid performances in all of cinema. Prior to making this film, his only other appearance on camera was when, at the age of nine months, his mother hosted Saturday Night Live and held him in her arms for the entirety of her opening monologue.

Former child actor Dean Stockwell had been making movies for even longer than Stanton but had frequently grown so frustrated with acting he was ready to call it quits. In the mid-1960s, he completely dropped out of show business and became a hippy, which led to his return to acting in the psychedelic films made by his counter-culture actor pals like Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern, who were working in indie exploration movies. But he spent most of the 1970s and early '80s doing somewhat generic parts on TV shows, and by 1984, he was ready to permanently give up acting to become a real estate agent when Wenders offered him this film. His was a larger part when they started shooting, with Walt originally going on the trip to Houston with Travis and Hunter to find Jane. But even though his role was truncated, Stockwell relished making this movie. 1984 was the same year he'd appeared in David Lynch's Dune. While being a small part of the overcrowded cast on that notoriously troubled production probably served to alienate Stockwell from his chosen profession all the more, it led to his small but unforgettable single-scene appearance in Lynch's follow-up Blue Velvet two years later, and subsequently to his Best Supporting Actor nomination two years after that in Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob. By the end of the '80s, Stockwell was a major actor, and it's clear that his transition from frustrated character actor to acclaimed movie star began with this picture.

Nastassja Kinski had worked with Stanton two years earlier in Francis Ford Coppola's musical romance One from the Heart. The striking German actress, model, and daughter of the volatile star of Werner Herzog movies, Klaus Kinski, brings a similarly haunted quality to her role in Paris, Texas. Her screen time is far more limited than Stanton's, but she is no less memorable. The character of Jane is built slowly in our minds as she is spoken about frequently in the movie's middle section, but we only see her in faded photographs, and in the Super-8 home movie Walt runs for Travis, Anne, and Hunter while Travis is staying with them. Hunter's only memories of his mother come from this old footage that was clearly shot during happier times for Travis and Jane. He's endlessly curious about his mother and what happened between his parents that made them separate and leave him behind.

Perhaps the most incredible aspect of this movie is that the mystery of this question of what happened between Travis and Jane is built up to such a degree that it would seem impossible to answer satisfactorily. Yet, the final monologue that Shepard wrote for Stanton to deliver in the final scene between the former lovers fills in the blanks in a way that is both expected and ordinary yet deeply sincere and unquestionably moving. The speech is similar to one found in Shepard's play Fool for Love but far more impactful because of the emotional release it provides after two hours of unexpressed pain, longing, and searching for some kind of forgiveness. The unusual setting also contextualizes this speech in a most cinematic way. The nature of the sex work Jane is engaged in when Travis finally finds her separates the two of them physically during their ostensible reunion. Thus, Travis is able to speak to Jane without her being able to see him most of the time. Their conversation is staged almost like someone seeking absolution from a priest in a confessional. Indeed, Travis' monologue is somewhat of a confession, an apology for past sins. Like most of Sherpard's works, it centers on the lasting emotional repercussions of masculine violence. Like most of Wender's works, it strives to make connections between deeply alienated individuals. More than any work by either man, it combines intellectual concepts that can be understood and analyzed with spiritual meanings that can only be sensed and felt.

Paris, Texas has often been compared to John Ford's The Searchers, another of my 100 favorite films. Indeed, Wenders' road movie plays somewhat like a quiet, introverted version of Ford's epic western. Like The Searchers, its protagonist emerges out of the past from the monuments of the Southwestern desert and goes on a journey to reunite a traumatized woman with her family, but while he may find some form of personal redemption, he understands that there is no place on the restored homestead for a man like him. In the case of Paris, Texas, the hostile forces that attack Travis and cause the breakup of his family are entirely internal. The title implies a similar type of search that John Wayne undergoes in the John Ford classic. Travis believes he was conceived in the nowhere town of Paris, Texas, and has bought a plot of barren land there with the halfhearted dream that maybe one day he'll reunite his family, and they'll all live there happily ever after. But we can tell he doesn't fully believe in this idea; he can't even seem to remember why he once viewed the town as some kind of a redemptive destination, but he still feels compelled to go there. Over the course of the movie, he comes to understand that he can neither change the past nor create the future. He only has control over his choices in the present moment—something that is true for all of us.

Paris, Texas, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, making 1984 the only year so far where my two favorite movies won the Best Picture Oscar (Amadeus) and the Cannes Palme d'Or, respectively, which certainly contributes to why this is my favorite year in cinema.