| Penny Folger |
Paris, Texas plays in stunning 4K at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, September 20th, through Wednesday, September 23rd. For tickets, showtimes, and series information, visit trylon.org.
A man wanders a Texan desert landscape in a red cap, mute, and in a daze. Rather than walking along the roadside, he seems to be walking down an invisible path that cuts across the landscape and that only he can see. We don’t know it yet, but this man is a casualty of lost love, not just some kind of homeless alcoholic drifter. Although alcohol does occupy a portion of his past, and maybe that’s why when he stumbles into an abandoned bar he curiously avoids all the alcohol contained within, in favor of ice cubes, before collapsing to the floor.
The man is named Travis, as played by Harry Dean Stanton, and Travis seems to be a symbol of what happens when a man is overtaken by a love that is eventually transformed by his own addiction and mental illness. But, one could argue rather unsentimentally, maybe it’s not love that’s at fault here at all. It’s what happens when love falls into the hands of those who are not healthy enough to care for it responsibly.
At any rate, Travis at the beginning of the film feels like a symbol and a warning from playwright Sam Shepard, the primary author of this film, about what can happen to something so potent and fiery between two people, when not handled with care.
The late Shepard, one of the most acclaimed American playwrights of the past 60 years and a sometime actor, knew German director Wim Wenders & the two wanted to collaborate. Shepard had never written a screenplay before but his book The Motel Chronicles, said Wenders, had “the feel of the film I wanted to make.”1
The overlap between the two men in their creative collaboration and differing influences was Travis. Quipped Dean about his character early in the film, “I was totally intrigued by it because I think everybody talks too much anyway.”2
By the time filming began, the collaborators had only written the first half of the script, assuming Shepard would join in on the shoot and they’d organically find the rest of the story while working with the actors. However, Shepard fell in love with actress Jessica Lange instead, went off with her to ghostwrite and act in the film Country, and so during production on Paris, Wenders was left to fend for himself. In addition to having the actors improvise the less significant dialogue, he enlisted the help of Kit Carson, a writer and an actor who would later appear in films such as Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty.
Wenders didn’t have to search long for the child actor he needed for the film. Carson’s 8-year-old son Hunter, whose name matches his character’s, and also happens to be the son of actress Karen Black (who I recently talked about in my piece on Family Plot) was a natural. Quipped Wenders, “They said, before you start looking you have to meet Hunter. So once I saw Hunter I stopped looking.”3
Hunter, who had never appeared in a film before, was especially adept with improvisation. Said Wenders, “Hunter was utterly reliable to come up with dialogue at any given moment, especially if the subject was spaceships or the space shuttle.”4
Paris, Texas is quintessentially American in its expansive landscapes and highways, but it was actually a co-production of France and Germany, so there are French and German actors sprinkled throughout. Female lead Nastassja Kinski (real life estranged daughter of Klaus) was German, but playing an American character with a slight southern accent, and the second female lead was French actress Aurore Clément, who does indeed play a French woman. For reasons of financing, the film demanded a certain amount of European actors to be cast, but It’s an interesting juxtaposition. The German point of view on Americana is something you also see in movies like Werner Herzog’s (a contemporary of Wenders) Stroszek, about a band of Germans who leave Berlin and wind up in the American Midwest. Said German journalist Roger Willemsen about the kind of clichés that can arise from these opposing sensibilities: “There were some detractors [of Paris] at the time who said that when a German comes to America, he films highways, the desert, there has to be a bottleneck guitar, someone appears in the desert with a bottle in his hand, which he tosses away, and so on.”5
But Paris transcends cliché into a thing of beauty through, among other things, its emotional performances. Wenders said Stanton was so in character that in one scene “I didn’t ask him to start crying, he just did that on his own.”6 In addition there is the depth of Shepard’s writing, and the exquisite cinematography by the late great Robby Müller (probably my favorite cinematographer of all time). Müller used an unorthodox yet beautiful technique in this film. Said Wenders, “Robby and I decided not to correct some of the neon lights.”7 He explained further, “Normally electricians would take neons out and put color corrected ones in there. Any lab in the world will tell you this green light is a mistake. But, we made use of the so-called mistake all throughout the film, and it gave a special look to some of the scenes.8
Dean Stockwell bathing in Robby Müller’s beautiful “mistake” green that permeates the film.
For the finale, Shepard agreed to return to the production long distance, at least long enough to write the famed monologue Travis gives in one of the film’s climatic scenes. He stayed up all night with Wenders relaying it to him by phone. Afterwards, according to Wenders, “Nastassja took 48 hours to drum the lines into Harry Dean. He had a lot of lines there! And Harry Dean had never learned more than two sentences together in his life.”9 It became important to the actors to preserve every word Shepard had written. In another interview Wenders said, “For three days and three nights they learned the dialogue of these most important scenes of the film, relentlessly.”10
They shot the scenes like a one act play. These scenes are the centerpiece of the movie. For its setting they created a type of peepshow, which said Wenders, doesn’t really exist. “We invented these little booths where men can talk to these women, and women can be looked at but cannot be touched. It’s a peepshow, and they don’t undress, they just listen to these men. It’s sort of a psychotherapy peep show.”11
Interestingly, the concept of framing these scenes around a one-way mirror was the brainchild of Wenders, not Shepard. Wenders said when he relayed the idea to Müller, he loved it, and said, “You know, we could do this for real?”12 Müller pointed out that this would also be better for the actors. As a result, said Wenders, “The biggest expense of the entire film was buying that mirror.”
But it paid off. The mirror works symbolically: the lovers finally reconnect while simultaneously remaining separated: there’s literally a one-way mirror between them, though the direction it faces, with the help of light sources, changes as the point of view and the dialogue shifts between characters. Wenders arranges the former lovers artfully around this mirror at different moments where one is speaking with their back to the other, so that both are facing the camera. They’re further separated by the fact that Travis speaks into a telephone and Kinski’s Jane hears him over the loudspeaker in her room. These protective layers between them are also, in a sense, like oven mitts. They can never completely come together or combust, again.
Jane and Travis reunite through some very expensive glass.
Paris seems to be about the concept that two people can love each other desperately but nevertheless can cross a line where they reach a point of no return. As Travis says late in the film to his lost lover, “I can’t see you, Jane.” Ironically, through the majority of the scene, he can see her, but she can’t see him. But that’s not what he means. He has gone into such a dark place within himself in the course of their relationship that he can’t return, and he can’t be around someone he loves so desperately when he knows their combined forces will only cause destruction. It’s too painful. The story is universally relatable for anyone who has ever loved someone they ultimately can’t be with. Said Wenders, “When we shot that I knew we shot something that a lot of people were going to be moved by, and that was unique and something that people hadn’t seen in a movie.”13
Footnotes
1 Wim Wenders, Interview by German journalist Roger Willemsen, The Criterion Collection, 2001.
2 Motion and Emotion: The Road to ‘Paris, Texas’, dir. Paul Joyce,1990, The Criterion Channel.
3 Paris, Texas, commentary by Wim Wenders, Criterion Collection.
4 Paris, Texas, commentary by Wim Wenders, Criterion Collection.
5 Wim Wenders, interview by German journalist Roger Willemsen, The Criterion Collection, 2001.
6 Paris, Texas, commentary by Wim Wenders, Criterion Collection.
7 Paris, Texas, commentary by Wim Wenders, Criterion Collection.
8 Paris, Texas, commentary by Wim Wenders, Criterion Collection.
9 Wim Wenders, interview by German journalist Roger Willemsen, The Criterion Collection, 2001.
10 Paris, Texas, commentary by Wim Wenders, Criterion Collection.
11 Wim Wenders interview by Ella Kemp & Mitchell Beaupre, Letterboxd, 2024.
12 Wim Wenders interview by Ella Kemp & Mitchell Beaupre, Letterboxd, 2024.
13 Wim Wenders interview by Ella Kemp & Mitchell Beaupre, Letterboxd, 2024.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon