paris, texas (1984)
In my ongoing journey to discover new cool and interesting music I encountered some bit of an interview with Deep Sea Diver's Jessica Dobson where she said that with the album Billboard Heart she was going for some of the vibes of desert and isolation from Wim Wenders's 1984 film Paris, Texas. It's a movie I had seen once, a long time ago and largely forgotten about. Spoilers below.
I remember once, my sister took a long solo backpacking trip--a few weeks, just her and her pack on the trail. She described to me how bizarre it felt to return to civilization and just . . . see people. After a few weeks! We are social creatures, we humans; for all the poetry there is in the ideal, too much time in absolute isolation does strange things to the psyche.
Paris, Texas opens with Travis, as played by Harry Dean Stanton, wandering the desert with nothing but a tattered suit, a mostly empty plastic jug of water, and a red hat. He doesn't move with the dramatic shuffling mannerisms of the dying man in the desert, but with a brisk, awkward purposefulness. And when people talk to him--the doctor who finds him, his brother--he doesn't speak. He only dimly reacts. We learn that he has been gone for four years. Four years! He has probably seen some humans in that time, but those early scenes, the scenes I remembered best, it was such a believable journey to watch a man learn how to be human again. How to speak, how to interact. Four years is an awfully long time.
We don't really know what he was doing at the start of the movie, whether he was trying to return to civilization or if he simply got unlucky. But his brother picks him up, and decides to take him back to LA with him. His brother refuses to give him any grace, treats him as if his silence and oddities are just some childish petulance rather than absolute brokenness of this man, but time around him, around civilization, seems to help Travis recover some of the skills of interacting with other humans that he's lost over the years. A change of clothes, a shave, some real food. Time spent behind the wheel. Remembering old jokes.
The lingering question, of course, is: what could possibly have driven a man to do this to himself? We learn bits and pieces of his past--Travis has an eight year old son, Hunter, who is now being raised by his brother; he had a wife, Jane, who has disappeared--but none of that answers the question. He has clearly either done or experienced something terrible. Then, when Travis learns where Jane is, he takes his son away from the people who have been raising him for half of his life and drives across the country, back to Texas, to try to find her.
You can imagine a movie where it feels like we're meant to be rooting for Travis here--and indeed, there are a few moments of genuinely touching bonding between father and previously estranged son--but here we mostly see that he is making phenomenally reckless decisions because he thinks he has a chance to right his past wrongs by tracking down his ex-wife.
He finds Jane working at a strip club, and using the magic of one-way mirrors and some real powerful cinematography he talks to her, and tells the story of an extremely fucked up trainwreck of a relationship which ends up with the man tying his wife to the oven to stop her from escaping in the night, and with her burning down the house, with him inside, on her way out. Their relationship. The things he did that broke him so badly he preferred to just disappear into the desert than be human anymore.
There's a bit of "what, did you expect something romantic?" to all of this. This scene works in part because it shatters what's left of the illusion that Travis is a victim in all of this--he didn't go into the desert for the poetry of it. Here, together, in a scene where neither character can see the other (he sits with his back to her), we can see the truth, the tragedy.
Again you can envision the Hollywood ending here where she forgives him and they get back together and he promises to save her from all of this. Instead he just sends her back to the hotel room, where Hunter is waiting, and once he's seen them reunited he drives off once again. It's not a happy ending, but it's an ending.
The theatrical release poster suggests this movie is about "picking up the pieces", a common poetic thread in cinema. But in this film, there's really nothing left to salvage that doesn't leave other shattered pieces in its place. Travis seems to come up with the idea to return Hunter to Jane on a whim, leaving his brother and sister-in-law devastated; he has convinced himself that this is enough to atone for his sins, but he also doesn't seem to have given it much thought beyond this act. The problems of raising him, of doing right by him, are passed off onto Jane, who until this very instant was only wiring some extra cash to a bank account for him--and it must be said, this was a solved problem. Hunter had a family.
But the sense I get is that Travis has always struggled to conceptualize a moment that isn't now. Even in the early days of their relationship, before things took a turn for the deeply fucked up, he described himself as being unable to bear spending too much time away from Jane, so he would quit his job and just spend his days with her until the money ran out, then just find a new job and do that over and over again. He has had four years in the desert with no one to talk to and nothing to look at but the landscape--four years with nothing to distract him from fixating on what he has done, from obsessing over it. Unsurprising, then, that his impulse to do something to fix it overrides any thoughts he might have about whether this is good thing to do.
Travis's experience being dragged back to civilization is not kind to him. Perhaps this has always been the way the world treats him--we only see idealized footage of Travis from before he disappeared--or perhaps it's something new. But in all of what happens, no one asks what he wants. And for all that the choices he makes are very bad, he does at the very least ask Hunter what he wants. He even seemed to try to talk him out of it.
And I don't know, I love stories like this. Stories about wandering and isolation, stories about sad, broken people, about the terrible, inescapable weight of the past. I loved Vagabond for similar reasons. (If you can believe it, the thematic similarity this month was unintentional.)
The whole time I was watching the movie, once we got past the early bits that I remembered quite well, I kept wondering if I had even finished watching this movie. Then the odd scene would jump out at me from my memory like a ghost. I'd been there before. But that person wasn't me, and I don't think the person I was watching the movie with at the time really engaged in story much. And for me the thing that makes movies come alive is to sit with them afterwards, to think about the themes and the characters and their decisions, to try to understand what we've just been told. To participate in the great conversation that has been ongoing since we first started telling each other stories and making paintings in caves. But in this case we skipped that step, so I got to watch this movie as if it were new.
It makes me wonder how many movies I have like that--something I watched and just didn't have time to settle in my psyche because I just never took the time to let them.
But that's why I'm here, in a space I control, writing about all these cool movies out there. Art matters, and our experience of art matters, and preserving that here on my critically acclaimed1 indie blog is my own small attempt to do my part to keep that alive.
Don't look that up, please.↩