PARIS, TEXAS (1984)

A man drives down a highway, disappearing furtively into the night. He’s trying to get away from his past, to flee into the recesses of his mind, a place where his memory will not follow him. He wants to escape his life, to outrun the fires that cling to his clothes and burn his heels. Living in a world without language, a space without streets, he’s become a ghost—he is a stranger to his own life.

Time is a foreign concept to him now; he can’t even remember how long he’s been running. Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) is found wandering in the deserts of Texas, catatonic and bedraggled. His brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), has come to take him home. Travis has the mute, distrustful stare of an abused child, a vacant look in his eye; his mind is in a distant place, trapped in a different time. Walt attempts to bring him back to the present: “Do you remember your little boy?”

Paris, Texas is a film about coming home. However, the story also posits that home isn’t a place; it’s the people with whom we build our lives. When we become phantoms to our loved ones, we become estranged from ourselves, and the idea of home forms into a misty, amorphous entity. As our havens of quietude are torn asunder, the agony of regret keeps us from rectifying the hurts we have caused. When chased by the ghosts of our past, it is hard to heal one’s scars—yet the future depends on it.

Much like the rest of Wim Wenders’ work, there’s a searching quality to Paris, Texas. In this spell-binding neo-Western tale, people are mournfully looking for answers in a format akin to a mystery. Having not seen his brother for four years, believing him to be dead, Walt is desperate to understand what happened to Travis and his wife, Jane (Nastassja Kinski). Why did they split apart under such enigmatic circumstances? Why was Travis’ son Hunter (Hunter Carson) left on Walt’s doorstep without so much as an explanation?

All of these questions must wait—Travis is in no state to talk about the past. Reduced to an almost vegetative state, Travis initially cannot speak at all. When Walt finds him roaming the Texan desert, meandering aimlessly into the barren landscape, a despairing look passes over Walt’s face. The fear that he has lost his brother forever, that he has retreated into himself so deeply he may never resurface, is apparent in his eyes. He tries frantically to get Travis into the car: “Where are you headed, Travis? What’s out there? There’s nothing out there!”

This quote reveals an existentialist concern in Paris, Texas. When Travis wanders without purpose in the desert, dwarfed by the massive, uniform landscape, one can’t help but ask the ancient and grandiose questions of meaning: what is he looking for? How did he get here, and why is he doing this at all? His purposeless marching is like a Sisyphean task: the more he plods forward, the more sand and rock open up before him. The liminal space swallows him whole, framing all of his actions as inevitably futile when compared to the expanse of time.

This is a reading compounded by a sign that hangs in a store Travis visits: ‘The Dust has come to stay. You may stay, or pass on through, or whatever…’ The choice ultimately doesn’t matter—all of us are just passing through. Our decisions possess monumental personal importance, yet are also grossly insignificant. Meaning is subjective, and the mistakes of our ephemeral existence will fade away, and vanish into the sands of time—but Travis has a lot of life to live before that happens.

Travis is a haunted figure. His hopeless endeavour mirrors his anguished attempt to outrun his past. Of course, it pursues him. No matter how far he walks, it will follow him doggedly. As Ry Cooder’s plaintive guitar provides a mournful score, a story about the power of sorrow and regret takes shape. We find ourselves trapped in the intricate labyrinth of another man’s heartache, a place where light cannot reach.

Filmed with an uncommon tenderness, Paris, Texas reveals the frightening extent of our own memory—even when wiped. Though Travis has forgotten much of what happened on that fateful night, he is tormented by it nonetheless. His sunken eyes and gaunt, lifeless face contain all the sorrow of the world. Shapeless spectres have made a home on his back—he can’t recall their precise origin, or when they clambered onto his shoulders, or how he could ever shake them off. All he can remember is a fire and the unanswered screams of the people he loved.

But Travis wants to do what’s right. He’s reintroduced to his son, a seven-year-old child who can barely recognise his own father—he’s been gone for four years, after all. “Half a boy’s life…” Travis wistfully intones. There’s a vast chasm between them, and Travis’ efforts to reintegrate himself into his son’s life are initially met with suspicion. When Travis goes to pick Hunter up from school, he instead chooses to leave with his friend. Travis is desperately trying to provide himself with purpose, with a sustainable sense of meaning—but it is possible such desires are based on a delusion.

And, perhaps, it does all lack meaning. Maybe chasing happiness is a hopeless, tireless strain. Travis’ struggle to shape a future for himself and his family is likened to building sand castles at high tide: though formed with loving, careful hands, arbitrary forces of fate, or the destructive arm of entropy tears them down. Plans for the future are washed away in the riptide, leaving both us and everyone in the story to question: where did it all go wrong?

Maybe it was on that one portentous night. However, it could also have been a storm that had been brewing for years, forming clouds that aren’t captured in photo albums or Super 8 home videos. When Travis watches a videotape of a blissful holiday with Jane and Hunter, he only seems aggrieved; we are unsure if he’s pained by loss or if, even in their best of moments, he can only see the cracks in their relationship. The truth of familial strife and the heartache it causes lies out of the reach of celluloid: the ineffable experiences of the human condition are not something that can be so easily captured on film.

Wim Wenders’ masterpiece is a tragic ballad to lost family, an ode to the regret that mars beautiful memories. A cosmic isolation pervades Paris, Texas: everyone’s at a distance from another, which the cinematography does well to convey. Feet at a dinner table are kept closely under chairs, and eavesdroppers are sequestered in the frame. Despite the affection they feel for each other, a gulf still forms between a man and wife; that we are fundamentally set apart from people, even those we love more than life itself, becomes a harrowing motif in the story.

Travis makes earnest attempts to overcome this distance, be it spiritual, temporal, or physical. He bonds with his estranged son Hunter gradually, who has come to think of Walt and his wife Anne (Aurore Clément) as his father and mother. As they peer through family ancestry, flicking through a photo album of distant and almost-forgotten relatives, Travis points out and describes his father, detailing how he died only a few months after a photograph was taken. Then, Hunter asks his father an all-important question: “Can you feel that he’s dead?”

It echoes one of the film’s central preoccupations: that ghosts from our pasts, though invisible, possess a tangible shape. They can practically be touched, heard, and smelled—one can even speak with these phantoms: “I used to talk to you all the time, even when I was alone,” Jane confesses to Travis. “I could hear you, I could see you, smell you. I could hear your voice. Sometimes your voice would wake me up. It would wake me up in the middle of the night, just like you were in the room with me.”   

The essences of our past lovers become distilled portraits of someone we only half-understood, locked away in our consciousness. A complex human being is purified, transforming into little more than a diffuse ideal, concocted by their partner’s imagination. Travis’ father liked to imagine that his wife was an ethereal creature, but his image of her was not based on reality. Such flights of fancy are described as a sickness, one that leads to irrevocable distances between partners: “He looked at her—but he didn’t see her.”

Then, over time, even the ideals of our loved ones fade into the ether. Jane details that even Travis’ ghost left her after a time: “Then, it slowly faded… everything stopped. You just… disappeared.”  Memory’s treasure chest rots and falls apart—the mental image we have of a person, someone we once knew so well, inevitably erodes with time. Then they become lost to us, flickers of them only discernible in nebulous silhouettes, the muffled voices of strangers.

When everything else crumbles, when forced to look at the end of a frivolously spent life, a man is driven to understand his origins. Perhaps if he could go back and comprehend the beginning of his journey, he could rectify his mistakes. It’s for this reason that Travis longs to go to Paris, Texas: “Mama once told me that—that’s where she and Daddy first made love. […] So, I figured that that’s where I began. I mean, me, Travis Clay Henderson. They named me that. I started out there.”

Children become adults, and adults become children in Wenders’ films. Travis nurses a childlike urge to correct the past, coupled with a pessimistic understanding that nothing can ever be the same. Meanwhile, Hunter looks at his father’s dysfunctional behaviour with an air of intrigue, as though he were watching an alien adjust to life on Earth. It is the bemused gaze of innocence met with the pain of the world, seen through the eyes of a child who couldn’t possibly begin to understand.

Wim Wenders has a remarkable talent for turning ordinary stories into romanticised tales of modern alienation. The New German Cinema director makes films about real people, and his insistence on using unrecognisable faces renders these stories sublimely authentic. Harry Dean Stanton (Alien) may never have been an A-Lister, but his weathered visage and melancholic eyes are perfect for the role. Nastassja Kinski’s performance is simply stunning, imparting the agony of a mother suffering from post-partum depression, still living in a hole of regret after abandoning her son years ago.

Paris, Texas is an exquisitely unique film; you can never predict where it’s going. When Walt and Travis are removed from their plane back to Los Angeles, you suspect it’s the beginning of a road movie. But then it transforms into something greater, besting Alice in the Cities (1974). It’s equally meditative but exceedingly more sorrowful. Sad moments are tinged with hope, whereas happy sequences are cast in shade as we know where this story ends.

This is a film to make your heart weep. You’re frustrated because you want everything to turn out alright—but part of the film’s power lies in its honesty. In this transfixing tale, a father and son walking along a pier become a poignant reminder of all that could have been, while a dance shared between a man and his wife on a sunlit beach is a gorgeous, painful memory: the weight and breadth of human experience is captured in one short home video.

We’re left asking desperately: why does he leave? Why can’t they try again? Perhaps Travis lives in sheer terror that he can only hurt the ones he loves and that, if he can only engender resentment in those he cherishes, even banishment is preferable. Maybe he only feels he’s safe behind a pane of darkened glass, forced to spend his life in awe of the beauty that turns to ashes in his wrinkled hands. I would love for a romantic ending—but life is not always so simple. Sometimes happiness evades us. It’s for this reason that, when a mother is finally reunited with her son, her self-imposed exile brought to an end with a warm, loving embrace, it’s just about enough to break your heart.

WEST GERMANY • FRANCE • UK | 1984 | 147 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • SPANISH

Cast & Crew

director: Wim Wenders.
writers: Sam Shepard & L.M Kit Carson.
starring: Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski, Dean Stockwell, Aurore Clément & Hunter Carson.