The 100 Best 80’s Movies

Wim Wenders understood in his bones that the road was a place to get lost. It offers an escape not just from the confines of a home but also an identity — the unique promise of constant forward motion. Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) first appears in “Paris, Texas” wandering in the middle of the West Texas desert; Robby Müller’s evocative photography catches him over a ridge as Ry Cooder’s plaintive slide guitar rings out over the score. We know nothing about him just yet, but we immediately understand that he’s been lost entirely by choice for a long time (four years, in fact). After he passes out in a convenience store, a local doctor calls his estranged brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) to come pick him up. Walt discovers that his brother has become a shell of his former self: a mute amnesiac who lost his sense of self somewhere on the road.

The reasons for Travis’ disposition are no less potent for being so ordinary: a marriage torn asunder, partially by the arrival of a child whom husband and wife weren’t ready to care for, but mostly because of depression and resentment neither were willing to confront. Co-screenwriters Sam Shepard and L. M. Kit Carson reveal the full details of Travis’ separation from his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski) in a tour-de-force confessional sequence near the film’s end, but the specifics, while enlightening, are somewhat beside the point. With “Paris, Texas,” Wenders wanted to make a film about America, and he accurately diagnoses that loneliness as an integral part of the national condition. Travis was alone surrounded by family and alone when he began running with no destination; isolation can be literal or an emotional state. The vast expanse of the American West only confirms such a conclusion.

Travis eventually begins to speak — albeit tentatively, as if he’s relearning the properties of human speech — over a lengthy road trip with Walt back to his home in Los Angeles. There, he reconnects with his son Hunter (Hunter Carson, Kit’s son), whom Walt and his wife Anne (Aurore Clément) have raised since Travis and Jane disappeared. Though Hunter initially distrusts Travis, like any seven-year-old boy would of a strange man who enters his home mostly to clean their dishes and shine their shoes, they eventually bond over walks home from school and old home movies and photographs. In a film filled with exceptional performances, the warm chemistry between Stanton, whose melancholy primarily resides in his eyes, and Carson, who exhibits a wisdom well beyond his years, stands out as an especially indelible pairing. In their limited screen time together, Carson makes you immediately understand why Hunter would want to travel with Travis on an indefinite trip to find Jane. They speak with each other openly and honestly, without any concessions made to their gap in maturity.

The two road trips that bookend “Paris, Texas” feature a slice of America defined by images one would see outside their car window: motels, gas stations, highways that stretch the infinite, barren deserts, railroad tracks, masses of vehicles, fast food restaurants, billboards, neon signs, nondescript skyscrapers, suburban sprawl. In interviews, Müller expresses a distaste for images that call too much attention to themselves, but it’s so easy to get lost in his painterly compositions — the very best of his career — especially considering his loving emphasis on warm colors. (Reds and greens have rarely looked better than in this film.) He captures a country with a fluid identity—and sure enough, the America of “Paris, Texas” would soon be permanently in the rearview mirror—and yet his photography endures because of how in tune he and Wenders are to small gestures. A comforting hand on a stranger’s back, a phone receiver used to wipe away tears, the anxious pull at the hem of a fuchsia sweater dress — to Wenders, these moments are as American as any roadside attraction.

Paris, Texas never makes an appearance in “Paris, Texas” outside of a crumpled photograph; its absence stands as a metaphor for self-actualization always out of reach. By film’s end, Travis remains lost by choice, back on the road again except a little less lonely. A reunion between mother and child comes at the expense of a father who fears his permanent restlessness will poison their wellbeing and a makeshift family (Walt and Anne) bereft of their adopted child. Yet, a shared, unspoken understanding between all five people ties them together even as they remain miles apart. The road can always bring them back together. —VM