Paris, Texas (1984) Review
9/10
A man in a red cap walks through desert until he collapses. He’s no identification and won’t speak. A doctor finds a number in his pocket and calls a brother in Los Angeles who had assumed he was dead.
The 9 is for a film with the patience to withhold its subject for ninety minutes and the writing to justify the wait. Travis doesn’t explain himself, the film doesn’t explain him, and when the explanation comes, the character himself delivers it to somebody who can’t see him. What holds it back from a 10 is the middle hour. That’s looser than it needs to be. The reunion with the son works and takes its time doing it, and there are stretches where the patience becomes indulgence.
Paris, Texas wrecks me in the best way. For a long stretch it seems to be about nothing but a silent man and a lot of sky, and then the last half hour hits harder than anything before it lets on. It makes me wait for its point, then trusts me to sit through the pain when it comes. Smart. The middle drags, and I’d put up with twice the drag to get to that ending.
Silence as Structure
Travis says nothing for the first twenty-five minutes. Not a word. His brother collects him, drives him, talks to him, and he stares out of the window.
That’s an enormous risk and the film converts it into the central device. An audience given a character who won’t speak spends every scene trying to read him. That means they’re doing what the dialogue would otherwise do.
Harry Dean Stanton plays it with almost no expression and total specificity. He’s not catatonic. He’s somebody deciding, continuously, not to say anything, and the decision is visible. Stanton is the reason those first twenty-five minutes work for me. With a lesser actor I’d be bored and irritated. With him I’m leaning in, watching his face for the moment he gives in and speaks. When he does begin to speak the tone is strange. Flat, practical questions about small things, a childlike literalism, and an inability to address anything that matters. The recovery of speech isn’t a recovery of function.
Dean Stockwell is what makes the silence bearable. Walt is a brother who has spent four years assuming the worst, has raised the abandoned child, and is now driving a man who won’t speak across several states while trying to be normal about it. His patience is the audience’s patience.
A character who won’t speak forces the reader into interpretation. That’s more engaging than being told. The cost is that you must give them something to do in every scene, because a silent character who’s also inactive is furniture. The technique has a time limit. Withhold too long and the reader concludes the author has nothing, so the first words have to be worth the wait and must complicate instead of resolve. Notice what he talks about when he starts. Small practical matters and nothing personal, which tells the reader that the silence wasn’t an inability but an avoidance, and avoidance has a subject.
The Photograph and the Town
Travis carries a photograph of an empty lot in Paris, Texas, which he bought by mail because he believes he was conceived there. That detail is the film’s best single idea. A man who has lost everything is holding a picture of a place he’s never been, bought from a catalogue, because it’s a beginning he can locate on a map.
It also supplies the title’s joke. That isn’t really a joke. Paris, Texas, is a real town, and the gap between the name and the place is the same gap the character is living in. Nothing is ever done with the lot. He doesn’t go there and the film doesn’t resolve it. That’s correct. Some objects in a life carry meaning that never converts into an action. The reunion with the boy is built on the same patience. Hunter doesn’t want a father who appeared from nowhere, and the film gives them a walk home from school on opposite sides of a street, gradually matching each other’s pace, with no dialogue at all. It’s the best scene in the middle hour.
That walk home is the scene I’d show anyone who calls this film slow for nothing. Two people on opposite sidewalks slowly falling into step, without a word, moves me more than any reunion scene with a speech and a swelling score.
Robby Muller Shot It
The photography is the reason the film looks like nothing else. Saturated reds and greens, neon against dusk, enormous skies, and interiors lit like paintings. Wenders is a German director looking at the American southwest, and the film is unmistakably an outsider’s view. Motels, gas stations, drive-ins and freeways are photographed with an attention Americans don’t give them because they’re not exotic. Ry Cooder’s slide guitar does the same work in sound. Sparse, bent, unhurried, and the pieces are short and repeated instead of developed. That leaves the landscape room.
The result is a film where you could stop on almost any frame and have an image worth looking at. That’s a real achievement and also part of why the middle sags. Beauty sustains attention less well than a question does. Muller and Wenders had worked together for over a decade by this point and the shorthand shows. Shots are held far past the point most directors would cut, and the confidence to do that comes from a photographer who knows the frame will still be interesting in four seconds.
An outsider’s eye finds detail the native misses. If you’re writing about a place you know well, the discipline is to look at it as somebody arriving would, because familiarity edits out exactly the things a reader needs.
Visual or sensory richness can’t carry structure. A gorgeous middle act is still a middle act, and readers will accept beauty for about twenty minutes before they want to know what’s happening.
Repetition beats development in an accompanying element. Cooder plays variations on one figure throughout. That keeps the music from competing with the story for the reader’s attention.
The Peep Show
Travis finds his wife working in a booth where men speak to women through one-way glass. He can see her. She can’t see him. He sits down and tells her a story about two people, in the third person, and she gradually realizes who’s talking.
It’s the finest piece of writing Sam Shepard did for the screen, and I’d put it up against any scene in American film. The one-way glass is the structural device, and the third person makes it bearable, because neither of them could do this face to face. It’s so painful to sit through that I almost want to look away, and it’s the reason this film gets a 9.
Nastassja Kinski plays the recognition in stages across several minutes with almost no dialogue. She listens, then understands, then turns off the light in her booth so she can see her own reflection and speak to it, and the staging is the whole relationship.
What he confesses is jealousy that became imprisonment, a man who tied a bell to his wife’s ankle so he’d know when she moved. The film has spent ninety minutes making the audience like him and delivers this without softening a word of it.
The reversal that follows is the other half. She tells her version, and it’s not a contradiction but a completion, and the scene ends with both of them having said the true thing and neither of them able to do anything with it.
The Ending Is a Refusal
Travis arranges for the mother and son to be reunited in a hotel room, watches from a car park, and drives away.
That’s the decision the entire film builds to and it’s the hardest one available. He doesn’t join them, doesn’t explain himself to the boy, and doesn’t ask for anything. He’s concluded that the family works better without him in it. The film declines to say whether he’s right. There’s no scene afterward, no reconciliation, and no indication of what happens to him, and the last image is a man driving into a city at night. That refusal is why the film lasts. A version where he walks into the room exists and is a lesser film, because it would convert a story about somebody understanding what he did into a story about somebody being forgiven for it.
Wenders had the nerve to end it there, and he was right to. Every instinct I have wants Travis to walk into that room, and the film is right to deny me that.
It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984 and did modest business, and its reputation has grown steadily since. The images have carried further than the film itself has, and a great many people know the red cap and the neon without ever having sat through the two extremely patient hours of film that are the only reason any of those images mean very much at all to the people watching them.
An ending that withholds reconciliation is almost always stronger than one that grants it, because forgiveness resolves the reader’s discomfort and discomfort is what they’ll remember.
The condition is that the character must choose the withholding instead of have it imposed. Travis could walk into that room. That he doesn’t is a decision, and decisions are what endings are made of.
Ask what your ending lets the reader off. If the last chapter relieves them of the thing the book made them feel, you’ve spent the book’s effect to make them comfortable.
Should you watch Paris, Texas?
Yes, for the last thirty minutes, and the two hours before them make those thirty work. I take a point off for the middle hour, where the patience turns into indulgence and the gorgeous frames start standing in for story, and that’s the only thing between this film and a 10. What’s left is a man who can’t say what he did until he’s in a room where the person he did it to can’t see his face, and that scene stays with me.
