19th September, 1984, saw the release of Paris, Texas...
Paris, Texas and the Lost Art of Travel
There are now thirty years between the release of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas and today, a lot has changed with the world and are we better for it?
Smoking on planes for example. As Walt (Dean Stockwell) flies to Texas to pick up Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) after not seeing him for four years, he sits on the plane with his pierced lips around a cigarette. It’s frustrating enough when someone walks by on the street and a cloud of smoke is in their wake, but to be sat next to someone on a plane for hours, breathing in their tar filled smoke is unfathomable. Some airplanes still have the last remnants of this time, the ashtray in the armrest, so in some ways the world has changed for the better but how else has the art of travel changed us.
The only answer Walt can muster is the saving of time. Travis eventually agrees but can’t go through with it as they start to take off and they have to leave the plane. Flying is too big a step for Travis, suggesting that the quicker form of transport is a symbol of his anxiety of returning to the social norm and returning to his past life.
It’s this travel as to save time that seems to be a constant theme through Wenders’ film. When Travis finally makes it to L.A. after a two-day journey in the car, he meets Hunter and his sister-in-law, Anne (Aurore Clément). The first night he can’t sleep and is found outside in the morning, sat watching the airplanes taking off and landing from the airport in the distance. Next to him is a wall lined with shoes that he has polished during the night. Not only does this seem to reflect that shoes are something that he is comfortable with and cleaning and polishing them brings him relaxation and security, but also that the planes are a distant possibility, something he can’t quite grasp or relate to yet. It also seems to show that shoes are an important piece of equipment, something worth keeping clean, not merely for fashion reasons but so they can keep taking their wearer places.
Again, when he is taken back to ‘civilisation’ and left so that Walt can get him some new clothes and shoes, he flees, wanting to be walking again and travelling towards his destination. A train passes as he walks along the train tracks and he doesn’t get on it, again not seeing it as a way to travel. Walking is a lost art of travel as we enter a period where space travel is open to the public. The quality of exploration seems to be measured by the distance of one’s journey. The next state or county is not as desirable as the next planet. This gauge of travel seems to have become a new social assessment – the more one has travelled the more cultured one becomes.
As Walt catches up with Travis on the train tracks he asks him where he is going. “What’s out there?” he asks and gets no reply from the silent Travis. The camera cuts to the landscape ahead of them, an empty, wild, secluded space. Which when one first sees it there is ‘nothing’, but when it is closely studied it is full of beauty. Even the endless train tracks draw the eye to the wondrous horizon. Yet Walt answers his own question with, “There’s nothing out there.” Here it seems that what Travis is doing is ‘weird’, walking such distances is something that a person in their right mind would not attempt, as there is no need for it.
Eventually, Walt takes Travis back to the city. The bright lights of the strip mall that they visit are a stark contrast to the rural backdrop that Travis occupied. The green and red lighting seems to signify traffic lights, a potential symbol of Travis’ roadblock in his life. The lights of the town represent the claustrophobic traits that civilisation has for Travis, whereas the natural light of the countryside equates to his clarity.
As the film continues, the level of transportation rises. This relates to Travis’ return to the civilised world. Walking was his preferred form of transport, the car was alien. As he seems to become more acclimatized to his surroundings, he accepts the car and simultaneously begins to talk. He wants to go to Paris, Texas but Walt is conscious of getting Travis home to see his young son, Hunter (Hunter Carson). They need to fly. Travis is against the thought of “leaving the ground” and asks why they have to fly to L.A.
Walking seems to have taken a back seat whens it comes to travelling; it just takes too long. Hunter says this when Travis suggests that he could pick him up from school and they could walk home together, he moans “Walk home? I don’t wanna walk home, mommy… nobody walks, everybody drives!” He continues to say that people will see him, as if it is a disdainful thing to do and that walking home could be a reason for others to ridicule him. When Travis does meet him at school, Hunter ignores his presence and asks his friend for a ride home. The fact that walking takes up precious time is tantamount to how society views the world, our progress in transportation and time saving technology has taken away our appreciation of time itself. Much of the Western world regards time as a right rather than a privilege and when our right is threatened by something that may waste our time, we see it as pointless. Maybe time is a privilege, and maybe we should acknowledge and appreciate the time it takes to do something. Perhaps there is more value in the process rather than the result; maybe an hour walk to the mall could have more value than a ten-minute car journey? It’s what we see and feel on our way to our destination that counts not what we do when we get there.
By Russell Farnham
Paris, Texas has a constant theme running through its superb imagery and cinematography – travel. Moving from place to place has been a human necessity for thousands of years, finding new food sources, escaping wars and conflict, or fleeing natural disasters. Travel was a means to an end, not necessarily a life choice. Today we see travel as a character-building exercise, a way to gain perspective on life and to “find oneself”. What a luxury we have that travel has become such a pastime other than an unwelcome upheaval.
In Wim Wenders’ 1984 film, he seems to explore the act of walking, not as a mere leisure activity, but as a form of transport. The film opens with Travis at the end of what seems a long walk, thirsty and exhausted from trekking through the desert. We are not sure where he is going but he seems to have a clear target and when he is picked up and taken to the doctors, he leaves as soon as he can to continue his walk. Wenders purposefully captures Travis’ trek with static, long shots, showing the vastness and emptiness of the land and therefore the potential loneliness and vacuous act of walking such long distances. But Travis doesn’t see that, it seems. Even when Walt finds him and stops to pick him up, Travis walks past almost as if he doesn’t recognise the car as a mode of transport. When asked to get in the car he is very reluctant, almost unsure of whether the car will take him where he wants to go.
