Wim Wenders: Paris, Texas by Jörn Glasenapp (review)

In Jörn Glasenapp's study of Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984)—a brief, highly readable analysis dedicated entirely to a single film—the author follows the film's many threads, the on-screen and off-screen ones, with equal fervor, trailing them along their courses until they lead him, one after the next, back to the main interpretive road. Following these pathways is the biggest pleasure in reading a book such as this and it was likely also the biggest pleasure in writing one.

Glasenapp begins by briefly discussing the inner logic of the American Western, noting that Paris, Texas inherits elements of its mood from John Ford's The Searchers (1956). This is a sensible connection, and Wenders himself has opined about Ford's influence. In Paris, Texas Travis Henderson, the solitary, meandering protagonist played by Harry Dean Stanton, suddenly appears in a desolate part of western Texas, missing much of his memory along with his ability to speak. His silence differs from John Wayne's, whose quiet self-presentation served as a hallmark of his masculinity. In Wenders's film, Travis's silence and his movement are functions of one another; they tell us that he is both broken and lost. The film thus begins with a question: What does he need in order to make his world whole again?

The Western is a largely American genre, although that has discouraged neither Italians nor Germans from riffing on it, and when it comes to Wenders's portraits of the US (which was, at the time Wenders made Paris, Texas, the director's newly chosen homeland), Glasenapp refers his readers to the book Written in the West (2000), Wenders's collection of his own art photography. In that book's photographs, the US and its streets look ruined and abandoned, much like Travis. This aesthetic, in which American splendor has evidently taken a turn for the worse, links Wenders's films to those of his American forerunners such as Anthony Mann and Nicholas Ray, to say nothing of the broken and ruined men who populate plays written by Sam Shepard, the author of Paris, Texas's screenplay.

As a Wenders protagonist who has been a perpetrator of domestic violence, Travis is somewhat unique. He is hardly the first violent character in Shepard's writings; but, as Glasenapp notes, violent or criminal figures rarely appear in Wenders's oeuvre—the director does not seem to have the temperament for them. Although a man can surely be both infantile and evil, Paris, Texas takes the position that Travis is mainly the former. The first word he speaks in the film, "Paris," is interpreted here as though it were a child's initial utterance and, in this way, Glasenapp's reading finds its psychoanalytic starting point. He looks to Otto Rank's study The Trauma of Birth (1924), casting Travis as a neurotic protagonist who longs to return to the womb. In one of the film's memorable set pieces, Travis ends up on the psychoanalytic couch next to his son Hunter, as the two discuss their search for the same "fancy woman," a label that refers to Hunter's mother, Travis's mother, and to any woman either of them has ever loved.

In focusing on Travis, Glasenapp by no means neglects Jane, the character played by Nastassja Kinski. Travis and Hunter drive to Houston to find Jane at the peep-show club where she works. While Hunter waits outside, Travis enters, encountering Jane, who remains behind the one-way mirrors. Among the threads at which Glasenapp then begins to pull are the multiple roles Kinski imported with her into this film. These include her youthful eroticization made famous by a widely seen 1977 episode of Tatort, as well as the role in which she was cast in Paul Schrader's Cat People (1982), in which she ended up behind the bars of a zoo. Here we meet...