By Ryan Thomas
Some answers to the question, “Where (or what) is Paris, Texas?”
1. About 100 miles northeast of Dallas, Texas. A real town with a population of 25,000, named after the French city of the same name. Home to a scale model of the Eiffel Tower, built in 1993, that stands 65 feet high (one-sixteenth the size of the original) and has a shiny red cowboy hat on top.
2. The namesake of Wim Wenders’ 1984 film Paris, Texas, screening Sept. 6-11 at The Independent Picture House.
3. A meeting point and creative zenith for some of the great artistic talents of the 20th century: director Wenders, screenwriter Sam Shepard (also an actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright), cinematographer Robby Müller, composer Ry Cooder and actor Harry Dean Stanton, among others. Also a clever nexus of intercontinental influences: the European road-movie avant-garde that Wenders all but perfected in the late ’70s (Paris), plus the melancholic neo-Western Americana that he was drawn to and helped invent in the early ’80s (Texas).
4. A great movie title.
5. A big fat metaphor for the American idyll. Travis (Stanton) owns a vacant lot in Paris, seen only via photograph, believes he was conceived there and wants badly to return with his family and live happily ever after. This, after he was discovered wandering the desert in a dissociative fugue by his brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), having gone missing for four years and only gradually, throughout the film, regaining his ability to talk, remember and be human. As he does, he journeys with his son (Hunter Carson) to Houston to find his wife, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and reconvene his estranged family. Paris is Travis’ American utopia and raison d’être.
6. One of the best-looking and -sounding films you’ll see, a pure evocation of the American West. A tour de force for cinematographer Müller and composer Cooder, the former combining desolate desert vistas and vivid urban night exteriors, the latter adding a haunting blues elegy on slide guitar. A vibe.
7. A showcase for Stanton in a rare leading role. Travis appears in the film from nowhere and seems to be born of the earth underneath him, frayed suit, full beard, bright-red hat. Stanton acts with his eyes and his manner and his entire being, run-down and hollowed-out, nearing 60 at the time of filming. He’d been an admired character actor for nearly 30 years (Roger Ebert once wrote that, as a rule, no movie featuring Stanton can be altogether bad), showing up for everyone from John Carpenter and Francis Ford Coppola to (later) David Lynch. Paris, Texas is his best performance.
8. One of the great films of the ’80s and a highlight of our Summer of ’84 series, an art-house pick turned seminal favorite cited by everyone from Wes Anderson to Kurt Cobain and the hip-hop duo Paris Texas. A road movie, a Western, a romance. A film of beauty and melancholy and American tragedy, as only a European master could make it.