Blind Pigs and the Paris, Texas Criterion Collection

I have been asked to write a script for a new film project. A new acquaintance, who is a cinematographer and fellow collaborator on the new project, recommended that I watch the Wim Wender’s Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner, Paris, Texas. He recommended that I watch it for inspiration, I suppose, before attempting to write the new script; as Wim Wenders is one of his favorite directors. As fate would have it, the Criterion Collection of Paris, Texas was due for release on January 26, 2010.

I had watched Paris, Texas years ago but basically had no recollection of it, due to the fact it was 1984 when it was released, and also due to the fact that was too many “inebriated” years ago. I just remember Harry Dean Stanton wandering in the desert, and I believe I tuned out after that. I had never watched a Wim Wenders movie, and being a college dropout and autodidact, I was not well versed in foreign films or movies in general. For years in the Seventies and early Eighties I avoided television like the plague, and found very little time for movies. To this day I’ve never seen an episode of the television show, Dallas, and many other hit shows of that era. I have blank spaces like an amnesiac for whole swatches of that era. I had always fancied myself a poet, which was probably a bit of a stretch, since teenage doggerel and mind-altered verse does not necessarily amount to poetry. So this is not so much a review of the movie Paris, Texas (I’m not worthy) as it is the ramblings of a film auteur wannabe.

One pleasant surprise I discovered was that the screenplay for Paris, Texas was written by Sam Shepard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose play Tooth of Crime inspired me to become a playwright and write my first play, Warboots. (Warboots received a somewhat nice review by critic Lawson Taitte of The Dallas Morning News when it premiered on the stage in Deep Ellum in 1993.) Paris, Texas is based loosely on Shepard’s book, Motel Chronicles. The screenplay was adapted further by Dallas screenwriter, L.M. “Kit” Carson. Carson’s son by actress Karen Black, Hunter Carson, plays the son named Hunter in the film, and did a superb job. (I’ve always loved Karen Black, especially in Day of the Locusts and Easy Rider.) I was surprised when I looked up Hunter Carson’s name on IMDb to discover that he has done very little acting since. He was very good in Paris, Texas as the young boy abandoned by his parents and left to be raised by relatives.

I must admit that while watching the Criterion Collection of Paris, Texas I kept waiting for something to happen. I like movies where something happens. I like movies with a linear plot and sequence of events that keep me interested. I was left thinking, maybe something is happening and I’m just not an astute enough observer to “see” it. I must confess, I just don’t get most “European” movies. They’re way too subtle for my tastes. The three “foreign” movies I can say I did like are Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Costa Gavras’ Z and the Chinese erotic movie, Sex and Zen. There are a few others, but I won’t bother listing them all.

The movie obviously deals with mental illness. Travis, Harry Dean Stanton’s character, is obviously mentally ill, probably paranoid schizophrenic. Why else would he be walking through the desert, mute and detached from reality? It would take more than just a broken heart to compel such wandering for four years. (I knew a guy like that who used to walk all the time on the highway. He never wore socks and wore big, thick boots. He wasn’t schizophrenic, but he had a slight speech impediment and it was rumored that he had dropped too much acid in the Sixties and Seventies. He told me he once saw ZZ Top when they were a garage band in Ft. Worth. He had a lot of old war stories from growing up in Ft. Worth in the Fifties and Sixties. He was actually a nice guy, just misunderstood and the object of much bullying.) One of my favorite scenes of the movie is the mentally ill guy screaming a monologue of apocalyptic content on the highway overpass as rush hour traffic rushes by below. I thought that was pretty brilliant to have that turn up out of nowhere. I’ve been around a lot of mentally ill people, and that scene was spot on.

I finally “got” Paris, Texas after watching all the extras and listening to the director’s commentary by Wim Wenders. That’s when I discovered that the movie was for the most part made up as they went along, a pastiche of scenes stuck together like a celluloid poem, a “poetic” movie if you will. I guess the film purists “got it” all along, or were satisfied if they didn’t “get it” right away. I’m afraid my attention span isn’t the best for European movies or sentiments.

My heartstrings were touched the most when French actress Aurore Clement, who plays Hunter’s aunt Anne, pleads on the phone for Hunter to come home. That was a sad and touching moment. (Aurore Clement is stunningly beautiful, especially in the French plantation scene in Apocalypse Now Redux.) Dean Stockwell is also great as Walt, the brother of the wandering Travis, and the beautiful Nastassja Kinski did a great job with her Southern accent and portraying Jane, the long lost mother eventually found working in a peep show in Houston. The movie actually didn’t have an ending until Sam Shepard dictated the ending over the phone to Wenders, because by that time Sam Shepard had other obligations as an actor on another movie set, and fax machines did not yet exist.

Robby Muller’s cinematography is superb. I loved the big, blue skies of Texas and the Southwest, the clouds, the trains, the colors, and the grandeur of the opening scenes in the desert area around Big Bend National Park, near Terlingua, Texas. Equally unique and nostalgic are the many shots of motels, stores and cafes (inevitable I suppose in any “road movie”), which Wim Wenders mentions in the commentary as being homage to the photography of Walker Evans.

The Criterion Collection also has great extras other than the director’s commentary: an interview of Wenders by German journalist, Roger Willemsen; excerpts from a 1990 documentary on Wenders featuring interviews with Wenders, Robby Muller, composer Ry Cooder, Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, Peter Falk, Hans Zischler, novelist Patricia Highsmith and director Samuel Fuller. It also has new video interviews with filmmakers Allison Anders, who was a young production assistant on the movie, and Claire Denis, who was assistant director.

The Criterion Collection has many other extras too numerous to list here. The film did provide much inspiration, but most of the inspiration came from watching the extras. Just getting the opportunity to listen to the director’s commentary alone was worth the price paid for the DVD. It was very interesting to learn about the many struggles of Wim Wenders to see the movie to completion, such as stealing shots on the Houston freeways, coming up with an ending midway through the film when there wasn’t a complete screenplay, and searching for some sort of central vision from a potpourri of ideas which weren’t totally worked out before filming began. Those are trying circumstances for any filmmaker. There is an old Russian saying, “Even a blind pig finds an acorn every once in a while.” Congratulations to Wim Wenders for his steadfastness in seeing his incomplete vision to the end, for winning the Palme d’Or and for making a beautiful, poetic movie in the process.