Content warning: this piece contains discussions of sexual assault.
Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas is an exquisitely constructed mystery, one which makes you forget you were ever looking for answers to begin with. Known for its stunning opening shots, tactful use of Ry Cooder’s music, and beautifully layered performances by its all-star cast, Paris, Texas is a brilliant allegory for both the American mythos and the dark secrets that lie beneath its seemingly pristine veneer. Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis Henderson is equal parts perplexing and charming in the film’s early scenes, but Paris, Texas reorients our initially empathetic relationship to him with the introduction of Nastassja Kinski’s character. By withholding the truth about Travis’ past, Wenders ultimately shatters stereotypical ideas of what abusers and domestic violence looks like and encourages his viewers to look at their communities in a new light.
We first meet Travis wandering through the desert with a near-empty gallon of water at his side, passing out at a run-down gas station and unable or refusing to speak when he wakes. A phone number for Travis’ brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), is found on his person and he is soon reunited with his son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), in Los Angeles where Walt and his wife Anne (Aurore Clément) have been living and taking care of the seven-year-old boy. There, Travis begins to warm up to his surroundings and us, becoming more empathetic in the eyes of the audience and his child who barely knows his own father.
Eventually Travis turns his attention toward reuniting with his estranged wife, and the mother of his son, Jane (Nastassja Kinski). Anne reveals that she gets a check from her every month from a specific bank in Houston. Travis and Hunter head there on a road trip that reinforces their new bond and furthers our perception of Travis as a good father. They eventually make it to the bank and spot Jane. Using walkie-talkies, as if they were in a family-friendly spy movie, Hunter signals to his father, and they follow her to the peep show where she works. Hunter waits in the car while his father speaks with her through a one-way mirror; he can see her, but she has no clue who she’s speaking to. He leaves shortly after.
He returns the next day as Hunter is left waiting in a hotel room. Again, speaking with Jane, Travis begins to recount their entire tortured love story as if it were someone else’s life. “I knew these people,” he begins. There are moments that signal the truth to Jane — his voice is familiar, both to the person who came to see her the day before and her former husband — but it isn’t until he mentions that they lived in a trailer that she’s certain it’s Travis. She listens as he discusses their idyllic beginnings, financial struggles, her postpartum depression, his possessiveness, her desire to leave him, and how it all ended: her tied to their stove as he slept, dreaming of “a deep, vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language, or streets,” before waking to find himself on fire and entirely alone. Jane finally responds to this monologue by saying:
“I used to make up long speeches to you after you left. I used to talk to you all the time even though I was alone. I walked around for months talking to you. Now, I don’t know what to say. It was easier when I just imagined you. I even imagined you talking back to me. We’d have long conversations…the two of us. It was almost like you were there. I could hear you. I could see you, smell you. I could hear your voice. Sometimes your voice would wake me up. It would wake me up in the middle of the night just like you were there in the room with me. Then, it slowly faded. I couldn’t picture you anymore. I tried to talk out loud to you like I used to, but there was nothing there. I couldn’t hear you. Then, I just gave up. Everything stopped. You…just disappeared. Now I’m working here. I hear your voice all the time. Every man has your voice.”
Her response demonstrates the complex, capricious feelings that survivors often navigate in the aftermath of abuse, particularly when it involves an intimate partner. There is lingering love as well as depression, fury, disillusionment, and many more feelings I can’t imagine putting into words. I’ve been raped multiple times and emotionally abused in other ways by other partners, and my feelings in the aftermath of each event would and still do fluctuate constantly. I’ve tried minimizing these experiences in order to survive, pretending they did not happen or joking about them, but trauma always finds a way of sticking around and memories are easily triggered. I know every feeling that Jane expresses in her monologue, not intellectually but in my bones. No matter how many times I’ve heard or read it, I shudder every single time that last line echoes in my mind: “Every man has your voice.” For me, however, it doesn’t stop at their voice. It’s their touch, their entitlement, their superiority complexes, and the lengths they will go to reinforce power and control, often including pretending to be as gentle and kind as possible in public.
This climax doesn’t rely on gimmicks or sappiness to succeed. Rather, the film works due to the richness of Sam Shepard’s screenplay and the talent of those two actors. There are so many layers to Paris, Texas as a whole, which are epitomized in those final twenty minutes. Kinski’s performance is so subtle but heartbreaking. For the majority of that timeframe, she silently reacts to Travis’ monologue, yet her expressions of flirtatious curiosity, triggered anguish, yearning, and reflection are infinitely more commanding than the words of the man who abused her. When she finally responds, it’s a heartbreaking yet subtle rebuke of what she underwent, as well as an acknowledgement that his abuse and objectification is everywhere, in every man she speaks to. Travis concludes the scene by giving her the name and room number of the hotel where Hunter is, knowing that they are better off without him and the potential for his violence to destroy the two people he loves most again.
It’s quite timely in the era of the #MeToo movement to see all the nuance that exists in those who perpetuate violence, so long as these stories refuse to compromise survivors’ humanity or honest lived experiences. During the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings of 2018, I was struck by his use of “character witnesses” in advertisements. I vividly remember seeing a blonde, middle-aged woman extol his thoughtfulness, integrity, and respect for women. All the while, I couldn’t help but think about the narrow image we’ve constructed of abusers and of abuse. As a college student grappling with prevalent sexual violence on campus at the time, it became abundantly clear to me that the media’s representation of abusive men, in general, has been deeply flawed for decades.
We imagine them to be caricatures of aggression, senselessness, selfishness, and overt sexualization. Regardless of how familiar we are with the statistics on sexual violence, we rarely consider how those close to us or in our communities could be implicated. For this reason, we can be quick to dismiss the stories of others as slander. The danger of this is clear, and yet, our narratives onscreen are still catching up with that fact. In 2020, we still lack much serious, accurate, or nuanced representation of abuse or abusers despite Wenders providing a blueprint on how to do so thoughtfully nearly forty years prior.
I am certainly not advocating for positive propaganda full of empathetic rapists. Rather, I’m urging the industry to tell it like it is. Realistic representation is crucial, especially now, especially in relation to this topic. Paris, Texas is one of very few portraits of full, complicated, messy abusers that doesn’t devolve into offensive appropriation of violence as spectacle. Any discomfort that Travis’ revelation elicits in Paris, Texas’s audience is necessary; that feeling where one’s cognitive dissonance suddenly dissipates and is replaced with even some degree of clarification as to what the private reality of abuse looks like is the only way forward to a more just world for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and other forms of abuse. We convince ourselves that seemingly good people could never do bad things. Unfortunately, that has been disproven time and time again, and it’s pivotal that we finally acknowledge that truth in our own lives and in the stories we consume on-screen. Paris, Texas is a good start, but it’s certainly not anywhere near the end.
