“I… I used to make 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 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 it up. Everything stopped. You just… disappeared. And now I’m working here. I hear your voice all the time. Every man has your voice. ”
“Can you see me?”
“Honey, if I could see you I wouldn’t be working here.”
- Paris, Texas (1984)
Paris, Texas. Dir. Wim Wenders, 1984.
EDIT: This is like watching one extended Dennis Hopper photograph
In Paris, Texas, there are no borders, and Wenders’s exhilaration is palpable. When Travis’s fear of flying gets him and his brother thrown off a plane and he insists they drive to Los Angeles, you can almost sense Wenders punch the air and say “Yes!”: they’re on the road again. Even that troublesome border a few hundred miles to the south doesn’t really seem to have had any meaning for Travis: from what we can gather in the opening scenes, he has simply walked across it back into the United States. I guess you could do that then. But Mexico and the desert have one thing in common in American culture: they are places people go when they want to get lost. And Travis, in the film’s wonderful, soaring opening shots, is clearly a man who would rather stay lost.
