Talking Costumes in Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas”

Harry Dean Stanton in “Paris, Texas”, 1984. Road Movies Filmproduktion

“Once I was driving to a screening for Paris, Texas,” Wim Wenders recalls in his book Einmal, “with Harry Dean Stanton in an incredibly long limousine. Even in the middle of New York, Harry was still Travis, sitting in the back of his brother’s car and driving silently through the desert.”

It was the role that Harry Dean Stanton, fifty-seven at the time, had been waiting for all his acting career, “something of some beauty and sensitivity,” as he told Sam Shepard who wrote the script. Shepard chose him for the role after he turned down playing the part himself in Wenders’ film. A one of a kind road movie, a modern fairy tale about a desert wanderer who wants to rediscover his past and a lost woman, a story of a man who doesn’t arrive anywhere definite but rather at a crossroads. His journey remains a mystery, but leaves the most beautiful mark on Earth, by reuniting a son with his mother.

Emerging from the desolate Texan desert and its blazing light to the haunting strains of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar, “on foot and wholly alone save for a watchful eagle, wearing a red cap and an inexplicable double-breasted suit, Travis looks like a former cowboy or maybe a businessman who took a wrong turn”, Manohla Dargis wrote as cited in the book Harry Dean Stanton, Hollywood’s Zen Rebel, by Joseph B. Atkins. “He looks like someone Dorothea Lange might have photographed during the Great Depression. He looks like the American West, all sinew, dust and resolve.” In his book Einmal, Wenders notes: “Old cowboys are the saddest, and most touching figures.”

It was Sam Shepard who convinced Wenders to set the main part of the story in Texas. “You can find all of America in Texas,” the writer told the filmmaker, who had initially considered shooting a road movie in California and all the way up to Alaska – “I didn’t know Texas that well at that point, but I trusted Sam. Everything I wanted to show was in Texas – America in miniature. Many of my films are based on travel routes instead of a script.” Wenders found in Shepard the perfect writer to render this image of Texas, America and the Wild West. It was his first screenplay, based on his Motel Chronicles, a collection of poems and fragmented stories from little towns and racetracks and diners in the West. Sam Shepard’s unique sense of the west, described by Atkins as “a boundless, iconic fixture in the American imagination that embodied both guilt and innocence as well as endless possibility and ruined opportunity, a rapidly-changing-and—not-for-the-better region that had haunted him since Shepard’s early days as a stable hand and sheep shearer on the family farm in California,” meshed perfectly with the European sensitivity of Wim Wenders. Paris, Texas is Wenders’ own take on the western, a western that is less about a setting and time period and more about man and the vicissitudes of life wherever and whenever he may be. Travis is “a Shepardian character, to be sure, adrift in a strange, surreal West, an in-between world where he can’t figure out how to reconcile the past with the present but searches vaguely for roots, the place where he began, where his parents first made love: Paris, Texas,” continues Atkins.

Harry Dean Stanton and Hunter Carson in “Paris, Texas”, 1984. Road Movies Filmproduktion

Travis’ pinstriped brown suit is probably a hand-me-over, which explains the ill fit but which, in turn, brilliantly places him in the story, seemingly coming from nowhere and going nowhere. His battered red cap however serves another purpose than that of protecting him from the sun while roaming the desert. Bright colours are present throughout the entire film, like cinematic reference points, and actually the colours and light in the film remind me of another favourite Wim Wenders film of mine, Until the End of the World, shot by the same cinematographer, Robby Müller. The vastness of the landscape, the blue of the sky seem different in Wenders’ films seen through the eye of Robby Müller (who also shot one of the best films set in Los Angeles, To Live and Die in L.A.. The landscape, the road have always exerted a huge influence on the German director’s films. Claire Denis, who was his assistant director to Paris, Texas, told Jason Wood in an interview that “working on Paris, Texas was especially important, if only because of the work with landscapes which has affected how I have worked with landscapes in my own work. I never use the landscape separately from the characters.”

Wenders, always with a photographer’s eye and a musician’s heart, went for location scouting by himself at the wheel of his car, as if in perfect synch with the cinematographer’s own approach: “So, I brought myself back to looking, really looking and thinking over what it’s all about,” Müller told Barbara Scharres in 1985.

But the landscape never overpowers the characters. The story is not the location. Everything must be a whole, bright sign posts, props of clothing items, too. Travis’ red cap. His wife Jane’s pink wool sweater with the low-cut back worn like a short dress, a costume that is credited to costume designer Birgitta Bjerke and that has made film history. Nastassja Kinski’s character’s presence is felt long before she finally appears, and when she does, she is dressed in that fuzzy pink mohair dress that instantly makes her so desirable and physically present on screen yet so unattainable and mysteriously withdrawn. Travis’ shirt in the flashback when they were a happy family. Their son Hunter behind the wheel of a bright red VW Beetle while in the care of his uncle after his father left and his mother also fled shortly after, connecting father and son and the road, the grown-up sadness of a child and the childlike-innocence of a father often making us wonder who is the father and who is the child in their relationship.

But maybe the most charmingly childlike rapport forms between Travis and Hunter when they take the short road trip through the South West together, looking for Hunter’s mother. We see Travis in a red shirt and Hunter wearing a checked red shirt and red shoes, grabbing a bite on the hood of the car. Or Travis and Hunter wearing red shirts, Travis at the wheel and Hunter sleeping under his father’s arm, the future far in the distance, as if they are both children at the beginning of their path in life, or at least of their relationship. We do wonder what the colour red means. Is it a warning? Is it love? Is it both? Is it the perpetual bond that is meant to bring them together even if they are apart?

Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski in “Paris, Texas”, 1984. Road Movies Filmproduktion

I remember how photographer Laura Wilson described in our interview the story behind a photo of Harry Dean Stanton on the set of The Wendell Baker Story: “In this moment, Harry Dean Stanton, oblivious to the heat, waited near a beautiful aluminum Beech 18 for the next scene in The Wendell Baker Story. He sang one of his favorite tunes, Canción Mixteca, the story of a man filled with sadness and longing for his home in Oaxaca, Mexico. With almost 200 films over 50 Hollywood years, Harry Dean is known on movie sets to regularly serenade actors and crews with Mexican Ranchera music. He has the same strong, haunting voice he had nearly a quarter-century ago when he sang Canción Mixteca for Wim Wenders in Paris Texas and, before that, the gospel song A Closer Walk with Thee for the soundtrack of Cool Hand Luke“.

I would watch Paris, Texas over and over again just to watch and hear Harry Dean Stanton, this incredible character actor who simply fills the screen. He doesn’t just act, he exists in his films. He doesn’t just exist, his story is carved in his life-hardened face. He doesn’t just talk, he makes you listen. Paris, Texas was a film meant to be his. And although his scenes with Nastassja Kinski are a defining point in the story, a reuniting with his wife after four years, it’s the moments with the little boy that carry more weight I believe. Those, and that finale embrace between mother and son. But Travis’ presence is still felt, moving on on the road again.

Nastassja Kinski in “Paris, Texas”, 1984. Road Movies Filmproduktion