On the road, find the way you are destined to go.
In "Paris, Texas," the hero Chavez has been running away, but also seeking.
He wanders all day in a wandering state that is incompatible with society, or, in other words, he can no longer be called a "social person". Savage". This is probably the metaphor of the desert eagle at the beginning. After abandoning his family, he became a "natural person" full of wildness. Others could not understand him or understand him, but he also ended up at ease.
Wenders is best at road movies. It is his specialty to unfold the inner world of characters in a journey. This is evident in his "Road Trilogy". In "Paris, Texas", the hero's closed heart gradually opened up during the journey. He began to talk, began to chat with people normally, and gradually returned to the "social person" in the eyes of the general public.
The moment he met his son at his brother's house, he suddenly realized that he was once a father. The social identity of "father" means a lot to him, and his desire to return to "social man" has become stronger since then. He is happy to chat with his son, and even hopes to win his son's favor by changing his appearance, which shows that his heart has gradually changed from "wildness" to "humanity".
It seems that everything is going in a good direction.
But Wenders is cunning, and he deliberately made a joke with the audience. Just when everyone thought the story would be a happy ending for "family reunion", a Kinski was killed halfway through. That is, the man's ex-wife. A new important character suddenly appears in the middle of the film, which completely changes the development of the plot. This kind of narrative structure is not common in literary films, but more often appears in suspense films or noir films.
During the viewing process, including me, no one knew what the male protagonist had experienced, and no one understood why he suddenly disappeared from the world four years ago? From the beginning of the movie until about two-thirds of the way through the plot, the answer has never been revealed. And when Kinski, dressed in red, came on stage, the mystery was about to come to light, and Kinski became the key to turning the whole movie around.
The male protagonist left his brother's house and took his son to find his wife. After four years of self-imposed exile, he still has not forgotten his wife. It was obvious that he had always loved her deeply. Perhaps after he plans to find his wife, he will reconcile with her, return to the intimacy of the past, and embark on the trajectory of a normal life from now on.
Along the way, the relationship between the son and the father grows closer. This passage can be compared with the "family search trip" in "Alice in the City", and Wenders also borrowed this classic road movie from his early years in "De". It can be seen that Wenders Love for "Alice in the City" (his personal favorite of all his works).
Unexpectedly, the wife played by Kinski was reduced to the dust and became a waitress who went to and from pornographic places. The male protagonist who discovered this fact was shocked. Although he eventually accepted this cruel fact, his fantasy of "reuniting with his wife" was also ruthlessly broken. At that moment, he also gradually realized that life is impermanent and difficult to overcome. Just like the classic line Judy Garland said in "The Wizard of Oz", "I don't think we can go back."
So next, the climax of the whole movie comes. Through the glass window, which can't recognize faces, Kinsky spoke his usual flirtatious language to her husband, and her husband attacked her with insulting words. The first meeting broke up unhappily. During the second meeting, the husband took the opportunity to express his sincerity to his wife and retell what had happened to them both. The audience, including me, finally understood what really happened in this family four years ago.
They came together because of their deep love, and because of their deep love, they suspected each other and hurt each other, which led to an irreversible tragedy. Marriage becomes a yoke that binds happiness, and everyone in it wants to escape. This kind of plot is actually not new. Don’t such stories often happen to men and women in modern urban life?
After the male protagonist confided, the couple both blurred their eyes with tears. Kinski finally learned that the man sitting across from him was actually his husband, who had entrusted his son to his wife. After saying goodbye to his wife, he chose to continue his self-imposed exile on his wandering journey.
This is indeed a rare scene of suffering in a Wenders movie. In the movie theater, there were audience members around who were moved to tears by this passage. At the end, the male protagonist saw his wife and children happily hugging each other through the glass window. After that, he turned around and left alone, as if he had completed a task and let go of a knot in his heart. While the process is decidedly heart-wrenching, Wenders' footage is as restrained as ever. We have no way of knowing the real mood of the male protagonist at that time, only through the reflective glass window, we can glimpse his tears at that moment.
Outside the window, neon flickered in the twilight.
So in the end, he did not return to the family and society, but continued to be a homeless "tramp" as before, constantly wandering alone on the road, from one place to another. And the "Paris, Texas" in his mouth with unclear meaning is just a happy pure land in his heart. Although it is desolate, it is the place where his parents love each other and may give birth to him. It is more like a "Utopia", he imagined You can also find the so-called "happiness" there. But can he really find happiness in "Paris, Texas"?
I don't know, and Wenders probably doesn't know either. All I know is that he is destined to belong to the wandering person, "on the road" is his destiny, and the mundane things such as "warm family" and "happy marriage" are far away from him. Maybe only in the endless journey of self-exile, he can feel a little love and a little warmth for a moment.
It can be said that the loss of one's home and the search for one are inevitable for modern people. Whether born or nurtured, you have to face the fate of homelessness. Especially in a super-capitalist country like the United States that is materialistic and surging forward. Many people said that they could not resonate with the story of "Paris Texas", and with the development of the times, in the near future, we may be able to better understand the kind of emotion "Paris Texas" conveyed to us.
In fact, after stripping away tradition and starting a fast-paced lifestyle, modern people have gradually become rootless duckweeds, homeless wanderers, or spiritual "vagrants". Of course, this is a unique spiritual experience in modern society. People consume, chase, and get lost in the reinforced concrete world built by money. They are alienated by speed and enslaved by material things. They gradually forget their original appearance, and become soulless "amnesiacs", day after day until their bodies die. extinguish.
What is even more terrifying is that the beliefs and values that people originally believed in collapsed easily overnight. With the advent of the Internet era, the kinship and blood ties between people that were once thought to be indestructible forever will become more and more unstable. Marx has long predicted this, "All fixed and frozen relations and the old and admirable ideas and opinions corresponding to them have been swept away, and all newly formed relations will become obsolete before they are fixed. All that was solid was dissipated, all that was sacred was desecrated, and people finally had to calmly confront the real state of their lives and their interrelationships."
America's Marshall Berman, in "Everything Solid Dissipates: The Experience of Modernity," also discusses this, but his conclusion is optimistic, "I believe that even in the homes we create, the streets of modern times, and the While the spirit of modernity continues to vanish, we and our successors will continue to fight to make ourselves at home in this world.” No matter how old the world may change, may everyone find their place in this world Your position, and the path destined to go.
I would like to end with a quote from Kerouac's "On the Road", "We still have a long way to go, but that's okay, the road is life."
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