Nastassja Kinski (Voices Under Your Skin)

Partial Interview ("Paris, Texas" - 1984)

How would you tell Jane's story before the beginning of the film?

I wrote a whole diary about what happened to her before. I just think she was a young girl, maybe coming from Europe, and when you meet someone, everything seems possible, crazy things happen that you never think could happen, and you just start to live. She met this man who made her laugh, and there was no wait, no demand or questions, no how or why. And somehow, for him, she was this young person who gave life to his world, and for her, he was this one person who gave her love and light. As soon as they have the baby, he starts to change. When a man needs someone, he tries so much to hold on to that, not to let it go, that his love becomes strange and overpowering. Love can be very threatening, suffocating; you can't breathe anymore. And I saw the story that way: it just became a web around this woman with her child. He would not let the world touch her or spoil her; he would destroy this most precious thing in the world with his overpowering care; and she would become crazy, she would suddenly become violent, she couldn't live anymore with herself, nor give to the child the love that he needed...So she left the man, she left the child - she left him in good hands, and in a way she never left him...

I don't think she ever experienced any love or emotion, except the memories, after that relationship. Through that strange job and that strange room, with all those creatures and men, she may have tried to understand Travis, to get through to him through other men, through the work of helping other men, in whatever silly way. Helping these men is like communicating her love to him...it is not at all an accident that she would work in that place...she guided herself to that town and that place to do what she would do. There was nowhere else to go.


How do you see the ending?


To me, that's really a sign of love and a sign of a possibility and a new beginning. Through that act of his, she can really learn to love them again. A child really is the most important thing in a woman's life. If your child is gone, there is no life - you torment your mind and your fantasy.

I think the beautiful miss Kinski has spoken real insight into her character. This kind of insight (or most kinds of insight) are spoken or projected from our own experience, our own psychology, and our witness of the experience and psychology of others around us. and this particular one presents the always severe issue of our inability to actually embrace, understand, and remain conscience of our "oneness". Oneness should imply or does imply that something isn't just shared, but actually transcends the idea of a two individuals sharing life, because they are not two individuals anymore. and well represented in this film, and in the quoted material above, is the idea that there is no greater symbol of two individuals becoming one - than seeing their oneness incarnated through a child. a child is not just something shared, it is our literal oneness, living and breathing. and to fear or reject this symbol, or be jealous of it, is most definitely the root of all evil. and to abandon or abuse something made in your own image, is the most severe definition of "broken".

and until we focus more on this most micro symbol of war and poverty in our very local communities, our global efforts to fight terrorism and our campaigns to end global poverty are quite certainly being done in vain.


Wendell Berry writes...

"Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another "until death," are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, "die" into their union with one another as a soul "dies" into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing..."





where two or three are gathered...