Paris, Texas

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Our first film of the Lenton Series..."Paris, Texas". a film to prepare us for the coming season. a film that certainly lives and breathes among us.

For one, it has an opening sequence that is reminiscent of John Ford and maybe even Terence Malick. Beautiful. In this sequence, we walk out of the desert with a man who has apparently been walking through this desert, alone, for three or four years. Over at TFT, i was reminded of the significance of this context...

"[Thomas]Merton says that no one can find true life ‘unless you have risked your mind in the desert’. There’s something about the truth of Sam Shepard’s writing in Paris, Texas, available now in a classy Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray edition that leads me to believe Shepard must be familiar with Merton, and not just because it’s about a man wandering in the kind of desert that has real sand and baking sun. This movie is about that most common of modern malaises (and my soapbox) – community breakdown [relational holocaust]."

The film then reminds me of Jim Jarmusch films from the same decade. Strange, mysterious, yet humorous (and plenty of road). When you walk out of the desert after 40 days, or 1,440 days, in present day America (1980s), get in a car, and get on the highway, you can imagine how difficult or even impossible that transition would be. but by now, we are trying to figure out the hows and whys from Travis, our desert man (who has yet to speak a word), while considering the excessive nature of our way of life.



Half-way through, we not only find out that our Travis has a wife and child, but that his brother (who picked him up in the car), has been caring for the child for the past four years. and after four years, the eight year old boy now calls his aunt and uncle - mom and dad. Travis, though still recovering, is beginning to put some pieces together. and through many scenes of stressful consideration of what to do next, we finally discover details about the real mother and wife, and her potential location - thus we find ourselves on another road trip with the father and son, down the narrow road towards reconciliation with mom - despite still not knowing how all of this happened - or if Travis has the capacity to confront and remember all that has happened. "I don’t know where I turned off, it didn’t have a name…but I can find our way out again". for Travis, there is no other option, but to find that fork in the road, consider it, and by choosing the right path this time, seek redemption for himself, giving him the responsibility to provide an opportunity for reconciliation between himself and his wife, and re-unification between mother and son. in other words, if the desert doesn't kill you, it is only because there is some purpose or responsibility that you have yet to fulfill - according to God and nature.



only now does the film begin to feel a little more like PTA, and slowly begins a bergman-like boil...

"He didn't even notice it at first. She started to change. From the day the baby was born, she began to get irritated with everything around her. She got mad at everything. Even the baby seemed to be an injustice to her. He kept trying to make everything all right for her. Buy her things. Take her out to dinner once a week. But nothing seemed to satisfy her.

For two years he struggled to pull them back together like they were when they first met, but finally he knew that it was never going to work out. So he hit the bottle again. But this time it got... mean. This time, when he came home late at night, drunk, she wasn't worried about him, or jealous, she was just enraged. She accused him of holding her captive by making her have a baby. She told him that she dreamed about escaping. That was all she dreamed about: escape. She saw herself at night running naked down a highway, running across fields, running down riverbeds, always running. And always, just when she was about to get away, he'd be there. He would stop her somehow. He would just appear and stop her.

And when she told him these dreams, he believed them. He knew she had to be stopped or she'd leave him forever. So he tied a cow bell to her ankle so he could hear her at night if she tried to get out of bed. But she learned how to muffle the bell by stuffing a sock into it, and inching her way out of the bed and into the night. He caught her one night when the sock fell out and he heard her trying to run to the highway. He caught her and dragged her back to the trailer, and tied her to the stove with his belt. He just left her there and went back to bed and lay there listening to her scream. And he listened to his son scream, and he was surprised at himself because he didn't feel anything anymore. All he wanted to do was... sleep.

And for the first time, he wished he were far away. Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language, or streets. He dreamed about this place without knowing its name. And when he woke up, he was on fire. There were blue flames burning the sheets of his bed. He ran through the flames toward the only two people he loved... but they were gone. His arms were burning, and he threw himself outside and rolled on the wet ground. Then he ran. He never looked back at the fire. He just ran. He ran until the sun came up and he couldn't run any further. And when the sun went down, he ran again. For five days he ran like this until every sign of man had disappeared."

irony and paradox.

what beauty there is, when a peep show becomes a confession station.

can you look in the mirror?

can you look through the mirror?

can you see me? can you hear me? can you redeem me? can we be reconciled?

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Happy Valentines Day.

Be Reconciled. Be Redeemed.

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