Paris, Texas
I wasn’t expecting a deep exploration of masculine role models in a film involving peep shows. The pink angora sweater gains a different meaning once you see the context. Travis in not Bickle.
The kid is a Star Wars fan, but this is closer to The Shining. It should definitively get some “blue warnings”, like Eternal Beauty, but there’s still some humour. The beauty remains squarely in the gorgeous visuals.
If you put it in order, it starts with the protagonist and his loving wife. They are so infatuated with each other, the guy quits his job to be with her all day. But the money runs out, he needs another job, meaning he starts to get jealous of imagined people the wife if fucking during the day. This continues for a while, until the guy shackles the wife to the oven, and she retaliates by burning the trailer down and escaping this abusive relationship with their kid.
After dropping the kid of with their uncles (living in an LA suburb), she gets back to Houston and eventually starts working in a peep show.
The guy seemingly has mental breakdown and disappears for years, until he collapses in some dinky gas station and gets taken to a doctor.
That doctor is the scuzziest rural Asclepius ever, with a German accent for Doylist reasons. After searching the protagonist’s wallet, he finds a business card and calls his brother, who comes right away. Of course, the protagonist escapes, but the doctor is not too worried, since he was busy fucking some woman in his trailer. As he sees the brother coming in, he immediately extorts money from him, in exchange for his belongings.
The brother drives around for a bit and finds him at last, in a dirt road. They got to a motel, and the brother goes into town to buy supplies and new clothes, but the protagonist runs away again. The brother picks him up again, they drive to another hotel, and this time he actually showers and wear the flannel and cowboy boots.
By the way, the protagonist doesn’t say a word during all this time, maybe over 30 minutes of runtime, easily. He’s just wearing a ratty suit, MAGA hat, and ratty snakeskin boots, always walking forcefully, towards some unknown place.
They get on a plane to get back to LA, but they have to drop the stairs for them to leave on the tarmac, the protagonist is too spooked to fly. They have to drive for two days. The protagonist finally mentions he bough some land in Paris, Texas, because his father said that’s where he was conceived. He always said his wife was from Paris, and then made a large pause before saying “Texas”, it’s kind of dad joke that endears the wife, but she got really embarrassed, not a good sign.
They eventually reach LA and the brother’s suburban house. The wife welcomes them, and our protagonist sees his kid for the first time in years, but since half his life has passed, he doesn’t recognise his “true” father.
At first the kid is cold and distant, but they eventually grow closer, and the kid lets his father pick him up from school, walking on different sides of the sidewalk, goofing around.
The brother encourages this rapprochement, but his wife grows weary. They both see the kid as their own, but understand the “real” parents have priority. The grieving feelings are real nonetheless.
The brother’s wife tells the protagonist about the last known whereabouts of his wife, so off he goes to Houston. The kid insists he tags along, and since the protagonist is impulsive, they go right away, leaving his parents worried sick.
And off they go in a trip through the desert, father and son, a reverse Odyssey, leaving home to get their family back together. The kid is a Star Wars fan, so keeps yapping about space and shit. The protagonist doesn’t have the knowledge nor the empathy to respond in kind, but the kid’s male relationships are almost as barren as the Mojave, so he takes it.
They reach Houston, where they skulk around, and find the mother, depositing money in the drive-in bank as usual. They follow her to her place of work, but our protagonist gets weary, he will have to go in there alone. It’s some podunk urban area, out of the way and windowless. After going thorough a red light corridor, he confirms this is a watering hole for ladies of ill repute.
The upper floor has a bar filled with satin, round sofas, and ingrained sleaze, and down below there are peep show booths, with all the fantasy locations, from Poolside to Hotel. There’s plenty of girl to choose from, such as Nurse Bibs, but our protagonist wants the woman in the pink angora sweater, with nothing below.
The girls have a one way mirror, so they only see themselves, and our protagonist doesn’t have the guts to identify himself. He just weeps silently and runs away with the kid. Things are so bad, he gets drunk in a bar, and has to sleep it off in some 24h laundromat waiting room.
As they leave in the morning, he decides for a long time whether to get back to the wife, or run away to LA. Even the kid know he needs to go back, so he does. He gets in another booth, the Cafe, and she’s not wearing the pink sweater anymore. He tells their story for about 10 minutes, and she recognises him.
This is the emotional core of the film. The protagonist mentions the kid is with him, and urges her to take him, but he himself cannot go with them. He cannot trust himself to be with them, his actions were too severe, they don’t deserve to be abused again.
The mother left the kid because of his own influence, so as long as he stays away, they might regain their relationship as he himself did for this past days.
In the end, the protagonist runs away, mirroring his own father’s getaway in a car. That means he successfully broke the cycle of family trauma, or reinforced it by getting drunk and dying in a car wreck, like his own father.
The brother and his wife do the right thing by letting the kid go, but that will make themselves miserable. Hopefully the kid can live near them, otherwise you recreated a family but destroyed another.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.