Roger Cook�s ÒPostmodern Culture and Film Narrative: Paris, Texas and BeyondÓ

By Kyle VanHemert

Roger Cook begins his article by outlining some of the prevailing contextsÑcritical and personalÑfor Wim WendersÕs films as he worked through the 1970s up to the release of Paris, Texas in 1984. As evidenced in Alice in the Cities, Wenders was unabashed about his relationship with America as one that was predominately defined through popular culture. Throughout the 1970sÑthe decade in which Wenders visited America for the first time and in which he produced his first Hollywood filmÑCook asserts that Òhis films begin to issueÉa dire warning about the growing threat the media industry poses to (post)modern societyÓ (121). Cook quotes Wenders as stating, in reference to his transformed cinematic project in the early 1980s, ÒI want to find a narrative cinema that avidly and with self-confidence establishes a connection between film art and life, and which no longer needs to reflect its own textuality in the narrativeÓ (122). Cook examines Paris, Texas and its effectiveness in realizing this new thesis.

In Paris, Texas, Cook asserts, Wenders engages the dialectical America which he experienced in his first visit and which he chronicled in the prose-poem we read, ÒThe American Dream,Ó that is, the extant historic, mythic identity of America with the postmodern, media-saturated simulacrum of America. These two Americas are geographically manifest respectively in the two sites of the Òhabitat of the Texas desertÓ and the Òcybernetic environment of Burbank.Ó

The Californian simulacrum, for Cook, denies the essential promise of the American Dream, that is, the quest narrative for one individual to realize their true identity. Paris, Texas, Cook claims, signals the death of this particular narrative but offers the possibility that a new type of story might be possible. Cook concludes, ÒThe lone cowboy Travis fails to find a way through the surface reality of empty signs and sterile environments, but the end of the film still holds out hope for a new position of the subject, one that can adapt to the external vacuity of a postmodern environmentÓ (128). That is, if an individual can perceive the empty reality of media-America, he might be able to navigate outside of it.

Paris, Texas, for Cook, is ultimately a transition point in WendersÕs films. For him, the film Òsuggests that clinging to past myths and identitiesÉinhibits the narrative from moving forward to new networks of collective identities.Ó These issues of modern and postmodern realities and the narratives they generate are useful in considering not only the work of Wenders but the other filmmakers we have studied this semester. Some things to consider:

-Do you agree that Paris, Texas reflects a much more pessimistic and politicized view of media culture? If so, are there traces of this nascent pessimism to be found in Alice in the Cities and The American Friend?

-How is WendersÕ engagement with AmericaÕs mythic West in Paris, Texas and in The American Friend similar or dissimilar to GodardÕs engagement with UlyssesÕs mythic journey in Contempt.

-If media culture is the true sign for a shift in modernity for Wenders, what aspects does Godard seem to identify as such in his films, especially Weekend?

-How do Antonioni and Godard relate to WendersÕs aim to create a film art that is direct in its relationship to real life? How does each director engage in self-reflexive filmmaking to strengthen the filmÕs relationship to the world in which it is produced or to deliberately distance the film from it?