Paris, Texas Gets Criterioned

My old DVD of Paris, Texas had been loaned out to friends and acquaintances many times, because it's the sort of movie I just want to make people sit down and watch.  DVDs are sensitive things, though, and somewhere along the line this one got scratched, making it skip and stall during one of the most important scenes at the end.  Sometime this summer, I decided to replace it, and went searching for a cheap copy on Amazon.  When I saw a Criterion edition would be coming out, I gave up on the idea of getting a cheap replacement for my wounded disc and instead pre-ordered the new one.  There are a few films that, if you're going to own them and watch them a few times a year (as I've done with Paris, Texas ever since first getting it on a $5 videotape during a sale at a local video store), you should get them on the best edition possible.  And the fact that it's now on Blu-Ray is nearly enough to make me run out and get a Blu-Ray player.

I ordered the disc so long ago, I nearly forgot I'd done so and almost ended up replacing the other edition.  But the new one arrived yesterday, and I quickly watched all the extras on the second disc and a few favorite scenes in the film itself.  Because it had been about a year since I'd last watched the movie, the final half hour seemed even richer in its emotional effect than ever.

The colors on the new disc seemed more vivid than ever, though I haven't compared it to the previous disc and my memory of the film is strongly affected by having watched it many times on a washed-out VHS.  The greens, reds, and blues are particularly sharp now, almost overwhelmingly so.  The film has always been, even at its most desaturated, a powerful visual experience, but with the fine-tuning of every element by Criterion, it now verges at times on being an assault on the senses.  In a good way.

Part of me, though, misses some of the old flaws.  I really love the 23-minute collection of outtakes and extended scenes that was on the old DVD and is also on the Criterion edition -- love it not only because all of the scenes are interesting, a few of them are stunningly beautiful, and together they add up to a fairly compelling short film on their own, but also because the film hasn't been cleaned up, it's grainy and torn and messy, with moments of Stan Brakhage texture.

The feature commentary with director Wim Wenders is very good, but is the same one that was on the old DVD.  Some of the interviews on the Criterion edition are interesting, but the real treasure of the extra features is a collection of the Super 8 films that were excerpted as home movies in the feature.  They're evocative on their own, but the best thing Criterion did was add an optional audio track of Travis's monologue to Jane over them.  Written by Sam Shepard, this is one of the great film monologues (in one of the great film scenes), and adding it to the Super 8 footage creates a deeply affecting new short film.

I hope to get around to writing more about Paris, Texas as a film (and as a screenplay -- it's some of the best work Shepard, in collaboration with L.M. Kit Carson and Wenders, has ever done, and I think he's written a few of the greatest American plays).  But first I need to watch it a few more times, to revel in it, because this is a movie of endless revelations.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b...
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie...
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d...
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not ...
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, ...
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw...
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes fro...
Read more