Paris, Texas
1984, dir. Wim Wenders
After destroying the only thing in your life that gave it any light or meaning, you lose yourself in the American desert, where the indifference and emptiness of nature reflect a truth about the universe that you've come to realise.
Which is that no matter whether you’re nice or you’re mean, life fucks us all. Even if you’re good and meek, even if you do the right thing and let children meet their alcoholic biological fathers and whore mothers, and you converse respectfully with your lawful spouse, the universe is going to come and fuck you raw. And if you’re an alcoholic, mean, neglectful father who drives everyone he loves away, the universe is going to return all of the things you love to you. Nobody deserves to be happy. Not a single person on this God-damned earth.
The shock of how much self-hatred you're actually capable of blasts your ego to shreds and sends you reeling into the empty desert. You disappears from society and from yourself. When you sabotage so much of your own happiness, when happiness is just within your reach and instead of embracing it you turn around and punch down the handle on the slot machine of the universe once again, just for another bitter hit of nothing, when you gamble the last shred of your dignity away, you get to thinking that you really don’t deserve to be anyone at all.
But it turns out that even your sober, good-natured, well-intentioned brother, who has a European wife, hates himself too. Because he drags you back from the desert so that he can have a chance to gamble his happiness away too. He lets you into his home. Tries to help you reintegrate into society. You kidnap his child. Who’s really your child, the son you abandoned years ago.
The universe delivers you back to her. This movie is really about life after ego death. Once you’ve stared into the black maw of who you are and how far you’ll go to destroy your own life, do you really think you can reintegrate into society after that. You find her in a telephone booth that’s decorated in a caricature of a motel room, like all these years she’s been locked in a box of the room that you left her in. This is going to be the last selfish thing that you’re going to do. After that, you’re going to leave her alone. You’re going to step away. Because whether you’re mean or you’re nice, life comes to fuck us all. The universe doesn’t care about your happiness or your kindness because even you don’t care about these things. You’d throw them all away in the blink of an eye for a chance to be unhappy again.
When you drive away from the hotel room where they've been reunited, that will be the first selfless thing you've ever done.
