Wim Wenders’s movies bespeak his fascination for the American Wilderness. In such films as Paris, Texas and Don’t Come Knocking, however, the Western hero is prevented from walking away into the sunshine: he is trapped in a past that just will not go away.
Is the stage, for the actor, what the arena is for the bullfighter? The reference to Hemingway early in the film provides unusual grist for the theatrical mill. Like the torero, the actor has to deal with “grace under pressure” and keep his “purity of line” in the face of adversity. For him, adversity means “losing it” to bad memory, fatigue and aging. The public might embody the bulls he has to face throughout his career: he cannot turn his back on them for fear of undergoing symbolic death—becoming a “freak” or a fraud. Yet, the fiercest bull is his own self roaming on the secret stage of his expectations and delusions.
(Keeping in mind Keats’s poem “ On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”)
After twenty days, you feel ready to face the glacier and come to terms with your own barrenness and harshness. At that altitude, no flowers, no birds to comfort you and release you from your existential angst. You must bring enough life in you to stand up to the surrounding desert. Bracing up for an expected fight between darkness and light, fullness and emptiness; your resilience will be tested by a full space of emptiness and void. By your fear of heights, your fear of the fog, your fear of the truthfulness and exposure involved in such an experience.
The sun is gone, now just a faint yellow blemish in the horizon. The moon is left alone as stage manager.
Piercing eye through the curtain of green.
White moon sitting on top of a snow-capped mountain like some giant Host offering itself to the world.
Pink stage, yellow and orange wings, deep blue proscenium. Then the pink gives way to a darker shade. Orgasmic light over snow shielded peaks. Knights in full armor of beauty and nobility. Spotless sky, pristine evening.
Every night a different show. A miracle of life offered anew to the beholder. Au veilleur.
Hannah Arendt notes in The Origin of Totalitarianism that the disasters of the twentieth century had proved that a globalized order might “produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages” (quoted in New York Review of Books June 2013, p. 6).
The artist’s task is to find the right language and images to address the breaking of this world—in particular, to reintroduce the literal into the figurative, the raw material behind the symbolic gloss. French philosopher Jean Pierre Dupuy, for example, has argued that the financial world is a way to contain (contenir) the violence of competition, placing it into acceptable (symbolic) forms away from primal—and primary— physical competition.
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