Make Time for This - GSPN's Podcast for Pop Culture and Other Things · GSPN, Blue Wire

Celebrating 40 years of Wim Wenders' exquisite Paris, Texas

·1 hr 31 min·5 clips

Paris, Texas arrives here as canon, but not the kind that gets treated like homework. Adam and Andrew use the film's 40th anniversary as the doorway in, though the episode feels more like two people trying to pin down why the movie still lands than a tidy tribute. They start with rhythm and routine, talking through the pleasure of getting back to regular movie conversation while their other podcast work rises and falls in the background. Then Paris, Texas takes over. The strongest stretch is built around Nastassja Kinski in the pink sweater, set against the fake hotel backdrop with a kind of exactness Adam treats as hard to touch. He reaches for Edward Hopper, then catches himself long enough to explain why that comparison usually gets thrown around too easily. Here, he thinks the film earns it. The lighting, the set, and the real use of one-way mirrors are not just pretty choices. They change how the performances work. That matters because the film has been moving toward those room-to-room encounters, where it finally has to answer who this man is and what happened before he came out of the desert. The mystery is emotional first. Adam keeps returning to the brother who thought he was dead, the long absence, and the weight placed on the final confrontations. Harry Dean Stanton's monologue becomes the release valve. With his back to the room, speaking by phone from a peep-show-style booth, he can confess before the mother of his son can fully see him or understand the moment. On paper, the setup sounds nearly too constructed. Their point is that the movie makes it feel unavoidable. Separation, glass, voice, and delayed recognition all work together to get under the story instead of simply explaining it. The conversation is cinephile, but it still feels lived-in. Even the closing housekeeping circles back to the sense that these two will keep dragging movies, music, and pop culture into sports-adjacent spaces whenever they feel like it. The episode is admiring, specific, and a little restless. Paris, Texas is not just praised for looking beautiful. It is treated as a film where one famous image opens into the whole emotional machine.

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