Revisiting this, I was less enamored with the first half, which blew me away in theatres, and was much more aware of (and captivated with) the banality and apathy of the fleeting chase. It's still beautiful eye candy, and interesting for different reasons: because all the striking imagery and vicious magnitude of the adventures are inversely muted by the characters' ennui, creating a raw detachment between expectation (of cinema, of fantasies, of dreams?) and reality. The film doesn't linger in any location for long enough to bask in topographical porn, and so the impermanent nature of travel is reduced to this facade of finite escapism. Claire experiences this, as we hear from narration and see ourselves loud and clear, a citizen of the world who is returning to home base, just as bored and indifferent to the world as I imagine she was when she set out on her 'adventures.' The intent of a geographical cure isn't known or important, but Claire's attempts at finding herself in any location, or accessing herself through accessing diverse spaces or cultures, are failures because she chooses to externalize her aims rather than internalizing them. All the scenery and adventures in the world won't solve the problem that is Claire.
The same goes for Hurt's Sam, who is caught up in a man-on-the-run scenario on a mission to record, rather than live, life. This is a film about people who are either afraid or numb to freedom from themselves to engage in the present moment. Claire acts as though she practices as unrestrained mindfulness, but she is always looking, moving, going somewhere; never 'present.' These characters' inability to meditate in place casts a shadow of dullness on our interpretation of their world, perhaps a result of the global decay of social and physical self-destruction projected onto them- or maybe the state of the world is as it is because of how human beings have projected their own self-destruction onto it, facilitating cosmic destruction. Claire is pining for Sam, obsessed with a future with him, even when together - they don't "share" moments, only ideas and the vague concept of future-oriented objectives. When they actually meet their destination, in the film's still-painfully-bloated second half, the focus turns to another escapist mission, though one that is physically static while the previous attempts were only mentally static. They cannot remain in the present, together or alone, and so they
become addicted to watching their own dreams, self-absorbed perhaps, but definitively evasive. The allegory to drug addiction is obvious, but this fits with the self-medication hypothesis of addiction- which can be subscribed to media addiction or other self-distancing practices as well- in that dysphoric states are so strong and unmanageable that a person avoids them at all costs. These mental states often manifest from sitting still in the moment with one's own thoughts and feelings. The characters cannot bear to do this, as they have not grown into themselves in a social context that encourages strategy-development in this domain and thus have identities that are reduced to faux-goals of hollow aims.
The commentary on our global evolution of cultural melting, and the stunting effects on individuals' existential muscles, is powerful in a subversive way, by prohibiting us from passively enjoying a film that should be joyfully escapist into one that is neither joyous or escapist, and reflectively
about the incapacity to enjoy or escape. The success of Wenders' earlier road movies comes from an acceptance of the idea of physical travel as futile in absolving an individual of their ennui in expected, conscious, safely externalized ways of accruing a measured alleviation of dysphoria; instead providing experiences that allow for development to occur unexpectedly and unconsciously through internalized travel via exposure to the banal, which acts as a reflective tool to force self-awareness. His films don't pretend that these trips solve existential crises, but that they do serve as new tools to knit the very same fabric of one's life. This film does something similar, though we are left at the end with
an almost uncomfortably unevolved state of the central characters to the naked eye, which is very much the point. Claire is continuing on her aimless path, now a temp astronaut, and Sam has returned to his family who have left him. And yet, Claire has friends who call in to wish her happy birthday, and she is significantly stuck in a static space (in space..), searching for change but allowing herself to remain in one place, no longer afraid to cope with sitting in her own skin- or if so, at least willing to, and capable of, facing the challenge. Sam has lost his family, but his own self-destructiveness in living his life for others' goals and dreams has ended, and one must hope that now that he has been stripped of all outlets to distract he may finally begin to live for himself.
One has to use their imagination here, but in an ironic maneuver the film has been one giant front for the journey that is yet to come. We have experienced a five-hour wildly eccentric colorful palette of adventure that has actually been a vapid minute chapter in the continuous journeys of these characters' lives, and one that -despite all the physical moving- has been all for igniting a spark that kicks off whatever exceptionally pronounced growth and change will happen next. Though of course, if we take the outlook that initiating change is the most difficult part of the process, we have witnessed something extraordinary-just against the grain of our expectations. So, undoubtedly, a Wenders film.
