A kind of road: The eye and the gaze in Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas

Abstract

In this article, I will analyse Wim Wenders's film Paris, Texas (1984) considering, on the one hand, the concept of destiny posed by René Arcilla in his work on Wenders's road movie philosophy of education and, on the other hand, the distinction between the eye and the gaze as Jacques Lacan defined it in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in 1973. The gaze becomes an unfamiliar point in the image, one that pushes the viewer—as well as the movie's main character—along what Arcilla calls a kind of road. In this work, I argue that the notion of a kind of road offers us a way to overcome Arcilla's binary opposition between learning and education, by following what Rousseau had previously called learning to live in the first book of Emile. In a world invaded by the look of the other, Wenders's cinema shapes the educational experience to help us understand the function of the eye and the gaze in destiny, articulating the imaginary and the symbolic, image and words, education and learning.