"I knew these people," Travis begins, in one of the great monologues of movie history. "These two people. They were in love with each other. The girl was very young, about 17 or 18, I guess. And the guy was quite a bit older. He was kind of raggedy and wild. And she was very beautiful, you know?"
He tells of a time when even a trip to the grocery store was an adventure. When he would quit jobs just so he could be at home with her. And then how the jealousy began to eat at him: "Then he'd yell at her and start smashing things in the trailer." When Jane repeats, "the trailer?" it is clear she knows this is Travis (I think she knows sooner, and gives it away with a sideways flicker of her eye). He continues with his story, ended when the marriage is in wreckage and he awakens with the trailer on fire: "Then he ran. He never looked back at the fire. He just ran. He ran until the sun came up and he couldn't run any further. And when the sun went down, he ran again. For five days he ran like this until every sign of man had disappeared."
This confession inspires Jane to turn her back to the window and tell her own story. At one point she turns off the light in her cubicle and he turns a light to his face and she can even see him. They never touch. He tells her that Hunter is waiting for her in the Meridian Hotel, Room 1520. "He needs you now, Jane. And he wants to see you."
The film ends with the mother and child reunited. In a decision that is both dramatically and cinematically inspired, Travis watches their meeting from the rooftop of a nearby garage, and then drives away. There is the same feeling as when John Wayne, in "The Searchers," restores the missing girl to her family and then looks on, alone again and forgotten, before turning to walk back into the wilderness.
Practical and logical objections can be raised about this story. Was Travis right to take Hunter away from Walt and Anne? Can Jane care for him? Could Jane work in the club and not be a prostitute?
But never mind. Wenders uses the materials of realism but this is a fable, as much as his great "Wings of Desire." It's about archetypal longings, set in American myth. The name Travis reminds us of Travis McGee, the private investigator who rescued lost souls and sometimes fell in love with them but always ended up alone on his boat. The Texas setting evokes thoughts of the Western, but this movie is not for the desert and against the city; it is about a journey which leads from one to the other and ends in a form of happiness.
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