The Desert and the City: Operation Sidewinder and Shepard’s Postmodern Allegory

Abstract

Two loci inform Shepard’s imagination and provide the geographical poles of the landscape of his plays — the desert and the city. For example, Shepard’s screenplay for Paris, Texas, and Wim Wenders’s cinematography use the desert and the city as pivotal images around which the narrative action revolves. Travis, initially seen wandering the landscape of the desert like some burned-out Natty Bumpo traversing the barren frontier, is later taken by his brother Walt into the city with its landscape of concrete freeways and enormous billboards. Indeed, the movement back and forth between desert and city constitutes the narrative movement of the film: Travis’s recuperation in Walt’s house in Los Angeles is only a prologue to a journey with his son back into the huge expanses of the southwestern desert in search of his wife Jane as well as his own personal history — and this journey takes him back into the concrete mazes and imposing overpasses, the impersonal electronic drive-in banks, as well as the sleazy back alleys of prostitution that lie in the dark heart of the city.