There could hardly be a more load-bearing visual metaphor than that of a man walking alone in a desert, tortured by the heat, defined by solitude. From John Ford to the Coen brothers and Sergio Leone to George Miller, filmmakers from across the globe have employed it as an optical signifier of everything under the sweltering, punishing sun, with isolation serving as the lone connective tissue. The oft-revisited passage invites inquiry with its very existence; after all, you don’t end up in the middle of an endless, desolate plane by coincidence, and the orientation of most of these nomads provides their respective films with an animating purpose. Be it revenge, money, love, or safety, there’s usually something tangible at stake, but moviedom has also found space for a distinctive subgenre that views motivation as a red herring. Not all who wander are in search of anything concrete, especially those who find themselves Adrift in America.

Or in the dried-out tundra of the Lone Star state, which is where we meet Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) at the start of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, though a proper introduction is still off in the narrative distance. He’ll have to remember how to talk first, a recollection that only arrives after days of chiding from his estranged brother Walt (Dean Stockwell), but even he takes a while to enter the picture. The 1984 classic is nothing if not patient, observing Travis’ trudge with the remove of a nature documentary, permitting the audience to project their own feelings of quarantined malaise right up onto the screen. No one involved with the making of the film could have foreseen how the character’s bright red hat would read in the year of our lord 2025, but there’s a twisted kismet to the project’s unwitting alignment with MAGA iconography. The sitting president rode a wave of disillusionment and perceived abandonment straight to the oval office, courting the exact type of person that Travis represents with his every weary step and watery stare. 

The question as to who has forsaken who is embedded into the core of all the films explored here, and never more prominently than in Texas. Travis, we come to learn, has been missing for four years, deserting his son Hunter (Hunter Carson) at the ripe old age of three. His mother, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), skipped town shortly thereafter, leaving the boy in the care of Walt and his wife Anne (Aurore Clément), with the pair raising him as their own. The kneejerk reaction here is to be appalled by the Hendersons’ actions, but Stanton’s forlorn gaze and disheveled appearance make indignation hard to summon, a fact that Wenders weaponizes to squeeze pity out of the understandably distrustful viewer. Though it’s never concretized, Travis’ fugue state comes packaged with signs of amnesia, his eventual first words sputtered out with the cadence and vocabulary of a pre-schooler. Stacking the sympathetic chips in favor of an unsavory character is necessary ballast against the winds of scorn, particularly when the reason for his disappearance remains a tightly-kept secret for the vast majority of Paris’ 147 minute runtime. Anyway, most new dads could use a little time to clear their heads after shepherding a new life into this cold, cold world.

For Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), the central player in director Bob Rafelson’s New Hollywood Era standout Five Easy Pieces, unmoored vacation time starts early. A California oil field worker in the contemporaneous early 1970’s, Bob is already bristling against his life’s reductive confines when we meet him, and that’s before receiving the news of his impending fatherhood. The unlucky lady is Rayette (Karen Black), his doting, live-in girlfriend, whose doe-eyed loyalty and absence of bowling prowess agitate her partner to no end. All that thinly veiled contempt, most pointedly aimed at his paramour’s lack of upper-class civility, makes it difficult to understand why Dupea stuck around long enough to find himself in this position, a puzzle whose first pieces fall into place when our antihero starts tickling the ivories.

It happens on the back of an uncovered moving truck, one that Bob drunkenly mounts while passing the time during a cantankerous interstate traffic jam. Awash in a sea of testily honking car horns and bilious shouts that may or may not be directed at his disorderly actions, Dupea unearths a piano, cracks his fingers, and launches into a dazzling concerto that lays his hidden talents bare for all to see. They were honed, we later learn, in his childhood home off the coast of Washington state, alongside his celebrated pianist sister Partita (Lois Smith) and lofty violinist brother Carl (Ralph Waite), who both remain in Puget Sound, looking after their ailing father Nicholas (William Challee) while pursuing careers in the arts. Perhaps inspiring the later depiction of Travis Henderson’s amorphous malaise, Rafelson and screenwriter Carole Eastman are evasive as to why Bobby flew the coop, but Nicholson makes his even-handed discomfort with both high and low society legible, and when that moving truck takes an unexpected exit with the former musician still aboard, the portrait of a man twisting in the wind between two disparate worlds crystalizes in real time.

He’s hardly the only one running from a life of scholarship and privilege, and you get the feeling that Mayor Jack Favor would rather his son engage in Dupea’s brand of figurative grunt work than the literal kind that’s engulfed his only son. Scott, the aforementioned progeny, has taken to gay sex work in Gus Van Sant’s 1991 independent cinema mainstay My Own Private Idaho, but unlike both Paris and Pieces, the one straying from their comfortable birthright isn’t the movie’s gravitational center. That would be Mike (River Phoenix), a narcoleptic street urchin who’s closer to a ball of exposed nerve endings than a proper human being. In keeping with every entry in this filmic subset, his trauma and neurosis have familial origins, with the movie’s latter half concerning the search for Mike’s mother, a quest that takes the mismatched duo from their Pacific Northwest haunts all the way to the Italian countryside.

That’s quite the trek for a pair of early 20’s failsons, especially when their continental father figures can be counted by the dozen. Leading the pack is Bob Pigeon (William Richert), the de facto leader of a group of lost boys, whose verbal lexicon, which hews closer to Shakespearian verse than modern language, belies his tattered clothing. He’s most present in the flick’s middle, Portland-set act, a passage inspired by the Bard’s Henry IV and Henry V, an odd and enlivening choice that reveals Scott as an echo of Bob Dupea, distancing himself from learned roots while reflexively heeding the call of elegance when he crosses its path. The rest of the horde is made up of lecherous benefactors, each employing the boys’ services despite doubling them in age, obliviously feeding into deleterious daddy issues by virtue of an uneven power dynamic. It all feels like a repetitive waking nightmare, but sweet Mike is forever dreaming of a unique tomorrow, arriving at a mantra of sorts on a vacant, anonymous stretch of highway where Idaho’s surreal opening is set; “There’s not another road anywhere that looks like this road.”

Contrast that with Stranger than Paradise’s Eddie (Richard Edson) uttering, “…It’s funny, you come to someplace new, and everything looks just the same,” and you’ve got a notion as to the movies’ conflicting paradigms. Initially located in a dingy corner of Brooklyn, writer/director Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 breakthrough is all about being stuck in a mud of your own making, and taking subconscious steps to remain mired. John Lurie, whose brief appearance in Paris, Texas makes him something like a patron saint of drifter cinema, stars as Willie Molnar, a Hungarian immigrant who wears his assimilation like a self-erasing badge of honor. Clearly ashamed of his heritage, he clings to poker, beer, and American football like a liferaft until the mother country comes knocking at the door, made manifest by his cousin Eva (Eszter Balint).

She’s here to look after Willie’s aunt Lottie (Cecillia Stark), but an extended stay at the hospital means the proud New Yorker will have to play host for the next ten days. They’re mostly spent idly, with supercilious jabs at Eva’s entire way of being functioning as the only breaks in their shared, loaded silence. Editors Jarmusch and Melody London ensure that you feel every ounce of their mutual, jobless boredom, cutting to black every time the film picks up even the smallest modicum of momentum. It’s intentionally maddening, making the movie’s second half pivot to roadtrip movie cause for temporary celebration until you realize, like Willie’s best bud Eddie, that relocation only results in excitement with an adjoining change of attitude. It’s no wonder that, as the film draws to a close, both Willie and Eva start mulling over a return to their roots; everything above ground is covered in disaffected grime and mold.

Maybe that’s just the states in general, as the draw of the Molnars’ potential European sojourn finds its way into both Idaho and Paris. The former makes good on the plan, sending Mike and Scott across the pond only to discover that disappointment has its passport ever at the ready, but the latter is more metaphorical. Travis’ tumbleweed tilt may have an elusive undergirding, but its stated motivation is a search for the titular town, where Henderson believes he was conceived. That the barren southern outpost shares its name with a destination synonymous with glamour is no mere happenstance, and while it’s impossible to imagine Travis’ squalor amidst a backdrop of Parisian splendor, he’s certainly no more at home in Texas. He’s closest to actualization when sitting across from his estranged wife, divided by a one-way mirror at the pep show club where she makes ends meet. Equal parts bravura and cathartic, the pair of dimly-lit scenes justify Paris’ rudderless opening hours all by themselves, with Travis’ barely submerged revulsion providing a skeleton key that fits in the respective lock all four features.

Jane, Scott, and Mike might be the only characters making a living off of sex or its insinuation, but that animalistic urge serves as a constant driver of action, though charting its influence is often easier with a bird’s eye view. Bob Dupea never gives any indication that his constant philandering has motivations beyond lust, but it likens him to a shark, and not just for Nicholson’s patented toothy simper. He needs movement to survive, and his frequent trysts betray a fear of death and stillness through the subconscious impulse to further his bloodline. Finally forced to take stock of his catatonic father near the film’s conclusion, the roguish spirit dissipates around his corneas, revealing a man that views sedentary life as a death sentence. Unearthing the truth behind his own desperate meanderings in real time, Dupea, momentarily setting aside his acerbic wit and defensive aloofness, woundedly admits that he’s, “…getting away from things that get bad… if (he) stay(s)”

If that reading of Five Easy Pieces seems a bit too Freudian, it might be best to avoid Stranger than Paradise altogether. Wliile’s antagonism of his Eva is tough to watch, but it sure beats witnessing the subsequent attraction he harbors toward his mild-mannered cousin, complete with the giving of ugly gifts, the warding off of potential suitors, and an unannounced road trip just to be in her presence. An expression of both his loneliness and confused citizenship, Eva’s tractor-beam pull isn’t just about the woman herself, but rather the missing things she symbolizes, representing both the family and culture he’s worked overtime to leave behind. She awakens something in him, even if those interior rumblings are difficult to parse. 

Eva is more than a stand-in for roads not taken, but it’s worth noting how these movies tend to situate women as ideas and motifs, and men as the sole possessors of autonomy. They’re the ones doing the moving and shaking, and while every example here is from a distant time with unrecognizable social mores, the subsequent years haven’t exactly evened the scales. Wild and The Lost Daughter stand as two female-centric counterbalances, but they’re drops in a bucket otherwise filled with testosterone, as much a product of industry presumptions as basic biology. Rayette’s pregnancy only has physical ramifications for one of initiators, affording Bob free reign to explore his options while his partner prepares for an inevitable future. Jane may have opted more stereotypically masculine path, but as Travis’ unspoken plan comes to fruition, it’s clear that the former lovers aren’t playing on a level field.

His advantages are most clearly seen in Hunter’s reaction to his father’s reappearance, with initial trepidation giving way to unconditional affection. Nevermind that Walt and Anne have provided him with both attentive love and safe harbor; there’s no loyalty like that of a son to a birth father, even if the debt only travels one way. Wenders doesn’t have any kids, and his lack of familiarity shows through in Hunter’s angelic forgiveness of his old man’s transgressions, as well as the stoic manner in which he traces Travis’ sporadic footsteps. He’s taking cues from everyone else in his orbit, with all of Paris’ supporting cast lining up to help Stanton reclaim himself, regardless of the damage in his wake. It’s a myopic worldview, but even that can be chalked up to the gene pool.

Death to the author is a catchy mantra to glom onto in English class, but ignoring the stratification between storytellers and their subjects here would be disingenuous. As college educated beneficiaries of studio financing, Wenders, Rafelson, Van Sant, and Jarmusch are all engaging in a sort of vampirism, marshalling both fiscal and interpersonal support to relay the stories of those who have neither. Even the lower-budget offerings can be read as patronizing, either silently mocking onscreen participants for their foolish foibles (Paradise), or casting their woebegone charges in the saintly glow of condescension (Paris). In fact, they’re probably better off charting the Bob’s and Scott’s of the world, mapping out how a person born to niceties could find themselves so magnetized by a world of scoundrels and ragamuffins. Those wanton excursions are a bit more legible from a lived-in vantage point, even if a bit of voyeurism seeps in along the way.

Traveling sidecar with anchorless individuals is an unpredictable venture, and as much as these filmmakers are enamored with their human creations, the scaffolding here is just as alluring. Making messes is a lot more fun than cleaning them up, and the road trip structure provides endless openings for tomfoolery, unshackled from the screenwriting safeguards of set up and pay off. Most movies wouldn’t have time for the filth-averse hitchhikers that take over Pieces for a good fifteen minutes, or the impromptu Miami run that wraps up Paradise. When nothing is shocking, nearly everything can be surprising, and there’s no telling what’s next when you hit the road without a destination in mind. The side doors practically open themselves, with characters, directors, and audience members all in alignment with their search of the unknown. There’s no predicting the second act of these things, though all that revelry end up in roughly the same destination.

That would be in a car, picking up speed, and hightailing it out of the frame. For some, it’s a sign of revelation, their journey equipping them with the tools to reorient. For others, it’s feeble retrenchment, even if that doubling back doesn’t come with a mailing address. In any case, the resuming of travel works as the steady bow atop each package, a farewell by way of ellipses. Your time with Travis, Billie, Mike, and Bob might be over, but their wandering, which was never spurred with an end goal in mind, continues apace, headed straight toward an intangible horizon. Incompatible as the films may look from the outside, they all agree on one thing; Once you’ve had a taste of migratory existence, those cold feet tend to stay with you.