‘Against Rushing through Places that Ought To Be Dwelt in’

Abstract

One might see Wim Wenders' early films as representative of a particularly European and specifically German attempt to grapple with the United States as the most important and fruitful, but also the most dangerous, ‘presence’ in the cultural, political, and economic landscape of the post-World War II world. During that period, he sought a basis for this grappling in the writings of Siegfried Kracauer and a fantasy construction of the United States following principles that recall Frederick Jackson Turner's claim that the essence of ‘America’ can best be understood on the basis of open spaces into which a continuous expansion takes place. The resulting Turnerian vision was fraught with problems that were linked historically and cinematically to the perceived dangers to subjectivity in modernity which concerned Kracauer and the threat of being overrun by ‘others’ that informed the culture of the ‘frontier thesis’. After many years Wenders has returned to the furthest reaches of the American West in films such as The End of Violence (1997) and The Million Dollar Hotel (2000). This article traces the way these two films revisit and revise this Turnerian view of America in the age of post-national chaos: the first seeks solutions to subjective instability by expanding vision globally following his previous, problematic Turnerian model, while the second breaks from it entirely.