Paris, Texas

If this doesn't convince anyone that paid paternity leave is a good idea, I don't know what will.

Reminded me a lot of Mark Fisher's thoughts about how capitalism both needs the nuclear family as an institution to reproduce the labor force, but also tears it apart by requiring working parents to be away from their children for many hours a day. I think you could read the entire film as a meditation on that exact idea—the tensions between capitalism and the nuclear family.
---
Houston as a city of escape. Arrive on the promise, the slight chance, that something can finally be fixed, that you can launch yourself away, into some place not on this planet, into the future, into the past, something neither past nor future nor present. A city that can get someone to that fictive blank slate divorced from everything. (*1)

A car turns into a metallic highway angel. The floating freeways, massive concrete arteries, the cars as purple-candy-and-spiked-rim blood cells, flowing into the heart of the city, where the neons can't be told apart from the sun's last few breaths of the day. A city where friendships are built on freeways -- friends that never look at one another's faces (*2), but are braiding each other's voices into that gap in the lane's white dashes, coming and going, disappearing and reappearing, changing back and forth between white and grey, something and nothing. The orchestrated psychic cacophony of music, conversation, and curling highways releases endorphins into the brain like a drug. The Aquarium's Ferris wheel has just reached its apex for a couple on their first date, and the Eye-45 watches them knee-buckled and clasping hands for a few seconds.

The poles on the tollway appear in your peripheral vision, just over your shoulder and to your left. They look like individual poles, unique in every way as you drive up to them, but once you are driving next to them, for a split second, they all like merge together and blend into a cloud.

Three yellow signal lights outside the firehouse blink in an alternating pattern: the two outside ones, then the middle, then back to the two outside ones. Over and over again. The one on the far left sags downward, like it is shy and trying to divert its gaze.
---

(*1) There's a certain poetic that exists in this regard between Houston and the barren Western landscape.
(*2) Not totally unlike Trevor and Jane's conversation.