Occupied Territories

America is the always re-remembered satisfaction of the image, whose status as memory is safeguarded by access to the means of mechanical reproduction, comparable to the primary and oral satisfaction of the mother’s presence, whose capacity to give pleasure is, however, also associated with the anxiety of separation and loss. No wonder, therefore, that sexuality becomes bound up with the technology of moviemaking on the one hand and a totally fantasized image of women on the other: in the world of movie mania, the truth is that women, cinemas, pinball machines, and jukeboxes belong together, and thus, quite logically, women are fascinating in [Wim] Wender’s films only to the extent that they can also function as substitutes for the pleasure of images and pictures, usually by direct association with cinematic representation, as in the frequent appearances of usherettes in his films, a particularly rich motif in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road. Given that an usherette in German is called “Platzanweiserin” (literally, the woman who shows you your place), the motif condenses time, place, and self by tying it to gender.

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Thomas Elsaesser, “Spectators of Life: Time, Place, and Self in the Films of Wim Wenders,” in The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition, edited by Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemünden (1997)

Two additional notes: First, the usherette mentioned in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is, importantly, murdered by the protagonist, an event that kicks off the story and precipitates his travels throughout the rest of the film.

Second, from the same essay by Elsaesser, there is also the following relevant passage:

[The goalie Bloch’s] itinerary from player to spectator on the football field is more generally a progress from player to spectator in his life—a progress the film neither moralizes nor associates with any angst-ridden state of modern alienation. The objectification of his own person is experienced as pleasurable by Bloch, and it already indicates the general movement of the hero in virtually all of Wender’s subsequent films. The goal of a Wenders hero is simple: to place himself in a position from which he can become his own spectator, or alternatively, to assume the place of an other, where he had once been, in order to observe himself from that place.