“Mayoral Race”, W Mercury St, Butte, MT, USA
contrelamontre
In 1972 Wim Wenders — medical school dropout, failed philosophy student, disappointed painter, film school reject — came to America. He didn’t come to see Los Angeles, he didn’t come to see New York City, he didn’t come to see Las Vegas. He came to see Butte, Montana.
Why Butte? Why did he cross the ocean to see an old working class mining town of fewer than 35,000 people? Because Wim Wenders is a weird romantic. Because Butte was town that hard-boiled detective writer Dashiell Hammett used as the model for his novel Red Harvest. In the novel, Hammett described the town as “an ugly city…set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.” But for somebody who’d wanted to be a philosopher, who’d wanted to be a painter, who’d wanted to make movies, it sounded like a sort of paradise. And Butte did not disappoint.
Wenders describes Butte as one of his favorite places. “Not just because the entire city looks like an open-air Edward Hopper studio – it does. In Butte, time sort of stopped in the 1950s; you see stuff there you just don’t see anywhere else.”
If you’re the right sort of person, if you have the right sort of eye, you can see what Wim Wenders saw. Stuff you just don’t see anywhere else.
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