UP IN THE SKY

Man on Wire (2008)
Director: James Marsh

The documentary Man On Wire portrays Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers as an outlaw artist’s championship feat, an action disconnected from normal social interaction and free of any historical significance. It’s like an adventure story from 1930s Hollywood. As in She or King Solomon’s Mines, no one questions the reasonableness of the adventure, and the story takes place in a vacuum, simultaneously heightening the drama and making it more unreal. Proponents of the auteur theory will love Man on Wire’s re-creaton of the basic ingredients of a Howard Hawks film: brave men, unquestioning female, hopeless task which no one expects to return from. Man on Wire is a tidy little film about an inhuman feat that occurred on the site of a future tragedy, and the tidiness both disconcerts and fascinates.

The story of Petit’s obsession with walking between the towers began when he saw an article about the building of the towers while sitting in a dentist’s office in 1968. From this humdrum beginning, Petit and his accomplices — who include his girlfriend, his best friend, plus a wire-walking expert and a fluctuating assortment of starry-eyed countercultural types — planned the walk over a five-year period. Petit had been obsessed with wirewalking since childhood and previous to the WTC walk had planned and executed outlaw walks on Notre Dame and a bridge in Sydney Australia.

The details of the planning are one of the fascinations of the film. The construction of the wire bridge on the roof of the WTC at dawn after a night of hiding from security officers makes for a great little caper film, and the director James Marsh plays up the sequence with some noir-esque touches. The other great charm of the film is the personalities involved in the feat. Petit himself is magnetic and playful, and it’s a salute to his magnetism that his friends and accomplices hardly seem to question his sanity. The accomplices are just as interesting: his girlfriend and best friend are as wholeheartedly committed as Petit, and their matter-of-factness about the nuts and bolts of the enterprise make their obsession all the more striking. The other accomplices are a mixed salad of 1970s post-flower child types: the songwriter who chickens out at the last moment, the be-whiskered bureaucrat who helps Petit’s team gain access to the building as part of his anti-establishment stace

The film’s refusal to acknowledge Petit’s feat as part of the history of the World Trade Center and their destruction gives the film an unusual power: it makes 9/11 seem more like what it is, a historical incident in a series of historical incidents, rather than what politicians and public hysteria have turned it into.