(Ed. Note: Originally published at Film-Think)
“And while Zarathustra was speaking in this way, someone in the crowd interrupted: “We’ve heard enough about the tightrope walker; now it’s time to see him!” And while the crowd laughed at Zarathustra, the tightrope walker, believing that he had been given his cue, began his performance.”
(Nietzsche)
“A new icon is formed… not the predictable two-dimensional tower soaring skyward but a truly three-dimensional experience.”
(Rem Koolhaas)
If Philippe Petit gets to wax so poetically about his illegal tight-rope crossing of the Twin Towers in 1974, then why can’t we? I am not sure how the documentary manages to ratchet up so much tension about an event that we know already happened, and was perfectly successful, but it does. It is a taut street-performer procedural about a guy stretching a wire between the Twin Towers and then dancing about on it until a few flabbergasted cops make him hop off. (Whadda we got, Lou? I don’t know. It looks like a man… on wire. We got somethin’ for that?) And it is beautiful. Mesmerizing. We become entranced with the documentary just like a random person on their way to work in lower Manhattan that day must have been transfixed when they stopped to see what the commotion was about and saw this man floating in the rarified air of what were once the world’s tallest buildings. Packed in and around the Ocean’s Eleven-ish narration of how Petit’s team came together, and the six years worth of challenges they faced in accomplishing the ultimate urban hack, are all these simple scenes of Petit moving gracefully across the wire. Back and forth, until it clicks: the perfect storm of natural skill, years of practice, and the vision of someone dancing across the skyline of a city.
Early in the documentary, Petit and his cohorts recount the time he walked between the towers of Notre Dame while a service was being conducted below. There is a rousing convergence here between the beautiful structure being used as was intended and Petit’s playground approach to architecture – theodrama and acrobatic play lending each other grace on their shared stage. This kind of urban hacking (which also happens in Parkour, the recent tidal wave of Banksy inspired street art, and urban installation) is more than just about taking advantage of the publicity offered by art-making in highly congested areas, but reconfiguring the way we think about where and how we live. Our cities are not just littered inconveniences through which we grumble our way to work, but spaces to be crossed and inhabited in increasingly aesthetic ways. They are to be constantly reclaimed by creativity. To Petit’s dismay, the first question from all the American reporters when he was brought down from the tower in handcuffs was: “Why?” He couldn’t quite respond in his exasperated French, but the reason is pretty clear. He began to conceive of the city as a “stage to be conquered,” and through his clandestine planning managed to transform a few blocks of lower Manhattan for 45 minutes into a place of theatrical wonder. Sadly, the scale of Petit’s momentary reconfiguration of the Twin Towers has been surpassed by their destruction. His Nietzschean buffoonery neatly recalls the morning I flipped from my daily Three Stooges episode to the news a few seconds before the second plane flew into the towers. I reeled. My mind still hasn’t shrugged off that juxtaposition which is tacitly recreated by the film’s lack of reference to 9/11. But I don’t want to lose this utter contradiction in my experience of 9/11. I don’t want to find ways for it to make sense, so I appreciate the candor of Man on Wire’s inescapably memorializing subtext.
There is a sense in which the event recounted in Man on Wire has the opposite effect of 9/11. They are both physical critiques of the World Trade Center as the capitalist hub of the universe. But Petit’s tightrope theatrically addresses and celebrates the humanity held in derision by terrorists