Is Man on Wire the most poignant 9/11 film?
No film about the WTC can play innocent and pretend 9/11 never happened
High wire
Watch Director James Marsh and Philippe Petit discuss Man on Wire
Forgotten in the noise of the seven years since 9/11 is the fact that New York's World Trade Center was a bad building. In spite of the ingenuity of its structure — load-bearing "mullion walls" — there was no hiding the fact it was just two dumb blocks, square in plan, projected up to 1,400ft apparently for the hell of it. And why two? The towers always looked unresolved, as if waiting for a third. Every time I saw it, the same thought came into my head — "So?"
Yet the architect, Minoru Yamasaki, did pull off one extraordinary coup — the placing of the towers. They were 140ft apart, and they did not, as they appeared to do, face each other corner to corner. They were slightly offset so that the walls, not the diagonals of the plan, were in line. The distance and the offset had an eerie effect. When I stood on the observation deck, I had a queasy feeling that was not quite vertigo. Rather, it was an overpowering, seductive sense that I could simply walk, jump or run across. The intervening space was alive with tension: enough, I thought, to support me for the few moments it would take to get across.
Philippe Petit also spotted something seductive about this gap. But he spotted it in 1968, five years before the building was completed. He saw the plan in a magazine in a dentist's waiting room, always a dangerous place for casual readers. Unlike me, Petit saw the gap as an opportunity rather than a threat to his mental stability. He really did want to walk across and, on August 7, 1974, at about 7.15am, he did, carrying a 26ft pole and balancing on a ¾ inch steel cable. He stayed up there for 45 minutes, crossing the gap eight times, teasing the police until it became clear that they were prepared to snatch him off by helicopter.
New York loved him for it, but, in the way of such things, the story receded in the imagination — and, after 9/11, all stories about the World Trade Center paled into insignificance next to the story of its destruction. Now, though, Petit's wire walk has been redeemed by a film, James Marsh's wondrous, magical documentary Man on Wire. People are comparing it to a previous British documentary, Touching the Void. Trust me, it's better.
Like Touching the Void, it is a docudrama in that actors are used and certain key scenes are re-created. For much of the time, it feels more fictional than it actually is, because Marsh has used some of the conventions of the heist movie. This is a crime, after all, but it is not merely victimless, it makes millions happy. It is, as one of Petit's crew says, "against the law, but not wicked or mean".
What, however, is it about? No film about the WTC can play innocent and pretend 9/11 never happened. Yet, superficially, that is what Man on Wire does. "Why burden this beautiful story with the ugliness of that?" Marsh has said.There are no explicit references to the destruction of the towers. On the other hand, Marsh is being a touch disingenuous. A mood of anticipatory sadness and nostalgia for a pre-9/11 world suffuses the film. We see the towers being built, the construction mess foreshadowing the wreckage after the planes hit. Most important of all, we see the wonder and joy of the New Yorkers as they stare up at Petit on his wire. He made these office blocks, in spite of their architecture, beautiful — and now they are gone.
"No one," the art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto has written, "loved the towers as much as everyone missed them." The WTC becomes a consoling memory, and Man on Wire celebrates their most uplifting, poetic moment.
In the end, there can be little doubt that this film joins the ever-lengthening list of works about 9/11.
In that context, where does it stand? From the moment the planes vanished into the buildings, art and 9/11 have been locked in a passionate embrace. So passionate that, to some, they appear indistinguishable. On the first anniversary, Damien Hirst said: "The thing about 9/11 is that it's a kind of artwork in its own right. . . It was devised visually." And Karlheinz Stockhausen described the event as "the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos". Such remarks are stupid, even pathetic, on a number of levels, but primarily because they embody a primitive view of art. If 9/11 itself is art, then everybody else, Hirst and Stockhausen included, is wasting their time. No, the real issue is how 9/11 is made a subject for art.
Steven Spielberg once told me that it would be some years before the great 9/11 films were made. Yet he couldn't resist ending Munich, set in the early and mid-1970s, with a shot of the twin towers. War of the Worlds was a dark film about terrorism:the terrorists just happened to be aliens. The same is true of The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, which features once again the comic-book correlative of New York, Gotham City, and once again the terrorism of the Joker. In Cloverfield, New York is first terrorised by a monster, then bombed. Then there is I Am Legend, a rather limp Will Smith vehicle in which the population of New York has been killed or turned into zombies by a virus. All of these films might have been made anyway, but it seems pretty clear that their mood and their message — that our comforts and cherished ways of life are horrifically fragile — owes much to Al-Qaeda.
Such implicit 9/11 films are evidence of a phenomenon identified by the feminist Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. This is the American impulse to mythologise. She noticed that the way the British dealt with their own terrorist outrage, 7/7, was "pretty matter of fact". We reacted to a crime; the Americans reacted to the attacks as an aspect of a wider national narrative. For Faludi, the effect was to strengthen the macho-man myth; but, equally, it strengthened the myth of American exceptionalism. New York/Gotham is not just a city, it is the city; to attack it is to attack urban life everywhere.
Beyond the mythologising are the much more explicit works. Oliver Stone's World Trade Center took us inside the destruction as it was happening. There is a Michael Moore polemic, Fahrenheit 9/11, as well as countless other documentaries. The problem for all such works that attempt to confront 9/11 directly is that, as Spielberg implied, we are still too close. Art, like history, requires a certain blurring of the facts. When blinded by a bright light, you need to half close your eyes to see what is really going on — and, as yet, we can't quite do that with the burning towers. Apocalypse Now was probably not especially accurate about Vietnam, but it said something about that war that was both true and unsayable in any other way. Francis Ford Coppola's eyes were half closed when he made that movie.
Paul Greengrass's eyes were definitely half closed when he made United 93. He kept his focus solely on what happened to the hijacked flight that was brought down by a passenger revolt on 9/11. The other events of that day were included, but only to intensify the claustrophobic isolation of the people on Flight 93. All the efforts of those on the ground did nothing to ease their predicament.
Somewhere between myth and explicitness lies Don DeLillo's novel Falling Man, which also directly deals with the intimate anguish of the day. It doesn't work, because DeLillo is trapped by his own self-awareness. He even mocks the too instant reactions of the time, inventing a book that details "a series of interlocking global forces that appeared to converge at an explosive point in time and space. . .". And there is Joseph O'Neill's recent Netherland, in which he considers the fine line between seeing 9/11 as a grotesque one-off and as a rationally explicable event.
Neither can quite capture the experience.
Can anything? It is not that so many people died on 9/11, it is rather that the global implications are so vast. To say that Al-Qaeda did it for reasons one, two and three is to say almost nothing in the light of the utterly different world — a world of endless security checks, constant surveillance, torture and perpetual fear of nameless shadows — that we now inhabit. In such an overwhelming context, perhaps the best answer is to say nothing.
Which is precisely where Man on Wire comes in. It says nothing and, as a result, says a very great deal. Van Gogh painted boots or chairs that were, in fact, portraits of people who weren't there. Similarly, Marsh, through Petit, paints a picture of an event, 9/11, that doesn't happen.
"Death," says Petit of the moment he steps onto the wire, "is very close." But "what a beautiful death" it would be, not the despairing plummet of one of those jumpers from the burning towers. At every step, Marsh draws our attention to the redemptive power of Petit's walk. From the moment he sees the plan for the WTC, Petit sees it as the occasion of a wonderful dream. He does other walks while planning the project — between the west towers of Notre Dame and the pylons of Sydney Harbour Bridge — but they are trailers for the big feature.
The walk itself is a kind of rebuke to the spirit of the time. Petit blew Nixon off the front pages on the day before he resigned as a result of the Watergate investigations.
Furthermore, the essential gentleness of the man is in sharp contrast to the city itself. New York then was not the largely peaceful, civilised city it is now. Manhattan was a dangerous, brutal place, its inhabitants surviving under a cloud of drugs and violence. But such a place made absurd heroism possible.
Man on Wire is not unlike the television series Life on Mars, which also embodied nostalgia for a tougher time as a fertile ground for beauty. But it's not just the city and the 1970s. Comically, Petit is in contrast to America as a whole.
He is absurdly French, with his existential assertions — "Life should be lived on the edge of life" — and his dreamy, poetic evocations of the experience of wire-walking.
The funniest moments of the film are when this Frenchness interacts with the gruff empiricism of the city. He describes the way New Yorkers keep asking him why: "Why? Why? The beauty of it is, I didn't have any why!"
But the simple joy of seeing Petit from below — walking, kneeling and lying on the wire — transcends all other considerations. At those moments, he occupies a space that is no longer there, that seductive 140ft gap between the towers that I once dreamt of crossing.
The best 9/11 work of art so far? Quite possibly.
Man on Wire is released on Aug 1; www.bryanappleyard.com
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