Man on Wire

We recently watched the documentary Man on Wire, which is the story of wirewalker Phillipe Petit's quest to secretly string a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center, and walk it. Petit suceeded--on August 7, 1974 he and some friends managed to sneak into the unfinished towers, went through the ordeal of placing the cables, and he stepped onto the wire, and into history. The documentary is really beautifully filmed. There is a lot of footage of a young Petit and his cohorts, and that, combined with some treated new film make a fantastic visual feel. It's just plain pretty to look at.

However, The Boy and I being the nerds we are, were equally interested in what the documentary said by omission.

One thing I'm sure was intentional was that the film, though it was an homage to the Twin Towers, said not a word about September 11. I'm sure it was because they didn't want to dilute their story, and this makes sense. I appreciated it. It allowed us to look at the massive scope of the towers and feel the loss of the lives, the buildings, and that day the world changed in a very subtle way. In a way, the film is about a love story between this man and the towers. They make him breathless. He speaks about them in poetry. It makes the viewer love and miss them as well, if only as a symbol of a time when the world seemed safer and happier.

Something the film covered only briefly was the effect of Petit on the people around him. He's a sort of rock star--charismatic and convincing, talking people into helping him possibly lose his life. What nobody says is that he's also probably also an egomaniac who, in this stunt, simply used the people around him as a means to an end, letting relationships die in the process.

In the interviews, Petit seems enamored of himself. He doesn't doesn't speak much about the friends who were crucial to his stunt, and who worked for years so that he could step out onto a wire and take the glory. He's thrilled to tell you he's a visionary, and that the world will remember him. The man who was his best friend struggles to hold back tears, and fails, saying that after the stunt, everything changed. Their friendship changed. The woman who was his girlfriend at the time politely looks away, and says that once Phillipe found fame, she realized it was time that their relationship moved along so he would be free. It's pretty clear that this means, "He immediately began screwing groupies (which he actually did, while at the same moment, his friends--the people who made the stunt possible--were under arrest and being deported from the country) and he decided he was too famous to be with me."

It's a fascinating and sort of sad story. An interesting film--well worth watching.