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.

Prettier than your average documentary

The Boy with the Incredible Brain is a documentary that follows the mental magic of Daniel Tammet, who is able to do insane mathematical calculations in his head with seemingly no effort.

The subject matter is intriguing all on its own--a young man who can recite twenty thousand numbers of pi by memory, who can learn languages ridiculously quickly, and will never need a calculator for anything--ever, unless it's for someone to check the fact that he's right.

However, I'm impressed at the prettiness of the documentary as well. It's beautifully put together, the music is lovely and the overall look if the thing is much more interesting than the usual fare.

Grey Gardens

I'm awful at blogging regularly these days. Enough said.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, life has been poking along as usual, though I did spend a week in Cincinnati, which was a nice change of pace. Now that I'm back, the cats can't seem to get close enough to me, and look on suspicously whenever I step out the door. At the moment, they're both hovering over me at the desk, occasionally causing odd typos by crowding around the keyboard until I set them firmly back on the floor.

I've just watched the 1975 documentary, Grey Gardens. It was filmed by the brothers who made Gimme Shelter, and is an oddly beautiful and bleak look into the lives of Edith Bouvier Beale, and her daughter, Edie. The women are relatives of Jackie O., and spent a good part of their lives in high society, and living exceedingly comfortably. However, at the time of the documentary, they're cloistered into a decaying summer homes owned by Edith.

The strangeness of certain remnants of their former lives against their current circumstances is part of what makes the documentary riveting--in the same way a train wreck is. Edith, her sparse white hair swept up into a 1930's style, spends most of her days propped up in stale bed covered in newspapers, old photographs, and cats. She talks in her aritstocratic east coast accent about her days as a singer, and contemplates giving herself "a month to get my voice back" so she can be a celebrated woman of the stage again.

Edie, the younger of the two, is in her fifties, but seems very like a teenage girl. She has a kind of naivety that is surprising, and tends to giggle to herself about things. At the same time as fiercely longing to be "outside," she fears the outside world, and this fear is part of the the chain that traps her with her mother. When she's not grumpily following her mother's orders, she spends her days feeding the crowd of cats, dancing, dumping bread onto a newspaper in the attic for the racoons. She also gazes off the back balcony with binoculars into the sea of overgrown foliage and vines that is the backyard, and beyond that, the real ocean.

There's a short scene that really sums the entire film in all its tragicomedy-- Edith is fighting with Edie about whose fault their circumstances are. Edie stops long enough to point at a large framed portrait of Edith in her younger days. It's a beautiful piece of art, in a gilded frame, leaned against the wall on a pile of old magazines and trash. "Ma, the cat's going to the bathroom behind it!" Edie declares, and old Edith takes a glance and remarks, "Well, at least someone's doing what they want around here."

I recommend watching Grey Gardens with a couple of people and bottle of wine. It'll make for a quiet and thoughtful time. Some of it is quite funny, in a sad sort of way.