I watched a documentary called Man On Wire last night.  Zack put it on our netflix list because he'd heard it was pretty good.  I watched it because there wasn't anything else around and it was only an hour and a half.

I'm really glad I did.  It was very good.

It's about Phillipe Petit, the crazy little Frenchman who, in 1976, strung a cable between the north and south towers of the World Trade Center and walked across.

The movie cuts together footage of Petit and his cohorts as youngsters thirty five years ago, present day interviews with them and a few re-enactments using actors.

You'd think it would take the edge off the suspense since it's clear that Petit survived his little stunt; there's the middle aged Petit laughing about it! but it really doesn't.  There's something about watching a guy walk a wire up in the sky with no net that just gives me the willies.

Petit grew up in Paris and first got the idea to walk a wire between the towers when he was fourteen years old and read an article about the plans to build the World Trade Center.  The movie focuses on the different stunts he pulled before he made it to New York.  He had a band of very loyal friends who helped him with the logistics and mechanics of stringing the cables.  They were arrested after he walked a wire between the spires of Notre Dame Cathedral.  They were arrested after he walked above that enormous bridge in Sydney, Australia.  Getting arrested was just part of the stunt for them.

All of those episodes were merely prep for the big one.  Le Coup, as they referred to it; the WTC in NYC.  They planned that one for years.  The logistics of what they did were amazing!  For starters, they needed fake IDs to get into the building.  Then they needed to sneak themselves and a ton of equipment in, lug it all to the roof and figure out how to string the cable.  It's hard to believe they never got caught.

One question the movie never even asks, much less answers, is; how did they pay for all of these adventures?  Air fare wasn't exactly spare change in the late sixties and early seventies and none of the crew seemed to have jobs.  Petit was a street performer, for crying out loud.  I wondered how he could afford to fly himself and his friends back and forth from Paris to Sydney and several trips to New York.  And what did they live on?

I guess the film makers thought such mundane questions had no place in a film about the guy who danced on the air 110 stories up and maybe they're right.

The preparation that went into the WTC walk was impressive.  They found a field with enough space to string a practice cable that would be as long as the gap between the towers.  To prepare himself for the possibility of high winds, and the sway of the towers, Petit would get up on the wire and have his friends not just pull on the guide wires, but jump and swing and try as hard as they could to  bounce him off the cable.  The footage is amazing; four grown men yanking themselves off the ground, shaking his cable like a jump rope and there's Petit walking across, walking backwards, walking with his eyes closed, stuck to that cable as though he were magnetic.

Even after all that, I was floored by what he actually did when he got up there between the towers.  I thought he just wanted to walk across, to do it.  Like climbing Mt Everest.  I expected him to just get across as quickly and safely as he could.

No.

He was between the towers for 45 minutes.  When he finally came in (and was arrested) his friend said "Did you know you crossed eight times?"  He didn't just walk between the towers.  He danced.  He laid down.  He knelt.  Most amazing of all; he looked down.  There was an interview at the scene with one of the cops who tried to bring him in.  The cop described how they were waiting for this lunatic to get within reach so they could grab him but just as he did, he grinned at them and then ran back out to the middle.  The cop said he really didn't want the guy to fall but he also said he realized that he was watching something that no one would ever see again.

I was a bit disappointed that no one asked Petit what he felt when the towers fell. Maybe they did but decided not to end the movie on such a downer.  Although how anyone could avoid thinking about the fact that the towers fell before the wire walker did is beyond me.

Or maybe all he felt was happy that no one else would ever pull off what he had.  He definitely comes across as a bit of a sociopath.

I mean, what sane person would do that?

 

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