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.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010