Smash hit

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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