/ 15 May 2009

I have tried in my way to be free

Before the acrobats of Parkour and the gonzo activists of free-running, before the situationist-anarchists of skateboarding in California’s Dogtown, who covertly drained suburban swimming-pools to ride their sky-blue curves, there was Philippe Petit.

This was the 24-year-old French highwire artiste who loved to trespass on famous high buildings and ply his marvellous trade, stringing cables between spires and ledges and masts and walking across without a net. On August 7 1974 he achieved his masterpiece: walking across the towers of the World Trade Centre in downtown New York as a stunned crowd gathered below. He and his crew had to creep up both structures in twin teams, and then attach the wire by firing across the initial guiding rope from one tower to the other with a bow and arrow. It was the épat to end all épats: a sensational piece of victimless criminal daring which required enormous cunning and discipline, not merely in the extraordinary act itself — Petit impishly danced back and forth across the wire over and over again while fuming cops raged near the ledge — but in the preparation and the skulduggery involved smuggling in the gear and disguised personnel, as if for a bank job.

What Petit brought off was a remarkable, even religious gesture of devotion, both to the building and to New York itself; this was, in fact, a unique act of homage no other artist could have managed, and New Yorkers instantly appreciated it. Graham Greene once playfully endorsed the Great Train Robbers’ crime, but his praise for these violent men was misjudged; I wonder if he missed a trick in not writing about Petit, instead? James Marsh’s documentary about this sublime piece of audacity, Man on Wire, does full justice to Petit’s vision, using interviews with the man himself and his crew, and using photos from the time, and dramatised reconstructions — there is evidently no home-movie record and no television footage, as this was before the age of rolling coverage and rapid-response news ‘copters.


Petit was an artist and a genius: the WTC exploit surely entitles him to both those descriptions. He describes how he conceived a fascination with the World Trade Centre towers even before they were built, reading about the plans in a magazine in a dentist’s waiting-room as a boy. He claims that there was something in the buildings that cried out for a tightrope walker’s wire to be strung between them. They were built to be used as he wished to use them: a successful high-wire walk would fulfil not merely his own destiny, but that of the two towers themselves. They were like those geographical areas in his In Search of Lost Time that Proust said were predestined to be battlefields because of accidents of geological formation: rivers, rises, gullies, which both hinder and inspire a general or tactician: “You don’t make an artist’s studio out of any old room; so you don’t make a battlefield out of any old piece of ground.”

Though big-hearted New Yorkers fell in love with the crazy Frenchman Petit, there was no celebrity status accorded to his humble helpers, who wound up being treated slightingly. Could it be that though Petit did not fall, there were others who did? What Marsh shows us is Petit’s childlike innocence and almost transcendental faith: faith in himself, faith in his leadership abilities, faith that the escapade would be a success, and faith that he would not fall. His sheer hypnotic self-belief meant that I found it quite impossible to imagine him losing his balance and plunging to his death: he defies gravity. In our world of health and safety, a world where success and fame means working within very well-understood corporate structures, Petit is a rare, exotic beast, and a wonderful one. —