JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Those are the towers of the World Trade Center. That is an airplane flying overhead. That thin line is a wire strung between the Twin Towers. That speck is the young Frenchman Philippe Petit, a street performer who juggled balls, pins, and flaming torches, rode a unicycle, and walked tightropes. On August 6, 1974, Philippe and his friends snuck into the North and South towers using fake IDs, rode the freight elevators to the tops of the buildings, then carried 400 pounds of equipment up 180 steps to the roofs.

Philippe’s friend shot an arrow attached to a fishing line across the 200m of empty space between the towers. By attaching the thin line to the thick cables they managed to set up the wire by daybreak. On the morning of August 7, 1974, New Yorkers on their way to work looked up to see a man dancing on a wire stretched between the two towers. It was beautiful.

After almost an hour of walking, dancing, lying, kneeling across the wire, Philippe allowed himself to be arrested by the police. He underwent psychological evaluation. They asked him, Why’d you do it? And he couldn’t say why, because there is no Why! There was only the overwhelming desire to step off the ledge, screw death, and walk the wire.

James Marsh’s documentary Man On Wire recreates that day with reenactments, interviews with Petit’s associates (who cannot stop themselves from bursting into tears at the memory of their fear and awe), discussions of the preparations for the feat and the technical problems that had to be solved, archival news footage, and the account of Petit himself. Man On Wire is joyous and exhilarating, made more poignant by the fact that the World Trade Center is gone. (Colum McCann has written a novel about that day, called Let The Great World Spin.)

My rating: The Cat’s Pyjamas. Philippe Petit must be a cat.