To dance in the clouds

Just finished watching "Man on Wire." (Thank you, Netflix Watch Instantly.)

It's the story of a Frenchman, Phillippe Petit, who dared to dream of walking on a wire between the World Trade Center towers, before they were even built, and how he brought his impossible dream to life.

There are many moments of poetry in the telling of his story. Petit has a gift for speaking in complete, beautiful phrases and you can easily see how his friends were captured by his vision, as insane and improbable as it seemed. There was the event itself: 45 minutes hundreds of feet in the air with nothing but a balance bar and the cable to stand on.

And then there are the Towers. They are as much of a main character in the story as the wire walker himself. As he describes the planning and training process over weeks and months (and amazingly there is home movie footage of it, too), you see the Towers rising. Which is more impossible, to walk between these buildings that reached into the clouds, or to build them in the first place? Just looking at the photos taken from the top was scary.

It's fitting that the film never makes mention of the fact that they no longer exist. It's better to remember them this way, as part of a piece of performance art that can truly never be replicated.

[2.28 update: Scott Simon interviewed Phillippe Petit on today's Weekend Edition Saturday.]