James Hynes

My father once explained the idea of hubris to me by comparing it to a rubber band. This happened, I think, in my early teens, around the time I was discovering philosophy for the first time, at the same time as I was reading lots of science fiction and popular astronomy books, all part of my adolescent jones for a Sense of Wonder. Somehow this lust for wonder led me to pick up my dad's two volume edition of Jowett's translations of Plato's Dialogues, and somehow hubris came up. My father, who was a sociology professor at a small college in mid-Michigan, had gotten his undergraduate degree in philosophy on the GI Bill at Michigan State in the late 40s (like father, like son: I got my philosophy BA at Michigan 30 years later), and I suspected even at the time that his explanation of hubris was something he'd heard from one of his professors in East Lansing as an undergrad.

Anyway, it went like this: hubris was like a rubber band because whatever you did out of pride or ambition, it shaped the rest of your life as well. If you pushed the rubber band on one side, the other side felt the pressure. Since then, I've learned that in ancient Greek culture, the idea of hubris had mostly perjorative connotations (think Oedipus), evoking the cost of tempting the fates or commiting acts of violence, but in my father's explanation, hubris was a more general principle that played a part in every person's life, pretty much at every moment. Everything you do has an effect on everything else you do, making hubris a sort of spiritual or psychological version of Newton's third law, that for every action, there is an equal or opposite reaction. Or, to put it more bluntly, what goes around, comes around. Or even more bluntly, there's no free lunch.

I was reminded vividly of this yesterday, when my wife and I saw Man on Wire, British documentarian James Marsh's remarkable film about the French tightrope walker Philippe Petit and the time in 1974 when Petit walked a high wire between the two towers of the recently completed World Trade Center in New York City. It's a frequently astonishing film, absolutely gripping, and Marsh frames the narrative as a sort of heist story, through interviews, re-enactments, and archival film and photos. I only dimly remembered the act itself, probably mostly because it happened on August 7, 1974, only two days before Nixon resigned, and I was pretty obsessed with Watergate that summer.

What's most interesting to me, though, is what the fim doesn't mention, namely the attack on 9/11 that brought the towers down a quarter of a century later. According the the Wikipedia entry on the film, Marsh decided to include no reference at all to 9/11 because Petit's act was "incredibly beautiful" and it "would be unfair and wrong to infect his story with any mention, discussion or imagery of the Towers being destroyed." I agree with Marsh that the stunt itself was beautiful—heartstoppingly so, in fact—but I'd be astounded if there was a single person on the planet who could watch this film without thinking at almost every point of what later happened to the towers. In the opening section, photos of Petit growing up and learning his trade as an acrobat—juggling, walking a wire—are placed alongside grainy old footage of the construction of the Twin Towers, and I found myself almost in tears at images that were so eerily suggestive of later footage of the excavation of the wreckage. An overhead shot of the empty construction pit before the first pilings were driven looked exactly like the empty pit after the last bit of debris was taken away, and watching giant, rust-red girders being swung into place, covered with chalked letters and numbers, I couldn't help but think that, against all expectation, we've seen those very same girders since, bent and shattered and burnt, being dragged away again on flatbed trucks. As I was sitting in the theater, trying not to sniffle, I thought for the first time in years of that famous passage in Slaughterhouse Five, in which Vonnegut imagines the bombing of Dresden in reverse, as American bombers extinguish the flames of the burning city by sucking the bombs back up into the sky, then returning to base where the bombs are loaded onto ships and returned to factories in America, where they are dismantled so they'll never hurt anybody again. Whatever Marsh's intention, the film's evocation of an earlier time (I won't say more innocent) has the same whimsically redemptive effect.

It isn't just the images of the towers' construction that evoke the memory of 9/11. The film also re-enacts Petit's planning for the stunt, when he cased the towers for months in advance while they were still being finished, constructing elaborate diagrams and models of the towers' two roofs and looking for holes in the buildings' security routines, so he could get his team up to the top. Much of this is played for laughs—and why shouldn't it be?—but, again, it was impossible not to think of 9/11 hijackers (and the earlier terrorists in 1993 who set off the bomb in the WTC parking garage) as they examined the towers in much the same way, with a vastly crueler gaze. Even the act itself, as Petit walked back and forth on his wire between the towers eight times for an astonishing 45 minutes, could not be represented without evoking 9/11. There are only stilll photos of the event (at least there's no film footage in the documentary), and while the photos taken from the roof are breathtaking, the news photos taken from the ground, of a tiny black silhouette against an overcast sky in the space between the squared tops of the towers, cannot help but evoke the images of the tiny figures jumping from the same towers as they burned in 2001. Indeed, the fate of those who were forced to jump adds another layer of ambiguity to Petit's achievement. Not that people in 1974 didn't understand the risk he was taking, but looking at him now, a stick figure on a wire you can't even see in some of the photographs, the fact that many people were later forced into a deadly decision while he undertook the risk willingly, complicates (to say the least) the emotional effect of watching him.

My wife and I enjoyed the movie enormously, but in talking about it afterwards, we realized it had made both of us surprisingly tense, a dim echo of the anxiety we'd felt on 9/11 itself. I don't mean this (or anything I've said so far) as a criticism of the film, which is one of the best movies I've seen this year. I think Marsh was right not to refer to 9/11, but I also think it's impossible to watch the film without thinking of the attacks, not only because of the film's setting, but because it's a film about an act of hubris, which is framed by two much more serious acts of hubris, one of which is in the film and one of which isn't. There's Petit's act, of course, at the center of the film, but there's also the act of having built the towers in the first place, and the vicious act of hubris that brought them down. Each one of these acts evokes a different conception, or, if you prefer, a different facet, of the idea of hubris.

The first act, the building of the towers, can be seen as hubris in its modern sense, as an act of pride that invites retribution. This is not to justify or excuse the attacks, of course, but the fact is, as evidenced by two separate attacks by Islamic extremists in less than ten years, the towers were long seen by people who hate us as symbols of overweening American pride and arrogance. Then there's the attacks themselves, which represent hubris in its ancient sense of an act of violence that shames or humiliates the victim (this, according to Wikipedia, was the legal usage of the term in ancient Greece). More specifically, it evokes Aristotle's definition of the idea (again, from Wikipedia): "to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater."

It's the genius of the film that, in between these two acts, as a sort of illustrative counterpoint, lies Petit's relatively benign, even magical act of hubris, which comes under the definition of hubris as tempting the fates or the gods through pride and arrogance. If you're not tempting the fates by walking a wire 110 stories up, then nobody ever tempted the fates. And yet even Petit seems to have paid something for what he did, since the stunt appears (at the very least) to have trashed his relationship with his then-girlfriend as well as his relationship with his best friend since childhood. The younger Petit of the archival footage is a creature of elfin beauty, like the young Baryshnikov—fantastically fit, without an ounce of fat on him, and possessed of truly awesome powers of concentration and drive. These days Petit, who turns 60 next year, is still amazingly fit, energetic, and excitable, but his elfin features have hardened, and as he tells his story—something he clearly still loves to do—there's something a little frightening about it, as if—true to my dad's rubber band definition of hubris—this singular act has somehow deformed the rest of his life. It's not just the fact that the most memorable thing he ever did happened 34 years ago, but perhaps that one of the consequences of his particular act of hubris is having to live the rest of his life knowing that he has never since felt, and will never again feel, the way he did during those 45 minutes he spent walking in the air between the towers. At one point near the end of the film, as he's talking about the actual stunt itself, he says he did something wire walkers are never supposed to do: he stopped and knelt on the wire and looked straight down, seeing the crowd far below, and even imagining he could hear them. It struck him in that moment, he says, that this was a sight he would never again see, the view from the space between the towers, straight down, from 110 stories up. It's part of the power of this film, and of its almost unbearable poignancy, that he's also the only person ever to see that sight and live to tell about it.