National traumas now seem to be de rigueur for the U.S. Followed by 9/11, one mass shooting after another and, most recently, by the election of Trump for president, we are a country with a hand to its mouth, either at a loss for words or choking on them, when it is clear that the sense of words, their capacity for reason and persuasion, are being crushed underfoot by forces larger than we can understand or, fearfully, even control. At Tower's consideration screening in San Francisco, filmmaker Keith Maitland was the first to apologize for the weight of his film's topic piled on top of an already oppressive week.
Tower, inspired by Jessica Colloff's article "96 Minutes" published in Texas Monthly, premiered at SXSW, winning Best Documentary Feature, going on to score the Grand Jury Prize at the Dallas International Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Riverrun Film Festival. It's now opening across the country and is a powerful meta-documentary detailing the events of that fateful afternoon, incorporating archival 16mm footage, broadcast radio reports and re-enactments brilliantly visualized through rotoscope animation.
Maitland admitted that it was this moment of bravery that inspired him to make the film. And it is this moment that recalls me to what my mentor Joseph Campbell termed tat tvam asi, a Sanskrit phrase translated as "thou art that." What is it in the human animal, Campbell posed, that causes an individual to risk their lives for another without fear of losing their own life? He implied that the answer was an interconnectedness between human beings, an inseparability, a recognition that—as quantum physics would suggest—we are not separate creatures after all but interdependent at every level. Rita Starpattern, who went on to become a well-known artist and feminist in the Austin scene, later admitted to her partner that this selfless act on her part was one of the stupidest things she had ever done; but, in the moment, she had no choice but to help keep this wounded pregnant woman alive. For me, this is the film's pivot. It also speaks to our need as a nation right now to recognize that we are at an equal pivot. Either we are all here for each other to save each other from the monsters among us, or we are doomed to be picked off randomly one by one.
Recognition and choice and action are all we have left.
