The United States has one of the most violent cultures of any industrialized nation, a fact that is constantly underscored by the unsettling frequency of mass shootings that have redefined the significance of names like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Orlando, and Aurora. An old truism is that coverage of such violence events tends to focus on the perpetrators at the expense of the victims. Most people can cite by name the person with the gun, but not the people who were shot (the same goes for serial killers, who are often elevated into some kind of twisted celebrity status while the victims are immediately forgotten, if they were ever known in the first place). On some level this is understandable because we have an automatic, morbid curiosity about who would commit such heinous acts; we want to know about them because knowledge is comforting, even if it’s horrifying. The victims are, for lack of a better description, innocents who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and therefore do not demand scrutiny.

It is this approach to mediated violence that Keith Maitland’s engrossing documentary Tower aims to flip in its portrait of the infamous “Texas Tower Shooting” on August 1, 1966, when a deeply disturbed young man named Charles Whitman climbed to the observation platform of the clock tower at the heart of the University of Texas at Austin and began to randomly shoot people with a rifle, killing 14 and wounding 31. In that sentence, I just told you more about Whitman than Maitland’s documentary does, as it goes out of its way to keep him a faceless, nameless menace, which allows the film to focus entirely on recreating the horrors felt by those on the ground and in the crosshairs on that hot summer day. Maitland gathered a wide array of men and women who experienced the violence firsthand: several people who were shot and wounded; bystanders, some of whom hid behind retaining walls and trees and some of whom risked their lives to help those who had been shot; and several of the men, including two police officers and one civilian, who ascended the tower in a bid to end the mayhem.

Following the visual template established by Brett Morgan in his searing documentary Chicago 10 (2007), Maitland employs computer-generated rotoscope animation for the film’s recreation of the event and talking-head interviews. Actors are employed to speak the words of the people involved, who are revealed on camera late in the film, albeit in a way that doesn’t entirely make sense in terms of timing and effect. The animation has a strong graphic quality, with heavy black lines outlining objects and people and blocks of solid colors, although at various times it is all in black-and-white. On paper this approach sounds odd, but it quickly becomes almost unnoticeable as we are drawn into the unfolding action. Scattered throughout the lengthy animated sequences, Maitland includes a mix of grainy archival footage shot during the event, television news footage broadcast as it was unfolding and in the immediate aftermath, and audio recordings of radio broadcasts and police dispatches to put us right into the moment.

The mix works fantastically, as Tower effectively dramatizes the horrors of the day with a uniquely humanist perspective. Rather than being just names and faces, the victims of that day are presented as unique and memorable people, especially Claire Wilson, who was seven months pregnant when she was shot alongside her boyfriend, who was instantly killed. One of the first to be shot, she lay on the hot pavement bleeding for more than an hour, the awfulness of her situation ameliorated first by a young woman who risked her own life to lie down next to her and talk to her just to keep her conscious and later by several young men who risked their lives to run out into the open and carry her to safety. The selflessness of those acts is counterbalanced by another woman who admits to her own cowardice in continuing to hide instead of helping others, which the film refuses to condemn as anything other than resolutely understandable. What Tower ultimately conveys with such power is the range of responses to the unthinkable and the unshakeable sense of humanity and sacrifice that emerges from even the worst moments of inexplicable cruelty.

Copyright © 2017 James Kendrick

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