Rev Film Fest 2017 Roundup #3: Tower
A unique combination of archival footage and rotoscope animation, Tower recreates the 1966 mass shooting that took place at the University of Texas.
On a sweltering summer's day, a young man went to the top of the Main Building, to the observation deck, and indiscriminately opened fire on the campus below. He killed 17 people (including an unborn child) and wounded 31 others.
The gunman's name was Charles Whitman. But Tower doesn't dwell on the killer's motives. In fact he's not much more than an omnipresent bringer of dread and violence, whose every thunderous bark from a tower either takes a life or tags a bystander. This is a great choice that puts us right in the shoes of the victims; they didn't know the why of it, and throughout this animated documentary, neither do we.
Although the gunman held the university hostage for 96 minutes, for some of the survivors those 96 minutes might as well have been an eternity. A heavily pregnant woman and her boyfriend are the first victims, struck down after exiting a cafe. She describes this in terms that indicate she didn't know what happened to her at first: “As if a jolt of electricity had shot through my body. Like I stepped on something.” “Baby?” says her boyfriend, seconds before the next shot blows his brains out. Immobilised, with every passing minute she feels the baby go limp and the summer pavement scald her body. A combination of the heat, the terrible wound, and the shocking site of her dead boyfriend induces vivd hallucinations and the feeling that she's “melting”. It is a gross, painful, and specific experience that's hard to conjure when you're thinking of something as common as a mass shooting.
Across town, two first year college students are playing chess in their room and listening to the Top 40 on the radio. The poppy innocence of radio-friendly 60s music is interrupted by a grave-sounding news report. Something about an air rifle. Figuring it to be a hoot, the two kids eagerly leave to check it out, utterly unaware that it'd be a day that would rob them of their innocence forever.
Director Keith Maitland has reconstructed a fifty year old event with powerful immediacy. We experience the harrowing events strictly through four or five different points of view. One, hidden in a classroom, sees the bodies writhing in agony across the campus. She doesn't rush to their aid; she doesn't want to die. Following the shooting she says, “I realised that day that I am a coward.” This is a whole different kind of heartbreak.
An unremarkable middle-aged man who's just minding the bookstore finds himself in exactly the right circumstances to step up and do the selfless thing. And so too do a few other bystanders. Tower depicts the horrors of that day without blinking, but the moments throughout when someone puts their life on the line for the sake of compassion, for the sake of helping a stranger, are the scenes that resonant the most.
Tower ends with a montage of modern mass shootings in America. It's a rapid fire sequence of sorrow and shock ripped straight from the news. Although Tower is made with consummate skill and artistry that rivals some of the best fictional films of this year, the event it depicts is nothing but the worst nightmare played out in reality.
