When you’re an American, you are vulnerable to becoming numb and glazing over when you hear of a mass shooting or some lone gunman. It gets easy to tune out each tragedy or find it difficult to distinguish shootings from each other even though the individual impact has an exponential ripple effect that literally destroys the lives of those in closest proximity to each incident. Tower is an eighty-two minute documentary that has the opposite effect of the news and empathizes with the people in the gun sight. It provides context to individual lives before, during and after the first unauthorized mass shooting in America on August 1, 1966 at the University of Texas.
Tower depicts what we couldn’t possibly see by animating events as survivors are relaying their stories. The Rotoscoping recreates experiences with emotional accuracy by depicting the survivors as they looked and felt then. This kind of representation would not work if there were ordinary cameras on campus following each interviewee in real time because the way that we interact with the world changes when we know that we are being observed. If a camera was there, people would talk to the camera, but because it wasn’t there, the animator has to put him or herself in the interviewee’s shoes, imagine how that person felt and how to convey that feeling through images then create that image. It doesn’t just take effort and skill, but demands a level of compassion absent in our quotidian depictions of tragedy. It slows time and enters a person’s mind.
For example, the majority of Tower follows one of the first victims who ends up lying on the pavement on a hot summer day after being shot for a considerable amount of time. If an outsider saw her, we would just conclude that she is dead and may move on. If we knew that she was alive, we may focus on rescue efforts. Instead the documentary hones in on what it is like to be her. The pavement is excruciatingly hot. There is no shade. It is Texas. She can sense people around her, including someone she loves dead on the ground next to her, but can’t proactively interact with anyone or put herself in further danger. She explains how she can feel death approaching. If a recording device was there at the time, she may have turned into an amateur reporter explaining where the gunman is and what is happening or use the opportunity to communicate her love to others, but without a camera documenting everything in real time, and with decades to reflect on what happened and find the words to express your most intimate thoughts, viewers are closer to feeling the real human impact of a mass shooting. Even though intellectually we know that she survives otherwise we wouldn’t have this interview and information, we are personally invested in her specific well being. After she recovers, it isn’t over.
Tower wisely used actors’ voices instead of actual audio from the interviews to reinforce the illusion that we are experiencing the events as they are happening. If the documentary used actual audio, we would hear the voices of older people while seeing the animated image of a young woman. The dissonance would create a distancing effect and allow us to be less emotionally invested in the victims and bystanders. The magic of movies, even documentaries, is that they find ways to make things seem more real than reality. They truly are empathy machines.
Even though Tower is only eighty-two minutes long, it feels longer, but not in a bad way. It is actually shorter than the actual ninety-six minutes that the actual shooting unfolded, but because you want the shooting to stop so these interviewees can resume living a semblance of a normal life not subject to the whims of another, I wanted it to end sooner. I don’t know much about the actual shooting, but knowing that there were more victims whose stories were untold made me realize how much longer it would be if the documentary’s aim was to create a complete recreation of all the events.
As a twenty-first century person hearing of a twentieth century novice deciding how to react to a mass shooting, viewers have the benefit of perfect hindsight and can be astonished that people took some really unwise steps. I was completely unsurprised that one official naturally thought, “Black people.” No, you would notice a black person with a stack of guns and actually stop them. It is Texas. Intellectually I know that they weren’t explicitly rooting for the Jefferson Davis statue for ideological reasons, but because it provided a good shield from gunfire, however would they? There were a lot of heroes and dumb asses, and some people wore both hats at once. Even though Tower’s goal is not prurient or a true crime entry, I did find myself treating it as if it was and found myself mentally critiquing people’s actions in spite of intellectually knowing that our responses during emergencies are not entirely controlled by thought, but an automatic physiological reaction. It is far easier to make good decisions from the safety of your couch. People may seem as if they’re doing something stupid, but the flipside is that it could result in saving lives. You won’t know until the end of the documentary.
I’m actually not a fan of Rotoscoping, but Tower showed me that there is a place for it in film. I hated The Congress and A Scanner Darkly, but enjoyed Waking Life so I think that I was conflating my dislike of the film’s substance with the animation technique. I associate Rotoscoping with pretention better suited to a young male adult who is a philosophy major. Keith Maitland, the director of Tower, has redeemed Rotoscoping for me so I will try not to be as dismissive in the future.
Tower is apparently an adaptation of Pamela Coloff’s Texas Monthly article, “96 Minutes,” which I’m not interested in reading….yet, but if you enjoy the documentary, that article would be a good jumping off point to delve deeper into the subject. Maitland has only made two other documentaries—one before and one after Tower. Tower is so good that I hope that he makes more, but I don’t think that I’ll be checking them out. One is on the music scene in Austin, and the other is about teenagers who became blind. If I were going to see one, it would be the latter.
I highly recommend Tower as one of the best documentaries ever. It offers a sensitive, nonpartisan, first person view of what it is like to be a survivor after a mass shooting. The documentary devotes almost no time to the shooter so if you’re interested in him (and usually it is a man), then don’t bother watching it. Maitland manages to breathe life into a historical subject, a genre and an animation technique that so many others have missed.