¹ Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in idem, The Uncanny (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 132 and 124.

² Ibid., 134.

³ Anthony Vilder, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), x and 9.

⁴ Ibid., 3.

⁵ For more on this subject, particularly in relation to the figure of the firefighter in US culture after September 11, see my Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011), chapters 1 and 2.

⁶ Petit's act also serves as a plot device in Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin (2009), winner of the National Book Award, and is the subject of Mordecai Gerdstein's Caldecott Medal-winning children's book The Man Who Walked between the Towers (2003), which was made into an animated film narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal.

⁷ In this way, the film bears comparison to Paul Greengrass's extraordinary film United 93 (2006), which sets out with careful precision to document – and where necessary imagine – the events that led up to the crash of the fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines flight 93, in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

⁸ There is, even in such attempts to describe and discuss September 11, an already complex terminological tension: is it the event or the events? The attack or the attacks? Is the World Trade Center and the Twin Towers a building or the buildings? The singular and the plural are in constant and irresolvable conflict. Any decision in the name of consistency leaves out as much as it clarifies, not least the attack on the Pentagon and the plight of United Airlines flight 93, each of which have been all but excised from the public perception of the day.

⁹ Nicholas Royle suggests of September 11 that “the appalling apparent accident of a plane flying into a skyscraper [which he calls an “extraordinary double-building”] was followed minutes later by its uncanny repetition, another plane crashing into the other skyscraper, immediately disconfirming (and yet, still, in that moment, incredibly) any sense of the mere ‘accidental’.” Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), vii.

¹⁰ On an episode of Larry King Live that aired in October 2001, Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for the New Yorker, claimed of Petit and WTC climber George Willig, “I thought both George and Phillipe did something wonderful, which is they put some of the romance into the towers that the architects had left out. These were – these were not always the most exhilarating buildings. We were proud of them. We believed in their height, we believed in the ambition that they represented, but there was a certain dullness to them, and it was only with Phillipe Petit and then later George Willig did their extraordinary things that these towers became actually objects of romance and excitement to so many people.” Transcript can be found at http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0110/27/lklw.00.html.

¹¹ Petit, one might say, was at the forefront of the now common relationship between corporate power and the culture industries. After his arrest and subsequent release following his wire walk, Petit was rewarded with a lifetime pass to the observation deck of the World Trade Center. He was, in effect, paid for his transformative act. In this way, Petit's own spectacular act fused the still-developing global economy (to which the World Trade Center was intended to be a monument) and the spectacle of art. It was corporate sponsored art avant la lettre. Transcript of Stockhausen's interview, in German, is available in MusicTexte, 91 (Dec. 2001), 69–77.

¹² Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), 11.

¹³ Such is the power of this image that it was chosen for inclusion in Petit's memoir of the events. See To Reach the Clouds (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 2004), 189.

¹⁴ Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15–16, original emphasis. Nicholas Royle devotes useful attention to this passage from Bloom in his discussion of the uncanny nature of being buried alive in The Uncanny. See Royle, 146–48.

¹⁵ Kaplan, Amy, “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space,” Radical History Review, 85 (Winter 2003), 83Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Freud, “The Uncanny,” 149.

¹⁷ Inside Man was Lee's most commercially successful film to date, grossing $88.5 million domestically with total global box-office receipts of $184.3 million (realized from a production budget of $45 million). These totals put the film ahead of the year's two explicitly September 11-themed films, United 93 (2006) and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006), whose domestic grosses totaled $70 million and $31.4 million respectively. Inside Man was also far more commercially successful than Lee's previous film, 25th Hour (2002), which grossed a mere $13 million (albeit from a production budget of only $5 million).

¹⁸ In Man on Wire, too, the criminal accomplices, driving a panel van, gain access to the subterranean WTC parking garage by masquerading as construction workers.

¹⁹ As Jean Baudrillard suggests, “Adding insult to injury, they even used the daily banality of the American way of life as a mask: these people were two-faced. Sleeping in the suburbs, where they read and studied, with wife and kids, until one day they sprang into action, like time bombs. The faultless mastery of this clandestinity is as practically terrorist as the spectacular act of September 11, because it throws the cloak of suspicion on any individual. Baudrillard, Jean, “L'espirit du terrorisme,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 2 (Spring 2002), 409–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ It is interesting, in this regard, that Lee does not choose to include the Empire State Building in this whirlwind tour, perhaps simply because none of the film's criminals come from that far up the island.

²¹ Freud, 148.

²² Ibid., 150.

²³ Vilder, The Architectural Uncanny, 70.

²⁴ Eric Darton, Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 5.

²⁵ On 16 September 1920, J. P. Morgan's bank located at 23 Wall Street (only completed in 1914) was extensively damaged by a massive explosion. Forty-eight people died and over 150 were injured. The blast caused two million dollars worth of damage to the exterior of the building, much of which is still visible today, and to its interior. The explosion was blamed on anarchists, with some claiming that it was a response to the indictment of Sacco and Vanzetti some days earlier. The cause of the explosion was never confirmed, however, and it has also been suggested that the explosion might have been an accident. See Darton, 4–7; “Havoc Wrought in Morgan Offices,” New York Times, 17 Sept. 1920; and Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).