Tragedy of Philippe’s End

[Ryan Day]

I find that the peculiar determination and effort Philippe put into his performance, and his character as someone who is so eccentric and doesn’t really fit the mold of anyone in the modern era, made it hard for me to pin down how he fits into the lens through which I viewed the time period. However, I think I’ve figured out where he fits, specifically as someone who truly gave up what our society deems as signifiers of a normal life. He spent so much time studying and practicing to do the walk, when really people his age would be going to college or working at a job or starting a family. In a sense, he put his art before all else, and here is where the tragedy comes into play. Truly, because of the time period, people like Philippe would be the last of their time, the last people able to not worry about actually living and instead focusing completely on their art. As the 70s was the end of America’s broad range of prosperity for the wealth of the population, so too was it the end of these people. Nowadays, the ability to focus so much on this art is so difficult because you need to make rent, you need to afford food, or utility payments or student loan payments, you need to take three gig economy jobs because if you don’t, you WILL fall below the “middle class” position you’ve grown up in. Since there’s very little safety net left, the Philippe’s of the world cannot shy away from these base human needs to focus on their artwork. Even the examples that come to mind when thinking of modern day Philippe’s are regularly forced to commodify themselves and their act just in order to survive, setting up fundraising accounts or selling cheap merch. This is, in my opinion, the tragedy of the Philippe Petit’s of the world.

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