Mass shootings at schools and other public places have sadly become the norm around the U.S., as more of them happen and little is really accomplished to stop them. When the first of these shootings happened, there was nothing to prepare anyone. That first mass shooting took place 50 years ago at the University of Texas and is the subject of the fascinating documentary Tower.
Rather than just piecing together archival footage and talking head sequences, filmmaker Keith Maitland decided to use animation to tell the story of the Tower shooting. His team even used the technique of rotoscoping to bring the stories of the survivors and heroes to life again.
For those unaware of the shooting, it started around noon on Aug. 1, 1966, when a sniper began randomly shooting at people walking around campus. The shooter killed 16 people and injured 32 before police officer Houston McCoy shot him over an hour and a half later. What lead Charles Whitman to decide to kill people that day is not the concern of the film, which instead focuses on the people who survived and witnesses who never forgot what happened that day.
Tower does go on a bit longer though, going all the way up to today. When Maitland catches up with the present day, the animated characters become real men and women who are still fighting to make sure no one forgets. We see Ramiro Martinez, an officer who made it to the observation deck just before McCoy, speaking before a class of young police cadets. Claire Wilson, whose baby died in the womb when she was the first person struck, now advocates against a new Texas law that allows for handguns to be openly carried on college campuses. That law ended up passing and, strangely enough, goes into effect on Aug. 1, 2016 - the exact 50th anniversary of the shooting.
However, at this point, it feels like clock management is kicking in and Maitland tries to skim through more recent shootings. The impact of the Tower shooting is astonishing as it is without trying to link it to recent shootings. Had Maitland delved deeper into Whitman’s psyche in order to show how troubled people are driven to mass murder (which should be the subject of another documentary), bringing up more recent events might have been called for.
Animating such a shocking event might seem like trivializing it, but it does the complete opposite here. Tower is a visceral film and somewhat dreamlike. It creates a vision of how we might see when we remember an event that forever changed a city and even a country. In our mind, we don’t see our elders explaining things to us in front of cameras. We try to picture events and Maitland ensured that we will see the Tower shooting as it happened thanks to the film.
Tower debuted at SXSW and won the top prize in the Documentary Feature Category, as well as the special Louis Black "Lone Star" Award.