Some Thoughts About Falling

The Swedish ship the Vasa was a naval flagship constructed between 1626 and 1628 and set sail on its maiden voyage on 10th August 1628. At 69 metres long it was a very nice boat and it was built to be a powerfully impressive vessel - the pride of the Swedish empire. However, shortly after setting sail, in front of a crowd of hundreds or possibly thousands of spectators, including ambassadors from both allied and enemy countries, the pride of the empire blew over in the wind and sank beneath the waves.

The wikipedia article for the Vasa includes this, truly magical sentence: “Despite this lack of stability it was ordered to sea and foundered only a few minutes after encountering a wind stronger than a breeze.”

The CitiGroup Centre in Manhattan was constructed in 1977 and I will be using the Spider-Man game to capture footage for this, for which I make no apologies. The tower is unusual in that instead of having a full square base, instead the corners of the base of the tower are missing, and it is held up by five columns - one in the center and one in the middle of each side.

The original design used welded joints for the load braces up the sides of the building, but due to cost cutting measures the actual construction used bolted joints, which are significantly weaker. 

In the design of most buildings it is more important to consider the winds that hit the building front on than the diagonal “quartering winds” which have less impact on the building overall. Because of this, the designer of the CitiGroup Centre didn’t actually calculate the potential effects of the quartering winds.

Between those factors alone, tests showed that a wind speed could easily occur in New York every 55 years strong enough to just blow the tower over in the wind, but if the tuned mass-damper on the work wasn’t working a much weaker wind, occurring on average every 16 years would be strong enough to bring down the tower. Why would the mass damper not work you ask? Well it was electrically activated, so something like a power outage, which famously never happens in New York City. And what might cause a power outage? Well, a hurricane could do it...

So if you haven’t already put it together: today we’re talking about falling over.

The CitiGroup Centre didn’t fall over, but if it had, it would have been absolutely devastating. Likewise, when the Vasa fell over and sank, and 30 people died, it was probably absolutely devastating to the crowds watching. However, with a little distance from both of these things, it’s just… kind of funny. It’s funny that these Swedes worked very, very hard on a ship and then it blew over in the first wind it encountered stronger than a breeze, but only because it happened a long time ago. It’s funny that a New York City architect built a 59-story tower that could have blown over in the wind, but only because it didn’t.

In Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut wrote:
 “My sister Allie in real life, which for her lasted only forty-one years, God rest her soul, thought falling down was one of the funniest things people could do. I don't mean people who fell on account of strokes or heart attack or snapped hamstrings or whatever. I am talking about peopleten years old or older, of any race and either sex, and in reasonably good physical condition, who,on a day like any other day, all of a sudden fell down. When Allie was dying for sure, with not long to go, I could still fill her with joy, could give her an epiphany, if you like, by talking about somebody falling down. My story couldn't be from the movies or hearsay. It had to be about a rude reminder of the power of gravity that I myself had witnessed.”

He then went on to describe several different stories in which people fell over, and I at least found them all pretty good. But I really don’t think that I, Kurt, and Allie Vonnegut are alone in this. The subreddit /r/childrenFallingOver has over a million subscribers, and the very popular youtube playlist titled “Important Videos” contains many videos where people just fall down, many of them with millions of views themselves.

I think inherently the humour in falling down comes from the humbling nature of the experience. Humans are the only primates who walk most of the time on two feet, standing upright, so perhaps there is an instantaneous understanding that someone who falls over hasn’t simply had an accident, but failed the entire species.

Maybe also, though, we laugh to move past the trauma of falling. Falling is a captivating thing, and we are drawn to images of it, symbolism around it, even language relating to it, and maybe that’s because falling is really scary.

The most iconic image of 9/11, an event in which a building in New York did collapse, was of a man who had presumably jumped from the tower to avoid the fire, but about whom we know very little. He is simply known as “the falling man”.

The image of the falling man is echoed in the title sequence of the AMC drama Mad Men which is also set in Manhattan. Even if it was unintentional, which I believe it may well have been, the similarity here is striking. The only thing that can really be made out on “the falling man” is that he is wearing a shirt - everything but the black and white of the suit is silhouetted on the figure in the Mad Men title sequence.

In the title sequence of Mad Men the falling man represents the shifting status of the main character, Don Draper, as the decade of the 1960s runs its course. Don Draper, over the course of the show, loses almost everything that he thought was important in 1959, and learns to appreciate a new set of values in the wildly different world of 1970, partly because throughout the 1960s, outside of simply Don’s personal life, the way that the world works turned practically upside down, and the societal status of white men such as him changed dramatically. Therefore, the title sequence of Mad Men is a visual, literal representation of a metaphorical fall.

I think we find something inarguably compelling about falling down. Our stories can often communicate ideas to us quickly by relating to this very universal experience. In stories, falling, literal or metaphorical, can be a lesson for others to learn from by consuming the story, be it learning to avoid the same mistakes or learning a positive reaction to that fall.

Kurt Vonnegut once drew out the shapes he believed that stories tended to take. While I don’t perfectly agree with Vonnegut’s archetypes, nor necessarily with the basic concept of trying to find the templates for all stories, I find it interesting that he mapped the good or bad fortune of the characters against time, and that the resultant shape of the story shows that metaphorical plummet in status as a literal sharp decline.

In Into The Spider-Verse a continual theme of the whole film is the ability to pick yourself up when you fall down. In everyone’s favourite part, the What’s Up Danger sequence, Miles swings hard upwards next to a building, the text of his excited “WOOOOO” following him, mirroring the screaming text “AAAAAAAA” that trailed after him as he fell earlier in the film.

And of course,  (In the only good bit) in Batman Begins, Alfred tells a dejected Bruce Wayne “Why do we fall Master Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up”.