It’s weird that falling comes under the sign of ‘failure’ and yet we’re always trying to re-create and choreograph these moments – maybe because falling/failing and flying/fleeing are actually closer than appears…
I’ve written a post on the fall of the fool at http://oneiria.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/the-fall-of-the-fool/ which you might like to check out.

That Rodney Ascher flick is da bomb, Peggy. Satanic Verses also opens with a sky-high fall from a cracked-up craft.

It turns out that when people fall from commercial-jetliner heights, they often come to rest in the nude; the air drags the clothes from their bodies.

The void has a powerful attraction — that’s one truth that existentialist and proto-existentialist philosophers were trying to get their heads around. What, exactly, is so perversely attractive about nihilism? Why nothing, rather than smomething? In Being and Nothingness, Sartre defined vertigo as “anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over.”