When things fall apart: Why the Falling Stars Challenge deserves a closer look
Picture this: You’re stepping out of your car with scores of shopping bags in tow. You flick your hair and make a clink on the concrete pavement with your six-inch heel. You croon out, slowly shifting your body weight, hoping to make a Sex In The City-esque entrance — and trip!
Now, you’re simply lying face-down on the pavement, soaked in embarrassment, with all your day’s splurge scattered around. What an anticlimax!
Internet’s current favourite, the #fallingstars2018 challenge is basically just that, except you’re supposed to fake et al.
This ‘fake fall’ originated somewhere in Russia in August (inspired by the artwork of Sandro Giordano, but more on that later), and soon gained popularity among its millionaires. It ended up becoming a tool for showing off one’s riches, with people falling off their yachts, private jets and plush cars, with everything, from designer shopping to fancy gadgets, lying on the floor.
The trend has since picked up everywhere else, even in the face of criticism it received for its blatant celebration of riches. After all, that’s literally the first thing you notice when you see these photographs — the luxury, the wealth, the opulence. How fancy and exotic are the elite, even in their fall.
But Giordano, the man who gave this fall a metaphorical push, had something entirely different in mind.
In his work, IN EXTREMIS (bodies with no regret), a collection of photographs, all capturing the very same moment — the fall — Giordano wanted to remind us, and himself, “that we never stop falling. But then we always get up again.”
The idea came to Giordano about five years ago after a terrible bike accident. “The inspiration came from a bad fall I had with my bike. In October 2013 I took a picture called “Homme sur le vélo” just to exorcise the nightmare of that bad accident,” he wrote, sharing a throwback picture on Instagram.
In a materialistic world, the impact is the only moment of truth. And the splatter makes our dark attachment to inconsequential things oh-so apparent. "We live in sad times when material things, expensive or not, have become more important than our own lives... For every single photo, I create a story. In most cases, I tell of common people incurring classic everyday accidents, revealing where possible, the black rotten side of everyone of us," Giordano wrote.
Interestingly, this basic and universal point that Giordano wanted to make was lost in translation. We’ve had criticism transform into sarcasm, then into plain mockery. We’ve had toddlers to cats, broke students to clueless teenagers ‘falling’ for this fad.
Now, stinky rich pot-bellied men falling off their private jets is hilarious, and even if one finds this to be a bit of a show-off, it at the very least, it gives us the opportunity to laugh at them. As is the case with wobbly toddlers and overworked students. A fall for the fallen, in that sense, is a great equaliser. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re falling from, or what your social status is — when you fall, you fall.
The impact is as brutal or as liberating as you want it to be. For, in that moment of utter still, when, against your best efforts, things have fallen apart, you’re completely, and unapologetically yourself. Everything that added up to that moment was a front and everything that will follow from that moment will be a front too.
As you lie, face down, you sigh, ‘Okay, that’s done. What now?’
You pick yourself up, gather up the fallen pieces, mount yourself on those six-inch heels and tick-tock into the sunshine.