Corner Ropes

In Peter Jackson's reverent 2005 remake of King Kong, Kong, with Naomi Watts in one hand, battles two T. rex while all four plunge off a steep precipice, their long descent encumbered by a network of vines on which the combatants swing and dangle as successively the vines give under their weight. It's one hell of an action scene in a film that has many balletic sequences of CGE magic. Jackson did Cooper and Schoedsack proud. This one scene is seductive primarily for its well choreographed fisticuffs, but also for the way it taps into our primal fear of falling. Freud theorized that dreams of falling signal that the dreamer may be about to cave in to an improper sexual urge. So the scene also encodes an element of the love triangle the film points up again and again in the relationship between Watts and Kong/Adrien Brody. Anyway, I was just thinking it would be great (though probably technically impossible, not to mention potentially fatal) if athletic men could replicate this stunning combat on cascading and crisscrossed ropes, high above a ring. The corner work of Pinkie Sanchez and Russ Myers in this Hybrid Wrestling TV episode from early this year gives us a glimpse of how one small rung of such an "avalanche match" might play out.