L'Appel du vide.

Few adventurers, and many idiots among them, mostly adrenaline junkies trapped in alpha-male mind frames, and fewer amazons, had been jumping from cliffs using wingsuits to pilot their descent. Some of them, performing as daredevils buoyed by high altitudes and airspeed, actively hunted the proximity—veering toward the slopes instead of gliding away from them.

While it seems impossible to drive what in French is called l’appel du vide—the call of the void—at the edge of the cliff wall, try to add the adrenaline rush of hurling yourself down through a talus slope, where any imbalance of the wingsuit or split-second delay of the parachute’s opening might be fatal.

There is a genre about daredevils in literary fiction, like the barnstormers and wing-walkers in propeller-driven biplanes in Pylon by William Faulkner.

Or the crowning achievement of New Journalism in The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, dissecting the psychology of a brave man like Chuck Yeager, whose military duty was pushing the envelope of the first jet aircraft through the sound barrier and into the stratosphere, paving the way for America’s first astronauts.

I guess I could drop in between the literary debut of James Salter with The Hunters, drawing directly on his experiences as a jet fighter pilot in the Korean War, cutting through the myth with prose as cold and lethal as the skies he actually flew in.

But comparing pilots with idiots, even if it rhymes, does not make the cut. Especially when amateurs are involved, looking for a viral picture for Instagram or helmet GoPro footage for TikTok, trying to emulate with a do-it-yourself weekend project the cold geometry of the movie star Tom Cruise jumping with a motorcycle off a Norwegian fjord—a maneuver forged through relentless rehearsals and obsessive skydives.

Add to this fatal equation a pair of minor-league television celebrities and anonymous adrenaline junkies who mix climbing cliff walls with BASE jumping, and then you get not the real stuff, but the real pulp instead—the cum shot of a bloody wingsuit. That’s a real story. Don’t you believe me? Get Netflix and watch To the Max.

Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan that “truth is always strange, stranger than fiction; if it could be told, how much would novels gain by the exchange!” With the screenwriter being a solid guy with a proven track record, I guess family constraints made it impossible to illustrate the story of a core group trapped in alpha-male mind frames until their luck ran out. So he wrote a morbid, documentary-style version of Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None. And the real story tragically unfolded in the heights of selfie mass hysteria, almost mixed up with the narcissistic idiots of many genders and tribes, tripping at modest heights, but sufficient enough to break their necks. Youth is wasted on the young.

Because the script refuses to engage with the twisted psychology of the call of the void, the middle-aged men simply keep dying paying homage to the first casualty, one by one. By the third death, the film becomes a tragicomedy. As is real life indeed. Watch the raw and unvarnished reality of how quickly one of them crashes against the merlon of a Spanish castle.

I’m not taking sides either. Back in the day, I was young and reckless too. As soon as my father could no longer report a teenage runaway to the police, I served two years in the Airborne. Skydiving was wildly fun, and the propellers of the Caribou on a runway made me cry of sheer joy, anticipating the stairways to heaven of that long-winged bird before a high-altitude jump.

A few years ago, one of my brothers-in-arms was still serving and shared his experiences with me about BASE jumping. Alas, military guys never gamble and follow procedure and rules, and fortunately his name did not come up in the Wikipedia list of fatalities due to wingsuit flying. A list full of middle-aged men, except two daring amazons. Draw your own conclusions.

What I did to drive my own call of t