The Precarious Ledge

I wouldn't look down if I were you.

Closely related to Lover's Ledge (but without the love), Precarious Ledge is precisely what it sounds like. It's a situation in which the characters have no choice but to navigate a dangerous ledge. This seemingly foolish route of travel can be taken for a variety of reasons. The Protagonist may be running away from The Syndicate or escaping The Men in Black, Climbing the Cliffs of Insanity, or exploring the Temple of Doom. But eventually, they will come to a point or seeming dead-end where the only way forward involves a high, ridiculously thin path upon which to traverse and advance.

While Lover's Ledge is particular to the escape by an adulterous sneakster, Precarious Ledge is more general; it can include everything from rocky cliff ledges to shiny white ledges in a futuristic facility, from the lip of a volcano to the edge of a high snowy mountain pass.

Perhaps the most defining feature of this trope is when the character will have his or her back pressed tightly against the structure as they move sideways very slowly.

Another way this trope is frequently used is when a character is about to potentially commit suicide by jumping. A character will threaten to jump off the ledge of a building, bridge, or other high structure.

No matter how this trope is used, there's always one common factor. When this trope occurs in some cinematic sequence, these scenes convey tension to the audience. A fear of heights, and indeed of falling from such heights, is quite common amongst people in general, and thus this trope plays on both fears. A little Plummet Perspective camerawork, and the whole thing just comes together so nicely.

Note that, when used in video games, it's not enough for the character to just be able to run along ledges with ease. Traveling along the ledge has to actually be precarious, meaning that the distance is high enough to be lethal or extremely dangerous, or there is Plummet Perspective. Bonus points if the character's animations reflect their fear in being on such a dangerous ledge.

Compare Talking Down the Suicidal when a character stands on a ledge to threaten suicide. Contrast No Escape but Down, where the heroes must jump into the unknown rather than get from Point A to Point B.

Also compare Climb, Slip, Hang, Climb, Literal Cliffhanger, and Balcony Escape.

---

Examples:

Anime

• The climax of Doraemon: Great Adventure in the Antarctic Kachi Kochi sees Doraemon stuck on one such ledge, in the middle of a ruined city currently being destroyed by the eldritch monster Blizarga. Luckily the gang arrived in the nick of time to grab him just as the whole ledge breaks apart.

Comic Books

• In the bonus V for Vendetta story "Vertigo," a Secret Police officer forces an innocent man to walk the window ledge all the way around the building, telling him if he makes it, he can go free. The man falls but V saves him, and then makes the officer walk the ledge, on which he's just happened to drop a Banana Peel.
• Wonder Woman (1987): When Widow Sazia's trio of superpowered assassins catch up to Paulie Longo while the skeevy mob boss is trying to hire Diana he escapes out the window of the office building they're in and starts trying to scoot away along the ledge.
• In The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones #9, Indy has to climb along an extremely narrow ledge at the top of a skyscraper to intercept a gang of thieves who absconding out the window of the display with the golden idol he has just recovered.

Film — Live-Action

• 1408: Mike tries to escape The Room by climbing out onto the thin, windy ledge and shimmying into the next room over's window, only to discover that there are no other windows, only an infinite sheer brick wall. He turns back, ending up in a Literal Cliffhanger thanks to the ghost of a woman committing suicide by throwing herself out the window.
• Accidental Hero: John, after taking credit for a rescue he didn't actually do, goes out on a ledge and is contemplating suicide. Bernie, the actual rescuer, goes out to talk him down. They both agree that John is more the "hero-type" than Bernie is, so Bernie lets John take the credit both for the original rescue and for talking him off the ledge.
• In The Bourne Identity Jason Bourne escapes the American Embassy by navigating a ledge.
• The second segment in the Stephen King anthology film Cat's Eye, "The Ledge", is built around this trope. A man is kidnapped by his lover's powerful and jealous husband for planning to run away with his wife. The husband makes the protagonist an offer: if he can navigate the minuscule ledge outside his top floor penthouse all the way around the building, he will divorce his wife, if not, he will frame the man for drug charges.
• In Chronicle the boys entertain themselves by sitting on extremely high ledges without fear. This is on purpose, of course, as the boys' powers have made them feel fearless. Which comes back to bite them.
• The Couch Trip: In the opening scene has mental patient John Burns (Dan Aykroyd) out on the ledge of a mental institution, but he's not jumping just admiring the scenery. But when his therapist shows up to try to talk him down, he acts like he really is going to jump.
• Played with in Crocodile Dundee II, when the titular character talks down a yuppie who is about to jump. Then, suddenly played straight when he himself almost falls off the edge. This is actually the scare the yuppie needs to change his mind. Played for Laughs at first when the yuppie thinks Dundee is there to talk him down, when he actually just wants to get past because he's out for a stroll. On the ledge.
• In The Day of the Beast the main characters, to avoid the police and possibly from Satan banging at the door after their summoning, choose to escape by climbing out a window and they dangerously hang from the Edificio Carrión's Schweppes sign.
• In Gambit, Harry Deane has to negotiate the outside wall of The Savoy across a narrow ledge twice. The first time, spiky metal decorations claim his pants.
• Played for laughs in The Great Race. Henry Goodbody, the editor of the New York Sentinel newspaper, sends his assistant Frisbee out on the ledge of a skyscraper to retrieve a messenger pigeon with information about the progress of the title race. The assistant almost falls but manages to retrieve the pigeon.
  Goodbody: Frisbee, next time be more careful. If you're falling, let go of the bird.
• In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Thorin and Company's route through the Misty Mountains includes a narrow trail along the side of a sheer cliff hundreds of feet high. They nearly lose half the Company when the stone-giants appear and start throwing rocks around, and part of the trail collapses as a result.
• In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, after the mine-cart chase scene, Indy and his companions wind up on a narrow ledge that runs past the shaft's opening. Water cascading from the mine causes parts of the cliff wall to cave in or be penetrated by broken wooden beams, forcing the three further along the ledge to avoid the debris.
• In The Killer That Stalked New York, Matt tries to evade capture by the police by climbing out of a window onto one of these rather than go down the stairs were they will surely be waiting for him. Sheila goes after him, but she's so delirious from her smallpox infection that she's unable to get off the ledge safely. Dr. Wood has to save her by getting her off it so she doesn't fall to her death.
• In King Kong (2005), the landing party gets caught up in a sauropod stampede in a narrow canyon. This becomes even more dangerous when the canyon empties out onto a cliff-side ledge, which begins crumbling under the massive weight of the panicked dinosaur herd.
• In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Fellowships must traverse a narrow ledge at The Pass of Caradhras through the snow, even as Saruman tries to bring them down with his foul chanting. They eventually decide it's too dangerous and take the route through Moria.
• The film Man on a Ledge is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The Protagonist spends a great deal of time standing on the ledge of a building over a city.
• Subverted in The Matrix. Neo is instructed by Morpheus to edge along a tiny ledge outside the windows of a skyscraper to escape The Men in Black. He chokes and gets captured instead.
• Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears: When she is almost caught searching Sheikh Kahlil's room, Phryne hides by climbing on to the narrow ledge outside his window and pressing herself against the wall.
• In Mission: Impossible Ethan walks across a ledge on a massive glass building.
• The Naked Gun: Drebin escapes a burning room from a window onto a ledge filled with anatomically correct male and female statues. Hilarity Ensues.
• The Hong Kong action film Tian Di have the protagonist (played by Andy Lau) escaping the Shanghai police after breaking out his cell through a window, and balancing on a ledge outside to avoid detection.
• Undercover Brother. While infiltrating the MegaCorp Multinational Inc., the title character must make his way along a ledge high up on the outside of a building in order to reach a room where he can download information from a computer.

Literature

• The Stephen King short story "The Ledge" from the collection Night Shift (which was adapted in Cat's Eye, as seen above) is about a mob boss who forces his wife's lover to circumnavigate a 5-inch ledge surrounding a multistory building, saying he'll let the couple go free if he makes it. When the man succeeds, the mob boss tell him the wife is now indeed free, but also dead; the lover manages to overpower the boss's bodyguard and forces the boss out onto the ledge. The lover then waits for him with a loaded gun, saying that he has been known to welch on a wager.
• Eden Green has the main character and her hated enemy walk along narrow ledges with no handrails, eventually resulting in a long fall.
• In The Truth, fledgling newspaper reporter William de Worde climbs out onto a ledge to interview a man threatening to jump. Only to discover the man is a steeplejack who does this stunt for fun, and who ends up rescuing William.
• The short story "Contents of the Dead Man's Pockets" is about a man trapped on a ledge after going out the window to retrieve a post-it note.
• In the Robert A. Heinlein story "Ordeal in Space", a former astronaut who had accidentally been set adrift in space is grounded by severe agoraphobia. He hears a kitten trapped on a ledge and nerves himself up to go out and rescue it, which cures his agoraphobia.

Live-Action TV

• 2point4 Children had an episode where Bill and Rona visit Bill's aunt at her seventeenth-floor apartment, only to discover that she has become stuck on a ledge after climbing out to feed the pigeons. She threatens to jump if they call the fire brigade (believing that the authorities would have her sent to a retirement home), so Bill and Rona go out to rescue her - then the ledge nearest the window crumbles, leaving them stranded. Thankfully, the whole building is so poorly constructed that Bill breaks through the wall when she stumbles backwards.
• In one episode of Adam-12 Reed and Malloy encounter a jumper on one of these. Malloy goes out on the ledge to pull him back in. The sergeant gives him a massive chewing-out for this.
• In The Adventures of Superman episode "The Human Bomb", Bet-A-Million Butler drags Lois out onto the Planet building's ledge, which seems barely a foot wide.
• All in the Family: In "Archie's Unemployment Story," Archie goes onto a ledge to help talk down a suicidal job applicant named Frank – a highly-educated financial analyst who had been unemployed for three years – after Archie had been hired over Frank for a job as a janitor. Archie tells him to keep looking for work and that he has a lot to live for. In the end, the police help Frank into the building (and likely get him mental health counseling) ... while they completely forget about Archie. Uh-oh!
• The Boy Meets World slasher episode "And Then There Was Shawn" has the second-floor library window, which is used for the final two victims, Angela and Jack. When Eric and Feffy are killed, Jack tries to kill himself by jumping out of said window when he thinks he won't be able to afford his rent for their apartment and could face the prospect of being evicted. Angela stops him in time and reminds him Shawn is still his roommate and they could still afford the rent. However, before Jack and Angela can go back inside, the killer shoves them out the window and both are sent falling to their deaths, just before Cory, Topanga and Shawn confront him. Luckily, it was All Just a Dream.
• Henry Morgan of Forever climbs down onto a narrow ledge under a bridge in "Look Before You Leap" to investigate a death everyone else is ready to write off as suicide. As a medical examiner, he goes into gruesome detail about exactly how a person dies if they go into the water from such a height. He does find the evidence he was after, that the victim was lured onto the ledge by a colleague claiming he was going to jump, to get her to try to talk him out of it and he then forced her off.
• In Frasier, Frasier's devious agent, Bébé, fakes a suicide attempt from a high publicly visible ledge to force Frasier to get out there with her and "talk her out of it". As this plays out in front of a crowd and TV news crews, it secures the radio shrink greater publicity and a massive pay rise. He does not appreciate the risk factor involved.
• I Love Lucy: In "Lucy Meets Superman" Lucy dresses up as Superman for little Ricky's birthday party after promising that Superman would show up but then it looked like he might not. She crawls out on the ledge of the building to come in through the window but the "real" Superman ^note George Reeves from The Adventures of Superman does show up while she's out there. She gets her cape stuck on a drainpipe so she's stuck out there in the rain. Superman goes out on the ledge and helps her get unstuck.
  Ricky: Lucy, of all the crazy things you done in the fifteen years we been married this is —
  Superman: Wait a minute, Ricardo! Do you mean to say that you've been married to her for fifteen years?
  Ricky: Yeah, fifteen years.
  Superman: And they call me Superman!
• A gag in Rutland Weekend Television involved a tough no-nonsense New York cop terrifying a would-be suicide off the ledge and back into the building by threatening to arrest them for waste of police time and possible littering. The cop draws his pistol and points it at the suicide, meaningfully, scaring them off the ledge.
• Sledge Hammer!: Sledge loses patience and fires five shots at a would-be jumper's feet. The bullets from the Amigo knock large pieces off the ledge and scare the suicide into giving up the attempt.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine uses the same "narrow ledge inside a cavern" set for this in several episodes.
  • In "Move Along Home" getting past one of these that's being shaken by an earthquake is the final challenge in the Wadis' board game. They fall off into the abyss, but fortunately you can't really die in the game and they appear back in the real world.
  • In "The Sword of Kahless" Jadzia, Worf, and Kor encounter a narrow ledge while working their way to the surface from the Hur'q treasure room. Kor falls down but grabs hold of the edge, and the others pull him back up.
• In the Switch (1975) episode "The Late Show Murders," Mac is snooping in an office when the owner almost walks in on him. Mac has to climb out the window and stand on the ledge, dozens of feet above the ground, while he waits for the coast to be clear.
• WKRP in Cincinnati: When Les is Mistaken for Gay he decides to jump off the ledge of the building. Herb climbs out the window to talk him down, and when Les gets a call from the person who had mistaken him for gay apologizing, Les now wants to live but is too petrified to move. They manage to bring him in, but Herb falls off and gets injured even though he falls into a Fireman's Safety Net (offscreen).
• In an episode of Yellowjackets a team member takes a step backwards from a ledge and falls to her death after being threatened by another team member.

Tabletop Games

• 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons module I12 Egg of the Phoenix. In the section "The Caves of Time", the PCs must climb up the inside of a huge pit using a set of narrow stairs, with several monster attacks to keep things interesting.

Video Games

• Tomb Raider: Lara Croft has to do this quite a few times. In Tomb Raider (2013), she has to move across a ledge at least once on a cliff face with her back to the cliff. Behind her, structures are being destroyed in a violent wind storm.
• Faith in Mirror's Edge slows down long enough to creep across ledges on the rooftops. These short sections come with Plummet Perspective too.
• In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty Raiden has to press his back against the walls of the Big Shell structures on narrow ledges. At one point he even has to crouch and move simultaneously. In the same portion of the game, a soldier pees over the edge of the building as Raiden eases across the very narrow ledge right underneath.
• In Metal Gear Solid Disc 2, there is a blast furnace section. You have to cross a ledge on the wall, and there's a piece of crane-like machinery moving around that will hit you and make you fall into the open furnace— As a bonus, you can actually shoot the thing down before crossing it, not that your various Mission Control tells you that like they usually do. This is also the only ledge where there is an actual danger of falling.
• In one part of Half-Life, during the "Surface Tension" section, you have to fight Marines along the side of a cliff face. It becomes extremely narrow in places and can be nerve-wracking for people with a fear of heights.
• In The Last of Us the trio Joel, Tess and Ellie go a short way around the edge of a sky scraper on a ledge. The segment of ledge lasts only a moment, and the ledge is a foot thick, but they stick closely to the wall anyway.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker has a few of these, which you have to get past with the "sidle" command. You're fine as long as you don't let up the 'A' button.
• In the casual game Escape the Museum, the ledge between two windows provides a route from one room to another. Subverted when you manage to raise a window-washers' platform from below and cross on that instead of the ledge.
• The Matrix: Path of Neo despite using the footage from The Matrix inverts Neo's decision and lets you cross the ledge, when you do it opens up the rest of the level.
• Parodied in The LEGO Movie Videogame: several levels have precarious ledges that most characters will refuse to go near. The only one who can cross them is Blind Seer Vitruvius, who can't see how dangerous they are.
• Shadow Guardian, an Uncharted clone, have your character Jason often standing on ledges on high walls to trigger hidden switches.
• A number of times in the Uncharted games.
• When you exit the hydro dam at the back in The Long Dark, the only way back is to cross the dam on a thin ledge.
• Submerged takes place in a drowned city after climate change has flooded the world. You have to climb the buildings' exteriors to find supplies, and crumbling ledges form a large portion of the handholds for this purpose.

Web Original

• Twitch Plays Pokémon has this as a recurring problem for the player characters, as a single down input will make them jump a ledge, potentially resetting a lot of progress.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Serpent's Pass is a long, narrow ledge across the body of water separating the main land from the city of Ba Sing Se. Because the Gaang and a pair of newlyweds had problems getting tickets for the ferry, they went there instead. Not only is navigating it already hard, the pass apparently got its name from the giant water serpent that lives there, trying to knock people off the ledge.
• A Cat in Paris: Nico makes a career of walking along incredibly thin ledges. At some point, he even saves a potted plant from falling off a window sill without so much as a stumble.
• Futurama: In the first Christmas episode, Fry buys Leela a bird. It escapes its cage and flies off. He chases after it, ending up along a building edge, then dangling from the numbers of a gigantic digital clock.
• Jonny Quest: The episode "The Devil's Tower". During their escape the Quest team must ease their way along a narrow trail in a cliff with the mad war criminal Von Duffel bombing them with grenades from the air.
• Kaeloo: Played for Laughs. Stumpy is asked to walk across a thin beam and balance. He's absolutely terrified... but the beam is on the ground, with his own stupidity leading him to believe that it is "too high".
• The Pink Panther: “Pinkfinger” does this at one point… and suffers a Banana Peel hit in the process. Also, when he falls off the ledge and into a garbage can, the peel lands square on top of him.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "On the Wings of Keeradaks", Echo's escape route from the city of Purkoll, built on pillars that lift it high above the ground, involves the team having to traverse a long, narrow pipe suspended between two buildings, which is even more dangerous than the usual examples of this trope because there's not even anything to lean against. When the team is cornered by battle droids while halfway across, they're forced to hitch a ride on some of the planet's native Giant Flyers to escape.
• Star Wars Resistance: In "The High Tower", while fleeing stormtroopers, Kaz winds up in a situation where he has to traverse several narrow ledges on the outside of a tower.

---