  Many and very general arguments indicate that the event horizon behaves as a
stretched membrane. We explore this analogy by associating the Gregory-Laflamme
instability of black strings with a classical membrane instability known as
Rayleigh-Plateau instability. We show that the key features of the black string
instability can be reproduced using this viewpoint. In particular, we get good
agreement for the threshold mode in all dimensions and exact agreement for
large spacetime dimensionality. The instability timescale is also well
described within this model, as well as the dimensionality dependence. We
conjecture that general non-axisymmetric perturbations are stable. We further
argue that the instability of ultra-spinning black holes follows from this
model.
