The Bridge: documentary explores suicide at the Golden Gate

in TV by griffn — August 13, 2009 at 9:00 am | 0 comments

the_bridge_movie_300 In 2004, a small documentary crew spent a year at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco filming suicide jumpers through long distance lenses on the shore below. The result was The Bridge, a fascinating but frustratingly inadequate film.

The opening sequence follows people on the bridge– some jogging, some talking on the phone, some pacing nervously, some staring off in the distance. Then an older man in a red hat climbs over the rail, stands on the edge for a moment and jumps. The camera follows him down into the water as his arms flail and his hat flies off. The rest of the film shows us images of people on the bridge in their last moments of life, as still-grieving loved ones talk about the circumstances that put them up there.

The Bridge focuses almost entirely on these personal stories, which can at times be compelling. One man survives the fall. Another man watches and snaps pictures as a nearby woman climbs over the railing; he pulls her back over to safety. But the stories often run long and run together, sometimes weaving confusingly within each other. At times, I couldn’t tell which loved one belonged to which victim. Eventually, it feels like a parade of nondescript jumpers with similar stories of severe mental illness and isolation.

But where The Bridge really misses the mark is that it never examines its main character– the bridge itself. There is no narrator, no expert testimony (on the bridge or the psychology of the jumpers), no overarching narrative, and none of the incredible history of suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge. Immediately after it ended, I pulled up the DVD extras looking for answers to the dozens of questions I was left with. How many people have jumped off the bridge? What’s being done to prevent or discourage jumpers? Why don’t they just put up a barrier?

Like the film, the DVD extras had no answers, but they did point me to the 2003 New Yorker article that inspired the film– “Jumpers: The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge.” It filled in all the obvious details the film missed and then some:

Unlike the Bay Bridge—or most bridges, for that matter—the Golden Gate has a footpath adjacent to a low exterior railing. “Jumping from the bridge is seen as sure, quick, clean, and available—which is the most potent factor,” Dr. Jerome Motto, a local psychiatrist and suicide expert, says. “It’s like having a loaded gun on your kitchen table.”

Almost everyone in the Bay Area knows someone who has jumped, and it is perhaps not surprising that the most common fear among San Franciscans is gephyrophobia, the fear of crossing bridges. Yet the locals take a peculiar pride in the bridge’s notoriety. “What makes the bridge so popular,” Gladys Hansen, the city’s unofficial historian, says, citing the ten million tourists who visit the bridge each year, “is that it’s a monument, a monument to death.”

There have actually been several campaigns over the decades to build a barrier on the bridge. And of all the would-be jumpers who have been talked back off the rail, 94 percent are either still alive or have died of natural causes. You would never know these kinds of details from watching The Bridge.

the_bridge_movie_200 In the end, the film’s pattern of “person paces bridge, loved one tells story, person jumps” becomes an exercise in unintentional voyeurism, if only because it’s ultimately pointless. If the filmmakers’ intention was to draw attention to mental health and suicide prevention issues, they seem to have overlooked one glaring problem: the actions and methods that were used in these cases all failed. We need a narrator or a group of experts to tell us what works, and what can work specifically to prevent suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge. Without that, and without any meaningful examination of the bridge itself, we are left with little more than fascinating video of people pacing the bridge and a morbid guessing game: will they or won’t they?