(The following review features frank discussion and description of suicide. Please read with discretion.)
By 2004, the Golden Gate Bridge sported over 1200 known suicides since its construction in May of 1937.¹ Once holding the distinction of the most popular place on the world to commit suicide, it is the Golden Gate Bridge that is the center of Eric Steel’s evocative 2006 documentary, The Bridge, which chronicles many of the deaths that occurred during 2004. What brings Steel’s documentary to the forefront – and what had ignited controversy around this project – is the inclusion of live footage of many of the victims of this documentary plunging to their deaths.
Steel doesn’t shy away from the gut-wrenching reality of witnessing suicide, as it bookends the film. After 365 days of near constant filming and accumulating over 10,000 hours of footage, the crew managed to film 23 of the 24 identified deaths that occurred on the bridge in 2004. To do so, he misled the city regarding the subject matter of the film, claiming the intent was “to capture the powerful, spectacular intersection of monument and nature that takes place every day at the Golden Gate Bridge.”² I use the word “misled” because he’s not exactly lying; the interviews of grieving family and friends are interspersed with deceivingly serene shots of the bridge and the flowing water beneath it. It is a testament to the stability the human race attempts to erect over the frothing, chaotic act of nature churning beneath, only a five-second fall away.
While our society has come a long way, suicide remains a taboo subject around the world, including the western world. Steel does not shy away from the horrific effects of suicide through not only his footage but the interviews provided by the families and friends of the same people who were recorded jumping to their deaths. Some survivors of the victims speak about their anger and distress. One friend of one of the jumpers conducts her account anonymously, recounting how she turned her friend away when he beseeched her support in his time of need, thinking it wasn’t her right to intrude on his privacy. He killed himself the next day. Her anonymity is a statement of her shame. “I will never again not intrude,” she says, cast in shadow, “I will never again not do something because I’m afraid they might be embarrassed.”
Others interviewed, such as the parents of Philip Manikow, who jumped off the bridge in May of 2004, revisit the lives of their loved ones with an almost surreal sense of understanding. Philip’s parents recount his difficulties in life and the peace he found in arranging his escape from his inner prison through suicide, and how their attempts to help him get better evolved into just hope for the best without great intervention. “Imagine what this looks like to people,” his mother says. “They probably look at us and say, ‘What kind of mother and father were they?” But the tone of the documentary is not one that shames or passes judgment on the members of these victims’ lives, regardless of the role they played. Their interviews are met with stark, objective honesty that sheds more light on the helplessness of those who have lost their loved ones. As a viewer, it is difficult to judge them for their actions or inactions, as the final choice in any of these cases wasn’t theirs to make.
When the documentary was released, many people were disgusted and offended by the use of footage suicides from the bridge. Steel admits that his team was trained in suicide prevention and called emergency services when possible. Although the deaths captured by camera happened too quickly to prevent, the crew managed to intervene a few times, preventing six suicides over the course of the year,³ and documenting another where an onlooker pulled a woman to safety before she could jump. For many, that won’t be enough. For many, this documentary would border on a snuff film, capturing the desperate moments before a depressed person’s final act to escape their pain. For others, they may find the footage morbidly essential to the message that Steel is trying to convey. After years of over a thousand souls leaping from the bridge, suicide barriers have never been installed, although there has been a push for them as early as 1977. As of a study in 1993, over 50% of responders opposed the building of a suicide barrier. In 1995, as the thousandth death approached, the media rallied in excitement. The deaths became a form of entertainment, macabre interest that no barrier could hold.
Who can, then, really say whether Steel’s movie is in good taste. Perhaps, it is exactly what we need to see. The documentary is not exhibited as a form of entertainment, but rather an honest experience where we, as the viewer, become onlookers to living, breathing human beings as they plunge to their deaths. While evocative and brutal, perhaps if we see these suicide victims as the real people they are and witness the grieving of the families they leave behind, they will cease being ticks in an ever-growing competition of death, and the siren call of the Golden Gate Bridge will be less romantic. In a modern time of live action death, videos of people shot by police, and dying refugees bouncing around social media, one wonders if we will be desensitized to the suffering of others. Or, perhaps, being witness to these atrocities will make them real to us, as they are no longer simply second-hand accounts or newspaper articles, but instead names and tear-stained faces that use a television or computer screen to drill their desperation into our souls.
As one might be disturbed at watching a lion take down an innocent gazelle in a nature show, it is natural to be horrified by a film crew documenting the point of human death. Whether it can be argued that any of these deaths could have, somehow, been prevented by willing witnesses, it also begs the simple reality that these people would have killed themselves regardless if a camera was turned on them.
The Bridge may disturb some and anger others in its use of this footage. But who is to blame? Those behind the camera, or those who continue to foster a society where some people’s only choice is to throw themselves into the freezing waters below to escape it?
In Tad Friend’s New Yorker article, “Jumpers,” he quotes Ken Baldwin, one of the few suicide jumpers who survived the treacherous fall. In those few seconds between the bridge and water he recounts, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.” This isn’t an uncommon thought process for some who have survived suicide attempts; others, however, attempt multiple times before finding success. For them, it is the only way to find peace, the only way to end a cycle of suffering that they feel too lonely, isolated, or too helpless to combat.
The Bridge is bookended by the death of Gene Sprague, a man who the filmmaker watched walk along the bridge for 93 minutes in the normal manner of a tourist before quickly jumping to his death. He was always depressed, characterized by those who knew him as dramatic by his constant mentions of suicide. His friend Caroline Pressley muses at the choice of the bridge at the end of the film, wondering why Gene chose such a location. With an almost eerie wisdom, she states, “Maybe he just wanted to fly one time.”
While the integrity of the filmmakers for their choices might be questionable, it stands that The Bridge does not glorify the Golden Gate Bridge as a monument of death, but instead successfully humanizes those who choose it to end their lives at its orange railings. It shows us the struggles of not only the victims, but the helpless loss of those left behind, and the confusion and regret that they all experience in wishing they could have changed the outcome. The movie challenges the viewer to empathize with those who make this impossible choice and those who could not or did not stop it, and does it in a way that does not reek of cheap thrills or exploitation. Instead, it gives the viewer a haunting sensation of having been complicit in the acts they have witnessed and leaves us with a very simple question: How can we never again not intrude?
If you are considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255 for support or text START to 741-741.
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