That Beautiful but Deadly San Francisco Span
“The Bridge,” an eerie and indelible documentary about suicide, juxtaposes transcendent beauty and personal tragedy as starkly as any film I can recall. Throughout the movie, inspired by “Jumpers,” Tad Friend’s 2003 article in The New Yorker, the Golden Gate Bridge shimmers like a pathway to heaven. Photographed from multiple perspectives, at all times of the day and in all kinds of weather, the bridge looms as an unearthly monument that seems to float in space, especially when ringed with fog through which the spires of San Francisco peek.
The Golden Gate, however, is also a legendary point of departure for people determined to end their lives. And as the camera fixes its gaze on the structure, it captures people leaping to their deaths. The director Eric Steel and his crew spent all of 2004 filming the bridge during daylight hours and caught most of the two-dozen suicides that occurred that year.
Mr. Steel has compared these images to Bruegel’s painting “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus”; because the fatal leaps go almost unnoticed by passers-by, the analogy sticks.
“The Bridge” juxtaposes breathtaking scenes of the Golden Gate and its environs, shot in digital video, with the harrowing personal stories of family members and friends of those who jumped. Because their testimony is remarkably free of religious cant and of cozy New Age bromides, this is one of the most moving and brutally honest films about suicide ever made.
There is little hand-wringing and no accusatory finger-wagging. A close friend of one jumper worries that the antidepressants she gave him without a prescription, and that made him sleepless, may have contributed to his suicide. But her account suggests it would have happened sooner or later.
“The Bridge” begins and ends with the story of Gene Sprague, a long-haired 34-year-old rocker-type who was periodically photographed prowling around the bridge before he made his final leap, a dramatic backward dive. Mr. Sprague left his friends pondering whether he heard a message left on his answering machine offering him a job managing a video-game store.
Another jumper, 44-year-old Lisa Smith, was given a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia while a teenager and is remembered by her family as struggling with severe mental illness for most of her life. Shortly before her suicide, all her teeth, which had rotted from a combination of medication and an addiction to cola, had to be removed, and that may have been the trigger.
For all its discussion of mental illness, “The Bridge” is metaphysically rather than clinically oriented. No mental health professionals are on hand to talk about suicide. The closest the movie comes to offering a case history is the story of Kevin Hines, a young man with bipolar disorder who decided midway in his leap that he wanted to live and arranged his body into a sitting position before he hit the water. He survived with severe damage to his lower back. Mr. Hines recalls standing on the bridge crying for 40 minutes before making the jump. The only person to approach him was a German tourist, oblivious to his tears, who asked him to take her snapshot.
In the language of Wallace Stevens, “death is the mother of beauty.” The fact that so many people choose an earthly paradise in which to end their lives reinforces the film’s intimation that people’s hopes of ending psychic suffering by moving to a more pleasant place may be futile. If suicidal impulses are your demons, they will probably accompany you to the place of salvation.
“The Bridge” raises inevitable questions about the filmmaker’s motives and methods and whether he could have tried harder to save lives. It raises age-old moral and aesthetic questions about the detachment from one’s surroundings that gazing through the camera’s lens tends to produce. Those questions remain to be addressed in an article, not a review.
Strictly as a film, this is an impressive piece of work, although its musical soundtrack (by Alex Heffes), while somber, doesn’t measure up to its imagery.
The sadness and fatalism the film can instill are perhaps best expressed by a surviving loved one’s description of a jumper: “Some people say the body is a temple. He thought his body was a prison. In his mind, he knew he was loved, that he had everything and could do anything. And yet he felt trapped, and that was the only way he could get free.” (NYT)
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