The Bridge

Due to popular demand I screened the film The Bridge in the last session of one of my courses. Admittedly it is odd to show a film about people who commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge but as the course was about madness and media, the film was an appropriate culminating moment for the course. Also in another course (about documentary) a student showed a clip of the film in her presentation when she was discussing contemporary nonfiction films that explore taboos (the student also showed Zoo, which is "about" bestiality). The Bridge may have left the cinemas over a year ago (and I don't remember it lasting very long) but it is having a very strong after-life.

The film is an eerie aesthetic delight; it encourages the oxymoronic imagination in any attempt to describe the film (gorgeous horror, horrific beauty and so on). One sees the Golden Gate bridge from a multitude of perspectives. In some shots, the bridge becomes shrouded in a cloak made of thick fog. In others, the bridge appears recently polished, shockingly bright, multiplying light. A feat of humanity in its engineering and construction, something that connects two shores once impossibly far apart, but a deathly object that lurks in the unconscious, haunting us.

The bridge, like the camera, takes on a dispassionate stance toward those who climb over the 4-foot guard rail onto the ledge. The film, like the camera, doesn't seem to care if you are a German tourist taking photos or a young American suffering from bipolar disorder with constant suicide ideation. The film crew trained two cameras onto the bridge for a year waiting to capture jumps/falls. Yet at the same time the crew tried to prohibit suicide attempts as they always called authorities whenever they saw someone go toward the railing and begin to climb over. The film only shows two jumps/falls--one in its complete trajectory, done gracefully, and begun by a backwards leap from atop the railing and another where the leap's velocity is too fast for the camera to keep up with. I don't want to indict the film for the emotional distance it keeps, but there is no doubt that the film indulges in the aestheticization of suicide itself, allowing the audience to understand why such a location is chosen in order to dramatize and heighten the event and render suicide into an act of performance as well as desperation.

The filmmakers are not present in the film: they are not seen or heard and there is no voice-over instructing the viewer on how to comprehend the footage. Instead much of the film is narrated by friends, families, and witnesses of the suicide victims through the form of interviews (again we don't hear the questions that were asked by the filmmaker). The interviews are filmed with the subjects talking straight into the camera (not at the interviewer) and the camera never moves in for an extreme close up, keeping a respectful distance. The friends and families are also dispassionate, never weeping, though they do wonder what if anything else could have been done. In sum, they seem remarkably philosophical and appear to be already processed by grief counsellors: they understand why the person committed suicide in most cases and do not implicate themselves or their own attitudes as causal. Often they sound incredibly selfish and fail to rethink the dynamics and situation of the suffering of the victim. One interview stood out in the honesty of his contradictory response: a close friend of Gene's (the fellow with the graceful jump/fall) spoke of being angry at him, yet at the same time he began to shed tears, allowing one to witness the range of emotions he felt from sorrow to rejection. There is a general denial of mourning in the film, and with somber background music that begins to suggest an interiority of the bridge itself, the film indulges in melancholy and shock. Again this is not an indictment of its strategy, and I appreciated how sad the film was, and yet it never made me want to cry.

For me the film has two heroes: one is a photographer and the other is a young man who survives the jump/fall. The photographer is brazenly forthright when he discusses in a voice-over beginning to take photos of a young woman who climbs over the railing. He admits how he continues to shoot, transfixed by the event, and feeling as if he is lucky to have the opportunity to document such an event. As he is behind a camera, he is unable to acknowledge how the event before him is actually taking place--it becomes representational. For a few seconds he is unable to recognize that a life is at risk and he has a duty to intervene. He stands in, in a sense, for the filmmaker, who also is drawn to witness the horror without stopping it. The photographer's sense of reality though does return to him, and we see him grab the young woman and drag her back over the railing and pin her to the ground. Though he recounts how the young woman stares at him without any gratefulness when she is taken away by police, he has done the right thing.

The other hero in the film is Kevin. As soon as he leaves the bridge he realizes that he doesn't want to die, and in the four seconds that it takes to travel the 220 feet (at 72 mph) he arranges his body so as to have the least impact when he hits the water. His interview is riveting and we can begin to see and hear how happy and fortunate he is to be alive now. When he is bobbing at the water after making his way up to the surface, unable to scream for help, seals come to his rescue and support him. Though Kevin views this as God helping him, I see this as seals themselves coming to his rescue in a way that his family never did. In my imagination the seals save him because they sense his will to live (I have always loved seals). They realize, like the photographer, that life must always be saved even if it is a life that seems to promise much pain.