See You On The Other Side

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The New York Sun

Any photographer that has ever visited it will agree that the Golden Gate Bridge is the Marlene Dietrich of municipal architecture — no matter where you put the camera, it simply doesn’t have a bad angle. Filmmaker Eric Steel’s new documentary, “The Bridge,” begins with a series of postcard perfect views that celebrate the Golden Gate’s unusually subtle and tasteful art deco lines and almost supernaturally perfect union with the nature and weather surrounding it.

But when the camera settles into a classic beauty shot looking north at the Marin Headlands from Golden Gate Park, something happens that transforms the bridge into an icon exerting a very different magnetism than the one tourists have flocked to for decades. Clearly discernible in the choppy grey tide between Golden Gate Bridge’s two towers is a small but distinctive splash — the first of many in this harrowing, tragic, and deeply disturbing film. Using footage from cameras continuously covering the bridge itself and interviews with family members and witnesses, Mr. Steel’s “The Bridge” documents a single year in the Golden Gate Bridge’s reign as the suicide capital of the world.

The Golden Gate Bridge has united the city of San Francisco with adjacent Marin County for nearly 70 years. Designer Joseph Strauss was safety obsessed and his creation’s perilous four-year construction had an unusually low fatality rate for a project of its magnitude. But within three months of the span’s completion, the Golden Gate Bridge hosted its first suicide.

The bridge’s walkway, with its low railing and adjacent ledge-like beam running the full length of the span, looms 250 feet above an underwater channel bottoming out more than 300 feet below the surface of the San Francisco bay. Between the four-second fall’s 75 mph impact and the corresponding 40- to 50-foot plunge into the Bay’s ice cold, violent currents, a “jumper” from the Golden Gate is almost assured of a one-way trip. Since its opening in 1937, the bridge has racked up more than 1,200 of these fatal leaps.

For the entirety of 2004, Mr. Steel and his crew kept a video vigil from the fixed Golden Gate Park view and from a panning telephoto lens-equipped camera that combed the walkway for any of the known warning signs of an imminent jump. Whenever a solo walker behaved agitatedly, set down a package, removed his shoes, or displayed any one of several other cues, the camera operator on call phoned the police and zoomed in.

As anyone who witnessed the eternity between the World Trade Center towers being struck and their collapse, nothing can prepare you for the sight of a fellow human being intentionally falling to his or her death.”The Bridge” contains several of these shots (and a smattering of rescues and foiled attempts) and they do not become easier to watch as the film goes on. The final example, a horrifyingly graceful leap performed by a young man named Gene Sprague, is unforgettable, much as I wish it weren’t so.

Mr. Steel and his film have endured a substantial amount of controversy. Inspired by an article in the New Yorker about the bridge’s erstwhile death cult, the filmmakers approached the municipal authority that administers the bridge about photographing a film that had nothing to do with suicide. The combination of this Nick Broomfieldish subterfuge and the fact that the “The Bridge” documents far more jumps than rescues, has opened the film up to suggestions that it is exploitative or irresponsible.

Indeed, Mr. Sprague’s death comes after many moments of deliberation and pacing that are interpolated throughout the film. Couldn’t something have been done to stop him? The New Yorker article concerned itself as much with the San Francisco Bridge District’s (the organizing body in charge of the Golden Gate’s operation) inability to put anything more than the most cursory and passive preventative measures into effect. Outside of its press kit, “The Bridge” makes virtually no reference to any ongoing efforts to raise the bridge railing height or install a suicide barrier.

But the film doesn’t just document jumps, it triangulates on the jumpers, their families, and the witnesses whose lives are transformed by their inadvertent participation in a stranger’s act of self-destruction. The footage of Lisa Smith’s family, for instance, is in its way as gruesome as Lisa’s death. Recalling the decade-long history of paranoid schizophrenia that culminated in Lisa’s death, her mother exposes the complete erosion of affection of a parent pushed past her limit of compassion.

“I always thought of myself as a stronger person than her,” Lisa’s sister says, momentarily in awe of the perverse courage behind her sibling’s final act. Ultimately, Lisa’s ability to climb out on the edge of the bridge and willingly let-go earned her a measure of respect she was unable to get from her family while she was alive. This ugly but honest and vivid subtext exposes a family that gave up on one of their own years before her actual death. It is one of the things that elevate “The Bridge” well above the level of the atrocity exhibition that some have hinted it is.

“It was almost like it wasn’t real,” a tourist photographer who stumbled upon a jump attempt remembers, “’cause I was looking through the lens.” But the photographer, we subsequently learn, set down his camera and helped to thwart the suicide he happened upon. By documenting the specific stories behind the otherwise anonymous Golden Gate body count, and the human toll that these suicides take on the living, “The Bridge” sets aside horrifyingly poetic snuff footage to unpack a half-dozen different public health issues, including the soaring American suicide rate among young-adults, and the dearth of affordable treatment for the socially marginalized and mentally ill, without ever preaching or proselytizing.

The suicides and their aftermath are heartbreakingly democratic. There is something for nearly everyone here in the “there but for the grace of …” department. Depressed or delusional, young and angry, middle aged and lonely, local or visitor, the inexorable call of the bridge and the bay below is heard by star-crossed people from all walks of life.

“We all experience moments of despair,” says one of the chorus of articulate and compassionate voices addressing a loved-one’s jump from the bridge, “but for most of us the sun comes out.” The capacity to destroy oneself, the film reminds us, lurks inside everyone. It’s merely a matter of circumstance and brain chemistry that separates any one of us from any of the 24 people who ended their lives in the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay in 2004.

By remaining calmly openhanded and nonjudgmental about a perennially taboo subject, “The Bridge” acknowledges a simple truth behind one of the worst impulses of human nature. And by doing so, it becomes an unlikely but no less worthy entrant, alongside Von Stroheim’s “Greed,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry,” and Coppola’s “The Conversation,” in the pantheon of films that paint the Bay Area in the darkest, most moving emotional colors imaginable.


The New York Sun

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