The Bridge

I saw two movies over the weekend, A Mighty Heart and The Bridge, a 2006 documentary about suicide and San Francisco's Golden Gate. Both were interesting misfires, and they misfired in similar ways - by misunderstanding where the central drama of their story was located, and heading off in another direction instead. In the case of A Mighty Heart (of which I'll have more to say, probably, in the next National Review), this meant turning the story of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder into the attempted canonization of Angelina Jolie - sorry, Marianne Pearl. In the case of The Bridge, it meant chasing the stories of the people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, rather than the story of the bridge itself.

The director, Eric Steel, spent a year filming the bridge from afar, a feat of cinematic endurance that enabled him to film at least half-a-dozen suicides in the act of jumping. This astonishing, morbid footage is the spine of his documentary; the rest of it is taken up by interviews with the jumpers' nearest and dearest, and with one jumper who leaped at age eighteen and survived the fall, buoyed up to safety by a passing seal. Steel was inspired to embark on the project by an article on Golden Gate bridge-jumpers that Tad Friend wrote for the New Yorker, but his film misses what made that piece so interesting. Friend investigated both the Golden Gate Bridge's history as a suicide magnet and San Franciscans' odd relationship to this history, from the media frenzy over the five hundredth and thousandth suicides to the city's resolute (and popular) refusal to put up the kind of barrier that might prevent so many people from leaping to their deaths. Steel, by contrast, largely leaves this sort of context out and focuses on the suicides themselves, using the bridge as a gorgeous, inscrutable backdrop for a series of conversations about mental illness that are depressing without being particularly illuminating. All suicidal people may not be alike, but in The Bridge, at least, their families and friends' accounts tend to blur into one another, while the Golden Gate itself hovers untouched in the background, its dark allure a mystery that the film circles but isn't brave enough to approach.

Photo by Flickr user Marymactavish used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments

A guy jumped off the bridge and was saved by a seal?

That sounds like a story that would be fascinating.

Posted by Eric | June 25, 2007 5:12 PM

I haven't seen the movie but I remember the New Yorker piece. One of the most interesting parts of that article was the discussion of the factors that cause some jumpers to survive the plunge. Apparently, the attitude and angle of the body as it enters the water is crucial. If it's too straight and vertical, the body descends too far into the water to allow the jumper to rise to the surface before he drowns. If it's too oblique, the impact with the water causes fatal physical injuries. The angle has to be just right for there to be a chance of survival.

Posted by Mixner | June 25, 2007 5:55 PM

Dr. Richard Seiden, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Public Health and the leading researcher on suicide at the bridge, has written that studies reveal “a commonly held attitude that romanticizes suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge in such terms as aesthetically pleasing and beautiful, while regarding a Bay Bridge suicide as tacky.”"

It is too bad that Dr. Seiden spent so much time in the class room and so little time in the practical realities of life.

People jump from the Golden Gate not because of romance - but because of desperation. They choose the Golden Gate Bridge not because it is less tacky but because it has easy access and pedestrian walkways.

No other Bridge in the Bay Area has pedestrian walkways. No access no deaths.

The Directorate of the Golden Gate has managed to keep the public in the dark for over 70 years ! Only now because of the internet can the story get out -

Not only that but the GG Bridge is bankrupt - the real reason that nothing is being done to end the deaths.

People open your eyes - and do just a little research before you opine as to the deaths at the Golden Gate Bridge which by the way have now climbed to one a week - yes one a week and over 2,000 to date that we know of...the research and studies are unanimous - if a person is prevented from suicide 98% yes 98% never try again.

I wish the Doctor and the rest of those that spend their time talking about death on the Bridge would do less talking and more action.

While they are talking and philosophizing one person leaps off the Bridge every week.

I am a native of San Francisco and I am horrified at the inability of citizens to understand that this one mile stretch of road is killing one person and devastating their families forever while people like the good doctor write about romance others advance their sophomoric take on death at the Golden Gate.

Open your eyes and look - this is a real tragedy and if you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem.

Just imagine the uproar if someone were to throw a poodle off the Golden Gate once a week ...

Posted by pkh | July 28, 2007 9:24 PM

Suicide is an impetuous act – or the act of an ill person lacking the capacity to make a sane decision. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Limiting access to the means of death has proved to dramatically reduce suicides 98% of those stopped never attempt suicide again not just at the Golden Gate but in every instance.
The rails at the Golden Gate Bridge are simply too low and access is too great.
Four people try to die there every week...
and one succeeds meeting a most horrible death.
But as the "Bridge" shows true victims are the loved ones left behind many of which carry terrible emotional scars the rest of their lives...tragically blaming themselves - often trying to also kill themselves out of guilt.
San Franciscans and the people of the Bay Area
are now well aware of the horror taking place almost daily at the Golden Gate and as such have a moral obligation to do something to help end the deaths at the Golden Gate Bridge.
Since 1937 we have been kept in the dark but now via the Internet the facts surrounding death at the Golden Gate Bridge are finally seeing the light of day.
You can help stop the carnage - you can help raise
public awareness you can help raise the rails
For more information see
http://www.bridgerail.org
Thank you

Posted by simon | September 2, 2007 12:53 AM

I WOULD LIKE TO DO A "PRO" HIGH DIVE OFF OF THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE. BELOW STREET LEVEL, SOUTHSIDE. MY WEB-SITE SAYS IT ALL! I COULD BE THE FIRST TO RIP A GOOD DIVE. I DO THIS FOR A LIVING, SO I MEAN "NO" DISRESPECT. I NEED TO DO IT FOR SOME ODD REASON.
SPLASHMAN-OUT

: PROFESSORSPLASH.COM

Posted by DARREN TAYLOR | October 14, 2007 11:11 PM

I WOULD LIKE TO DO A "PRO" HIGH DIVE OFF OF THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE. BELOW STREET LEVEL, SOUTHSIDE. MY WEB-SITE SAYS IT ALL! I COULD BE THE FIRST TO RIP A GOOD DIVE. I DO THIS FOR A LIVING, SO I MEAN "NO" DISRESPECT. I NEED TO DO IT FOR SOME ODD REASON.
SPLASHMAN-OUT

: PROFESSORSPLASH.COM

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Posted by Marc Craft | December 18, 2007 5:53 AM

Kevin Hines, the then-19-year-old who survived the plunge from the bridge, never actually said a seal saved him. Rather, he remembers something brushing up against him after he surfaced, first thinking it was a shark, then thinking later it must have been God in the form of a seal saving him. In an interview his mother did a few years later, she stated that he had never mentioned a seal to anyone.
He is a well-spoken, bright young man, and more power to him for speaking out about mental illness (and the need for some type of barrier on the bridge). Watching the movie, and his interview, one is overcome with joy that he survived. And so forgive him for the age-old impulse to credit "God", or in this case a seal standing in for God, for what was actually utter blind luck.

Posted by Glen Janney | February 5, 2008 9:15 AM