Cinema Hype

How does a director make a documentary about suicide? Ignoring for a moment the potential ethical dilemmas embroiled in real-life coverage of people ending their own lives, how does one get that particular kind of candid footage? If you’re director Eric Steel, you just need to know where to go and how to hide the camera.

Steel directed the newly released documentary The Bridge, about people who commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. The film was inspired by Tad Friend’s 2003 New Yorker article, which gave a rundown of the past and present of bridge-jumping. It was a popular article. I live near the Golden Gate, and in the Bay Area, at least, that article struck a nerve–I remember reading it at the time, and I’ve never heard of a single article so often referred to by so many different people over the years.

It seems that the Golden Gate Bridge itself strikes a nerve with people. It’s the number-one suicide spot in the United States–someone jumps off of it approximately every two weeks. In a way, it’s not hard to see why; walking or driving across, there’s the feeling of being on the very edge of the world. Standing on the ocean side–from which most people jump–there are the cliffs on either end of the bridge, and then water, and fog, and nothing else.

In 2004, Steel and his crew attached hidden cameras to the bridge, then went away and just waited. Much of the film, it seems, is made up of interviews with the victims’ loved ones, with the people who last spoke with them, with the people who knew them best. There are copies of suicide notes and other mementoes of the people who jumped, and an interview with one man who jumped and survived. But the crux of the movie, what is most haunting and most disturbing about this film, is the footage taken by the hidden cameras–nearly all of the twenty-four people who jumped in 2004 did so on film.

I haven’t seen The Bridge, and I don’t know that I will, not because it’s not a good movie, but because it seems like such an intrusion. Maybe some of the people caught on camera needed an intrusion, and maybe not. But it’s the experience of essentially being present–even two years later–for another human’s death that makes this movie dicey and understandably difficult to watch. I’m not saying Steel was wrong to make the movie or even to install the cameras; I’m just saying I don’t know that I can watch it.