Crisis Counseling phone on the Golden Gate Bridge. Picture: Danny Birchall
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Synopsis
More people choose to end their lives at the Golden Gate Bridge than anywhere else in the world.
The Golden Gate Bridge is an iconic structure. An engineering masterpiece. A triumph of human ingenuity and muscle over the elements, and over the Depression. A constantly pulsing, poetic artery of traffic. A picture perfect postcard. A symbol of a San Francisco, the West, freedom - and something more, something almost spiritual but impossible to describe.
More people choose to end their lives at the Golden Gate Bridge than anywhere else in the world. The sheer number of deaths there is shocking but perhaps not altogether surprising. If one wants to commit suicide, that is, there is an eerie logic in selecting a means that is almost always fatal and a place that is magically, mysteriously beautiful.
The director and crew spent all of 2004, an entire year, looking very carefully at the Golden Gate Bridge, running cameras for almost every daylight minute, and filming most of the two dozen suicides and a great many of the unrealized attempts. Though this was a massive undertaking in many regards, it was only a small part of the process. The director captured nearly 100 hours of incredibly frank, deeply personal, often heart-wrenching interviews with the families and friends of these suicides, with witnesses who were walking, biking, or driving across the bridge, or surfing, kiteboarding, or boating underneath it, with medical and psychiatric professionals, and with several of the attempters themselves.
The Bridge offers glimpses into the darkest, and possibly most impenetrable corners of the human mind. The fates of these 24 people are linked together at the bridge and by a 4 second fall, but their lives seem to have been moving on parallel tracks and similar arcs all along. The interviews reveal in tragic and touching detail that they share years of struggle with bipolar disorder, psychosis and depression; alcohol and substance abuse; repeated, escalating attempts to end their lives; parents and siblings who have also committed suicide; and medications, especially the black-warning-labeled anti-depressants, that both appease and excite their demons.
Looming behind these stories is the Golden Gate Bridge itself, a monument that mirrors our highest aspirations and our lowest natures. We are uncomfortable with the grim realities suicide forces us to confront. We'd rather not see the mentally ill; we'd prefer suicides to be invisible -- or at least to take place quietly in hotel bathrooms, barns, dorm rooms and closets. Homicides are a nightly recitation on the local news, but suicides are never mentioned - this despite the fact that there are almost twice as many suicides each year as homicides. And so the Golden Gate Bridge District will happily spend millions of dollars to erect a barrier between the roadway and the pedestrian walkway - even though there has never been a pedestrian fatality on the bridge - and yet repeatedly refuse to discuss the possibility of putting up a suicide barrier - until the nature of my film was revealed to them.
The Bridge is at once a startlingly profound and poetic documentary, a visual and visceral journey into one of life's gravest taboos.