The Bridge

Many of you have already heard this particular ramble. If that's the case, feel free to tune out momentarily and go on to the rest of your life. For those who have not, let me tell you about a documentary that I saw this weekend called "The Bridge".

This documentary was about the Golden Gate Bridge. Specifically, about the fact that more people commit suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge than any other place in the world. From a Newsweek article:

"The death scenes are only a fraction of “The Bridge,” which instead focuses on the back stories of the “jumpers.” Through interviews with friends and family members of the deceased, as well as traumatized eyewitnesses, Steel paints a clear-eyed portrait of those who jumped—and the circumstances leading to their public deaths. “It’s clear in hindsight that almost everyone left clues,” he says. “As a society, though, we aren’t usually trained to recognize those clues.” Steel says he got the idea for the movie, which opens next week in selected cities, after reading a 2003 New Yorker article chronicling the Golden Gate’s status as the world’s leading suicide magnet. Each year, according to authorities, approximately two dozen people kill themselves by leaping from the 220-foot-high span. Since the bridge opened in 1937, the San Francisco Chronicle has recorded more than 1,200 deaths. (Several years ago, in response to a request from the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California, local media stopped reporting the total number of leaps, box-score style, in order to discourage jumpers who wanted to become the 500th or 1,000th suicide.) Steel says he was “shocked” by the resistance of local authorities to erect a suicide barrier, citing aesthetic and cost concerns. “You can be sure that if two dozen people a year threw themselves under the cable cars, they would do something about it in an instant.”

The filmmaker trained his cameras on the Golden Gate Bridge for a year, and caught the deaths of 24 people on tape. The shocking thing that one discovers in watching this movie is how unshocking it is to watch people jump to their deaths. You see them jump, then see a splash, and that's it.

When I have mentioned this movie to others, people get squeamish, saying "I couldn't watch that...that's horrible." Some feel that it's exploitative. It is not. The key to this movie is the backstories of the jumpers. The people that loved them. The long histories of mental illness and hospitalizations. The resignation and acceptance that some families and friends felt, the denial of others. There was also a fascinating interview with a young man who jumped and survived, and with his father. That alone would have been worth paying the admission fee to see. This movie is an incredibly important statement to our culture. I didn't go to watch the movie to watch people jump to their deaths. I went to see the movie because when I stood on the Golden Gate Bridge last month and looked down into the water so far below me, I wondered how tortured a person must be to feel like falling to your death is a relief. A dear friend of mine had a close sibling die of suicide. And we, as a culture, ignore it. We call it a sin or we call it a shame. But we aren't addressing is the fact that there are some people that are so broken, so tortured, so scarred, that the only freedom they perceive is to free themselves from their earthly bodies. One person was talking about a friend who jumped, and she said, "Maybe, for just one moment, he wanted to know how it felt to fly."

It is a choice, one that I do not always begrudge someone. It is also a choice not brought about easily or thoughtlessly, in most cases. A girl who was interviewed spoke of her earlier trek out to the bridge, where she was ultimately stopped from jumping by others, and she said, "Making the decision on how to kill yourself is like choosing a college. It is not something taken lightly. It is rational thought when others deem it completely irrational." There are usually signs, warnings sent out by people contemplating suicide. We've chosen not to look for those, or ignore them, or chalk it up to the fact that there are hospitals for this. For us to ignore suicide, in any of its forms, is for us to reinforce the loneliness in the hearts of those who feel that there is no hope left. And we neglect to care for those left behind after a loved one commits suicide. There is a tangled, intense grief that comes for those left behind. We cannot as a society continue to ignore the issue of suicide. I saw "The Bridge" because I wanted to be reminded of the reality in which we live. There is a lot of pain out there. God has laid it on our hearts to address it, not ignore it. We all need to figure out how we fit into that healing puzzle, but I assure you, you are a necessary piece.