The Bridge

I'm a firm believer in the power of movies. Not just the standard power to move the audience while they are in the act of watching the film, but the haunting effect of the afterglow after the credits have rolled and we've all gone home. That's when the real action begins.

About three months ago, I rented a documentary called "The Bridge" because I had read about it in one of the silly trade mags I seek out to keep up on my movie trivia. The movie was actually released to the masses early last year, but I've been working up my nerve to see it ever since that time. The movie's concept sounds like a Faces of Death episode when one first reads about it, but looking deeper, it's a profound idea. The filmmakers set up cameras on either side of the Golden Gate Bridge for one year, and filmed everything. Families taking a Sunday stroll, lovers walking hand in hand, and the other kind of bridge dweller: The Jumper. The vantage points of the cameras gave a visual context to the stories behind these folks' desperate, often last, actions. There were no swells of music as the people jumped. There were no CGI effects to make a caricature of the people as the lost flying Walendas. They just jumped, choosing to die violently rather than go on living under their unbearable pressures. There on that bridge surrounded by horrified onlookers, and in one case a person with fast enough reflexes to stop the jump, they made a decision to end their lives for a spectrum of reasons and then did it.

"The Bridge" not only gives a visual context to the suicides, but seeks out the stories behind the people caught on film. We hear of their backgrounds often marked by depression, masked mental illness, and desperation. We hear of the unimaginable pain the person felt before they decided to jump, and of the enduring pain of their surviving loved ones. It is affecting. It is maddening. And most of all, it is haunting. The film meanders a bit and is not a perfect documentary, by any means, but the makers reach their intent and goals of telling the stories that would turn the people from merely Jumpers #1-24 into flesh and blood human beings with families and histories. And ends.

This movie lives in me now. I can't help but be struck by its echo whenever the Golden Gate comes up, or when I'm thinking of the people in my own life who are or were affected by clinical depression and desperate circumstance. The majority of them decided to reach out for the help they didn't have the tools to provide themselves. Others have made more permanent, tragic choices. When I was 18, one of my close friends decided it would be a better choice to stand in front of a speeding train, rather than face the idea of living one more second. When I first heard of his death, I was angry, enraged really, that he would choose such a selfish option. But I didn't have the knowledge to understand what informed his decision at that time. As time passed, details of his homelife came out that would give a seasoned child services advocate pause. Without context, every suicide appears senseless and meaningless. For me, "The Bridge" was a catharsis 13 years in the making. It's a movie that I'm grateful to have seen, but saddened it had to be made.

I love films for many reasons. They can pick us up off the floor. They can provide an escape route. They can cement a bond between loved ones. And they can help us say goodbye.