I love a good documentary and with a recent subscription to Netflix coming in to my life, let's just say that more of my life is being wasted on them than before (as well as a wide variety of American television). One that I happened to stumble across when browsing for something to watch was a documentary called 'The Bridge'. Rather stupidly I just clicked 'watch' without reading what it was about. The poster (as you can see) is a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco so I assumed, rather naively, that it would be something about the city and its culture or, at worst, a film about the bridge itself and those who made it (I was quite bored at this point and needed something different to watch as I had seen more episodes of American Horror Story that I care to admit). It was only after watching it and having a bit of a Google did I realise that what I had actually watched was a highly controversial and hard hitting documentary on a very sensitive.
To cut a long story short, this film is about suicide. The Golden Gate Bridge is the second most used suicide site on the planet only losing out (if that's the appropriate phrase) to a bridge in China crossing the Yangtze River. In 2013, 46 people chose to end their lives by jumping off the iconic bridge and after a fall of about 4 seconds and a maximum velocity of around 75 mph, 98% of jumpers will die. The majority pass away immediately from the impact with around 5% surviving that but later dying from drowning or hypothermia from the water's freezing temperatures. I realise by this point most of you are probably thinking "What the fuck?! Why is there a documentary about this and why on Earth did you sit down and actually watch it?" Well partly, as I explained earlier, I had a very different idea of what this documentary was actually about when I began watching it. There's also the fact that I recently graduated as a Psychology student so themes of mental health issues and peoples personalities interest me. I certainly didn't watch it because I have a morbid fascination with death or I want to watch footage of people committing suicide (of which there is a lot). That didn't come in to it all and to be quite frank is slightly disturbing. The fact of the matter is that the film is incredibly interesting and revealing about this little known aspect of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Filmed by Eric Steele over the course of 2004, he captured on film 23 of the 24 suicide jumps that year and footage of these jumps are shown throughout intersected with interviews with friends and family members of those who jumped. It's not all sadness and death though. There are several examples of people being saved by passers-by or the bridge guards as well as an interview with one man who jumped and survived after realising halfway down that he didn't actually want to die. One specific individual's story is a running thread through the film. Eugene Sprague's story is told from beginning to end by his friends and family and the film constantly cuts back to footage of his final few hours on the bridge. It's not morbid, it's not insensitive , and it's certainly not a clinical examination of suicide. It is just the story of people's struggles in life.
More than anything this film is a commentary on us as humans and what it can take to push us over that final breaking point. For some it is a split decision and for others it is a long thought out process. This film isn't about the death that occurs on that bridge but the lives that have brought them to that point. It is thought provoking, brutally honest and shows humanity at its rawest. This may just be me, but rather than finishing the film and feeling sad and distressed, it made me feel grateful. Thankful that I am not in that situation, thankful the some people will help even when you are at your lowest low and grateful that at the very least, these tortured individuals had people who cared about them.
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