Get your suicides here, folks People who jump off the Golden Gate bridge drown in their own blood and have their eyeballs eaten by crabs. Not stuff for a documentary, you'd think. Howard Feinstein on a film that is shaking San Francisco Friday June 23, 2006
The Guardian
Fatal attraction ... the Golden Gate Bridge. Photograph: Eric Risber/AP
The scene is straightforward, sombre, and heartbreaking. A woman in profile and silhouette recalls her friend Daniel "Ruby" Rubinstein, a 52-year-old depressive who killed himself by jumping 225ft from the Golden Gate bridge to the water below. "It romanticises him a bit in the legend, but he doesn't benefit from it," she says, from under her veil of sadness. She is one of the friends and family members interviewed by the New York film-maker Eric Steel in The Bridge, which tells the stories of six of the 24 people who killed themselves at San Francisco's most famous landmark in 2004 (more than 1,300 people have killed themselves there since the bridge opened in 1937). Those who see this film will never forget it, for as well as learning about the lives and problems of the six dead people, they also see them jumping.
It's not hard to kill yourself at the Golden Gate bridge. There is only a 4ft safety rail separating the sidewalk from the void, and 98% of suicide attempts there have succeeded. The predictability of deaths there is such, in fact, that Steel was able to film 23 of the deaths in 2004 at the site. From dawn to dusk every day of the year, he and his small crew worked from two mini-DV cameras on each side of the bridge: south, at San Francisco's Battery East, and north, on a fishing pier at Fort Baker in Marin County. One was for the wide-angle view, one for close-up telephoto shots. He had uninterrupted access to everything that happened during daylight hours on the east side of the bridge, with its seductive panorama of San Francisco, Angel Island, Alcatraz, and the East Bay. That is the only side that allows pedestrians, and it closes at nightfall.He had to lie to do it. He needed a permit from the National Park Service, which administers the bridge in tandem with the powerful Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District, led by a board of political appointees. He wrote in a letter to a bureaucrat at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in November 2003: "This is meant to capture the powerful, spectacular intersection of monument and nature that takes place every day at the Golden Gate Bridge. It will be the first in a series. Future projects are to focus on the arch in St Louis and the Statue of Liberty in New York City."
No one twigged. Fourteen months later, in January 2005, after shooting nearly 10,000 hours of footage of the bridge and 100 additional hours of interviews around the country, he emailed Mary Currie, public affairs director of the District, to request access to records and assorted bridge personnel - and confessed. "I believe the film will allow us to see into the most impenetrable corners of the human mind and challenge us to think and talk about suicide in profoundly different ways," he wrote. Implicit in his message was the need for a preventive measure more reliable than the ineffective foot patrols and cameras currently in place. Currie went right to the local press - and they ate it up. "Film Captures Suicides on Golden Gate Bridge," ran the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle the following week. "Angry Officials Say Moviemaker Misled Them."
"Monuments or suicides, it's his choice," says Currie. "But if Steel misrepresented himself on his application for a permit, that gave us cause for concern relative to the security of the bridge. He has likely recorded patrol patterns and lighting and intrusion detection elements." Oddly, during the week of the film's debut - it was premiered last month at the Tribeca film festival in New York, then shown two days later at the San Francisco international film festival - Currie announced the District board had put in place $2m to study the feasibility of improving the safety barriers. The board had voted down the erection of a suicide barrier seven times since 1948.
Steel was also not entirely forthcoming with his interviewees. He did not tell them that the deaths of their loved ones would be shown on screen. "I didn't want the word to get out and possibly encourage people to kill themselves who saw a chance to be in the film," he says. Steel says the families were accepting once they found out, although other reports suggest that some have called him to complain about the deception. "I think it is disgusting," says Cynthia Murray, a member of the District board who supports a suicide barrier. "If it were my loved one, I would be horrified." "The film is voyeuristic, nothing more, and the interviews are unfeeling and exploitative," says the head of a major film festival, one of several, including Sundance, Berlin and Cannes, that have rejected it.
Those who study suicide are pleased whenever the public learns about the mental health and behavioural issues underlying it, but they are troubled by the shots of jumpers. "Studies show that, particularly with vulnerable people and youth, seeing pictures of suicidal acts results in an increase in suicides," says Ann Haas, research director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Madeleine Gould, an epidemiologist at Columbia University and a suicide prevention expert, points to "clusters of location" - places that become sites of choice for suicide. "One person's suicide facilitates the occurrence of another. A stimulus, whether it's a movie or someone's death, influences subsequent deaths." And The Bridge certainly lets people know this is a suicide site.
"The bridge already has a copycat problem," Steel responds. "Twenty-four people a year kill themselves here. Not having a conversation about this doesn't solve the problem. We can handle suicide if it takes place behind closed doors or in a barn. But at the bridge, they're happening in plain sight. What I set out to do is to show the problem inside and out, to open up a dialogue about mental illness, suicide prevention, and despair. When suicidologists talk about not depicting the problem, they're swallowing the shame."
Gould also finds the way that the suicides are depicted in the film is too appealing. "It's a pity Mr Steel didn't make the deaths more unattractive, jumping in this beautiful setting," she says. Steel had optioned the article Jumpers, which appeared in the New Yorker in 2003, and contained scatalogical detail that the film omits: jumpers drown in their own blood, shatter organs and bones and, when swept out to sea, are nibbled at by sharks and have their eyeballs and cheeks eaten by crabs. "The film is missing the fact that suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge is very painful," says Dr Mel Blastein, chair of the Golden Gate Bridge Barrier Task Force. "When you watch the movie it looks like a quick death. That's a mistake. It's very slow."
Steel counters the charges. "Lisa Smith's body is fished out of the water, lifeless. One man has trouble getting over the rail - he has to hitch his pants up twice - and then slips without grace between the cord and the rail. Kevin Hines [who survived a jump in 2000] talks about what happened to his spine. You can see that when someone goes off the bridge, they do not fly; they just go right down." There is no romance in a four-second drop at 75mph into a cold, swift current.
Troubling to many is the case of Gene Sprague, a long-haired figure clad in black. He is a motif running throughout the film. We see him pacing up and down the bridge, eventually jumping up on the rail and falling backwards into the water. Steel followed Sprague with a telephoto lens for 90 minutes. Isn't it odd that he would select him out of the thousands on the bridge and not sound an alarm, as he and his crew had for at least five suicide attempts? "He walked from the south side to the north side, off the bridge, and then back north to south, which is typical of what tourists do," says Steel. "I didn't sense he would jump off the bridge, but there must have been something about him that caught my attention."
Studies reveal that potential bridge suicides thwarted at a "cluster" location almost never go to another jumping-off spot. Barriers have virtually halted suicides at the Clifton Suspension bridge in Bristol, the Bloor Street viaduct in Toronto, and the Sydney harbour bridge, as well as at such tall buildings as the Empire State building and the Eiffel tower. Assuming that engineering, wind shear, aesthetic, and funding concerns can be met - and experts indicate they can - will the Golden Gate bridge finally get a barrier?
"We'll find something that prevents that solution," says Cynthia Murray. "We live in a place that can put people on the moon." Love the film or hate it, the end may prove to justify the means. As Blaustein notes: "Eric has been a fabulous catalyst."
