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Disgusted and near tears
I am physically sick and I want to cry.
I wasn’t that way 10 minutes ago. I was taking a short break from writing a story. My break took me to the Internet and my homepage, Yahoo! Browsing the headlines, I saw one that would catch anybody’s attention: “Film showing Golden Gate Bridge suicides sparks anger.”
I’ll admit it - I was intrigued. I clicked on the link and watched the video it led me to. It was an interview with documentary filmmaker Eric Steel, the director of “The Bridge,” which was released in 2006. Steel got permission to film the Golden Gate Bridge from January to December 2004, saying he was trying to capture its beauty and mystique.
In reality, he was capturing the final moments of the people who came to the bridge to commit suicide. He had a good chance of succeeding. More than 1,200 suicides have been recorded from the bridge since it was completed in 1937. Those are just the known instances. Who knows how many more deaths went unseen there?
In a year worth of shooting, Steel captured 23 of the 24 people that took that fatal plunge. He interviewed witnesses, relatives of the victims and people who attempted suicide at the bridge. He then went and edited it all down to a 93-minute documentary.
Suicide is still a largely taboo issue in any culture. There is a morbid fascination in most of us that shies away from this kind of thing at the same time we want to look. It’s like the kid who watches a scary movie and hurries to put his hand over his face but then peeks through his fingers.
For about a minute, I thought I might be able to handle this documentary. I try not to judge a film worthless or wrong without watching it, because I know trailers can be misleading. Being the ever-inquisitive reporter, I went to youtube.com to see if there were any clips. Unfortunately there were. I watched two excerpts and shut it down. One was of a man stopping a woman from committing suicide. (She later came back and was stopped again.) In the other, they showed a man’s jump from several different cameras, following him from the bridge to the water.
This brings me back to feeling sick and wanting to cry. Suicide is not just a problem than can be ignored and it will go away. I think part of what this film was trying to do was show the high number of people who take their lives at that bridge and figure out why it draws so many for that purpose. But a majestic shouldn’t make suicide more glamorous or appealing to watch.
In 2004, the year this footage was gathered, suicide was the 11th leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for 32,439 deaths, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
When I watched just those few minutes of the film, every cell in my being seemed to cry out that it was wrong, that those last minutes were not something to be gawked at on a screen, no matter how delicately it was handled.
What do you think of the idea of a film showing multiple people committing suicide? Share your thoughts by commenting here or e-mail me at lmcfarland@coxnc.com.
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