Eric Steel, the director, and I apparently read the same article in The New Yorker about the Golden Gate Bridge being the most popular suicide site in the world. The Bridge occasionally popped up on top ranking lists as one of the best documentaries so it ended up in my queue. Steel arranged for cameras to be trained on the bridge for a year, but it does not feel like an exploitive snuff film done for entertainment, but a catalogue of lost souls starting from the end followed by testimonies by those who knew them the best, but were helpless to stop them. As the documentary unfolds, the deliberate pacing and repetitive scenario can make it challenging to proceed. As The Bridge’s portraits sadly increase, it becomes harder to distinguish individual stories from each other.
If you are looking for a real life horror movie, keep on looking because this film feels more like a memorial to a place and the people who died there as if training an unblinking mechanical eye would reveal the mysteries of their mind. The Bridge is a documentary about mourning and recollection, an effort for those who survive the deceased to try and make sense of something that does not make sense and to construct a feasible story from a life of unfulfilled goals and dangling threads. It is surprisingly lacking in meditations about spirituality or God except from a single survivor. I’m sure that some people may find the subject matter triggering for a variety of reasons, but as someone who has been left to examine a life after an untimely early, ambiguous death, an unknown mixture of choice and illness, I did not.
For the viewer, it satisfies our curiosity and captures the moment of death, which every one will experience, but not witness objectively. The Bridge acts as a memento mori and a focal point between heaven and earth both visually and metaphorically. It is a strange meeting place of the historic, the monumental, tourist kitschy stop and quotidian highway in the sky. It is a transition from land to air, from air to water, from daily life to eternity or nothingness. I think it helps us to process the death of others and our eventual mortality in a setting familiar and iconic, but not ordinary for those who jumped or worked to capture the moment.