28 September 2007
The Bridge (2006)
Eric Steel’s documentary The Bridge has an alarmingly fatalistic and derivative tag line: Be afraid of what lies beneath… Did the marketers even watch this thing? Physically speaking, are they actually invoking the water itself below the bridge, suggesting perhaps that’s what’s doing the killing? Or are they talking about Mr Steel’s soul, because really who could conceive of a project so determined to invade tortured privacies? Something suggesting the utter unknowability of a person would have been much less reductive, I think. This isn’t, after all, The Host.
There are a lot of stories out there about this movie and its maker’s “ethics.” Some people suggest that Steel somehow misled people into talking about their loved ones, and their reasons for suicide. It’s really something to see someone totter along the bridge–some make phone calls before going over, others stare down over the railing. Others climb over, as though they’re going to sit and eat their lunch like old construction workers erecting the thing.They fall like popped balloons. Or if you prefer a more heavy-handed motif, a broken-winged bird. It’s not like they don’t know where they’re going, but then if nothing else this documentary stresses that it’s a place that remains unaccompanied.
The unknowability of someone (look at Gene as he walks along the bridge — his hair in the wind, and then–at least as the film is edited–he walks back and forth, contemplating the spot; put yourself there then, and compare that to how he looks when he goes over–Jesus Christ) was what struck me predominately. And the second thing, tied intimately to the first, that really struck me was the utter narcissism that friends and relatives wrestle with in the face of suicide. I guess it’s a pretty obvious psychology–what else can death be for but to teach us about ourselves?But look at his friends — how familiar is it to hear the echoes of “if-I-could-say-just-one-more-thing-to-you: you-hurt-me,man” rationalization? And the couple struggling to find meaning through a job interview on an answering machine? I don’t know–but in a documentary of such wrenching honesty, it strikes one as patently false.