I offer my span for the traffic of man, At the gate of the setting sun.
Joseph Strauss (Chief Engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge) The Golden Gate Bridge is to suicides what Niagara Falls is to honeymooners.
Tad Friend (2003) I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.
Anon (Suicide note from Golden Gate Bridge Jumper)
W
e open Unbecoming Cinema by taking in earnest Albert Camus’s assertion that there ‘is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide’(1955: 11). For alarmingly, today we inhabit a world where around 800,000 people are known to take their own lives every year, which the WHO informs us amounts to around one self-killing every forty seconds (2014). Although Emile Durkheim cast considerable doubt over the value and validity of suicidal statistics on account of the phenomenon’s many and varied morphological ‘species’, by propositioning that we consider suicide collectively as sui generis a ‘social fact’, he concomitantly highlighted dangers in overlooking the ‘mutual connection’ between suicidal event-acts and the ‘social constitution’
(Durkheim [1951] 1997: 37, 636). In the wake of such thinking, we must also take seriously Durkheim’s notion that collective suicidal tendencies emerge within any given culture, especially those where certain social ‘breakdowns’ or ‘maladjustments’ permit ‘suicidogenetic’
currents to flow towards and infect individuals. For indeed, it is under the shadow of today’s so-called suicide ‘epidemic’ that we here set out to explore a raft of moral and ethical issues bound up with the public documentation and projection of suicide, particularly with regard to Eric Steel’s haunting ninety-four-minute debut The Bridge (2006); an unsettling, upsetting and yet edifying personal-political project that literally brings viewers face to face with twenty-three (out of twenty-four) suicides that occurred around San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge during 2004.1
The Bridge
The opening black frame bleaches out so that a surging pearly greyness engulfs the screen.
All the while a resonating sound-wave amplifies towards a higher frequency. The intensifying pitch peaks as a dark object pierces through the soupy fog. This allows viewers to retroactively discern what it is they have been seeing; a time-lapse image of a gigantic body of sea harr rolling through the architectural struts of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge: the imperious structure that will hereafter serve as the film’s gravitational centre.
Gear changing to a more accustomed ‘human’ speed of perception, the ensuing montage strings together a series of scale-shifting close-ups depicting seagulls gliding beyond the bridge’s steel cables, a ferry sounding its horn as it navigates beneath the bridge’s span, pleasure craft skimming over the water, kite-surfers skipping waves and hanging in the wind, seabirds paddling against the tide. A conspicuous zoom thereafter introduces us to the bridge’s human traffic, as Alex Heffes’ elegiac string and piano score The Shadow of the Bridge is sneaked in. The lilting melancholically tune immediately mediating how viewers perceive and ‘think’ the subsequent ‘all too human’ montage containing images of a lean male figure dressed in black striding along the bridge (a character we will later come to know as Gene Sprague), some joggers taking in morning exercise, a businessman peering over the red railing, a family of three enjoying an uninterrupted view of the Bay, a motionless hooded woman contemplating the water’s surface below, a tourist making snaps and a rout of schoolboys marching headlong into the gusting wind. Presently, an older gentleman dressed in a green T-shirt and red baseball cap is isolated by the camera’s trembling telephoto lens. He abruptly straddles the bridge’s four-foot barrier, crossing over it with an assured movement. He pauses, for a pulse, and then in a heart-in-mouth moment, throws himself away from the bridge.
The unexpected, and yet inevitable, hits us as the figure crosses from the horizontal platform to swiftly drop down a vertical plane. The shaken camera is jolted by his precipitous celerity. Limbs extend outwards, pathetically kicking against thin air. His body hastens down, escaping the camera’s haphazard framing as it approaches terminal velocity. Frame and body blur into pure motion. Two hundred and fifty feet down, seventy-five miles per hour, 9.83 meters per second per second: four fleeting seconds.
A splash sound (effect?). The camera’s catch-up gaze misses the impact. Its operator scours the scene for traces. There is no visible scar. A kite surfer moves into shot, towards where this stranger’s life must have passed. The Coast Guard arrives moments later. Heffes’
sorrowful piano tinkles on, as the film’s title fades up: The Bridge.
Thinking Suicide with Film
Deleuze, whose own suicide and writing upon death and life becomes fundamental to our later analysis of Steel’s film – offers us a valuable and practical philosophy that appears well suited for
approaching this particularly unsettling documentary artwork. For one thing, Deleuze’s practical philosophy is immediately ethico-political, and utterly inseparable from a lived way of life, in that its primary duty is to confront and formulate a response to the real problems challenging us in our actual lived experiences: otherwise it would be of absolutely no use. What remains true of ethical philosophy also stretches out to account for our ethical evaluation of Steel’s thinking film, which we likewise argue appears capable of bringing adequate thoughts and perceptions into being, which increase the powers of those who encounter it to act and live.
In What is Philosophy? (2011) Deleuze and Guattari argue philosophy and art are comparable creative disciplines, with the philosopher and artist each unleashing productive forces into the world that become capable of transforming the individuals, populations and societies they encounter. For the purposes of this chapter we maintain that Steel’s film bridges these two worlds or disciplines, emerging as an ‘evental’ artwork that inculcates a philosophical encounter with those who encounter it. As discussed in the introduction, in his Cinema (2005a [1986], 2005b [1989]) project Deleuze demonstrates how films provide material conditions for thinking and emotionally evaluating, by offering viewers affective and perceptive methods of making sense of their world. By extension, a film’s psychomechanical capacity to generate movements in the viewers’ brain, body and mind also harbour potentials for generating movements of world, creating change or igniting becomings. From this vantage, both philosophical thoughts (concepts) and film thoughts (affects and percepts) are understood as immanent assemblages, or difference engines, that intervene in and operate upon the very problem-worlds from which they emerge.
Of particular interest here is how, whilst working to disturb and agitate existing thoughts and feelings, and stimulate new patterns and associations, The Bridge emerges as an immanent and ethical ‘machinic’ force. Undoubtedly, Steel hoped that his film would contribute to specific pragmatic outcomes and real-world consequences. For one, he anticipated the film would draw public attention to an otherwise secreted problem, and by so doing, elevate suicide into a political rather than merely private discourse. Steel also hoped his film would inspire real-world action, and be a factor contributing to the building of a barrier to prevent further suicide bids from this notorious landmark. Concomitant with these pragmatic goals, The Bridge also emerges as an affective body or force that works to inculcate ‘philosophical’ modes of thought. For as a material exercise in film-thinking that circuitously approaches life via a confrontation with death, The Bridge builds associations with a long and illustrious line of philosophical thinkers. Indeed, in a statement which itself echoes a belief that ‘has been the living formulation of philosophy since Plato’, Deleuze describes the philosopher as he who ‘has returned from the dead and goes back there’, and as ‘someone who believes he has returned from the dead in full consciousness’ (2005b: 201).
Going back further still, Enrique Dussel traces Plato’s idea to the Egyptian sages, whom the Greek philosopher conceded were the ‘originators of the wisdom of the Greeks themselves’, and thus responsible for erecting the first ancient pillar of all ethical thinking. Before that, the Bantu African world too used the knowledge of death for thinking through ‘what is right, what is correct, law, order, justice, and truth’ (Dussel 2013: 6–7).
The strong ties between ethics, philosophy and death also becomes the subject of Simon Critchley’s benchmark Book of Dead Philosophers (2009), which opens by reminding us that Socrates claimed ‘all philosophers had to make dying their profession’, that Cicero argued that
‘to learn to philosophise is to learn how to die’ and (of particular interest to our investigations below) that Montaigne felt that only those who learned how to die could unlearn how to be a slave (Critchley 2009: xv–xvii). There, as in his own philosophy, Critchley argues that in order to gain any true sense of freedom today, we should pragmatically structure our life (or our entire living existence) in relation to the stark reality of death. Somewhat tragically, however, ‘the most pernicious feature of contemporary society is the unwillingness to accept this reality and to flee the fact of death’ (Critchley 1997, 2009: xviii).
To recapitulate before moving on, then, we might say that The Bridge emerges as an immanent response to two different real-world problems encountered in the particular milieu it records and screens within: the sociopolitical problem of suicide itself, and the acculturated difficulty bound up with ignoring the stark reality of death (that interferes with living a proper life). By extension, by overtly making death one of its primary themes, The Bridge offers its viewers a rare chance to confront and think about life in a
‘philosophical’ manner. What is more, courtesy of the repeated convergence of death and suicide throughout the documentary, Steel’s film appears to cajole viewers into an evaluative attitude, experientially inviting them to assess whether or not life is worth living (both in the concrete and in the abstract), and by such token can be understood encouraging viewers to grapple with what Camus refers to as ‘the fundamental question of philosophy’ (Camus 1955: 11). In the following sections we will also claim that The Bridge emerges as a powerful ethico-political force that demonstrates a real potential for imparting a renewed belief in the world.
Film Ethics and an Ethics of Film
Unquestionably certain film-makers and films address their viewers as emotional and moral beings, and inculcate viewing experiences that are tantamount to exercises in moral thought or psychology (see for example Downing and Saxton 2010; Nagib 2011; Kupfer 2012; Miller 2013; Choi and Frey 2014; Brown 2015; Sinnerbrink 2016). As a starting point we might pick up on two commonly touted ways in which film can be thought of as an ethical force during the screening encounter. The first relates to how, during its running time, a film builds up a distinctive evaluative attitude towards a given subject using formal devices and framing techniques. Thereafter we might concern ourselves with how such a film encourages an individual (or collective) to adopt its attitude or perspective upon that subject, object or event; particularly if this differs from their current attitudes, or those prevalent within the wider milieu. With these overlapping perspectives in mind, we might then try to decide whether the new attitude was better than the old one, by judging its moral value against some higher force or law. This immediately proves problematic however, for here we run
into problems of moral relativism: the belief that the truth of all moral judgements is individually or culturally relative.
If we were to ask whether or not a film is an ethical one from a Deleuzian perspective, however, our questions and assumptions about film need to be framed slightly differently, and force us to pay attention to the manner in which a film increases or decreases the powers, or ability to live and act, of those it comes into contact with. As already discussed in the introduction, Deleuze’s larger philosophical project can be understood in terms of an ethical desire to be done with negative judgements (whether these be through a God figure, some associated system of laws or morality or even the opinion of some authority). For throughout his work Deleuze upholds that there can be no objective standard or transcendental moral ground from which to evaluate a life, an artwork, or indeed the state of the present, because any given judgement can be little more than an expression or opinion of the ‘I’ or body that evaluates, and this cannot take us very far.
A brief return to Deleuze’s writing on Nietzsche helps us chart a path around the apparent
‘moral relativist’ roadblock, for there, Deleuze concedes that there can be a legitimate and ethical evaluation of life, but if and only if it is based upon an immanent will to power. In explaining why, Deleuze first warns us away from many of the age-old moth-eaten platitudes surrounding this greatly misunderstood Nietzschean concept. In the first instance, we must not mistake the will to power for a sinister Machiavellian desire to enslave or exercise control over others. Far from it, the will to power must instead be recognized as a positive desire for an enriched life. Thus, in following Nietzsche and Spinoza, Deleuze recognizes the will to power as being concerned with a given body’s ability to affect and be affected by other bodies and forces, which amounts to saying that power does not reside inside any individual body, but rather is locatable in the empowering or disempowering relationships that any given body forges with other external bodies and forces. From such a perspective, we can only ever evaluate in terms of empowering or disempowering encounters. Disempowering encounters are those that affect individuals with sadness, or negatively impact or negate their power to live and act. Against these bad physical and psychical articulations, a positive encounter would be one that affects them with joy, and increases that body’s will to power.
For the remainder of this chapter we should enquire into these ethical aspects of Steel’s film, which on the surface appears to institute a somewhat standard reflexive documentary format, aiming to uncover a veiled truth by constellating an array of interviews and recordings that are edited together with various dynamic shots wrestled from over 10,000 hours of footage amassed throughout the 366 days of shooting in 2004.As already indicated, these images are intercut with ‘surreptitious’ footage of the bridge’s human visitors, and contain twenty-three images of real suicidal actors and acts captured around the bridge. It is these images in particular that serve to differentiate The Bridge from most other documentary fare, and are responsible for profoundly unsettling and moving encounters with the film. The bold directorial choice of recording and screening these self-killings contribute to the film’s affective intensity, and lead to several strange effects, including the shocking experience of time itself slipping out of joint.
Without doubt, foreknowledge of The Bridge’s disturbing content allows muted pre-emptive feelings to operate upon viewers before the screening even begins. For me this foreboding became manifest as a mild feeling of nausea or anxiousness the moment I emotionally committed to watching it. During viewing, untimely sensations are also kindled by the film’s obsessive return to close-ups of human bodies lingering near the edge of the bridge. For whether these are actual jumpers or not, watching these precarious bodies immediately serves to dilate and fracture the experience of film time, at once evacuating the present from the image (as thoughts speed up and make it known in our viscera that whatever is about to occur has already passed), while at the same time trying to offset the shock by concomitantly splitting the image into actual and virtual components, wherein the virtual or compossible (they may jump) coexists with the actual and the possible (they do or do not jump). Further disquieting feelings are actualized and amplified by seeing atypical images of real people jumping to their death, which makes tangible the film’s strange articulation or folding together of ethics and aesthetics, perception and affect, sight and moral insight (see Sobchack 2004: 231). Such unusual qualities ensure that The Bridge is a film that touches us before we see its first image, gets under our skin during the screening event, and stays with us and works upon us long after the final credits have rolled.2
With specific regard to the themes of self-killing, there can be little doubt that most film viewers will be predisposed to hold certain personal and deep seated (acculturated) beliefs about the phenomena and actions under scrutiny, and inclined to apportion causation or blame to certain already known factors, such as nature, nurture, biology, biography, pathology, etc. In its attempt to give shape to a hidden story and secreted situation without evaluating or judging, though, Steel abandons any mediating ‘Voice of God’ or first-person voice-over convention, allowing instead a dispersed multiplicity of talking heads, embodied voices, photographs, sounds, images and memories to map out a tangled and fractured rhizomatic picture.3 Throughout, the farrago film also begins to betray a ‘will to art’, made noticeable by the unleashing of subtle ethico-aesthetic vibrations that gather into a philosophical counter-rhythm. This only gradually becomes palpable to the viewer’s senses, however, as they are prompted to grope beyond the realm of the visible and, as we will discover below, to grapple with the as-yet unthought of a ‘pure event’.
Documenting Death
Much has been written of late about the ethics of depicting death in documentary films.
Beyond my own work on the unethical framing of murder and suicide in twenty-first century ‘Terrorist infotainment’ (Fleming 2016), Joshua Oppenheimer’s unforgettable 2012 docudrama The Act of Killing has now occasioned the spilling of much academic ink. The special dossier of Film Quarterly inspired by this ‘lightening rod for debate’ (Rich 2013: 8) offers some outstanding examples, which stand alongside Slavoj Žižek’s typically insightful essay exploring the inversion of public and private space in The New Statesman (2013), and
Robert Sinnerbrink’s more recent investigation into the ties between these historical murders and the Hollywood gangster movie genre (2016: 165ff). To me, The Bridge offers itself as a comparably provocative example of documentary film, albeit one that appears to have slipped under the critical radar, as such, despite the fact that it, unlike Oppenheimer’s work, captures images of actual, as opposed to simulated, death/killing. Consideration of this film allows us to expand these cine-ethical discussions somewhat, while opening up another perspective on such issues and debates.
On account of its recording of twenty-three acts of self-killing, Vivian Sobchack’s archaeological exploration into the recording and projection of ‘nonsimulated’ images of death in documentary film makes for a useful starting point for our ethical enquiry into The Bridge. For there, Sobchack takes time to unearth how it came to pass that human death became ‘an antisocial and private experience’ within advanced western cultures, and a fact of life that increasingly became voided from public representation (Sobchack 2004:
On account of its recording of twenty-three acts of self-killing, Vivian Sobchack’s archaeological exploration into the recording and projection of ‘nonsimulated’ images of death in documentary film makes for a useful starting point for our ethical enquiry into The Bridge. For there, Sobchack takes time to unearth how it came to pass that human death became ‘an antisocial and private experience’ within advanced western cultures, and a fact of life that increasingly became voided from public representation (Sobchack 2004: