Death 24X A Haecceity: Or Deleuze, Life and the Ethico-Aesthetics of Documenting Suicide in (and off) The Bridge

As harps for the winds of heaven,
My web-like cables are spun;
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)

We 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.

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...