Recommended to me by a fellow psychiatry resident, I was expecting gut-wrenching scenes, philosophical and poignant revelations about the human psyche. It left me empty.. I think the interesting thing about the filming is exactly how most of the suicides are shown as just a splash in the water.. even the people shown in their full trajectory are done so until the last second, then the camera moves away to not portray the impact. Why? For the same reason the people who were interviewed distanced themselves from the reality of the jumpers. After all, people pretend to be all-knowing about what goes on inside the heads of everyone else.. if someone kicks me in the shin, they may imagine it is hurting and maybe even titrate the imaginative scale of pain according to whatever past experiences they may have had.. but they won't know how much it hurts to me.. nobody will, except me... And I find it interesting how cavalier even the family members were in their discourse. Similar to the story about Samuel Beckett visiting a psychiatric facility and meeting a schizophrenic. His description was "he was like a hunk of meat, there was no one there". And this is a Nobel Prize winner... Anyway, it is disappointing to see ourselves reduced to a splash in obscure waters or encapsulated within the spectrum of mental illness. It certainly keeps the "normal" people away from such a nefarious reality. Truth be told, interviews with many people who survived jumping off bridges reveal that most of them immediately regretted their decision. The desire for life is present in everyone, but we create layer upon layer of denial and repression to suffocate it.. living an inane life and smirking about random death is a horrendous way to live.. so the question is, what extreme jolt would it take to remove you from your own powerfully repressed psychotic universe? At least the jumpers found theirs... dead or alive.
Review of The Bridge
