If your friends jumped off a bridge...

So, as you've no doubt realized if you've flipped through my Flickr photos, I kinda have a thing for the Golden Gate Bridge. Not exactly an obsession, but it's a) nearby; b) kinda hard to miss; c) moody; d) freakin' gorgeous. I've been over it and under it and above it and on it and near it and on sides of it hundreds of times and it's always changing despite it's stoic immutability. It happens to be one of the few man-made landmarks that not just fits into, but actually enhances, the surrounding scenery.

But I have now seen another side of the Bridge, which, while somewhat tainting, adds yet another dimension to its complex place in the landscape. A few friends and I went to see "The Bridge" on Friday night - a documentary ostensibly about the engineering marvel, but actually about something quite different. With cameras trained on the Bridge over the course of 2004, the filmmaker captured 24 people climbing over the rails and leaping to their deaths in the cold hard waters 24 stories below.

Rather than an exploitative snuff film, though, it turned out to be a fascinating, if disconcerting, look at the diversity of human experience. Through uneasy interviews with friends and family we learn about several of the jumpers - the mentally ill woman who stopped her meds, the exasperated man who never caught a break, the once-happy guy who hit a rough spot, the kid who had felt trapped in the wrong life for its entire duration, the outwardly jovial man whose suicide note exposed a deep self-hatred and unhappiness. And equally interesting were the people left behind - the friend who felt responsible, the brother who refused to believe his sister jumped, the parents who shrugged and said there was nothing they could have done, the woman who encouraged her friend to at least put her name and number in his pocket so she would know when he was found.

One woman described her elaborate planning so she could travel from Texas to meet her end here, while in footage you could witness the very moment one man made his decision, took off his backpack, set it gently on the sidewalk, and leapt. There's no reason to think that 24 suicides in one year is out of the ordinary, which is heartbreaking enough. But when set against the interview with a kid who survived, describing not only the drawn-out period leading to his decision to jump, but the 4 long seconds he had to regret it before he hit the water... well, it makes you pause. Or it should. And maybe hope that you yourself never reach that point, no matter how impossible it may seem now.

And the Bridge goes on standing there, and I suppose I'll go on taking pictures.