NYU Suicides spurs wary student reaction

Freddy Deknatel Arts Editor

The six student suicide deaths that occurred in a span of one year at New York University from Sept. 2003-2004 are the subject of the new documentary film The NYU Suicides by the filmmaker Adario Strange. While a compelling, if horrific, subject for documentary, the proximity of the film’s premiere—a year after the last suicide at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema on Houston St., blocks from the Washington Square campus—spurs questions of how NYU students might respond.

“Well my initial reaction was ‘How come I never heard of it before?’” said Caroline Biggers, a junior in the Gallatin Program at NYU, when asked of the film, which initially premiered on Aug. 25 at the Landmark, with a return engagement there last Friday, Sept. 16. “And second, ‘What is NYU going do about this one, in terms of covering their ass on a P.R. level?’”

Using a sample as a judge, much of the campus seems unaware of the fact that the movie was being made at all. But students still react. “I have not seen the film, I've never even heard of it, and my initial reaction was a little shocked,” Phillip Engelhorn, a sophomore at Tisch, related from a crowded street.

“What is the tone of the movie, what is the purpose of the director?” asked Arthur Greene, a sophomore in the Gallatin Program. “They still have a right to show it in the city, on Houston. But looking at it from the point of one of the kids who knew them, that would be very hard. Walking by a constant reminder of a friend who killed themselves…” he trailed off. “But if it makes an effort to answer things and explain why they did these things, then it’s a good thing. It all depends on the director’s mood.”

That tone can be perhaps superficially gleaned from the trailer, available at nyusuicides.com. Dramatic synthesized music plays in the background as suicide statistics—“Over 30,000 people commit suicide in the United States each year; one in 12 college students have made a suicide plan.”—fade in and out as talking heads state things like “Certainly 9/11 has made New York a scarier place to live,” and “The drug culture of our medical profession and psychiatric and psychological professions is part of the larger technological problem of our society.”

Those who watched the trailer thought it “biased from the jump,” among other conclusions, in terms of casting the string of suicides as a result of isolated students, abusing drugs (whether illicit or prescription), and falling victim to a lonely, frightening culture created by the University and the city.

“I think that [the film] could be blowing it somewhat out of proportion,” said Biggers. “That trailer was so dramatic and, yes, there have been six deaths, but the first was a kid who stopped taking his meds and the second kid, who actually lived below me in my dorm freshman year, was on 'shrooms and just jumped, and people argue about if it even was a suicide.” She did not dismiss the notionbroadcasted loudly by the media since the suicides began—that the University and city culture are to blame. “It can definitely be a very competitive and isolating environment much in the same way New York City itself can be,” she said. “The thing about NYU, above all else, is that it's definitely real life; no one is going to hold your hand.”
Greene related similar sentiments. “NYU can be an impersonal place: 7,000 kids in the freshman class, that’s obvious.” But he wonders about the success of using a string of New York City suicides as exemplary of a national epidemic, even if the numbers are compelling. “I understand that documentaries are normally more effective when they can focus on one specific place or idea...But then when you look at NYU and New York as the location to try and explain a trend hitting thousands of adolescents all over America, the logic breaks down. If you have been to New York and seen NYU you will understand that there is no other place like it in the country, or even the world. So talking about the high pressure environment in New York doesn't explain the cause for the other 98% of suicides in the country.”

Moreover, he said—and Biggers agreed—as awful as the numbers are upfront in headlines and on nightly newscasts, their significance has been blurred and perhaps hyped. “It's such a big school: six kids kill themselves at NYU; one kid kills himself at Brown. There are six times as many kids at NYU,” offered Greene. Conversations of suicide, and of a documentary film intending to explain or theorize them somehow academically, are certainly grim. “I mean, I think that it is blowing the reality of the situation out of proportion because there are 40,000 students here and so 6 killed themselves? It is probably just average in terms of statistics,” said Biggers. Their cold conclusions about suicides on campus were not their only response, though. “When I'm walking to the library half the time I’ll just look up: 'Holy shit.' Holy shit, the fact that so many people killed themselves that they had to put up glass [on the high-story railings], and tile the floors so it looks like spikes,” Greene said.

But the location of the film was not troubling. “Actually, I think if you are going to show it anywhere it should be near campus so that NYU students, whom the film has constructed an image of—whether or not they intended it to and regardless of the veracity of that image—can have access to it,” said Biggers.

Seeing the movie does have its appeals, whether to discover the director Strange's tone, to know and contest its construction of NYU and its students, or simply to learn more about the horrific string of suicides. “I am going to go see it,” Biggers said “because whatever my feelings about it are, people who see this movie are going to then associate it with me because I go here.”