In January 2019, a Reddit user posted a GIF from the 1995 Leonardo DiCaprio drama The Basketball Diaries, claiming that a person’s suicide was unintentionally captured by the filmmakers.
In the sequence in question, Jim Carroll (DiCaprio) and his friends jump off a cliff into the Harlem River. If you look closely toward the left side of the Henry Hudson Bridge behind them, just before Mark Wahlberg’s character lies down on the side of the cliff, you can spot something (or perhaps someone) falling down in the background. (A blown-up version of the image can be viewed right here.)
Within a few days, Snopes looked into this claim, and arrived at the conclusion that the Reddit user who pointed the anomaly out didn’t base their assertion that it’s a suicide on any actual evidence. Furthermore, they say that the object is so small and blurry that it’d be difficult to accurately determine what it is. However, going by the location, which is confirmed to be the “C Rock” on the northern shoreline of the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, the folks at Snopes were able to search through news reports from the area to see if any suicides were mentioned.
No such results were found for the Henry Hudson, the nearby George Washington Bridge, or the cliffs themselves.
The Truth Behind the Alleged Suicide in ‘The Basketball Diaries’
On top of that, they contacted James Madio, who played Pedro in the film and appeared in the scene with DiCaprio and Wahlberg. According to him, it’s a safe bet that the suicide rumor is false.
“I spent many fun hours on that hot rock in Harlem, with a group of extremely talented actors that I admire,” said Madio. “I’ve never remembered or heard of anyone committing suicide off the [Henry Hudson] Bridge while we were shooting,” he continued.
Madio went on to suggest that the object in the background looks more like a garbage bag than a human being. The Snopes staff acknowledge that it could definitely be a bag or debris of some kind. Another possibility discussed was that it might be a large bird diving off the bridge into the water. Whatever the case may be, an undocumented suicide certainly seems like the least likely of the proposed explanations.
The National Suicide Prevention Hotline is toll-free in the US and available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255, while suicide.org has a list of international suicide hotlines, including Canada and the UK.
The post Did ‘The Basketball Diaries’ Accidentally Capture a Real Suicide? appeared first on VICE.
