TACtics: Girlfriend (Upset, Outrage, Appal)

In 1989 the Transport Accident Commission joined forces with advertising agency Grey Melbourne, and created the 60-second television ad "Girlfriend" with the explicit mission to "upset, outrage and appal". This no holds barred assault on Victoria's cultural nerves was to prove a resounding success. "Girlfriend", a short piece about the perils of driving while intoxicated, might be one of the most important road safety ads ever made. Not only did it kick off a long and ruthlessly traumatic line of televised TAC campaigns, it also birthed the fantastic slogan "If you drink then drive, you're a bloody idiot" - here spoken in the ad's dialogue by a character identified onscreen as Karen Warnecke of The Royal Melbourne Hospital - which sent shock waves through Australia and beyond (we've observed from LTSA's "Gonna Get Caught" series how the phrase also caught on in New Zealand).

For all that, "Girlfriend" seems fairly subdued by subsequent TAC standards. As the campaigns went on, a particular point of notoriety garnered was in their predilection for raw spectacle - they weren't ones to shy away from showing you the accidents themselves in all of their lurid, jaw-dropping horror. Cars crashed, cars crunched, bodies within were brutally mangled. A TAC formula emerged, which could be broken down into essentially three acts - the deceptively innocuous build-up, the literal impact in the middle, and then the aftermath, with its inevitable overflowing of tears, hysteria and the gnashing of teeth. For now, TAC had no interest in those first two acts, leaping head-first into the protracted epilogue and showcasing the happenings in an emergency ward in the late hours, the results of a crash that has already occurred. "Girlfriend" isn't overly graphic when it comes to injury detail, the worst of it being a glimpse of a leg wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage near the start of the ad, but it is high on emotional anguish. With its repeated cross-cutting and intimate close-ups, it replicates a documentary format, the point seemingly being to give us a fly on the wall view of the stomach-churning messiness of the onslaught of emotion that arises at a time of calamity, here allowed to be a spectacle unto themselves.

Compared to the UK's contemporary "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign, the entry it most resembles is "Fireman's Story", with a few shades of "Arrest". Like the former, it centres on a monologue from a professional who is already well-familiar with the tragic consequences of drink driving - the aforementioned Karen Warnecke, who relates to the camera how anyone in her position has to learn to cope with the emotional devastation along with the physical. She maintains her composure better than Ken Stott's firefighter, but is blatantly just as perturbed by the things she's witnessed, hence her damning, campaign-defining final verdict. Meanwhile, her words are juxtaposed with one such example, as a critically injured young woman, Lucy, is wheeled into the emergency room while her unnamed boyfriend, the driver, staggers around uselessly in the foreground, a feeble, whimpering wreckage of a man. Much like "Arrest", we have the perpetrator attempting to navigate his way around an institution where everyone he meets regards him with barely-muted disdain - that is, until he runs into the mother of the woman he's harmed, who is far less inclined to hold back her anger. Karen herself has more of a low-key presence throughout these sequences, but for one fleeting close-up once Lucy's parents are brought up to speed on the possible consequences; her face slips into a harrowed frown, cluing us in that no matter how many times she's seen this scenario play out on previous nights, it still gets to her. The most optimistic thing you could say about the situation is that the injured party is, from the sounds of it, expected to live (at least, it's never suggested that she could die), although the full extent of the damage is not known - the ad fades out with a question mark still hanging over whether Lucy will get to keep both her legs or if her head hasn't suffered some serious trauma.

"Girlfriend" established TAC's approach as one that strove doggedly for realism, and to push the viewer uncomfortably close to the kinds of horrific incidents we'd prefer to convince ourselves could only happen to other people. While their devotion to overstatement could intermittently get a bit heavy-handed for yours truly, in this case there is a certain sense of knowingness to the ad's voyeurism, a feeling that we, like the driver, are intruders amid the family's displays of grief and suffering, witnessing more that we should perhaps be permitted - consider that moment where Lucy lies immobilised whilst subject to the indignity of having her clothing forcibly removed from her chest. A persistent narrative thread throughout the ad is in the boyfriend's efforts to get to Lucy, only to be continually barred, either by the medics or by Lucy's indignant parents - a reinforcement of his status as a persona non grata, and of the barrier we suspect this incident is likely to present in terms of their relationship going forward. Throughout the ad, we're encouraged to empathise with just about every other participant - Lucy, her parents, Karen - yet we end up cast out in the cold with the boyfriend, last seen weeping in the hospital corridor about how sorry he is, his patheticness a grotesque reflection of our own helplessness in the face of such misery. The point is clear - if we're not willing to be a part of the solution, we belong out in the sin bin with the problem.

Under The Skin (aka The Other From Another Planet)

Here's a thought experiment - I propose that you could swap out the titles of Jonathan Glazer's 2000 film Sexy Beast and his 2013 film Under The Skin and they would, in a way, make every bit as much sense. "Sexy Beast", the subject its own insoluble mystery in terms of where it fits in with the tale of Ray Winstone's retired London gangster, ceases to be a puzzle at all when applied to the odyssey of Scarlett Johansson's seductive night stalker. "Under The Skin", meanwhile, seems a pertinent allusion to the bestial realities forever throbbing below the interplay of Don and his desperately reluctant hosts - the violent past that Gal aspires to transcend but will likely always have a hold on him, which he defiantly attempts to bury deep beneath the surface of the earth. While we're at it, the title of Glazer's 2004 film Birth seems just as interchangeable with Under The Skin. The former picture has Nicole Kidman questioning if the soul of her deceased lover has re-entered the world and concealed itself inside the form of a 10-year-old child. The latter opens with a sequence that evokes a birth (light intersecting with darkness and morphing into something resembling an eyeball) and a human form coming into being. Like Birth, it could be a reincarnation story; at the beginning, the body of a young woman (Lynsey Taylor Mackay), who might be the protagonist's doppelganger, is retrieved from a roadside and stripped of her clothing by Johansson, who puts them on and seemingly sets out to walk the Earth in her stead. Throughout the film, she undergoes an internal transformation, one that suggests she is being born all over again, as she comes to experience the world through new eyes.

This is to say that Glazer's (sparse, but consistently strong) filmography, while encompassing an array of tones and genres, touch on similar themes - horrors that are unspeakable, the troublesome duality of human nature, an awareness of mortality as omnipresent as it is grotesque. Outwardly, Sexy Beast and Under The Skin couldn't be more different creatures. Sexy Beast is a wordier, more character-driven piece, punctuated by intermittent outbursts of violence and a hyperealism that seems reminiscent of Looney Tunes cartoons. Under The Skin has comparatively little use for dialogue, at least dialogue that can be readily understood. Numerous scenes are reliant on stretches of eerie silence, and on Mica Levi's piercing string score. Conversations are frequently muted, and in some sequences all speech is reduced to an incomprehensible babble. The characters therein are more vague silhouettes than individuals we particularly get to know, and most of them are not given names. Sexy Beast plays out mostly in the scorching Mediterranean heat, while Under The Skin unfolds amidst a chilly Scottish haze. Sexy Beast is intense and aggressive whereas Under The Skin is icy and cerebral. Yet there is more overlap between the respective arcs of Gal and Johansson's unnamed protagonist than perhaps meets the eye. Both are ex-patriots looking to abandon pasts that are dark and undefined in favour of a more secluded existence (Gal has settled on this path before his story has begun, while Johansson chooses it throughout the course of hers). Both are pursued by sinister figures who seem intent on reminding them that there can be no escape from the deadly forces with which they have already aligned. Gal is menaced by Don in the real world and by a monstrous rabbit in his dream visions, while Johansson is relentlessly followed by a mysterious motorcyclist (Jeremy McWilliams), who initially appears to assist in her activities but becomes more threatening as she grows more elusive. Early into Under The Skin, Glazer continues a gag implemented at the end of Sexy Beast, when Gal is abandoned at a bus stop in the company of an ad for a Bosch phone, commanding consumers to "Show Your True Colour", a playful allusion to the character's incongruous qualities. In a similar fashion, we see Johansson cruising the streets of Glasgow in her white van, passing several signs that clue us in to her true nature - among them, a poster promoting the video game Space Invaders and another advertising a stage production of Beauty & The Beast (roles that she jointly fulfils). An ad for a grammar school on the rear of a bus, meanwhile, tauntingly assures us that "It's possible".

Glazer's great achievement with Under The Skin is in creating a film that scrutinises humanity through the eyes of something that feels distinctly inhuman - in this case, a carnivorous extra-terrestrial who poses as a human female in order to lure unsuspecting men in the outskirts of Glasgow to their doom. Adapted from Michael Faber's 2000 novel of the same name, the screenplay, a collaboration between Glazer and Walter Campbell, uses few of the plot specificities of Faber's novel, stripping it down to its core element of an otherworldly female with a sinister agenda interacting with a world that is unknowable to her, but speaks increasingly to her sense of curiosity. Johansson is perfectly cast as the tantalising space vixen, exuding a beguilement but also a delicateness that is not quite of this Earth. Faber gave the protagonist a name - Isserley - which is never spoken in the dialogue of Glazer's film. His novel also went into greater detail about the nature of the alien race, and the gruesome fates awaiting the humans they harvested, the sole purpose of their covert Earth operations of course being To Serve Man. In Glazer's film, this much is merely hinted - the protagonist ensnares her prey by leading them into a black void and enticing them to remove their clothing, before leaving them suspended in an ominous pool, to be deflated like a balloon, leaving only their skin (is this a symbolic sequence? Or has she literally opened a portal to another dimension?). A queasy but revealing sequence momentarily transforms the process into something more familiar - a stream of bloody innards are seen moving along on what looks like a conveyor belt - and then back into something unfamiliar, as a beam of red light apparently engulfs them. Glazer's film regards the alien world as something that it is predominantly beyond our comprehension, but just comprehensible enough to enable another, macabre interpretation of the film's title, in that it is literally what is under our skin that these extra terrestrials find so appealing about us. It becomes a memento mori, a reminder that beneath it all we are just collections of flesh, bones and viscera - in this foreign species' eyes, little more than bags of offal waiting to be extracted, processed and consumed in some far-off planet's equivalent to a Happy Meal.

The implications are terrifying, yet this extra terrestrial perspective is a fascinating one to experience, for what skilfully unfamiliar work it makes of the familiar. The Glaswegian roadsides by night, stretches of tarmac beneath glaringly bright street lamps, are the kind of perfectly mundane location we'll have seen a thousand times over, but here become frightening, hypnotic and alien, a light show as beautifully realised and as awe-inspiring as any of the spectacles in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of The Third Kind (1977). The world we see in Under The Skin seems alive and intimate but also distant, cold and as impenetrable to its protagonist as any of those alien horrors would be to its denizens. The protagonist's pick-up ritual is as eerily detached; from inside her vehicle, she peruses the streets for prospective prey. Notably, she has just exited a shopping mall, turning her hunt into a dark reflection of the Earthlings' own consumerist rapacity. She ignores the women and carefully assesses each of the men, working according to a meticulous selection process whereby the men chosen are all young, walking alone and, as her chat-up ritual seems designed to establish, unattached. Despite the open reference to Beauty & The Beast, the fairy tale being evoked here is more a gender-reversed version of Little Red Riding Hood, in which a she-wolf seduces and effectively consumes the naive young men who can be tempted to wander astray. She purchases and dons a fur coat (another skin that has been gruesomely detached from its original owner), a jarring choice of attire that openly flaunts her beastly nature.

The allure of the protagonist, and her dark deadly portal, are not the only forces in the world that threaten to engulf its inhabitants, nor is carnal desire the single impulse that can prompt an individual to walk willingly to their destruction. Emotional attachment is shown to be its own slippery slope, prompting those affected to act in ways that are contrary to their self-preservation. The film's most disturbing sequence has little to do with the protagonist's hunting ritual, with which there is only incidental intersection. The protagonist is on a beach, talking to a potential new target in the form of a Czech swimmer (Kryštof Hádek), when her seduction is interrupted by a crisis from further along the shore. A family's dog has been caught up in the tide; the wife (Alison Chand) has entered the waves in an attempt to save it, but become caught up herself. The husband (Roy Armstrong) then follows to try and save her, but certainly awaits a similar fate. Meanwhile, the couple's baby is left unattended on the beach. The swimmer intervenes and manages to get a hold of the husband and drag him back to shore, but his heroic gesture is rejected; the husband immediately charges back into the waves, presumably to his doom. His devotion to his wife is such that he would sooner join her in her watery grave than abandon her - which might be more laudable if it didn't completely override his devotion to his infant child, who is left abandoned. The protagonist takes advantage of the swimmer's exhausted state to make a shortcut with her abduction process - she walks over, knocks him out with a stone and drags his body away, all while ignoring the distressed howls of the baby. The point of this sequence, so shocking and so gratuitous to so many viewers, is commonly thought to be to demonstrate the aliens' lack of humanity, a crying baby being the one thing that is practically guaranteed to arouse our human sympathies. When the motorcyclist later arrives on the scene to remove all traces that the swimmer was there, he too takes no interest in the baby, who is still there and still howling as the dusk sets in. Its prospects now seem harrowingly grim - either it will be claimed by the waves itself or it will freeze to death during the night. But there is another, more subtle purpose to this interlude that reveals itself slightly later in the film, when the protagonist listens to a radio broadcast reporting on what we presume to be the same tragic occurrence. The body of the husband has since been washed up on the shore and identified as a chemistry lecturer from Edinburgh University, while police continue to search for his wife and son. We might be so preoccupied with the open (although obviously inauspicious) fate of the abandoned infant that we might not immediately pick up on one individual's absence from this news report - yes, the dog, but there is also no mention of the swimmer, who would have disappeared at the same time, and whom we might have expected to be included in the police search. But then no one knew that he was there (any more than they knew about the presence of the protagonist), and the motorcyclist has acted to make sure it remains that way. Notably, this is the only instance in the narrative in which we hear any kind of commentary on a death we've witnessed after the fact. There are no news bulletins on any of the missing young men the protagonist has abducted, the implication being that their absence has not been noticed, or at least not deemed worthy of making the news. A distinction is drawn between the everyday chaos of the universe and the meticulously clean efforts of the aliens, who go about their business in a way that ensures they will not be detected. The motorcyclist ignores the crying baby because its plight has nothing to do with the protagonist's actions, and it is not on the aliens' agenda to intervene with Earthly matters that extend beyond their own practices - this is just universe being its typically indifferent self.

I wonder if Glazer included this horrifying sequence, which has effectively no consequence in terms of how the protagonist's story progresses (the news report is the last we hear of it), as a deliberate means of testing the viewers' sensibilities and illuminating our own empathic blind spots. We don't like to see babies, dogs and idyllic families become the victims of terrible tragedies. But perhaps we feel a certain indifference to the kinds of victims the protagonist seeks out - those who lack familial ties and (compared to the university lecturer) are not distinguished enough to inspire much concern. We might be disturbed by the squeamish fates awaiting her abductees, but do we necessarily feel the same sympathy for them as we do the drowning family? Are these character types that we are happy to treat as dispensable? In the grander scheme of things, there perhaps is little difference. The film moves on quickly from the family's tragedy, and we suspect the news cycle will also - the radio broadcast has already switched to a more cheerful discussion before we've cut to another scene.

Before his untimely, undetected demise, the swimmer imparts enough autobiographical information to establish himself as a prospective soulmate to the protagonist, and to Gal of Sexy Beast - he's another ex-patriot who, in his own words, is looking "to get away from it all". He does not specify what he is looking to get away from in the Czech Republic, but states that he has settled in this Scottish locale because "It's nowhere". His remoteness and anonymity, the very things that mark him out as viable prey to the protagonist, are to him defence mechanisms. Notably, he is the first character who says anything of genuine resonance to the protagonist, in letting her in on the possibility of escape. This possibility becomes increasingly relevant, as the more time she spends with the Earthlings, the more her perspective is seen to evolve and draw her away from her given directive. She begins to notice women and observe them from her typically chilly distance, but in a way that feels curious rather than predatory. Later, whilst walking, she trips and lands face-first on the pavement, and a group of passers-by help her to her feet. A dramatic change occurs; the world momentarily blurs out of focus, and suddenly she is seeing the denizens of downtown Glasgow up close, male and female alike, going about their nondescript business. She is seeing people, not prey, and from an intimate enough proximity to suggest that she feels like a participant in their world, not an interloping observer. Was it the kindness of strangers that triggered the change, or the impact of the fall? The most game-changing incident involves an encounter with a man with facial deformities (Adam Pearson), whom the protagonist talks into accepting a ride in her van and subjects to her usual seduction routine. We've seen this ritual enough times by now to know what kind of danger the man is in, but on this occasion the process seems particularly cruel. He admits that he has no friends, has never had a partner and shops at night because the daytime crowds would not accept him; she tells him he has beautiful hands. The cruelty is double-edged - are we more troubled by the alien's willingness to take advantage of this man's isolation, with kindness that is presumably feigned, or by the callousness of his fellow human in making him an outcast for his physical appearance? The man's lack of social connections make him an ideal candidate for the protagonist's deadly harvest, and yet this time she can not see it through to its conclusion. She lures him into her portal and entices him to undress, but ultimately leaves him alive (albeit to be picked off by the motorcyclist the following morning).

With that, the nature of the narrative drastically alters. The protagonist leaves the city and flees into the Highlands, abandoning her van and shedding her skin in the form of the fur coat. Her days of luring and ensnaring human victims now behind her, her new aspiration is, like the swimmer before her, to get away from it all and find some refuge in the world beyond. She is pursued by the motorcyclist - frighteningly, there is revealed to be more than one of them at work - yet they never quite get close enough to burgeon into an immediate threat, rather a distant but relentless one. For now, the greater dangers to the protagonist come from the people themselves, and from her inability to blend in with them. Minus her beastly coat, the locals  are aware of how she is ill-dressed for a Highland winter. Elsewhere, we see her attempt to adjust her diet. She visits a tea room and tries a slice of cake, but this is clearly, at best, going to be an acquired taste for her - her reflexive reaction is to noisily reject the foreign foodstuff, garnering her quizzical looks from her follow diners.

Man, meanwhile, might not necessarily be the warmest place in which to hide. A paradox emerges; the protagonist's latent capacity for empathy is what prompts her to break away from her alien directive and attempt to assume some kind of place among the humans (it is implied that she spares the deformed man because she identifies too much with his plight as an outsider), yet humans are not themselves shown to be a uniformly empathic species. They too are governed by predatory impulses, and seem just as primed to sniff out and take advantage of her loneliness and vulnerability as she is theirs. Shortly before her encounter with the deformed man, the protagonist narrowly avoids becoming the victim of a gang attack, when a young man approaches her van and gestures at her to wind down her window, and several accomplices descend violently upon the van's bonnet. Other interactions are more ambiguous, and it is hard to distinguish which are rooted in genuine benevolence and which conceal more sinister objectives. While caught in a traffic jam, a fellow motorist has a rose delivered to her by a roadside flower salesman, although his motive for doing so (a random act of kindness? An attempted seduction?) is never established. Later in the film, while on the run from her former life, she is approached by a man on a bus (Michael Moreland) who seems drawn to her vulnerability and offers to help her. He treats her with great compassion, allowing her to stay at his house and serving her food (although she is not seen to eat it), and taking her out on a day trip to the remains of a castle, where he delicately picks her up and carries her over a puddle. He also seems entirely ready to have sexual relations with this non-commutative and potentially damaged stranger, adding a question mark to the purity of his intentions. The attempted intercourse is ultimately thwarted, in a somewhat comical fashion, when the protagonist becomes preoccupied with her own (non-functioning?) genitals.

Before that, the man's attempts to integrate her into his domestic space lead into what I personally rate as the film's funniest, most quietly unnerving and most underrated sequence, when he introduces her to the televised antics of Welsh comedian Tommy Cooper. Cooper holds up a jar and a spoon and makes a barrage of incomprehensible stuttering noises. The man snickers. The studio audience is uproarious laughter. The protagonist stares blankly at the screen, unsure what she is even intended to be perceiving. I'd imagine that Cooper (certainly Cooper out of context) would be a baffling enough experience to anyone who didn't participate in the UK zeitgeist of the 1970s, but the scene touches on far more sinister nerves still. The focus on the protagonist's bewilderment and the continued roaring of the studio audience turns their laughter into a reaction to her reaction. That she isn't in on the joke makes her squarely the butt of it. These noises are a communal expression of emotion from which she is excluded; her status as a perpetual outsider renders her a subject of almost cosmic derision. There is a dark side to this communal expression that perhaps becomes more salient when we consider the circumstances of Cooper's unfortunate death; he collapsed during a live television broadcast in April 1984 and his audience responded with the same uproarious laughter, believing it was part of the act.

The universal characteristic that seems to lurk beneath the skin of the various individuals our protagonist encounters is not really empathy, but vulnerability. Each one is as intrinsically destructible as the next. The realisation that this vulnerability extends to her is what causes the shift in her perspective. Safety in numbers (consider the group of girls the protagonist meets outside of the nightclub) and membership within communities represent one of our most primal, longest-standing tactics for combatting our fragility as individuals. Under The Skin is concerned with the plight of the other, with those for whom such communities are basically impenetrable and offer their own oppressions in place of solidarity. The protagonist never overcomes her loneliness; the disconnect that keeps her from mingling with the humans is not something she figures out how to straddle. After her failure to physically connect with Moreland's character, she appears to give up on integrating herself into civilisation altogether, choosing instead to follow the swimmer's suggestion and to seek out her "nowhere" in a remote stretch of woodland. The solitude that made her human quarry fair game, and expendable in the eyes of their own society, now becomes her sole means of sanctuary.

(Spoilers now follow)

The climax of the film sees a return to the Little Red Riding Hood allusion, with the roles now completely reversed. Here, the wolf seeks refuge amid the seclusion of the woods, only to be greeted by a woodcutter (Dave Action), who attempts to engage her in ostensibly benign small talk. The clue that his intentions are anything but is in how reminiscent his tactics are of her earlier chat-up routine; crucially, he is looking to establish that she has come to the woods all alone. The protagonist is too fatigued or perhaps too fundamentally naive herself to pick up on this. She walks on and comes to what we presume to be the woodcutter's bothy. Curling up inside, she seems to momentarily find her peace; a dissolve shot juxtaposes her with the swaying trees outside, depicting her as a giant in the landscape, comfortably nestled in this perfectly impassive nowhere. This is interrupted by the reappearance of the woodcutter, who attempts to sexually assault her. She flees and he pursues. The reversal is a little further-reaching than the hunter becoming the hunted. The woodcutter is clearly positioned as the interloper in this scenario (the wolf was, after all, the one in its natural habitat), his hulking logging truck an alien vessel on the wooded terrain (one that nearly becomes another trap for the protagonist when she attempts to escape in it), his objective a threat to the equilibrium and to the trees that have provided cover and solace to our protagonist. When he wrestles her to the ground and starts to forcibly tear off her garments, the confrontation is carried through to its grimmest of fairy tale conclusions. Like the wolf in the story, she is physically ruptured; the woodcutter manages to rip open her human skin, giving him a misbegotten glimpse of the dark, uncanny form hidden underneath. He is so repulsed by what he sees that he sneaks away and returns with a can of gasoline and a lighter to set her ablaze. Tellingly, his reapproach is represented via a POV shot that regards his fractured prey with the same chilling detachment as she formerly did her own prospective victims. In aspiring to obliterate what is strange and incomprehensible to his earthly perception, he affirms himself as the inhuman one in the equation.

In spite of the protagonist's demise, the final sequence is not presented as a bleak outcome, but as one of unspoken triumph (a contrast to the more ambiguous ending of Sexy Beast). We see the motorcyclist standing out in the snow-covered horizon, scanning the terrain but apparently not locating her; she has evaded the grasp of her pursuer. We cut to the her charred remains, as smoke rises toward the sky and becomes intermingled with falling snowflakes; the final shot shows the snowflakes falling directly onto the camera, some of them visibly darkened with the protagonist's ashes. This closing image evokes the reincarnation theme of Birth, indicating that this is not the end but the beginning of a renewed cycle; the protagonist has fallen to Earth all over again and has finally found her place within it. It is the same place that awaits all beings that are subject to the same forces of death and decay - the frailty of the flesh and its inevitable breakdown a unifying process that keeps us bound within a natural rhythm as impassive and insurmountable as the thrashing tides, rustling winds and falling snow. Neither human nor other, she now simply is.

TACtics: Nightshift (Fatigue Kills)

"Nightshift", a 1994 road safety advertisement about the dangers of driving tired, gets my vote for the best production from Australian televisual trauma veterans TAC. This one has all of TAC's strengths and none of their weaknesses - and something genuinely unexpected into the bargain.

In general I have mixed feelings about the campaigning methodology of TAC, aka the Transport Accident Commission, a government-owned organisation that provides personal and financial support to those affected by road accidents in the state of Victoria. It would be hard to deny that they've had their share of psychologically-denting classics. Their first television campaign was launched in 1989 with "Girlfriend", and advertising history was born - this was the film that coined the immortal tagline "If you drink, then drive, you're a bloody idiot" (a phrase that doubles as a frank admonishment and an irresistibly fiendish pun), which proved so successful that it was adopted by similar campaigns in Canada and New Zealand. A pseudo-documentary set in a hospital emergency room, where a nurse commented on the lamentable happenings while the family of a critically injured passenger gave the driver a rollicking in the backdrop, "Girlfriend" cemented TAC's favoured approach as one of thoroughgoing realism. The weirder, artsier tactics from the later installments of the UK's concurrent Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives campaign were certainly not for them. What TAC do exceptionally well in that regard is to capture a credible sense of the calm before the storm; a signature TAC technique is to carefully establish each scenario and the doomed souls within via a sequence depicting the build-up to the accident. Nondescript people are shown going about their day in a seemingly nondescript manner, before a bad decision on someone's part causes things to flip over (sometimes literally) into the stuff of nightmares. The characters' interactions feel natural, the ways in which the seeds of their impending destruction are sown are deliberately low-key, cleverly positioning them as ostensibly small things with the potential to reap catastrophic consequences. TAC's forte is in illustrating just how painfully fragile is the dividing line between the everyday and the horrific.

Where I tend to have a harder time with TAC is in their favoured strategy once that dividing line has been breached, which is to say that they're very big on displays of raw, uninhibited emotion. The muted, austere nature of those earlier Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives PIFs was also not for them. With TAC campaigns you get ample instances of people in grave distress, sobbing about how sorry they are for their lapses of judgement, screaming for badly mangled loved ones, etc. It's not that this is an inherently ineffective approach (I'd rate "Tracy", an ad that's nothing but a driver in absolute hysterics, as one of their stronger entries), but it is absolutely the case that TAC prefer to overstate the emotive content of their ads, and overstated emotion is not something I'm inclined to respond to in a safety campaign. I'm of the opinion that the best campaigns are the ones that manage to exercise a little restraint, and to convey their messages in a sharply succinct manner that doesn't rely on beating you over the head with how distressing their cautionary scenarios are (ideally, that much should be self-evident). I think D&DWL was onto something in attempting to keep its emotional horrors as below the surface as possible - there, it's often the small things that sliver into your psyche and fester (the way Kathy breaks the fourth wall while her parents argue, the demonic background laughter at the end of "Pudding", the grimly sardonic "Cup of tea, sir?" at the end of "Arrest"). In pitching things at the opposite extreme, I find that TAC intermittently dampens the impact of their ads, having them come off as merely overwhelming, and at worst pushing them into the arena of gruesome sentimentality (see "12 Days of Christmas", a campaign I find so personally indigestible that I'm very unlikely to touch on it here).

"Nightshift" works as well as it does for its lack of any big emotional fall-out. It's a rare occasion on which TAC took the D&DWL-favoured route of less is more. Sure, we could have had an epilogue in which the mother of one of the crash victims, referenced in the preceding dialogue, is shown going to pieces on receiving news of the central accident, but why would we need to see that? Our imagination can fill in that blank just fine. The ad says all that it needs, through a subtle gesture from an innocent bystander after the crash has occurred - a gesture that's perhaps even more devastating, in its way, than the crash itself. As I say, it's the small things that should really stick with you in a safety campaign.

Before we come to that, "Nightshift" establishes itself, in classic TAC fashion, with a naturalistic sequence in which we get to know our characters and the thought processes that lead them astray before having to abruptly say our goodbyes. Our protagonists are a young couple - Shaun, who's been working a late shift in his job at a pizzeria, and his unnamed girlfriend, who comes to collect him in a combi van. The two of them are planning to take a trip over the weekend, and the girlfriend makes the sensible suggestion that they go home and get some sleep beforehand, but Shaun is intent on making the drive overnight while the roads are deserted. We can sense that he probably isn't up to it, having already admitted to having had a demanding shift at work. The most ominous early statement, though, comes from Shaun's boss, who makes the parting remark, "See you Monday". A seemingly innocuous pleasantry that seals his fate from the outset, cluing us in that Shaun, in all odds, won't be back at all. As with slasher movies, there's got to be a particular set of rules for surviving a safety awareness campaign; saying anything along the lines of "See you shortly" guarantees the recipient victim status.

Sure enough, as the night wears on Shaun finds it increasingly difficult to stay awake. He tries turning the radio on, but his girlfriend, who's attempting to sleep in the passenger seat, objects to the noise. He then asks her to talk to him, but she refuses, advising him to pull over if he's tired. Shaun, for whatever reason, is determined to keep going. Come dawn's early light, and he's reduced to a barely-conscious daze, blatantly fighting just to keep his face upright. At one point, it looks as though Shaun might have averted disaster; he accidentally drifts onto the right-hand side of the road, but a truck approaching up ahead flashes its headlights at him, spurring him awake for long enough to redirect the vehicle out of its path. Unfortunately, Shaun's sleep-deprived body can't hold out for any longer, and as the truck passes them, he looses control and veers directly into it. As crashes go this one is pretty, as Shaun himself would phrase it, full-on - the front-end of the combi completely crunches. The ad stops short of showing you any bodies or injury detail (it's one of TAC's lighter ads in that regard), but it's hard to imagine how either occupant could have survived that impact. The real moment of devastation occurs when the driver of the truck jumps out, his adrenalin clearly up, only to survey the damage and take in how hopeless the situation is, whereupon his shoulders droop forlornly. That shoulder-drooping, so subdued a gesture, says everything we need to know about the accident's emotional aftermath; the ad fades out on a moment of chilling silence, with the continued, eerily incongruous background ambience of the newly broken morn.

It's the smaller and sometimes incidental details in "Nightshift" that make it such an effective work. Take that brief shot of a Gumby doll positioned on the combi dashboard. It doesn't contribute anything significant to the story, but it's a quirky touch that adds a little extra character, both to the van's interior and to the film's broader atmosphere, giving us some insight into the lives of these ill-fated individuals.

Here's where we get to the ad's unexpected strength. This is not something I'm accustomed to saying about road safety advertisements, particularly ones featuring crashes as brutal as this, but "Nightshift" is actually a really beautiful-looking piece of film-making. Sure, once the combi goes into the truck it gets as grim and ugly as you would expect from a production of this ilk, but the preceding sequence in which Shaun and his girlfriend cruise along the Australian highway and past a lake bathed in the orange glow of the rising sun is so dazzling that the first time I saw it, it made me gasp. For a split second, I nearly forgot that I was watching a safety promotion that was gearing up to end in carnage. There's something so wonderfully deceptive about the calm and the beauty of that moment, almost as if we too are being lulled into a gentle stupor before the crash snaps us back abruptly into the reality of the situation. It also emphasises the implicit cruelty of the final outcome, with the freshness and promise of a new day getting underway with two young lives being tragically snuffed out.

"Nightshift" proved so indelible that it was partially remade in 2015 for an ad entitled "Then and Now", designed to illustrate how advancements in safety and technology could result in a happier outcome. The climax of the original ad was featured alongside its 21st century update via a split screen; while things play out as disastrously as ever for Shaun '94 and his girlfriend, their modern counterparts fare better thanks to the presence of safety barriers in the middle of the road, which prevent their vehicle from making contact with the truck. The car's dashboard then activates a warning, telling the driver to take a break after detecting that he's been at the wheel for too long. The update ends with the modern, more fortunate version of Shaun pulling over and asking his girlfriend if she'll take over driving for the rest of the journey, which she agrees to do.

That's all very swell, you know, but what the newer version sadly lacks is cinematography as gorgeous as its predecessor. In the 2015 version, the world looks comparatively dull and hazy - which seems ironic, given that our characters here live to relish whatever it may bring.

Oh, and a small disclaimer. You'll notice that here and in my review of "Gonna Get Caught" I've purposely avoided describing these ads as public information films, or PIFs, and that's because I'm not sure what the correct technical term would be for such films from Australia and New Zealand. (That might seem pedantic, but I'm mindful of how the terms "public information film" and "public service announcement", while regarded as one another's UK/US equivalents, are not as interchangeable as popularly assumed, and prefer to apply caution in using them.)  This 1999 study from the Monash University Accident Research Centre refers to TAC's output as simply "road safety advertisements", which seems a safely generic enough term to use for the time being. The study itself makes for an interesting read - even if "Golf", which would likely be my vote for the second best TAC installment, was sadly excluded from their research.

Urban Deer (Canon Come and See)

In 2014 Jonathan Glazer teamed up with  JWT London for Canon's "Come and See" campaign, a series of ads encouraging us to get out there and gape at life's marvels, so long as we were gaping through the lens of a Canon camera. The first of Glazer's contributions, "Gladiator Football", was a wordless celebration of Florence's tradition of Calcio Storico (in a nutshell, a form of football thought to date back to the Renaissance era, in which players are expected to beat the living snot out of one another). It was a roaring, full-blooded snapshot of the action and intensity unfolding within the sporting arena, taking us closer to the drama than I suspect most casual spectators would care to venture. His second film, "Urban Deer", looks to have been purposely conceived as the very antithesis of that. This is spectacle of a meeker, almost furtive nature, characterised by its stillness and its quietness. Compared to the brightly-lit brawling in "Gladiator Football", this is a phenomenon that prefers to keep to the shadows, revealing itself only to those with the patience to see it. Turning its attention to Canon's capacity for capturing nighttime images, its subjects are the fallow deer that are a familiar seasonal sight in the Essex suburbs near Epping Forest, at times of year when the grassy verges offer more attractive grazing opportunities than the brambles in their woodland home.

The spectacle here comes from the mismatch between the natural and the artificial; immediately, the deer seem out of place beneath the relentless glare of the suburban streetlights, and sauntering over the patterned terrain of zebra crossings, but seem totally at ease in going about their business in these paved environs. The atmosphere (unlike that of "Gladiator Football") is one of total calm, offering few sounds beyond the patter of deer hooves on the asphalt and the background hum of wind and traffic. In lieu of narration we're left to draw our own conclusions about the significance of what we're seeing. Is it a testament to the adaptability of the deer, or does it say something about the tensions between human expansion and the balance of nature? Are the deer to be viewed as interlopers, or as reclaiming territory that was formerly theirs? There is, potentially, a haunting underpinning to the images - captured largely in silhouette, these shadowy cervines might be perceived as almost ghostly presences, the spirits of a bygone time and place long stripped away and buried beneath cement - but more perceptible still is the faint suggestion of quirkiness in the ad's presentation. Glazer's film seems to capture a feeling of dry humor in the very notion of deer making use of the most mundane features of human development. Take that wide shot of a deer approaching a zebra crossing, as though preparing to use it with as much confidence and casualness as any of the estate's diurnal residents. The film also incorporates what might be described as a comical interlude involving an intersection between three different species and their apparent indifference to one another. A strutting deer, scent-marking fox and cat in a hurry are observed moving along their own private trajectories, uninterested and unfazed by the others' presence (that running cat, a further symbol of convergence between the wild and domestic, makes for a priceless visual punchline). The film' slyest gag comes from a slight interference to its ambience - momentarily mixed in with the soundscape are the muffled noises of a logotone and the opening phases of what sounds like a news announcement, presumably the overheard noise from a television (or radio) in an adjacent living room. There's a sense of two spectacles competing with one another; the loud bombast of the television (or radio) purporting to offer our all-important window into the world, juxtaposed with the actual world as it exists right outside our windows.

Notable in "Urban Deer" is the total absence of any direct human presence, with all representation going to its technology and its architecture. The closest we come is in the vehicle seen disappearing into the distance at the start of the ad, before the deer feel safe to emerge from the greenery. This sets up a circular narrative, with the deer later scarpering to the sounds of a vehicle getting uncomfortably near, although the ad closes before it comes into view. It is in the intermittent presence of those vehicles that we get a sense of conflict, and of immediate threat to the deer (for all their adaptability, maybe this environment is not so ideal a place for a deer to linger), and the calm is accordingly broken. Once again, Man Was In The Forest, even if on this occasion the "forest" looks deceptively like our own turf.

As with many of these advertising ventures, you've got your choice between full 90 second version and the 60 second edit. Alas, the 60 second version makes something of a hodgepodge of the overheard television jingle.

The Crepes of Wrath (aka The Life of A Frog, That's The Life For Me)

"The Crepes of Wrath" was the 13th Simpsons episode to enter production (as indicated by its code name 7G13), meaning that at one time it was presumably pegged as the prospective finale for Season 1. The teething troubles that plagued "Some Enchanted Evening" dictated otherwise (for some reason it also slipped ahead of "Krusty Gets Busted" in the airing order), but it's not hard to fathom how it might have served as an appropriate end point to the show's first chapter. The closing scene is one of family unity, with all five Simpsons gathered together in the same room and on more or less the same page; they're happy to see one another after an episode spent largely divided. The season bows out with a final, heartening affirmation that the ties that bind our titular clan are essentially unshakeable.

There's an argument to be had that "The Crepes of Wrath" was also The Simpsons' biggest and most adventurous episode to date. Up until now, the series had rarely allowed its characters to venture outside of Springfield, the only notable exception being "The Call of The Simpsons", in which the family spends a few days lost in the wilderness after a camping trip goes awry. "The Crepes of Wrath" represented a much deeper broadening of the show's canvas, by looking further afield and opening the door to exploring the characters' relationship with the wider world. Here, the wider world in question happens to be rural France, where Bart is exiled after Homer and Principal Skinner have each had their respective fill of his mischief. Homer trips and injures his back when Bart fails to pick up his Krusty doll, while Skinner's mother Agnes (making her debut appearance and seeming deceptively sweet-tempered) becomes a casualty of Bart's latest prank of detonating a cherry bomb in the toilets at Springfield Elementary. Skinner proposes that they take advantage of the school's foreign exchange program to send Bart to a vineyard in France for three months, purely so they can enjoy a period of respite ("Normally, a student is selected on the basis of academic excellence or intelligence, but in Bart's case I'm prepared to make a big exception!"). Bart is enthused by the idea, only to discover on arrival that the whole thing is basically a dupe; the "fabulous château" he was promised has clearly seen better days, and its unscrupulous owners have signed up to the foreign exchange program as a source of child labour.

 "The Crepes of Wrath" is sometimes credited with being the first in a long and particularly notorious line of Simpsons episodes - the Simpsons travelogue, in which the family jets overseas and dedicates 18-odd minutes to providing a rundown on the people, landmarks and culture of their selected destination through the eyes of crass American tourists, in a world where every crass American tourist's wildest, most prejudicial assumption is accurately realised. Let's just say that such episodes tend to be divisive at best. I would argue that "Crepes" is, at most, a distant cousin, and that the archetypal Simpsons travel episode didn't come into being until fairly late in the game - "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo", which landed about midway through Mike Scully's reign, feels like the one that properly cemented the formula (with its bitty, meandering narrative and first use of the deliberately vexing catchphrase "The Simpsons are going to__!") and made them a fixture of the series going forward. Prior to that, it's curious just how little interest the series had in exploring how the Simpsons would cope with the world beyond America. Episodes where the family travelled to other countries were rare, and rarer still were the episodes where travelling to another country represented the plot in itself, as opposed to a dash of frivolity on the side, eg: Homer going to India on a deliberately inconsequential tangent in "Homer and Apu", Lisa going to Britain for a small chunk of "Lisa's Wedding". Notably, facing foreign cultures was not something the family typically did as a unit; it was not so much a case of the Simpsons vs the world as individual members temporarily splitting from the clan to pursue personal business. By my count, the "classic" era offered only two instances of the entire family taking an international trip together...and since one of those was in a Halloween episode (the family's vacation in Morocco in "Treehouse of Horror II"), there's effectively only one. "Bart vs Australia" feels a lot closer in spirit to the archetypal "travel episode" than "The Crepes of Wrath"; its treatment of the Australians is significantly meaner-spirited than the depiction of the French in "Crepes" (for all the horrors Bart has to face at the Château Maison, there is no equivalent, on the metre of viciously bad taste, to his remark about hearing a dingo eating a baby - to quote Tropic Thunder, you about to cross some fucking lines). But what "Crepes" does nail straight off the bat, and which set the tone for every travel episode to come, is this basic idea that foreigners are to be regarded with suspicion. On that score, it offers two cautionary examples for the price of one. Bart's nightmarish reception in France's wine country is interwoven with a parallel narrative in which the remaining Simpsons accommodate an Albanian exchange student (Homer: "You mean all white with pink eyes?") by the name of Adil Hoxha, who seems innocuous but is actually a Soviet spy.

Occasionally with Season 1 you can spot telltale signs of their being penned while the 1980s was on its deathbed, little snippets of the spirit of the decade right as that spirit was gasping for relevancy. The Happy Little Elves, a pastiche of your typically cute and toyetic 1980s cartoon, were one such example. The early concept of Mr Burns being modelled on Ronald Reagan was another. On account of the Adil subplot, "The Crepes of Wrath" might be the most 1989-into-1990 of all Simpsons episodes, a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of Cold War paranoia from the very last days in which Cold War paranoia had genuine currency. By the time it made it to air, on April 15th 1990, the Iron Curtain had fallen and the non-threatening nineties were in the process of beginning (Albania itself would abandon communism before the year was through). With that in mind, it's not surprising that Adil never made any significant reappearances (though he was seen in the "Do The Bartman" video, dancing by the remains of the Berlin Wall, which seems a nice enough postlude for his character). Bart's story is a lot more evergreen, offering a darker take on the familiar tourist experience wherein the reality of travel does not align with what was shown in the holiday brochure. But "Crepes" ultimately succeeds because it is at its heart about the family and how they are fundamentally stronger as a unit, even when there's an Atlantic ocean between them. It offers yet another variation on a theme that was becoming increasingly familiar in the back end of Season 1 - an exploration of how that unit is at risk of disintegrating whenever one of its members is pushed or drawn out of the equation. We saw it with Marge in "Life on The Fast Lane" and Homer in "Homer's Night Out", and now it's Bart's turn to be the wayward Simpson. The threat to the family here is somewhat lower-key, but no less troubling, and lurks in Homer's outspoken preference for Adil over Bart. Homer's view is that he's effectively swapped out his son for a superior model, one who's polite, helps with the housework and above all takes a keen interest in what he does at the nuclear power plant. His belief that equilibrium has finally been attained through Bart's exclusion is something he's not shy about expressing in the presence of Marge and Lisa, and it disturbs them so. The arrangement is obviously askew, but it goes deeper than they could possibly imagine.

Adil made an appearance as a villain in the tie-in video game Bart vs. The Space Mutants, and was identified in the instruction manual as one of several "totally evil" characters who wanted revenge against Bart for past defeats "even if it means selling out Earth to the Mutants!" The others, for the record, were Nelson, Jimbo, Ms Botz, Sideshow Bob and...Dr Marvin Monroe (WTF? Why did they go with him when César and Ugolin from this very episode were present and waiting?). I remember thinking nearer the time that Adil was likewise out of place with that lot, on the grounds that he'd never even met Bart and had no personal aggro with him (he also seemed entirely loyal to his home country of Albania, so why would he sell them out to the mutants? Was he disillusioned by the political turn his country took soon after his return?). But I suppose their video game enmity works on a symbolic level, when we consider that Adil was effectively Bart's usurper. He took Bart's place within the household, and within Homer's affections, and he used his guise as the perfect surrogate son to gain access to the power plant and take photographs of the nuclear reactor to fax back to Albania (ah, for the days when the fax machine was regarded as cutting edge technology). In reality, he poses a far greater threat to security and to the established order than any of Bart's childish pranks, something that Homer never fully grasps, being so intent on tending to the brood parasite that's infiltrated his nest. Adil might use the codename "Sparrow" for his spying operations, but as bird metaphors go, he's definitely more of a cuckoo.

The point "Crepes" is essentially making is that the Simpson family, for as chaotic and dysfunctional as they might appear, signifies something that is intrinsically wholesome, loving and good. It's a point it bears out by portraying its foreign forces, whether they're interlopers or operating on their own turf, as harmful corruptions of the family unit. This can be seen not only in Adil, but in Bart's French hosts, César and Ugolin. Not for nothing are they the first Simpsons villains who are themselves a family, albeit a distorted reflection of the more conventional family the Simpsons embody. An uncle and nephew team, in practice they function as more of an off-centre married couple (in her letter to Bart, Marge identifies them as his adopted parents) whose pet donkey Maurice makes three, and is positioned firmly above Bart in the maison's hierarchy (in fact, a line from César suggests that Bart was brought in specifically for Maurice's benefit). The privileges that Maurice enjoys over Bart include getting to lounge around with César and Ugolin while Bart toils in the vineyard, sleeping on the bed of straw intended for Bart, and most egregiously, the transgression Bart later feels compelled to cite to the French authorities, being granted ownership of Bart's favourite red cap. As happens in the Adil subplot, Bart finds himself pushed out in the cold by someone else's child, which in this case happens to be a fur (and hoof) child.

It's interesting and perhaps a mite unfortunate that "The Crepes of Wrath" came only two episodes after "Life on The Fast Lane", another story in which a French character proved a disruptor of the family's peace, something that could be perceived as the series having a somewhat Francophobic edge. It's worth noting that this was not the original plan, and that Jacques was written as a Scandi named Björn but improvised as French by his voice actor A. Brooks, who thought that gave him more to work with. What keeps the episode from becoming too repetitious is that César and Ugolin are a deliberately far cry from the archetypal Frenchman that Jacques embodied. Whereas Jacques, the Parisian charmer, was suave and impeccably groomed, they're vulgar, rustic and unkempt. Their antipathy is presented with such broad strokes that they perhaps don't register as the most immediately distinguished of the Season 1 antagonists. They're exceedingly mean, but they're never quite as legitimately threatening as Ms Botz of "Some Enchanted Evening". They're also not characterised with any of the nuance or shades of sympathy that Sideshow Bob exhibited in "Krusty Gets Busted". A possible redeeming quality, their obvious love and kindness toward Maurice the donkey, isn't treated by the plot as a virtue, but as a further reflection of their disdain for Bart. Nonetheless, César and Ugolin get my "Still Waters" award, for having more cultural depth than perhaps meets the eye. For César and Ugolin are borrowed characters, named for and heavily inspired by the antagonists of Claude Berri's 1986 period drama Jean de Florette and its follow-up Manon des sources (the same pictures that inspired the "Reassuringly Expensive" campaign for Stella Artois). There, César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) were an uncle and nephew team living in southeastern France post WWI, and also not above carrying out a few dirty deeds to get what they want. For all its ostensibly xenophobic trappings, "Crepes" is the episode in which The Simpsons reveals a passionate, almost clandestine affection for French arthouse cinema (NB: on the DVD commentary, writer George Meyer confesses that he's never seen Berri's films, but it's evident that someone in the production team took a shine to them). At the time it debuted, Berri's two-part saga was still a relatively contemporary cultural touchpoint, but I wonder how many of the show's audiences were going to get the reference? For anyone familiar with Berri's works, it's pretty unmissable, but not something the internal narrative openly advertises or underscores (myself, I was compelled to watch Berri's films because of the Stella Artois campaign - picking up on the Simpsons connection was an unexpected and revelatory bonus that gave me a greater appreciation for "Crepes" with hindsight).

The Ugolin who appears in "Crepes" is a pretty decent caricature of Ugolin as portrayed by Auteuil. The elongated nose is perhaps a little off, and he's here notably taller than his uncle, but you can otherwise see the Jean de Florette character in the design. César's interpretation is a fair bit looser, giving him a curiously cricetine appearance - with his hunched posture, long whiskers and rounded nose, he doesn't resemble a man so much as an overgrown muskrat. How does their characterisation compare? Well, keep in mind that Berri's combined saga runs for just under 4 hours, while "Crepes" only has 22 minutes, so it goes without saying that the Simpsons renditions have considerably less scope for development than their arthouse counterparts. The narrative of Jean de Florette had César (or Papet, as he is more affectionately termed) and Ugolin coveting a plot of land and attempting to drive out its new owner, city boy Jean Cadoret (Gérard Dépardieu), by blocking its water supply - not out of malice, but out of a sense of familial duty and a desire to restore and preserve the Soubeyran line, of which they were the last standing members. Naturally, their actions have no such complexities in "Crepes", which is happy to play them as straight villains - although Ugolin does demonstrate enough of a moral compass to object to his uncle's practice of adding anti-freeze to their wine on the grounds that it might kill someone, which is consistent with his being the more sensitive of the two in Berri's saga.

The allusions to Berri's cinema were a gratifying confirmation that The Simpsons did not underestimate its audience. But they also functioned as sly rebuttals to those critics of the show who felt that the popularity of the series represented a lowering of standards, by playfully demonstrating that its production crew were learned and had an appreciation for more highbrow fare. This much is also flaunted in an early sequence - one of the showiest and most visually inspired of Season 1, next to Marge's dream sequence in "Life on The Fast Lane" - when Ugolin goes to collect Bart at the Parisian airport, and their journey away from the city and deep into provincial France is represented as a ride through the scenes of various paintings by (mostly) French artists. Let's see, we have Claude Monet's water lilies, Henri Rousseau's dream and Édouard Manet's luncheon. Vincent van Gogh's wheatfield gets in, presumably on the basis that it was painted in France, even if van Gogh himself was Dutch.

And, contrariwise to the episode's gleefully xenophobic front, it is specifically through his embracing of the French culture and language that Bart finds his deliverance, and makes a connection with a much more benevolent local. Having been sent to a nearby town in a downpour to acquire a bottle of César and Ugolin's illicit ingredient, he passes a man whom he identifies as a police officer and attempts to reach out to him about his dire situation. Alas, the police officer speaks no English and Bart cannot make himself understood. He bemoans his inability to communicate in French, despite having been exposed to the language for two months, only to discover that he is in fact capable of speaking it fluently. (Bart has long struck me as something of a natural polyglot. I recall he could apparently speak Chinese in "Bart on The Road". In "Blame It On Lisa" he also mastered Spanish with remarkable speed, even if he forced himself to forget the language with self-inflicted brain damage...oh, Season 13). He runs back to the police officer and gives him a thorough account. There is a slight back-handedness in the sympathy he receives; while the police officer is clearly aghast at what Bart has endured, the crime he explicitly identifies as most serious is the addition of anti-freeze to wine. Nevertheless, he comes to Bart's aid and enables him to return to Springfield with his own back-handed remark of having encountered one nice French person on his travels.

For me, the most harrowing aspect of Bart's predicament is the revelation that it's gone on for two whole months, which frankly feels like an eternity in Simpsons time. Did nobody seriously catch wind of what was happening over those 60-odd days? (Likewise, did no one in the Simpson household have any inkling of what Adil was doing?) Watching the episode recently, I had a bleak thought that had honestly never occurred to me before - does Skinner know what kind of place the Château Maison is when he sends Bart there? It seems a bit of a stretch that he would do it on purpose, no matter how incensed he was about the mishap with his mother (Skinner dispenses discipline because he's a stickler for order, not because he's in any way vindictive), but there's nothing in the episode that explicitly rules it out (and "Crepes" does showcase a particularly dickish side to Skinner, as evidenced in his speech "welcoming" Adil to the school). In the end, maybe it isn't important - Skinner is complicit in Bart's ordeal simply through not caring enough to look into where he's actually sending his students. You could lay the same charge against Homer and Marge, who also don't seem to demand too much oversight of their son's experience. Marge cares enough to write Bart a letter (in which she sells him a half-truth about Homer going to sleep talking about how much he loves him), but that's all the communication from home he apparently gets. Granted, contact means were more limited in the days before email and social media, and we don't know for certain that the maison has a telephone, but you'd think they might have made a bit more effort. To a point, there's a sense that this lack of oversight stems from Homer's feelings of having moved on, now that he has Adil, and being happy to leave Bart to his lot. This ties in with another favourite theme of the series, present pretty much from the start - that of adult indifference to childhood anxiety, and the various strategies those shrugged off children must fall on to survive, be it Lisa's need for artistic expression or Bart's itch for rebellion.

Bart doesn't get any opportunities for his usual mischief-making whilst abroad; his act of rebellion against César and Ugolin ends up being a noble one that has him recognised as a hero by the French authorities. With that in mind, his vineyard ordeal can be viewed as your basic grind toward redemption - he gets banished to the dingy confines of the Château Maison for a show of unruliness that has him deemed unfit to live with decent, civilised society. His pride and humanity are stripped away (it may be the life of a frog to which he aspires, but he's saddled with the life of an unfavoured donkey), but he earns his way into the world's good graces by demonstrating what a tremendous force for righteousness he can be (in this case, by upholding the integrity of France's wine trade). César and Ugolin are last seen being apprehended and assured by Bart's cop buddy that their future wine-making will be happening in prison (now there's a joke that went over my head as a child). But then again, maybe not. César and Ugolin made a cameo appearance fairly soon after, in the Season 3 episode "Lisa The Greek" (in which they exhibit the stereotypically French trait of spurning American football but loving the comedy antics of Jerry Lewis). They are visibly not in prison in that episode (also still stockpiling the anti-freeze), indicating that they got a light sentence and/or a really ace lawyer. That's all well and good, but we sadly don't find out what became of Maurice. Was he ever reunited with his folks?

Adil's narrative, meanwhile, takes the opposite trajectory to Bart's. He gets a comparatively warm reception in America. Skinner's school hall speech is obviously the worst of it; he also gets into a dinner table dispute with Lisa about which of their countries uses the better system of government, which descends into a childish back and forth but is resolved amicably enough (by way of a glib compromise offered by Homer). On the whole, he's thrilled by just how trusting his American hosts are, and how little trouble he has getting them to accept him and his strange fascination with nuclear blueprints and civil defence plans. His strategy is to get close enough to Homer to get what he wants, but his success is equally dependent on adults not taking too keen an interest in the particulars of  what he's doing. Through no ingenuity whatsoever on the Simpsons' part, he ends up being exposed as a villain, when an investigation by the US authorities leads them to Evergreen Terrace, although they mistakenly target the Flanders' house (Ned, disappointingly, doesn't even seem to be in) and it's Homer who inadvertently gives Adil away. It works out okay for Adil, though - the US authorities agree to release him and return him to Albania in exchange for the release of one of their own spies captured on Albanian soil. The American spy turns out also to be a child, presumably sent to Albania under similar pretences to Adil, which I guess makes both countries even in their duplicity (and maybe also comparable to César and Ugolin, in their willingness to exploit children). A brief verbal exchange between Adil and the unidentified American spy indicates that they've met each other under similar circumstances before, and there's a discernible level of familiarity and connection in their dialogue. Adil shares that he thinks he's "getting too old for this game", which is on the one hand an acknowledgement of the threat an impending adolescence poses to the aura of innocence necessary to maintain his ruse. But it reads equally as a world-weary desire just to see the Cold War end; that Adil says it to the character to whom he should see himself as most diametrically opposed feels significant. He's fatigued with the conflict, and he recognises that he and the American spy are basically no different. They each understand what the other has been through. Given that the end of the Cold War was in sight by the time it aired, "Crepes" could be viewed as an expression of hope and optimism for the potential peace and understanding that lay ahead. Then again, Adil bids the Simpsons farewell by imploring that they not be put off accepting further students from the foreign exchange program, presumably to leave the door open for more of his allies to sneak their way in, so maybe they were hedging their bets after all. 

PS: Here's another nice postlude - in the aforementioned scene in the "Do The Bartman" video, the American spy is seen dancing alongside Adil, and I'd take that to mean that they're openly the best of friends now.

PPS: For some reason the scene with Adil and his American friend does not appear in the version of "Do The Bartman" that's included in the Season 2 DVD box set. I was so bummed when I found out. Why would you deny Adil his coda?

Last Orders (aka The Good Son?)

Let's get back to Jonathan Glazer, shall we?

"Last Orders", from 1998, is one of Glazer's best-known and most celebrated adverts (the tussle for the top spot is effectively between this, "Surfer" and "Swim Black"). It formed part of Stella Artois' "Reassuringly Expensive" campaign, a collection of ads set in rural France that were purposely designed to recall the work of French film-maker Claude Berri - an influence loudly proclaimed through its reappropriation of the score to Berri's 1986 film Jean de Florette. (For all the campaign's French preoccupations, we'd do well to remember that Stella Artois is of Belgian origin, and from the Dutch-speaking Flemish region.)

The slogan "Reassuringly Expensive" had been used in print ads since 1982, but gained fresh momentum in 1991 when the Berri-inspired television campaign got underway with the ad "Jacques de Florette", directed by New Zealander Michael Seresin, best renowned for his work as a cinematographer on several Alan Parker features. Seresin also helmed the earlier entries of the "Papa and Nicole" series, which debuted that same year; both campaigns took place in the south of France, with Seresin's cinematic eye bringing out the beauty and the vividness of the scenery in each, although tonally the two were cut from very different cloths. "Papa and Nicole" focussed on evoking the chicness and glamour of modern France, the kind went down well with British holidaymakers, while "Reassuringly Expensive" transported us to the more distant world of French peasants in the early 20th century. The two also took very different approaches in getting around the fact that their characters weren't English speakers; whereas the "Papa and Nicole" ads were mostly non-verbal, with dialogue restricted to a scant number of proper nouns, the "Reassuringly Expensive" spots were wordier pieces, and the absence of subtitles was certainly a bold move for a campaign targetted at UK audiences. In practice, the language barrier was all part of the appeal - the stories they told were straightforward enough that a grasp of the French language was not necessary in order to follow what was happening, but they had a certain mystique, prestige and larger than life-ness that left them feeling less like promos designed to make beer look sexy and more like bite-sized morsels of arthouse cinema. They were gorgeously-shot, narrative-driven and stocked with vibrant, well-defined characters who had us immediately invested in where their misadventures were headed. Each installment offered its own delectable set of twists and turns; the results were humorous but typically marked by a sinister undercurrent, a fascination with the slippery nature of human morality and how the entry of a certain sought-after liquid into the equation could tip even the best intentions out of whack.

The original "Jacques de Florette" ad was not itself a particularly sinister affair. It focussed on a cash-strapped flower salesman who convinces a barman to let him pay for his lunch by trading some of his wares. He at first hands over only a couple of bunches, but when he realises that the barman is pouring him a pint of Stella Artois, he ends up decking out the entire building exterior in red carnations. A running theme that would become more salient in later entries is worked in only implicitly here - that the booze in question is so valued and so coveted it brings out the dishonorable bastard in us all, the insinuation that the barman deliberately fixes Jacques a pint of Stella Artois in order to extract more flowers from him being a fairly low-key example. A later ad, "Good Samaritan", saw a group of locals offering a free drink to a mysterious traveller, a Christ-like figure who'd previously helped them out of various jams, only to balk when he requested a Stella Artois (and subsequently deny him back-up when he's called upon to fix a leaking roof). Later still we had Glazer's contribution, which finds an elderly man at death's door, as his son endeavours to fulfil his dying wishes. There are limits as to how far even the most dutiful son is willing to go to appease his poppa, however, as the father discovers when he makes the audacious demand for one last swig of Stella Artois before he expires.

"Last Orders" is an exemplary entry into the "Reassuringly Expensive" campaign. It has everything - bold cinematic visuals (we open with a murder of crows, ever the bad omen, encircling a somewhat dilapidated house), a vivid cast of characters and a simple, elegantly-crafted narrative building up to a dynamite punchline. The story is one of corruption, of the good son who learns to be a conniving bastard. Ostensibly, the glass of Stella Artois he's tasked with carrying back to his ailing pop is the serpent in his proverbial garden, although the final reveal potentially flips all of that on its head.

The corruption has the clout it does because the ad takes the time to first establish its protagonist as someone who is ordinarily inclined toward honor. The son (played by French actor Denis Lavant, who would work with Glazer again in the music video to Unkle's "Rabbit In Your Headlights") is depicted as a selfless and devoted man who's willing to scale the treetops to find the rare and precious flower his father's nostrils are craving, and to dip his hand into a hive of bees to retrieve a slab of the honey for which he hungers. But still his father hasn't yet had his full share of earthly delights. When he requests a Stella Artois, he tests the fidelities of his entire family, who convey the aggravation typical to anyone in a "Reassuringly Expensive" spot forced to accommodate someone else's hankering for said beer. They put all that aside, however, and manage to cobble together enough francs to purchase him a glass. The real challenge arises when Lavant's character must trek to the nearest pub (which is clearly a great distance away) and back again with the beverage in hand. On the return journey he passes some hunters firing their guns, startling him and causing him to spill a small quantity of the beer onto his sleeve. Reflexively, he licks it off and unwittingly passes the point of no return. Now, it's a done deal. He's sampled indulgence, and the rest of that liquid has zero chance of making it back to his family's house within the glass and out of his digestive system (the sense that he's a prisoner to his mounting temptation is reinforced with the imagery of the caged poultry behind him). His shameless consumption of the beer intended for his father is not, however, the point where he demonstrates his gut-churning plunge into depravity. That much is sealed when he reaches the house and is met by a priest who's come to give the last rites. The protagonist shows the priest inside and tricks him into carrying the empty glass into the bedroom. So, naturally, when he walks in on the family, they assume he's the culprit who downed the Stella (a deception the protagonist, now a full-on rotten egg, furthers by making the drinky-drinky motion behind the priest's back). This leads into the final twist in the narrative - the father, shocked by this outcome, bolts vigorously upright, exposing a dirty little secret of his own. He's not dying at all. No, this was all just a cunning ruse to secure himself a glass of the coveted beer. Tsk tsk. The lengths these "Reassuringly Expensive" characters will go to just to down a flaming Stella.

Although let's face it, this particular revelation doesn't come as a massive shock to us. We probably had an inkling as to what the father was up to earlier on in the ad, when the flash of pure, twinkling greed in his eyes as he delivered his bombshell request for Stella Artois was pretty unmistakable. The ad visual punchline proves as satisfying as it does not because it surprises, but because it drolly confirms that the apple might not have fallen far from the tree. It wasn't necessarily the drink that wrecked our hero's integrity, but what was already latent in his genetics; the Stella Artois simply helped him to acknowledge and come to terms with this true nature. Having discovered who he really is on his epic journey, he's receiving his proper homecoming, greeted by a reflection of his own character in the form of his father's duplicity. And the reality is, we're rooting for him for make that fall. It's clear that his obedience to his father isn't getting him anywhere, other than covered in bruises and beestings. His father's "last" requests keep coming, and he keeps getting put through the hassle. The only thing for it is to learn how to play his dad at his own deceitful game. (Meanwhile the priest, the character who stands for virtue, gets the shortest end of the stick, in being used as a pawn in the father and son's respective schemes and falsely paraded as a thief and a lush.)

"Last Orders" made such a stirring impression that Glazer would return to direct two further ads for Stella Artois: "Whip Around" and "Devil's Island".

The ad exists in two versions. There's the full 90 second version and a shorter 60 second edit that omits a few details, including the ominous corvids and the moment where the hunters' gunfire causes the protagonist to first spill and taste the beer. In this version proximity to the beer alone is enough to tip him over the edge.

You're Gonna Get Caught (And You Smell Like A Brewery)

"Gonna Get Caught", a collection of ads broadcast on New Zealand television in the early 00s, is one of the more novel drink driving campaigns that I've seen. Created by the Land Transport Safety Authority (LTSA), it tells a cautionary story that's serialised over multiple ads, following the nightly exploits of a brash young bar patron who regularly drives home over the limit, indifferent to the fact that his drinking blatantly impairs his ability to negotiate the snaking road ahead. His wife, who's always retired to bed by the time he arrives, disapproves of this behaviour, warning him that one day he'll get caught out, but does he listen? The pattern continues until, sure enough, we reach the fateful night when something unexpected occurs on that road, and catastrophe duly ensues.

The results are certainly striking, although the novelty of the technique does not surprise me. The obvious disadvantage of using such a slow burn tactic is that it requires the viewer to have a decent attention span and to become invested in the scenario over a prolonged period of time. Most campaigns of this ilk would, I suspect, prefer to unleash their psychological bombshells within 90 seconds or less, to ensure that the message is delivered before anyone's interest expires. I'm aware of only one other road safety campaign that followed this format, and that's "Alan and Kate" a series of anti-speeding PIFs devised by the UK's Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) in the late 1990s. "Alan and Kate" depicted four different mornings in the lives of its titular characters, two mundane suburbanites who didn't know one another but were unwittingly on a harrowing collision course. The three with "nice" endings did the rounds for a few weeks, until eventually they dropped the traumatic finale where Alan meets Kate (we all knew it was coming, but bloody hell, those closing images were brutal). The intention behind "Alan and Kate" and "Gonna Get Caught" was effectively the same - we got to see how the protagonists had incorporated dangerous habits into their everyday routines, and were so accustomed to nothing coming of it that they didn't see it as a big deal. In reality, it was always an accident waiting to happen, something made all-too stark to the viewer by the repetitive nature of the ads, and the seemingly minor variations that threatened to offset the balance on each day. Our relief that no accident has occurred by the end of each passing episode is nullified by our awareness that every new addition takes us a step closer to the defining occasion where things will obviously not end well. But whereas "Alan and Kate" offered only a slow march toward the inevitable, "Gonna Get Caught" actually doesn't go the way you might expect it to. There's a bit of a fiendish twist in that the unnamed drink-driving protagonist hasn't been caught by the series' out (at least in the traditional sense), although the situation he does wind up in is arguably all the more lamentable.

The story of "Gonna Get Caught" is told in five parts. As with "Alan and Kate", there are three variations where the protagonist's routine plays out without incident, followed by a fourth in which his reckless actions finally catch up with him. Unlike "Alan and Kate", which ended with the tragic accident and left the fall-out to our imaginations, "Gonna Get Caught" furthers its story with a fifth installment depicting the austere ways in which life goes on; we see the protagonist attempting to go about more-or-less the same routine as before, but it's a thin facade. His whole world has been irrecoverably shattered. And that's why I honestly prefer "Gonna Get Caught" to "Alan and Kate". "Alan and Kate" made good on its protracted portentousness by bowing out with a shocking final sequence, but didn't leave you feeling a whole lot more than overwhelming bleakness. "Gonna Get Caught" has a juicier taste of devilish bitterness in its closing arrangement; it is, for lack of a better word, more of a "fun" cautionary tale.

Compared to Alan, the habitual speeder of "Alan and Kate", there's not much of an attempt to make the protagonist of "Gonna Get Caught" sympathetic. When Alan wasn't doing 35mph in a 30mph zone, he was shown to be an affable family man. This guy is, as the characteristically Antipodean tagline openly advertises, a bloody idiot. He staggers drunkenly through most of the narrative, giggling inanely as he makes that ominous drive home. His obvious failing is in treating everything as a joke, always producing some silly quip whenever he's challenged by his bartender on whether he's okay to drive. We are clearly meant to feel contempt for a character this unashamedly foolish (as opposed to Alan, where the intended viewer response was more along the lines of, "Oh heck, that could be me"), which has the effect of turning his gruesome story into more of a black comedy. Which is not to say that it's not tremendously unsettling. In the earlier episodes, much of this creeping unease is achieved in smaller, more low-key ways that make skilful use of the serialised format. Over the course of the campaign we see minor changes in how the protagonist's evening plays out, suggesting a breakdown is already in motion even before we get to the accident. When he gets home, he practices a childish ritual of always throwing his keys into the trinket dish on his hallway table; on the first night, they land successfully, on the second he misses and hits the telephone instead, on the third he misses and knocks the letter rack off the table. The response he gets from his partner also noticeably changes with each installment. She goes from laughing along with him to silently ignoring him (but still cracking a half-smile at his antics), to openly disparaging him ("You smell like a brewery!"). Clearly, she's getting tired of the situation, and of having to wait in each night for a persistent drink-driver, never knowing if he's going to make it home safely or not. There's also an element of horror in the nightly journey, the road being a long and forbidding void between two fragments of civilisation. It's ill-lit, eerily desolate, and you can't see exactly what lies ahead.

That's the other significant way in which "Gonna Get Caught" differs from "Alan and Kate" - with the latter, it was made obvious from the very first installment how things would eventually end. Not so with "Gonna Get Caught". Of course, we know that something bad is going to happen on that dark winding road, but we don't know exactly what. Perhaps we're expecting the protagonist himself to either be killed or seriously injured in a crash - the fateful fourth installment certainly appears to hint at this outcome in having him assert "Still alive, aren't I?" when the bartender poses his usual question. But no, our protagonist does not become a casualty. Instead he unwittingly meanders onto the right side of the road (New Zealand being a left-hand traffic country), only to be greeted by the sudden glare of a motorcycle headlight directly in his path. He swerves to avoid it, and seemingly succeeds - he and his car come to a standstill in one piece, with no further sign of the bike. It's here that the protagonist makes his most dickish move. Assuming he's gotten away with it since there was no actual collision between the vehicles, he heaves a sigh of relief and drives on home. The correct thing to have done might have been to have stopped and made sure that the motorcylist was okay? He is evidently shaken by the experience, as he forgoes his usual ritual with the keys, placing them neatly into the dish, but only when he enters the bedroom and his wife asks him if met up with Matt that evening does it occur to him that he might have done something egregious. She mentions that Matt was looking for him earlier and was planning to drive out to the pub to see him on his bike. For the first time, the protagonist, a man who couldn't take anything seriously, wears an expression of pure unspoken horror.

But who was Matt? It's not clear to me if he's meant to be one of the bar patrons glimpsed in any of the earlier episodes, but he certainly doesn't receive the kind of extensive build-up as a character as the similarly doomed Kate was given. Even the protagonist requires some bringing up to speed on who his wife means by "Matt". On what business Matt was wanting to see the protagonist likewise remains a mystery. But the fact that Matt was specifically going out to meet with him adds an extra dash of tartness to the outcome, transforming the encounter into one of personal reckoning. Matt becomes Fate, Destiny, Death even, with the subversion that Matt himself is the unlucky party who dies. (On that note, I've seen some confusion regarding how the protagonist managed to kill Matt when there was no direct collision between their vehicles. The answer is simple enough - his dangerous driving forced Matt off the road and caused him to fatally crash.) But it does represent a death of sorts for the protagonist, whose world is about to drastically change. He's about to get acquainted with that ugly little thing called consequence.

The fifth and final installment sees the previously jovial bar atmosphere replaced by an altogether more sombre mood, as the patrons discuss the sad fate of Matt and our protagonist sits there in stony silence. The truth of what happened on that night is not completely known to them, although one patron mentions that a car is thought to have been involved, as the police found skid marks on the road close to Matt's body. The protagonist leaves after the discussion shifts in this direction, and we see a notable change in his demeanour. There is, to a point, a sense that he has matured following his experience - he's no longer giggling inanely or driving dangerously, and he takes steps to ensure that his remaining friends get home safely. All the same, we sense that his inclination is still very much against owning up to his part in Matt's demise, which could potentially remain his grisly little secret forever. That treacherous road now stands as a monument to that secret, and how it haunts him in the present - he makes his usual drive home, passing both a floral tribute to Matt and the visible skid marks he left behind. The fifth ad closes, as with all the installments, with the protagonist back in bed with his wife. In contrast to her earlier distance, she responds to her husband sympathetically, assuming that his visible agitation stems from his grief over Matt and his outrage at the perpetrator. She turns to him and delivers the campaign punchline: "Don't worry, love. They'll catch the bastard." It's a callback to her statement in the opening episode that the protagonist would get caught out one day; the possibility of getting caught still looms, but the nature and implications of that threat have drastically shifted.

Of course, by the end the protagonist hasn't been caught (that we haven't even learned his name, in contrast to his victim, is a testament to his enduring elusiveness), leaving his fate unclear - all very deliberate, I assume, in order to depict that uncertainty as a full-blown nightmare in itself. The final episode teases us with the possibility that he could be exposed later down the line. He's left forensic evidence in the form of those skid marks, and while his wife remains guileless, there's ambiguity as to whether his friends might be cottoning on. One of them seems to have connected the dots - when it's observed that our protagonist isn't coping well, he responds "Not at all" with intonation that suggests wariness rather than sympathy. But whether he'll take that thought any further is, like everything else, left hanging. I would argue that, for the purposes of the narrative, it doesn't matter if he'll be found out or not. What's important is that he's already in his own private trap, in having to live with the omnipresent threat of being caught at any moment, with his stifling inability to voice his remorse to anyone, and with having to secretly be the villain whom everyone around him openly despises, all while still having to go through the motions of the same old routine. In that regard, he hasn't gotten off scot-free. What lies ahead of him is, much like the road he always traversed, dark and indistinct, yielding only one certainty - he's stuck with his guilt, whatever happens next.