When the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign first launched in 1987, the idea was to divert emphasis from the immediate consequences of drink driving and to focus on the emotional devastation that was going to linger on long after that fateful moment of collision, reverberating, inevitably, throughout the entire lifetimes of those affected. Even more harrowing than the sight of vehicles crumpling and bodies rupturing was the sight of hurt individuals attempting to go about their business and resume something resembling normalcy when the psychological fallout continues to tear them apart. The real wreckage in such accidents, as is hinted in the campaign slogan, is the one that occurs in the aftermath, subtler to the eye but no less excruciating to those who live it.
The original tactic was one of all-out sombreness, preliminary installments being characterised by their use of dull colours and a kind of atmospheric inertia, evocative of time slowing to a deadening crawl and trapping the occupants in their unending grief. The haunting plainness of these films was geared toward creating a sense of authenticity, a naked emotional honesty designed to replicate the talking heads approach endemic to the documentary format, so that the featured individuals felt as though they could have been real people describing actual occurrences. Some of these early attempts work better than others - in "Real Lives" (aka "Funeral")* from 1989, the austerity, while initially impactful, ultimately risks dragging the film into tedium, while "Classroom" (the second weakest of the series) veers dangerously close to mawkishness. On the flip side, "Jenny" (aka "Mother") is extraordinarily powerful, and Ken Stott's performance as the titular figure in "Fireman's Story" still sends shivers down spines. "Fireman's Story" was, in many respects, typical of the campaign's beginnings, in consisting of a monologue delivered by an individual grappling with the traumatic repercussions of irresponsible driving, although it was a unique entry in choosing to focus wholly on the perspective of a first responder, a perspective often overlooked in safety campaigns. Its approach is also somewhat more overtly dramatic than anything this soon into the campaign's lifespan and, thanks to the opening in which Stott's character is seen entering the station in his firefighting gear, feels deceptively more action-driven (the immediacy of the set-up foreshadows the creativity of later installments in which the viewer got to experience the situation directly from the perspective of one of the active participants), while remaining as talk-orientated as its contemporaries. The result is a sterling example of how to deliver a hard-hitting message without the use of gore or spectacle.
In the 60-second film, Stott plays a firefighter who has just returned from dealing with the appalling aftermath of a crash that claimed three lives, and gives an account of the night's events to an off-screen colleague (this was, for a while, the closest the campaign came to incorporating anything of the accident itself). His description of the dismantling of the vehicle, and the removal of the mangled bodies therein unfolds, eerily, like the opening of a Matryoshka doll, with new layers of horror being uncovered the deeper in you go: "Me and the new lad got the first one out the front seat. He'd never seen anything like it. Had to leave the body on the side of the road. I covered it with my tunic. Took, what, two hours to get the other one out? Pretty girl, looked a bit like my sister. And, uh, then we found the baby..."
The lack of visible gore does not preclude the pervasion of squeamish detail regarding the fragility of the human form, although this goes largely understated. The implication is that the crash has wiped out an entire young family, but the first body to be removed from the car, presumably having taken the worst pummelling in the collision, goes unidentified. Their body was so badly mutilated that Stott's fireman is unable to think of them, in their current state, as a person; when he recounts how he covered their body with his tunic, they are designated the status of "it". By comparison, the second body was intact enough that Stott was able to project a sense of familiarity onto her; his observation that she "looked a bit like my sister" is clearly intended to evoke a sense of interchangeability, that it could be anybody's sister in this awful situation. The mention of the baby, whose presence the first responders were not aware of until they were already deep into the wreckage, provokes a startling change in Stott's presentation. While visibly agitated when he arrives, he at first seems to be keeping his distress in check, and his account at a genial, conversational level. The baby, though, completely breaks him - he sobs, then suddenly lurches forward in anger, making the nature of the film explicit: "You know what bothers me? The bloke in the other car kept saying it wasn't his fault, but he'd been drinking, hadn't he?" Notably, Stott does not seem at all surprised by the role that alcohol has had to play in this incident; reading between the lines, we can conclude that he has seen this same scenario before on previous nights (he also comments that his new colleague had never seen anything like it, implying that he himself has), which clearly hasn't numbed his ability to be a part of the suffering. By opening with Stott and crew arriving at the station, the film might have us primed for a traditional story of macho heroics, but our expectations are swiftly subverted with Stott's opening up of his own emotional vulnerabilities, making it plain that there is no room for heroism in this scenario, merely pain and trauma on every side.
In his closing statement, Stott alludes to both the drink driver's crippling lack of self-preservation, and the bitter implications of his having survived the incident in spite of it: "I don't know how he'll ever live with himself." In this scenario, the survivors probably should envy the dead.
Ken Stott never really got the recognition he deserved and that bugs me because he was really good.
ReplyDeleteI say was, I forgot he wasn't dead. He did a pretty good job as Balin in the Hobbit films,
Deletestrange and mediocre as they were.