Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Jenny (aka Mother)

Of the early wave of "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" films that circulated UK television in the late 1980s, I give "Jenny" (or "Mother", according to some sources) props for most effectively accomplishing what it sets out to do - tell a story so searing in its emotivity that it somewhat dampens your ability to return to whatever escapist entertainment you happened to catch it in the middle of. Whereas "Funeral" is appropriately sombre without showing much teeth, and "Classroom" belabours its emotional heft to a near insufferable degree (I feel a bit heartless for saying it, though), "Jenny" strikes a good balance between the deceptive mundaneness of the imagery on offer and the overwhelming turmoil evidently raging below the surface. There is the perception of life carrying on as normal, and the semblance of resilience following a shocking event, as a portrait of grief is built up and borne out as utterly insurmountable.

"Jenny" follows a middle-aged woman returning home on what looks like a perfectly nondescript commute. She explains that this journey has become part of her daily routine, and that she is returning from visiting her daughter, who has been hospitalised after being hit by a drink driver, an accident that could have been easily avoided if not for the presence of alcohol in the equation. This film offers a slight twist on the standard set-up of the bereaved friend or family member - her Jenny is alive, but unresponsive. We can discern from the monologue that she is in a coma from which she is not expected to recover, and in some respects the indeterminate (although not really) nature of the ending makes the scenario all the more poignant. The protagonist reflects on the injustice of the matter, noting that the drink driver themselves left hospital a mere three days following the accident, whereas Jenny will likely never get to leave at all. She closes her monologue with the assertion that, "But I've got to believe she might...one day." "Jenny" thus ends not with acknowledgement of despair of the situation, but with the expression of hope, which is probably the harshest thing about it. The protagonist admits that the belief that things might eventually get better is the one thing that enables her to face the bleakness of her day-to-day reality; meanwhile, the final image, which shows the protagonist in the absent Jenny's bedroom, is one of total stagnation. Judging by the assortment of pop star pin-ups adorning the walls, Jenny was a teenager at the time of the accident, and she has been cruelly denied the opportunity to progress any further. As her mother assumes her place within this monument to a life disrupted, the implication is that she is as much a victim of this entrapment as her daughter, consigned to an existence as static as the pin-ups that surround her.

"Jenny" is notable for its lack of ambient noise - all that is heard throughout is the monologue, which hangs in its own dead, empty numbness. The mother, casting a shaken, vulnerable figure, is the only human in sight for its full duration, reinforcing the sense that, for all intents and purposes, she is completely alone in her broken world. In one shot, we see no shortage of traffic stirring in the street behind her, but it seems coldly indifferent, the world passing her by and leaving her stranded in her private desolation. In the backdrop of another shot, a stop sign is glimpsed, offering further symbolism of a life permanently on hold, while also doubling as a slick bit of subliminal messaging to the viewer.

Something you'll notice about the campaign's beginnings is that the immediate participants of the life-altering incident in question were usually kept firmly out of the picture. With one exception, the early films tended to avoid focussing directly on the victim of the collision, putting emphasis instead upon the knock-on victims who were tasked with living with the long-term consequences. In the case of "Jenny", the titular character is alive, but the lack of corporeality afforded her throughout the film regulates her status to that of a ghost; neither functionally living or conclusively gone, her existence is equated to one of living death, a fate paralleled in the sombre solitude of her mother's daily routine (and it must be said that, however authentically haunting the images of her mother's grief, the approach is somewhat invalidating to Jenny herself). The perpetrator likewise is nowhere to be seen - not only were the drink drivers never the focus, but they were seldom shown to take part in the suffering, with "Fireman's Story" being quite unusual in explicitly ruminating on the ramifications for the driver themselves. They became, in many respects, an invisible bogeyman, leaving a trail of devastation wherever they roamed and generally appearing to walk away scot-free. They too lacked corporeality, and while several later films would attempt to represent some of the horrors from the driver's side of the equation, many of those, such as "Arrest" and "Kathy", still opted to keep them off of screen. This might have prevented the perpetrator from being fully humanised, although paradoxically the driver was the figure that we were encouraged to think might have been us, were we not mindful of our choices. It was an ominous void, horrifying in the knowledge that somebody would inevitably step up to fill it.