Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Mark (A Great Bloke?)

As the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign entered the 1990s, the emotional sincerity of the earlier films began to peter out, with astringent snarkiness becoming the dominant flavour of the series going forward - and "Mark" would be a strong candidate for snarkiest of them all. It's certainly the campaign's most unbridled trip into the surreal. Compared to D&DWL's previous foray into Christmas-themed campaigning, "Christmas Pudding", it doesn't attempt to lure you into a false sense of security by approaching the pivotal accident from the sidelines of everyday banality - it places unusually direct emphasis upon the accident itself, distilled down to its purest, most nightmarish essence, and framed using the visual signifiers of an actual nightmare. The result is the most visually arresting of the D&DWL shorts, and the short that plays most overtly with the codes of horror storytelling. It's a monologue, like those earliest PIFs, but this ghoulish shape-shifter and his taunting sarcasm seem miles away from the faux-documentary approach of "Fireman's Story".

Our baleful narrator tells the cautionary tale of Mark, whose reputation for being a "great bloke", and always so kind and generous toward his friends, was undone one Christmas when he thought he was okay to drive after "a quick one" and his poor judgement wound up spelling tragedy for a family. The misery of the situation is presented bluntly enough, but the suffering of the family isn't really the focus of the short; in the end, those two bereaved children and their glaring, accusatory faces don't serve a much greater purpose than to further accentuate that tidal wave of horror (and to provide a conspicuous metaphor, in the form of a roundabout spinning out of control). The real focus is squarely on Mark, and how his being a nice guy didn't preclude his ability to do terrible damage by driving over the limit, however marginally. In that regard, it takes the opposite approach to the campaign's preliminary installments, in which the perpetrator was frequently presented as an invisible boogeyman, wrecking lives and walking away with nary a scratch. "Mark", by contrast, appears to humanise the drink driver, only to pinpoint that very humanity as the root of his failing - no matter how generous and trustworthy he might have been for 99.9% of the time, Mark had the same vulnerabilities as everybody else when driving with alcohol in his system. And after doing something as horrible as killing a couple and making orphans of their children, suddenly his history of good deeds couldn't help but seem like a bit of a duplicity. He went from being a great bloke to a "great bloke" (with heavy Scottish-accented sarcasm). The implication being that, no matter how comfortable and familiar we might feel with a person (or indeed, with ourselves), a simple moment of ill-judged complacency might be all it takes for us to discover what they're really capable of.

We get some sense of who the drink driver was in this equation - a question that does go unanswered, however, is just who the hell the narrator is intended to be. The campaign's Wikipedia page has him down as Mark's "best mate", but no such relationship is actually established in the PIF itself. To my mind, he seems to be deriving a perverse amount of pleasure from the scenario he describes, so I would presume that he is neither a friend to Mark or to the bereaved family - either way, he doesn't come across as much of a great bloke himself. Rather, I would propose that he is intended to embody those very boogeyman qualities with which the drink drivers of those earlier PIFs were inevitably ascribed, his perpetually-distorting facial features and uncanny radiance holding up a sort of fractured mirror to Mark's latent personality flaws. The narrator refers to Mark in the third person, implying that they are to be seen separate entities; nonetheless, I am inclined to see him as signifying that uglier side to Mark that was always waiting to be teased out with a little alcohol and one fatally unwise decision. He also disappears in a puff of smoke at the end, but there is a deeper reason for that than simply leaving the viewer with one final unsettling visual. "Mark" was also a tribute, to an obscure piece of short animation that you might remember if you'd tuned into Channel 4 during its artsier beginnings.

What's special about this D&DWL entry is that the animation was provided by none other than David Anderson (the film-maker behind the "Sweet Disaster" short, Dreamless Sleep), the style of the PIF being blatantly replicated from Anderson's 1989 film Deadsy (Deadtime Stories For Big Folk). Deadsy is described in the blurb of the VHS release David Anderson: Works On Film as "a graphic interpretation of Russell Hoban's narration of man's fascination with weaponry and the sexual power of military aggression. Using a combination of live action, xerography, hand-rendering, laser xerography and model animation, DEADSY is a powerful and disturbing piece." It is an allegory, of sorts, for the nuclear arms race, with the titular Deadsy developing "grate big sexo-thingys" and forcing the rest of the world to do the same in order to participate in his great cosmic orgy - a lust for domination that's linked to the rush he felt as a small child swatting flies and cockroaches. It is a glimpse, in other words, into the darker side of human nature, with Anderson's warped, uncanny visuals providing the perfect canvas for this twisted dive into our baser impulses. The D&DWL short "Mark" attempts something of the same - we've all got that destructive potential nestled deep down at our core, and if we're at all heedful we might avoid the abasement of exposing it to the world.