Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Arrest (aka Police Station)

Let's start 2023 on a high note, by looking at the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" installment that I personally rate as the campaign's strongest - "Arrest" (aka "Police Station"), which made the television rounds somewhere at the dawn of the 1990s. Intense, compellingly disconcerting and with not a single wasted moment, "Arrest" is a fine example of the creative muscles the once-austere campaign was rapidly building, and its ability to hammer home an impactful message without resorting to the more obvious shock tactics suggested by the collision itself. In this case, we're taken on a tour of the inner passageways of a police station, in a manner that recalls the punchy immediacy of the opening of "Fireman's Story", only instead of sharing an emotionally intimate tea break with Ken Stott we're greeted by an endless parade of accusatory eyes, practically burning holes in our jackets with their ill-disguised contempt. The promise of a tea break does eventually arrive, once we've been sufficiently basted in the relentless spilling over of scorn, but odds are that you'll be left with very little stomach for it.

I noted when I covered "Jenny" that the earliest films in the D&DWL canon were less interested in exploring the direct consequences to the drink driver than they were in the suffering of the friends and family of the people they crashed into (and, where enough of them was left intact, the victims themselves). The drink driver remained a perpetual blank, an invisible phantom whose thoughtless deeds have left long and baleful shadows across all of the featured individuals, the implicit suggestion being that this loathsome boogeyman could well be you, if you did not keep your drinking habits in check. "Arrest" both turns the table on that and follows it through to its logical conclusion, centring specifically on the perspective of a drink driver undergoing questioning by police after causing an accident and leaving a young woman in critical condition. The drink driver is still given next to no corporeality (we get a fleeting glimpse of their hand and arm, but that's it), and that's because on this occasion the phantom perpetrator is very pointedly supposed to be you. "Arrest" puts you in the shoes of the driver and depicts their eye-view as they're ushered from one stony-faced official to the next, journeying ever more critically down the fast track to incrimination. We're given a bitter taster of the invasive discomfort the procedure, which sees us abandoning our personal possessions at the front desk, having our bodily fluids extracted by a laboratory technician (she's probably the nicest of the officials we encounter, in that she actually says "please", but no more familiar in tone than those police officers), and finally being read our rights when it becomes apparent that we aren't going to be awakening from this nightmare any time soon. 

Superficially, "Arrest" might strike you as the D&DWL equivalent of a parent forcing his wayward teenage son to visit a police station in the hopes that the mere sight of a holding cell is going scare him straight - it purports to show you what a frightfully intimidating experience it would be to be arrested for causing grievous harm (and ultimately death) by driving under the influence of alcohol, but I suspect that much won't come as a massive bombshell to most viewers. There is a frantic claustrophobia to the piece that deftly gets across the horror of the situation, but what makes the film so effective, I think, is the wall-to-wall disdain that it radiates - making it clear that, despite your passivity for the entire duration, you are never anything less than the villain of the equation. Like "Fireman's Story", it shows us that the professionals who deal with this type of trauma on a daily basis are human too, and how their familiarity with such matters does not preclude their ability to feel the emotional impact. Its greatest strength, though, is in how convincingly the anger of those police authorities translates into self-loathing on our part; by the end of the film, despite identifying with the driver's abasement for the preceding forty seconds, we emerge sharing the officials' infuriation for the devastation they have caused.

"Arrest" opens in the aftermath of the accident, the closest we get to the grisly incident being a momentary glimpse of the unconscious victim as she's carted away by paramedics. Like most of the D&DWL films, "Arrest" is light on gore (unless the sight of a needle in action makes you squeamish) and, while the ad does climax with us hearing second-hand that the injured woman unfortunately did not survive, it bucks the more common D&DWL trend of focussing extensively on the issue of bereavement. Who was the woman in question and who does she leave behind her? We get no insight into either. Rather, news of her death is slipped in to illuminate the exact point at which we've personally slipped over the barrier of no return. This moment is marked by a startling halt to the barrage of formalities, giving way to a few seconds of dead, empty space in which the entire world seems to hang in the balance. A particularly nice touch is the reluctant spectatorship in the form of those extras lingering about in the backdrop, close-up footage of whom is intercut with the unfurling of the slip of paper containing details of the woman's fate, and by extension our own. What is running through their heads at this stage is painfully obvious - whatever business has brought them to the police station at this time of night, they're just relieved that they're not in your situation.

The punchline occurs when the last of the police officers offers us a cup of tea, a gesture of civility which, coupled with his flagrant sardonicism in addressing us as "Sir", barely conceals the repressed primal urge to sock us in the jaw. Coming out of the grave series of rituals with which we've just been bombarded, it seems an almost glibly mundane proposition, the taunting token of a return to a normalcy that now seems entirely beyond our reach. But of course it's also a beverage, and in that regard it provides an ironic echo to a presumed moment from earlier on in our narrative, when we were first served liquor by an off-screen bartender. It was our craving for liquids and the reckless consumption of which that got us into this whole catastrophe; perhaps it's only fitting that we bow out with a nod to its voracity.