Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Eyes

As the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" series goes, the 1992 offering "Eyes" is a particularly unlovely one to have to look at, although it starts out, deceptively, by emphasising the apparent beauty of its subject. The young woman at the centre of the film looks perfectly pretty in her opening close-up, as though she could be staring off dreamily into the distance. Straight off the bat, however, are clues that we haven't walked in on an innocuous scenario, if we should happen to notice that one of her pupils is dilated, or the strange objects protruding from her mouth. The film pivots on a simple technique - a gradual pull-back from the face of the woman, shortly revealed to be the victim of a road accident, as paramedics attempt, to no avail, to revive her. We continue to move away, but her expression remains unnervingly static. Interspersed with the paramedic's procedural commentary is the voice of the driver, who stays off-screen for the duration. What we have is a juxtaposition of two parallel narratives, in the woman's unresponsive form and the driver's disembodied voice, with each conveying their own individual despair. The driver's account is an entirely familiar one - almost word-for-word identical, in fact, to the circumstances that reportedly convinced Mark he was okay to drive on that fateful Christmas night.

D&DWL was never an especially gory series, preferring to seek out horror from the emotional debris of each featured calamity, although "Eyes" might be considered a slight outlier in that regard. It offers only minimal blood, yet it still ranks as the most disturbingly graphic of the D&DWL canon, being the entry that's most fixated on the blunt physicality of death, and in the sheer discomfort of watching a body slip past that queasy barrier between being and corpse as its last waning flickers of function are slowly extinguished. Technically, the protagonist is never actually dead for the span of the film - at the end the paramedic pronounces her asystolic, which isn't exactly the same as death but does mean that her chances ought probably to be considered non-existent. In practice, it makes very little difference - with her pallid skin and stationary gaze, it's an exercise in horror as worthy as any video nasty. The technique used in "Eyes" is something of a variation on an earlier D&DWL film, "Kathy", which also had a character affected by a drink driving incident stare directly into the camera while a disembodied voice filled in the narrative gaps and impressed the moral weight of the scenario. In both cases the fourth wall breaking is implicitly accusatory - the subject, while powerless to change their situation, is utterly merciless in challenging the viewer to return their gaze and to confront the consequences of their own prospective actions (something explicitly evoked in the film's print counterpart, which instructed spectators to "Look her in the eye. Then say a quick drink never hurt anyone"). In the case of "Eyes", the subject's expression is entirely vacant, conveying absolutely nothing, and yet so much at the same time. There is a certain ironic tension between the subject's physical inertia and the stony relentlessness of her stare, her seeming refusal to back down from presenting us with the impacts of drink driving in their harshest, ugliest detail. Who this woman is and the repercussions of her demise go unexplored, which here only adds to the impact; we do not venture outside of this very specific moment in which she is reduced to only a stagnant image, as all prospects of progressing beyond this are tragically shut off to her.

"Eyes" was, along with "Kathy" and "Arrest", part of a sequence of D&DWL entries that bucked the trends of the opening wave of PIFs by shifting the focus more toward the offender's side of the equation, and of the ramifications (both legal and emotional) for them. Noteworthy is that the driver was still denied corporeality in any of those three films, allowing the outcomes of their poor choices to continue to define visually, although "Eyes" is unusual in actually giving them a voice. The driver is humanised, but through distinctively debasing means, with his final insistence that he "didn't mean it" emphasising his fundamental limpness; we do not doubt the truthfulness of that statement, but it seems a distressingly futile response to such a dire situation - a point underlined by whichever of the first responders (I'm not sure if it's the police officer or the paramedic) is heard to scoff after the fade-out. There is, again, an ironic tension between the evident patheticness of the driver and the harrowing destructiveness of his actions.

What might take the sting off a little, if you find yourself losing sleep over the imagery in "Eyes", is the realisation that the subject in question is actually a teenaged Denise van Outen, who later rose to prominence as a presenter on The Big Breakfast at the latter end of the decade. Her familiarity comes as a reassuring reminder that, for as horrifying as this PIF's contents are, they were only feigned and she did, in reality, progress beyond the gruesome stasis encapsulated here. I fear that stasis may be forever etched into my skull, however.

"Eyes" is, as far as I'm aware, the only D&DWL film to have been made commercially available for home viewing - you can find it on the BFI release The COI Collection Volume Four: Stop! Look! Listen!, along with "Lonely Water".