We're at the end of my coverage of the "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign, and I've put off "Dave" (perhaps the most notorious of all the D&DWL films, sparring only with "Eyes") for last, simply because it is the one I find the most challenging to watch. It's an easy one to sit on for most of the year, since it is technically another Christmas edition (of sorts - there are seasonal cards and decorations in the backdrop, but it doesn't weigh too heavily on the narrative). I couldn't bring myself to face it last December, when I did "Christmas Pudding" and "Mark". If I let it drift another year I'll probably never touch it, so in the interests of completism I gotta act now. Let's just get this over with and move on.
"Dave" was one of the later additions to the D&DWL campaign, arriving circa 1994/1995, and focussing on a young man, played by Daniel Ryan, who made the fateful decision to have "just one more", even though he was driving, and apparently hit his head real hard in the resulting collision. As with "Mates", "Dave" was one of the D&DWL films that was on my radar at the time, chiefly because they went all-out with their promotional blitz. There was no escaping Dave. They slapped his expressionless face on billboards all up and down the UK, and it haunted me so. I was a kid, and absolutely not the target audience for this sort of thing, but by the mid-90s I had an awareness of what drink driving was and why it was such a bad idea. I was also old enough to understand what brain damage was, so I could look up at that billboard, with its minimal narrative detail, and appreciate exactly what it was getting at. It was all very grim and ruined multiple days out to various cities, but unbeknownst to me at the time, the billboards had spared me the most repellent details of their television counterpart. The TV ad itself I don't think I saw until my morbid curiosity for all films public and informative exploded in the mid-00s, and I started to snap up every online upload I could find. I scoured the D&DWL campaign in its entirety and, of the lot, "Dave" was the one I most wished that I could unsee.
"Dave" gets my vote for the most visually icky of the D&DWL films, even more so than "Eyes", albeit not because of its bodily horror elements. Like "Eyes", and "Kathy", it appreciates the potency of an excessively intimate close-up, and the nastiest element here isn't to do with the drink driving per se. As with most of the D&DWL films, "Dave" incorporates nothing of the accident itself, just the aftermath paired with a bitterly ironic echo accounting for how we led up to this point. A series of disembodied voices make it clear that Dave was the victim of peer pressure - he was conscious of the fact that he was driving and that he needed to depart soon for dinner with his mother, but his so-called friends mocked him for his caution ("Half's what girls drink!"), until eventually he caved. In the present, we can see that Dave ultimately made it for dinner at his mother's, but it's not exactly a sumptuous feast she's serving him.
Disgust is a funny emotion. It's amazing what images will push you to your limits and what won't. Earlier this autumn, I made it through that entire sequence in Saw X where Valentina has to stick a tube up her own femur and drain out her bone marrow without ever once averting my gaze. It had me squirming like crazy, sure, but I couldn't take my eyes off it. After all these years I still can't quite do "Dave". It frankly hurts me not to pull away during the close-up shots of the liquefied dinner his mother is spoon-feeding him. The mere sight of that stuff has my gag reflex reeling, eager to heave up something that would no doubt look quite similar. All very deliberate on the part of Safety on The Move, I'm sure, who want us to appreciate the total lack of relishing in Dave's post-crash existence, and to forge some kind of Pavlovian association between the nauseous images on display and the toxicity of the overheard discussion. It was a fairly unusual installment of D&DWL, where it was rare enough for the drink driver to be given corporeality of any kind, let alone be represented as the victim of the scenario. Its implicit concerns are very similar to those conveyed in "Mates", where the ostensible camaraderie between young drinkers was exposed as highly treacherous. Compared to "Pier", in which the wheelchair-bound protagonist was well-supported by his mates, Dave's friends are conspicuously absent in the present; his mother, whose nurturing relationship with Dave was treated as a subject of mockery among his fellow drinkers, is the only one who's clearly there for him, with his now total dependency on her being played up as a kind of backhanded consequence for his embracing of his mates over her. Like the unseen protagonist of "Mates", Dave's communication is restricted to a monotonous breathing, heard at the film's climax right before his mother produces the sardonic punchline, "Come on Dave, just one more." His existence now is a matter of mere survival, with sustenance that keeps him going, but offers no delectation; such is the price he's paid for his single moment of indulgence.
THINK! include "Dave" in their official website's campaign timeline (although it should be noted that THINK! weren't established until the new millennium and thus didn't make this PIF - D&DWL was way too cool to have been the work of THINK!, for serious), claiming that the ad was controversial, and was taken off the air when enough viewers registered their distaste for it. This is, currently, my only source for that particular tidbit and while it's all very interesting, THINK!, I do need more information. What was the nature of the controversy? I'm not sure if this is what people back in 1995 would have objected to, but I could certainly see the tactics in "Dave" being considered problematic now - it has the same issue as quite a few of the D&DWL films, including "Pier", "Mirror" and, to a more muted degree, "Jenny". If you're going to focus on the possibility of incurring life-changing injuries as a deterrent (with the insinuation that this is a more nightmarish outcome then actually being killed in a crash), then the onus is on you to tread carefully. At what point do you slip past the line between making a powerful statement about human fragility and objectifying disability as grotesque, stigmatising and invalidating? For all of its emotional potency, it's hard to deny that "Dave" is reliant on shock value regarding the details of Dave's living with disability. Unlike the protagonists of "Pier" and "Mirror", he isn't in a position to be telling his own story, with the viewer being invited to gawk at his dependency and appreciate that they're not him. Obviously that's not great, but the billboard side of the campaign managed to be even more horrifically on the nose about it - one of the accompanying slogans was "How would you like to do nothing for the rest of your life?" And I accused "Mirror" of being kind of tone-deaf.
Anyway, it's been masochistic. I now require another long-running series of public information films to go through and dissect one by one in similar nauseating detail. Except, I don't think there are many that offer quite the same rich variety of mind-bending horrors as "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives". It truly was a remarkable campaign. What are my options? I suppose there are a whole bunch of THINK! ads on a broad range of road safety issues I could look at, but I'm not quite that stuck for new content just yet. "Fire Kills", then? Bloody hell, I'm not that much of a masochist.
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