The Crepes of Wrath (aka The Life of A Frog, That's The Life For Me)

"The Crepes of Wrath" was the 13th Simpsons episode to enter production (as indicated by its code name 7G13), meaning that at one time it was presumably pegged as the prospective finale for Season 1. The teething troubles that plagued "Some Enchanted Evening" dictated otherwise (for some reason it also slipped ahead of "Krusty Gets Busted" in the airing order), but it's not hard to fathom how it might have served as an appropriate end point to the show's first chapter. The closing scene is one of family unity, with all five Simpsons gathered together in the same room and on more or less the same page; they're happy to see one another after an episode spent largely divided. The season bows out with a final, heartening affirmation that the ties that bind our titular clan are essentially unshakeable.

There's an argument to be had that "The Crepes of Wrath" was also The Simpsons' biggest and most adventurous episode to date. Up until now, the series had rarely allowed its characters to venture outside of Springfield, the only notable exception being "The Call of The Simpsons", in which the family spends a few days lost in the wilderness after a camping trip goes awry. "The Crepes of Wrath" represented a much deeper broadening of the show's canvas, by looking further afield and opening the door to exploring the characters' relationship with the wider world. Here, the wider world in question happens to be rural France, where Bart is exiled after Homer and Principal Skinner have each had their respective fill of his mischief. Homer trips and injures his back when Bart fails to pick up his Krusty doll, while Skinner's mother Agnes (making her debut appearance and seeming deceptively sweet-tempered) becomes a casualty of Bart's latest prank of detonating a cherry bomb in the toilets at Springfield Elementary. Skinner proposes that they take advantage of the school's foreign exchange program to send Bart to a vineyard in France for three months, purely so they can enjoy a period of respite ("Normally, a student is selected on the basis of academic excellence or intelligence, but in Bart's case I'm prepared to make a big exception!"). Bart is enthused by the idea, only to discover on arrival that the whole thing is basically a dupe; the "fabulous château" he was promised has clearly seen better days, and its unscrupulous owners have signed up to the foreign exchange program as a source of child labour.

 "The Crepes of Wrath" is sometimes credited with being the first in a long and particularly notorious line of Simpsons episodes - the Simpsons travelogue, in which the family jets overseas and dedicates 18-odd minutes to providing a rundown on the people, landmarks and culture of their selected destination through the eyes of crass American tourists, in a world where every crass American tourist's wildest, most prejudicial assumption is accurately realised. Let's just say that such episodes tend to be divisive at best. I would argue that "Crepes" is, at most, a distant cousin, and that the archetypal Simpsons travel episode didn't come into being until fairly late in the game - "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo", which landed about midway through Mike Scully's reign, feels like the one that properly cemented the formula (with its bitty, meandering narrative and first use of the deliberately vexing catchphrase "The Simpsons are going to__!") and made them a fixture of the series going forward. Prior to that, it's curious just how little interest the series had in exploring how the Simpsons would cope with the world beyond America. Episodes where the family travelled to other countries were rare, and rarer still were the episodes where travelling to another country represented the plot in itself, as opposed to a dash of frivolity on the side, eg: Homer going to India on a deliberately inconsequential tangent in "Homer and Apu", Lisa going to Britain for a small chunk of "Lisa's Wedding". Notably, facing foreign cultures was not something the family typically did as a unit; it was not so much a case of the Simpsons vs the world as individual members temporarily splitting from the clan to pursue personal business. By my count, the "classic" era offered only two instances of the entire family taking an international trip together...and since one of those was in a Halloween episode (the family's vacation in Morocco in "Treehouse of Horror II"), there's effectively only one. "Bart vs Australia" feels a lot closer in spirit to the archetypal "travel episode" than "The Crepes of Wrath"; its treatment of the Australians is significantly meaner-spirited than the depiction of the French in "Crepes" (for all the horrors Bart has to face at the Château Maison, there is no equivalent, on the metre of viciously bad taste, to his remark about hearing a dingo eating a baby - to quote Tropic Thunder, you about to cross some fucking lines). But what "Crepes" does nail straight off the bat, and which set the tone for every travel episode to come, is this basic idea that foreigners are to be regarded with suspicion. On that score, it offers two cautionary examples for the price of one. Bart's nightmarish reception in France's wine country is interwoven with a parallel narrative in which the remaining Simpsons accommodate an Albanian exchange student (Homer: "You mean all white with pink eyes?") by the name of Adil Hoxha, who seems innocuous but is actually a Soviet spy.

Occasionally with Season 1 you can spot telltale signs of their being penned while the 1980s was on its deathbed, little snippets of the spirit of the decade right as that spirit was gasping for relevancy. The Happy Little Elves, a pastiche of your typically cute and toyetic 1980s cartoon, were one such example. The early concept of Mr Burns being modelled on Ronald Reagan was another. On account of the Adil subplot, "The Crepes of Wrath" might be the most 1989-into-1990 of all Simpsons episodes, a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of Cold War paranoia from the very last days in which Cold War paranoia had genuine currency. By the time it made it to air, on April 15th 1990, the Iron Curtain had fallen and the non-threatening nineties were in the process of beginning (Albania itself would abandon communism before the year was through). With that in mind, it's not surprising that Adil never made any significant reappearances (though he was seen in the "Do The Bartman" video, dancing by the remains of the Berlin Wall, which seems a nice enough postlude for his character). Bart's story is a lot more evergreen, offering a darker take on the familiar tourist experience wherein the reality of travel does not align with what was shown in the holiday brochure. But "Crepes" ultimately succeeds because it is at its heart about the family and how they are fundamentally stronger as a unit, even when there's an Atlantic ocean between them. It offers yet another variation on a theme that was becoming increasingly familiar in the back end of Season 1 - an exploration of how that unit is at risk of disintegrating whenever one of its members is pushed or drawn out of the equation. We saw it with Marge in "Life on The Fast Lane" and Homer in "Homer's Night Out", and now it's Bart's turn to be the wayward Simpson. The threat to the family here is somewhat lower-key, but no less troubling, and lurks in Homer's outspoken preference for Adil over Bart. Homer's view is that he's effectively swapped out his son for a superior model, one who's polite, helps with the housework and above all takes a keen interest in what he does at the nuclear power plant. His belief that equilibrium has finally been attained through Bart's exclusion is something he's not shy about expressing in the presence of Marge and Lisa, and it disturbs them so. The arrangement is obviously askew, but it goes deeper than they could possibly imagine.

Adil made an appearance as a villain in the tie-in video game Bart vs. The Space Mutants, and was identified in the instruction manual as one of several "totally evil" characters who wanted revenge against Bart for past defeats "even if it means selling out Earth to the Mutants!" The others, for the record, were Nelson, Jimbo, Ms Botz, Sideshow Bob and...Dr Marvin Monroe (WTF? Why did they go with him when César and Ugolin from this very episode were present and waiting?). I remember thinking nearer the time that Adil was likewise out of place with that lot, on the grounds that he'd never even met Bart and had no personal aggro with him (he also seemed entirely loyal to his home country of Albania, so why would he sell them out to the mutants? Was he disillusioned by the political turn his country took soon after his return?). But I suppose their video game enmity works on a symbolic level, when we consider that Adil was effectively Bart's usurper. He took Bart's place within the household, and within Homer's affections, and he used his guise as the perfect surrogate son to gain access to the power plant and take photographs of the nuclear reactor to fax back to Albania (ah, for the days when the fax machine was regarded as cutting edge technology). In reality, he poses a far greater threat to security and to the established order than any of Bart's childish pranks, something that Homer never fully grasps, being so intent on tending to the brood parasite that's infiltrated his nest. Adil might use the codename "Sparrow" for his spying operations, but as bird metaphors go, he's definitely more of a cuckoo.

The point "Crepes" is essentially making is that the Simpson family, for as chaotic and dysfunctional as they might appear, signifies something that is intrinsically wholesome, loving and good. It's a point it bears out by portraying its foreign forces, whether they're interlopers or operating on their own turf, as harmful corruptions of the family unit. This can be seen not only in Adil, but in Bart's French hosts, César and Ugolin. Not for nothing are they the first Simpsons villains who are themselves a family, albeit a distorted reflection of the more conventional family the Simpsons embody. An uncle and nephew team, in practice they function as more of an off-centre married couple (in her letter to Bart, Marge identifies them as his adopted parents) whose pet donkey Maurice makes three, and is positioned firmly above Bart in the maison's hierarchy (in fact, a line from César suggests that Bart was brought in specifically for Maurice's benefit). The privileges that Maurice enjoys over Bart include getting to lounge around with César and Ugolin while Bart toils in the vineyard, sleeping on the bed of straw intended for Bart, and most egregiously, the transgression Bart later feels compelled to cite to the French authorities, being granted ownership of Bart's favourite red cap. As happens in the Adil subplot, Bart finds himself pushed out in the cold by someone else's child, which in this case happens to be a fur (and hoof) child.

It's interesting and perhaps a mite unfortunate that "The Crepes of Wrath" came only two episodes after "Life on The Fast Lane", another story in which a French character proved a disruptor of the family's peace, something that could be perceived as the series having a somewhat Francophobic edge. It's worth noting that this was not the original plan, and that Jacques was written as a Scandi named Björn but improvised as French by his voice actor A. Brooks, who thought that gave him more to work with. What keeps the episode from becoming too repetitious is that César and Ugolin are a deliberately far cry from the archetypal Frenchman that Jacques embodied. Whereas Jacques, the Parisian charmer, was suave and impeccably groomed, they're vulgar, rustic and unkempt. Their antipathy is presented with such broad strokes that they perhaps don't register as the most immediately distinguished of the Season 1 antagonists. They're exceedingly mean, but they're never quite as legitimately threatening as Ms Botz of "Some Enchanted Evening". They're also not characterised with any of the nuance or shades of sympathy that Sideshow Bob exhibited in "Krusty Gets Busted". A possible redeeming quality, their obvious love and kindness toward Maurice the donkey, isn't treated by the plot as a virtue, but as a further reflection of their disdain for Bart. Nonetheless, César and Ugolin get my "Still Waters" award, for having more cultural depth than perhaps meets the eye. For César and Ugolin are borrowed characters, named for and heavily inspired by the antagonists of Claude Berri's 1986 period drama Jean de Florette and its follow-up Manon des sources (the same pictures that inspired the "Reassuringly Expensive" campaign for Stella Artois). There, César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) were an uncle and nephew team living in southeastern France post WWI, and also not above carrying out a few dirty deeds to get what they want. For all its ostensibly xenophobic trappings, "Crepes" is the episode in which The Simpsons reveals a passionate, almost clandestine affection for French arthouse cinema (NB: on the DVD commentary, writer George Meyer confesses that he's never seen Berri's films, but it's evident that someone in the production team took a shine to them). At the time it debuted, Berri's two-part saga was still a relatively contemporary cultural touchpoint, but I wonder how many of the show's audiences were going to get the reference? For anyone familiar with Berri's works, it's pretty unmissable, but not something the internal narrative openly advertises or underscores (myself, I was compelled to watch Berri's films because of the Stella Artois campaign - picking up on the Simpsons connection was an unexpected and revelatory bonus that gave me a greater appreciation for "Crepes" with hindsight).

The Ugolin who appears in "Crepes" is a pretty decent caricature of Ugolin as portrayed by Auteuil. The elongated nose is perhaps a little off, and he's here notably taller than his uncle, but you can otherwise see the Jean de Florette character in the design. César's interpretation is a fair bit looser, giving him a curiously cricetine appearance - with his hunched posture, long whiskers and rounded nose, he doesn't resemble a man so much as an overgrown muskrat. How does their characterisation compare? Well, keep in mind that Berri's combined saga runs for just under 4 hours, while "Crepes" only has 22 minutes, so it goes without saying that the Simpsons renditions have considerably less scope for development than their arthouse counterparts. The narrative of Jean de Florette had César (or Papet, as he is more affectionately termed) and Ugolin coveting a plot of land and attempting to drive out its new owner, city boy Jean Cadoret (Gérard Dépardieu), by blocking its water supply - not out of malice, but out of a sense of familial duty and a desire to restore and preserve the Soubeyran line, of which they were the last standing members. Naturally, their actions have no such complexities in "Crepes", which is happy to play them as straight villains - although Ugolin does demonstrate enough of a moral compass to object to his uncle's practice of adding anti-freeze to their wine on the grounds that it might kill someone, which is consistent with his being the more sensitive of the two in Berri's saga.

The allusions to Berri's cinema were a gratifying confirmation that The Simpsons did not underestimate its audience. But they also functioned as sly rebuttals to those critics of the show who felt that the popularity of the series represented a lowering of standards, by playfully demonstrating that its production crew were learned and had an appreciation for more highbrow fare. This much is also flaunted in an early sequence - one of the showiest and most visually inspired of Season 1, next to Marge's dream sequence in "Life on The Fast Lane" - when Ugolin goes to collect Bart at the Parisian airport, and their journey away from the city and deep into provincial France is represented as a ride through the scenes of various paintings by (mostly) French artists. Let's see, we have Claude Monet's water lilies, Henri Rousseau's dream and Édouard Manet's luncheon. Vincent van Gogh's wheatfield gets in, presumably on the basis that it was painted in France, even if van Gogh himself was Dutch.

And, contrariwise to the episode's gleefully xenophobic front, it is specifically through his embracing of the French culture and language that Bart finds his deliverance, and makes a connection with a much more benevolent local. Having been sent to a nearby town in a downpour to acquire a bottle of César and Ugolin's illicit ingredient, he passes a man whom he identifies as a police officer and attempts to reach out to him about his dire situation. Alas, the police officer speaks no English and Bart cannot make himself understood. He bemoans his inability to communicate in French, despite having been exposed to the language for two months, only to discover that he is in fact capable of speaking it fluently. (Bart has long struck me as something of a natural polyglot. I recall he could apparently speak Chinese in "Bart on The Road". In "Blame It On Lisa" he also mastered Spanish with remarkable speed, even if he forced himself to forget the language with self-inflicted brain damage...oh, Season 13). He runs back to the police officer and gives him a thorough account. There is a slight back-handedness in the sympathy he receives; while the police officer is clearly aghast at what Bart has endured, the crime he explicitly identifies as most serious is the addition of anti-freeze to wine. Nevertheless, he comes to Bart's aid and enables him to return to Springfield with his own back-handed remark of having encountered one nice French person on his travels.

For me, the most harrowing aspect of Bart's predicament is the revelation that it's gone on for two whole months, which frankly feels like an eternity in Simpsons time. Did nobody seriously catch wind of what was happening over those 60-odd days? (Likewise, did no one in the Simpson household have any inkling of what Adil was doing?) Watching the episode recently, I had a bleak thought that had honestly never occurred to me before - does Skinner know what kind of place the Château Maison is when he sends Bart there? It seems a bit of a stretch that he would do it on purpose, no matter how incensed he was about the mishap with his mother (Skinner dispenses discipline because he's a stickler for order, not because he's in any way vindictive), but there's nothing in the episode that explicitly rules it out (and "Crepes" does showcase a particularly dickish side to Skinner, as evidenced in his speech "welcoming" Adil to the school). In the end, maybe it isn't important - Skinner is complicit in Bart's ordeal simply through not caring enough to look into where he's actually sending his students. You could lay the same charge against Homer and Marge, who also don't seem to demand too much oversight of their son's experience. Marge cares enough to write Bart a letter (in which she sells him a half-truth about Homer going to sleep talking about how much he loves him), but that's all the communication from home he apparently gets. Granted, contact means were more limited in the days before email and social media, and we don't know for certain that the maison has a telephone, but you'd think they might have made a bit more effort. To a point, there's a sense that this lack of oversight stems from Homer's feelings of having moved on, now that he has Adil, and being happy to leave Bart to his lot. This ties in with another favourite theme of the series, present pretty much from the start - that of adult indifference to childhood anxiety, and the various strategies those shrugged off children must fall on to survive, be it Lisa's need for artistic expression or Bart's itch for rebellion.

Bart doesn't get any opportunities for his usual mischief-making whilst abroad; his act of rebellion against César and Ugolin ends up being a noble one that has him recognised as a hero by the French authorities. With that in mind, his vineyard ordeal can be viewed as your basic grind toward redemption - he gets banished to the dingy confines of the Château Maison for a show of unruliness that has him deemed unfit to live with decent, civilised society. His pride and humanity are stripped away (it may be the life of a frog to which he aspires, but he's saddled with the life of an unfavoured donkey), but he earns his way into the world's good graces by demonstrating what a tremendous force for righteousness he can be (in this case, by upholding the integrity of France's wine trade). César and Ugolin are last seen being apprehended and assured by Bart's cop buddy that their future wine-making will be happening in prison (now there's a joke that went over my head as a child). But then again, maybe not. César and Ugolin made a cameo appearance fairly soon after, in the Season 3 episode "Lisa The Greek" (in which they exhibit the stereotypically French trait of spurning American football but loving the comedy antics of Jerry Lewis). They are visibly not in prison in that episode (also still stockpiling the anti-freeze), indicating that they got a light sentence and/or a really ace lawyer. That's all well and good, but we sadly don't find out what became of Maurice. Was he ever reunited with his folks?

Adil's narrative, meanwhile, takes the opposite trajectory to Bart's. He gets a comparatively warm reception in America. Skinner's school hall speech is obviously the worst of it; he also gets into a dinner table dispute with Lisa about which of their countries uses the better system of government, which descends into a childish back and forth but is resolved amicably enough (by way of a glib compromise offered by Homer). On the whole, he's thrilled by just how trusting his American hosts are, and how little trouble he has getting them to accept him and his strange fascination with nuclear blueprints and civil defence plans. His strategy is to get close enough to Homer to get what he wants, but his success is equally dependent on adults not taking too keen an interest in the particulars of  what he's doing. Through no ingenuity whatsoever on the Simpsons' part, he ends up being exposed as a villain, when an investigation by the US authorities leads them to Evergreen Terrace, although they mistakenly target the Flanders' house (Ned, disappointingly, doesn't even seem to be in) and it's Homer who inadvertently gives Adil away. It works out okay for Adil, though - the US authorities agree to release him and return him to Albania in exchange for the release of one of their own spies captured on Albanian soil. The American spy turns out also to be a child, presumably sent to Albania under similar pretences to Adil, which I guess makes both countries even in their duplicity (and maybe also comparable to César and Ugolin, in their willingness to exploit children). A brief verbal exchange between Adil and the unidentified American spy indicates that they've met each other under similar circumstances before, and there's a discernible level of familiarity and connection in their dialogue. Adil shares that he thinks he's "getting too old for this game", which is on the one hand an acknowledgement of the threat an impending adolescence poses to the aura of innocence necessary to maintain his ruse. But it reads equally as a world-weary desire just to see the Cold War end; that Adil says it to the character to whom he should see himself as most diametrically opposed feels significant. He's fatigued with the conflict, and he recognises that he and the American spy are basically no different. They each understand what the other has been through. Given that the end of the Cold War was in sight by the time it aired, "Crepes" could be viewed as an expression of hope and optimism for the potential peace and understanding that lay ahead. Then again, Adil bids the Simpsons farewell by imploring that they not be put off accepting further students from the foreign exchange program, presumably to leave the door open for more of his allies to sneak their way in, so maybe they were hedging their bets after all. 

PS: Here's another nice postlude - in the aforementioned scene in the "Do The Bartman" video, the American spy is seen dancing alongside Adil, and I'd take that to mean that they're openly the best of friends now.

PPS: For some reason the scene with Adil and his American friend does not appear in the version of "Do The Bartman" that's included in the Season 2 DVD box set. I was so bummed when I found out. Why would you deny Adil his coda?

Last Orders (aka The Good Son?)

Let's get back to Jonathan Glazer, shall we?

"Last Orders", from 1998, is one of Glazer's best-known and most celebrated adverts (the tussle for the top spot is effectively between this, "Surfer" and "Swim Black"). It formed part of Stella Artois' "Reassuringly Expensive" campaign, a collection of ads set in rural France that were purposely designed to recall the work of French film-maker Claude Berri - an influence loudly proclaimed through its reappropriation of the score to Berri's 1986 film Jean de Florette. (For all the campaign's French preoccupations, we'd do well to remember that Stella Artois is of Belgian origin, and from the Dutch-speaking Flemish region.)

The slogan "Reassuringly Expensive" had been used in print ads since 1982, but gained fresh momentum in 1991 when the Berri-inspired television campaign got underway with the ad "Jacques de Florette", directed by New Zealander Michael Seresin, best renowned for his work as a cinematographer on several Alan Parker features. Seresin also helmed the earlier entries of the "Papa and Nicole" series, which debuted that same year; both campaigns took place in the south of France, with Seresin's cinematic eye bringing out the beauty and the vividness of the scenery in each, although tonally the two were cut from very different cloths. "Papa and Nicole" focussed on evoking the chicness and glamour of modern France, the kind went down well with British holidaymakers, while "Reassuringly Expensive" transported us to the more distant world of French peasants in the early 20th century. The two also took very different approaches in getting around the fact that their characters weren't English speakers; whereas the "Papa and Nicole" ads were mostly non-verbal, with dialogue restricted to a scant number of proper nouns, the "Reassuringly Expensive" spots were wordier pieces, and the absence of subtitles was certainly a bold move for a campaign targetted at UK audiences. In practice, the language barrier was all part of the appeal - the stories they told were straightforward enough that a grasp of the French language was not necessary in order to follow what was happening, but they had a certain mystique, prestige and larger than life-ness that left them feeling less like promos designed to make beer look sexy and more like bite-sized morsels of arthouse cinema. They were gorgeously-shot, narrative-driven and stocked with vibrant, well-defined characters who had us immediately invested in where their misadventures were headed. Each installment offered its own delectable set of twists and turns; the results were humorous but typically marked by a sinister undercurrent, a fascination with the slippery nature of human morality and how the entry of a certain sought-after liquid into the equation could tip even the best intentions out of whack.

The original "Jacques de Florette" ad was not itself a particularly sinister affair. It focussed on a cash-strapped flower salesman who convinces a barman to let him pay for his lunch by trading some of his wares. He at first hands over only a couple of bunches, but when he realises that the barman is pouring him a pint of Stella Artois, he ends up decking out the entire building exterior in red carnations. A running theme that would become more salient in later entries is worked in only implicitly here - that the booze in question is so valued and so coveted it brings out the dishonorable bastard in us all, the insinuation that the barman deliberately fixes Jacques a pint of Stella Artois in order to extract more flowers from him being a fairly low-key example. A later ad, "Good Samaritan", saw a group of locals offering a free drink to a mysterious traveller, a Christ-like figure who'd previously helped them out of various jams, only to balk when he requested a Stella Artois (and subsequently deny him back-up when he's called upon to fix a leaking roof). Later still we had Glazer's contribution, which finds an elderly man at death's door, as his son endeavours to fulfil his dying wishes. There are limits as to how far even the most dutiful son is willing to go to appease his poppa, however, as the father discovers when he makes the audacious demand for one last swig of Stella Artois before he expires.

"Last Orders" is an exemplary entry into the "Reassuringly Expensive" campaign. It has everything - bold cinematic visuals (we open with a murder of crows, ever the bad omen, encircling a somewhat dilapidated house), a vivid cast of characters and a simple, elegantly-crafted narrative building up to a dynamite punchline. The story is one of corruption, of the good son who learns to be a conniving bastard. Ostensibly, the glass of Stella Artois he's tasked with carrying back to his ailing pop is the serpent in his proverbial garden, although the final reveal potentially flips all of that on its head.

The corruption has the clout it does because the ad takes the time to first establish its protagonist as someone who is ordinarily inclined toward honor. The son (played by French actor Denis Lavant, who would work with Glazer again in the music video to Unkle's "Rabbit In Your Headlights") is depicted as a selfless and devoted man who's willing to scale the treetops to find the rare and precious flower his father's nostrils are craving, and to dip his hand into a hive of bees to retrieve a slab of the honey for which he hungers. But still his father hasn't yet had his full share of earthly delights. When he requests a Stella Artois, he tests the fidelities of his entire family, who convey the aggravation typical to anyone in a "Reassuringly Expensive" spot forced to accommodate someone else's hankering for said beer. They put all that aside, however, and manage to cobble together enough francs to purchase him a glass. The real challenge arises when Lavant's character must trek to the nearest pub (which is clearly a great distance away) and back again with the beverage in hand. On the return journey he passes some hunters firing their guns, startling him and causing him to spill a small quantity of the beer onto his sleeve. Reflexively, he licks it off and unwittingly passes the point of no return. Now, it's a done deal. He's sampled indulgence, and the rest of that liquid has zero chance of making it back to his family's house within the glass and out of his digestive system (the sense that he's a prisoner to his mounting temptation is reinforced with the imagery of the caged poultry behind him). His shameless consumption of the beer intended for his father is not, however, the point where he demonstrates his gut-churning plunge into depravity. That much is sealed when he reaches the house and is met by a priest who's come to give the last rites. The protagonist shows the priest inside and tricks him into carrying the empty glass into the bedroom. So, naturally, when he walks in on the family, they assume he's the culprit who downed the Stella (a deception the protagonist, now a full-on rotten egg, furthers by making the drinky-drinky motion behind the priest's back). This leads into the final twist in the narrative - the father, shocked by this outcome, bolts vigorously upright, exposing a dirty little secret of his own. He's not dying at all. No, this was all just a cunning ruse to secure himself a glass of the coveted beer. Tsk tsk. The lengths these "Reassuringly Expensive" characters will go to just to down a flaming Stella.

Although let's face it, this particular revelation doesn't come as a massive shock to us. We probably had an inkling as to what the father was up to earlier on in the ad, when the flash of pure, twinkling greed in his eyes as he delivered his bombshell request for Stella Artois was pretty unmistakable. The ad visual punchline proves as satisfying as it does not because it surprises, but because it drolly confirms that the apple might not have fallen far from the tree. It wasn't necessarily the drink that wrecked our hero's integrity, but what was already latent in his genetics; the Stella Artois simply helped him to acknowledge and come to terms with this true nature. Having discovered who he really is on his epic journey, he's receiving his proper homecoming, greeted by a reflection of his own character in the form of his father's duplicity. And the reality is, we're rooting for him for make that fall. It's clear that his obedience to his father isn't getting him anywhere, other than covered in bruises and beestings. His father's "last" requests keep coming, and he keeps getting put through the hassle. The only thing for it is to learn how to play his dad at his own deceitful game. (Meanwhile the priest, the character who stands for virtue, gets the shortest end of the stick, in being used as a pawn in the father and son's respective schemes and falsely paraded as a thief and a lush.)

"Last Orders" made such a stirring impression that Glazer would return to direct two further ads for Stella Artois: "Whip Around" and "Devil's Island".

The ad exists in two versions. There's the full 90 second version and a shorter 60 second edit that omits a few details, including the ominous corvids and the moment where the hunters' gunfire causes the protagonist to first spill and taste the beer. In this version proximity to the beer alone is enough to tip him over the edge.

You're Gonna Get Caught (And You Smell Like A Brewery)

"Gonna Get Caught", a collection of ads broadcast on New Zealand television in the early 00s, is one of the more novel drink driving campaigns that I've seen. Created by the Land Transport Safety Authority (LTSA), it tells a cautionary story that's serialised over multiple ads, following the nightly exploits of a brash young bar patron who regularly drives home over the limit, indifferent to the fact that his drinking blatantly impairs his ability to negotiate the snaking road ahead. His wife, who's always retired to bed by the time he arrives, disapproves of this behaviour, warning him that one day he'll get caught out, but does he listen? The pattern continues until, sure enough, we reach the fateful night when something unexpected occurs on that road, and catastrophe duly ensues.

The results are certainly striking, although the novelty of the technique does not surprise me. The obvious disadvantage of using such a slow burn tactic is that it requires the viewer to have a decent attention span and to become invested in the scenario over a prolonged period of time. Most campaigns of this ilk would, I suspect, prefer to unleash their psychological bombshells within 90 seconds or less, to ensure that the message is delivered before anyone's interest expires. I'm aware of only one other road safety campaign that followed this format, and that's "Alan and Kate" a series of anti-speeding PIFs devised by the UK's Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) in the late 1990s. "Alan and Kate" depicted four different mornings in the lives of its titular characters, two mundane suburbanites who didn't know one another but were unwittingly on a harrowing collision course. The three with "nice" endings did the rounds for a few weeks, until eventually they dropped the traumatic finale where Alan meets Kate (we all knew it was coming, but bloody hell, those closing images were brutal). The intention behind "Alan and Kate" and "Gonna Get Caught" was effectively the same - we got to see how the protagonists had incorporated dangerous habits into their everyday routines, and were so accustomed to nothing coming of it that they didn't see it as a big deal. In reality, it was always an accident waiting to happen, something made all-too stark to the viewer by the repetitive nature of the ads, and the seemingly minor variations that threatened to offset the balance on each day. Our relief that no accident has occurred by the end of each passing episode is nullified by our awareness that every new addition takes us a step closer to the defining occasion where things will obviously not end well. But whereas "Alan and Kate" offered only a slow march toward the inevitable, "Gonna Get Caught" actually doesn't go the way you might expect it to. There's a bit of a fiendish twist in that the unnamed drink-driving protagonist hasn't been caught by the series' out (at least in the traditional sense), although the situation he does wind up in is arguably all the more lamentable.

The story of "Gonna Get Caught" is told in five parts. As with "Alan and Kate", there are three variations where the protagonist's routine plays out without incident, followed by a fourth in which his reckless actions finally catch up with him. Unlike "Alan and Kate", which ended with the tragic accident and left the fall-out to our imaginations, "Gonna Get Caught" furthers its story with a fifth installment depicting the austere ways in which life goes on; we see the protagonist attempting to go about more-or-less the same routine as before, but it's a thin facade. His whole world has been irrecoverably shattered. And that's why I honestly prefer "Gonna Get Caught" to "Alan and Kate". "Alan and Kate" made good on its protracted portentousness by bowing out with a shocking final sequence, but didn't leave you feeling a whole lot more than overwhelming bleakness. "Gonna Get Caught" has a juicier taste of devilish bitterness in its closing arrangement; it is, for lack of a better word, more of a "fun" cautionary tale.

Compared to Alan, the habitual speeder of "Alan and Kate", there's not much of an attempt to make the protagonist of "Gonna Get Caught" sympathetic. When Alan wasn't doing 35mph in a 30mph zone, he was shown to be an affable family man. This guy is, as the characteristically Antipodean tagline openly advertises, a bloody idiot. He staggers drunkenly through most of the narrative, giggling inanely as he makes that ominous drive home. His obvious failing is in treating everything as a joke, always producing some silly quip whenever he's challenged by his bartender on whether he's okay to drive. We are clearly meant to feel contempt for a character this unashamedly foolish (as opposed to Alan, where the intended viewer response was more along the lines of, "Oh heck, that could be me"), which has the effect of turning his gruesome story into more of a black comedy. Which is not to say that it's not tremendously unsettling. In the earlier episodes, much of this creeping unease is achieved in smaller, more low-key ways that make skilful use of the serialised format. Over the course of the campaign we see minor changes in how the protagonist's evening plays out, suggesting a breakdown is already in motion even before we get to the accident. When he gets home, he practices a childish ritual of always throwing his keys into the trinket dish on his hallway table; on the first night, they land successfully, on the second he misses and hits the telephone instead, on the third he misses and knocks the letter rack off the table. The response he gets from his partner also noticeably changes with each installment. She goes from laughing along with him to silently ignoring him (but still cracking a half-smile at his antics), to openly disparaging him ("You smell like a brewery!"). Clearly, she's getting tired of the situation, and of having to wait in each night for a persistent drink-driver, never knowing if he's going to make it home safely or not. There's also an element of horror in the nightly journey, the road being a long and forbidding void between two fragments of civilisation. It's ill-lit, eerily desolate, and you can't see exactly what lies ahead.

That's the other significant way in which "Gonna Get Caught" differs from "Alan and Kate" - with the latter, it was made obvious from the very first installment how things would eventually end. Not so with "Gonna Get Caught". Of course, we know that something bad is going to happen on that dark winding road, but we don't know exactly what. Perhaps we're expecting the protagonist himself to either be killed or seriously injured in a crash - the fateful fourth installment certainly appears to hint at this outcome in having him assert "Still alive, aren't I?" when the bartender poses his usual question. But no, our protagonist does not become a casualty. Instead he unwittingly meanders onto the right side of the road (New Zealand being a left-hand traffic country), only to be greeted by the sudden glare of a motorcycle headlight directly in his path. He swerves to avoid it, and seemingly succeeds - he and his car come to a standstill in one piece, with no further sign of the bike. It's here that the protagonist makes his most dickish move. Assuming he's gotten away with it since there was no actual collision between the vehicles, he heaves a sigh of relief and drives on home. The correct thing to have done might have been to have stopped and made sure that the motorcylist was okay? He is evidently shaken by the experience, as he forgoes his usual ritual with the keys, placing them neatly into the dish, but only when he enters the bedroom and his wife asks him if met up with Matt that evening does it occur to him that he might have done something egregious. She mentions that Matt was looking for him earlier and was planning to drive out to the pub to see him on his bike. For the first time, the protagonist, a man who couldn't take anything seriously, wears an expression of pure unspoken horror.

But who was Matt? It's not clear to me if he's meant to be one of the bar patrons glimpsed in any of the earlier episodes, but he certainly doesn't receive the kind of extensive build-up as a character as the similarly doomed Kate was given. Even the protagonist requires some bringing up to speed on who his wife means by "Matt". On what business Matt was wanting to see the protagonist likewise remains a mystery. But the fact that Matt was specifically going out to meet with him adds an extra dash of tartness to the outcome, transforming the encounter into one of personal reckoning. Matt becomes Fate, Destiny, Death even, with the subversion that Matt himself is the unlucky party who dies. (On that note, I've seen some confusion regarding how the protagonist managed to kill Matt when there was no direct collision between their vehicles. The answer is simple enough - his dangerous driving forced Matt off the road and caused him to fatally crash.) But it does represent a death of sorts for the protagonist, whose world is about to drastically change. He's about to get acquainted with that ugly little thing called consequence.

The fifth and final installment sees the previously jovial bar atmosphere replaced by an altogether more sombre mood, as the patrons discuss the sad fate of Matt and our protagonist sits there in stony silence. The truth of what happened on that night is not completely known to them, although one patron mentions that a car is thought to have been involved, as the police found skid marks on the road close to Matt's body. The protagonist leaves after the discussion shifts in this direction, and we see a notable change in his demeanour. There is, to a point, a sense that he has matured following his experience - he's no longer giggling inanely or driving dangerously, and he takes steps to ensure that his remaining friends get home safely. All the same, we sense that his inclination is still very much against owning up to his part in Matt's demise, which could potentially remain his grisly little secret forever. That treacherous road now stands as a monument to that secret, and how it haunts him in the present - he makes his usual drive home, passing both a floral tribute to Matt and the visible skid marks he left behind. The fifth ad closes, as with all the installments, with the protagonist back in bed with his wife. In contrast to her earlier distance, she responds to her husband sympathetically, assuming that his visible agitation stems from his grief over Matt and his outrage at the perpetrator. She turns to him and delivers the campaign punchline: "Don't worry, love. They'll catch the bastard." It's a callback to her statement in the opening episode that the protagonist would get caught out one day; the possibility of getting caught still looms, but the nature and implications of that threat have drastically shifted.

Of course, by the end the protagonist hasn't been caught (that we haven't even learned his name, in contrast to his victim, is a testament to his enduring elusiveness), leaving his fate unclear - all very deliberate, I assume, in order to depict that uncertainty as a full-blown nightmare in itself. The final episode teases us with the possibility that he could be exposed later down the line. He's left forensic evidence in the form of those skid marks, and while his wife remains guileless, there's ambiguity as to whether his friends might be cottoning on. One of them seems to have connected the dots - when it's observed that our protagonist isn't coping well, he responds "Not at all" with intonation that suggests wariness rather than sympathy. But whether he'll take that thought any further is, like everything else, left hanging. I would argue that, for the purposes of the narrative, it doesn't matter if he'll be found out or not. What's important is that he's already in his own private trap, in having to live with the omnipresent threat of being caught at any moment, with his stifling inability to voice his remorse to anyone, and with having to secretly be the villain whom everyone around him openly despises, all while still having to go through the motions of the same old routine. In that regard, he hasn't gotten off scot-free. What lies ahead of him is, much like the road he always traversed, dark and indistinct, yielding only one certainty - he's stuck with his guilt, whatever happens next.

Dishonor At The Discotheque (Together We'll Crack It)

A popular tactic of the public information film is to lull you into a false sense of security by tricking you into thinking you're watching a promotion for something else entirely. That way, when calamity strikes, it does so with all the horrifying abruptness as in real life. If you happened to catch "Disco", an anti-pickpocketing filler from 1989, without context, you'd probably think you were watching an ad for some brand of trendy beverage. The blue, seductive nightclub ambience and melancholic soundtrack convey plaintive longing, not the manoeuvres of a predator sidling up to prospective prey. Heck, the first time I saw "Disco", I went into it knowing full well that it was a crime prevention PIF, and I still felt properly betrayed by its ending. Forget The Usual Suspects, this is the kind of twist that has you kicking yourself for days on end because you didn't it see it coming.

What's so diabolical about the twist in "Disco" is that it delivers its gut punch on two separate levels. Like his unwitting victim, we end up being suckered in by the sticky-fingered disco dancer because he does little from the outset to arouse suspicion. At the same time, we don't see the scenario play out from the perspective of the victim and, until the very end, she's not the figure with whom we're encouraged to identify. The villain of the piece is our protagonist, and we end up being implicated as accomplices in his underhanded ploy. Because basically, we willed him to do it.

Our mistake was in thinking we already knew the story. We're centred on a lonely attendee at a discotheque who, spurred on by the DJ's warning that the incoming dance will be the evening's last, takes an interest in a young woman hovering on the sidelines. He swigs his drink while attempting to summon his nerves, only to turn and see that she's with someone after all. Hopes dashed, his eyes quickly settle on another prospective target; steeling himself, he manages to approach her, only to keep walking right past her. At this, it's revealed where his real interests lay, as he discreetly pockets the purse she'd left on the counter behind her. The PIF closes with the victim none the wiser, as the thief slips away into the shadows. Naturally, it's an unsettling film to experience the second time round, because we can see how the protagonist's mind is really working. His original target had left her purse unguarded in exactly the same manner; he dismissed her as a potential victim simply because her partner was blocking his route to the purse (not to mention that having to bypass two sets of eyes would make it harder for him to pull off his theft unnoticed).

Obviously, the PIF works as a stark reminder of how you can't identify a ne'er do well just by looking at them, though its sting goes somewhat deeper than the revelation that this seemingly dapper gentleman actually had dishonorable intentions. It's not so much the protagonist's handsomeness that makes him ostensibly sympathetic as his apparent and possibly genuine vulnerability. The various small movements in his body language - the sip of his drink, the lick of his lips - suggest that he isn't overly confident about the advances he's gearing up to make. He's a nervous man who seems just a little out of his element on that love bird-packed dance floor, but the yearning in his eyes is salient enough that we're immediately rooting for him to overcome his self-doubt. It's just too bad that that yearning, and the reason for his nerves, turn out to be for something else entirely, resulting not in the tender moment of human connection we were expecting, but a nasty surprise as he takes advantage of the vulnerability of one of his fellow lonely dancers. Even the DJ's opening lines, the only diegetic dialogue discernable throughout the PIF, acquires a darker edge when we realise that the protagonist was effectively being warned that this was his last chance to make off with someone else's property before the evening was out. As noted, the victim hasn't even realised by the end that she's been robbed, and there's not a lot to say that she herself was overly invested in the prospective interaction - from her perspective, the approach was but a passing possibility that didn't go anywhere, and that smug smile the protagonist flashes on accomplishing his dirty deed has the "joke" feeling like it's predominantly at our expense. It's a sinister ending, with the protagonist becoming a silhouette, to reflect his dark intentions, and deftly vanishing into the crowd, no longer our dashing leading man but a malevolent shadow looking to evade detection.

Making "Disco" a particularly frosty concoction is that lingering emphasis on just how alone its subjects really are, alerting us not just to the devious practices of a few rogue individuals, but to the wider indifference of the world at large. All those eyes around you and ultimately no one's got your back. Deviancy goes unnoticed in this wilderness, as does your personal distress. "Together We'll Crack It", the campaign tagline promises, yet an overall sense of togetherness is the thing that's sorely lacking here.