"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.
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