Bart's Dog Gets an F (aka Mr Universe Takes A Walk)

I've said in the past that I don't particularly like Simpsons episodes that focus heavily on Santa's Little Helper. "Bart's Dog Gets an F" (7F14), which first aired on March 7th 1991, has long languished as my pick for the weakest of Season 2. There was a time when it might have competed for that honor with "Dancin' Homer", but that's an episode I've found to improve with each viewing, whereas "Bart's Dog" has never outgrown its status as the runt of the litter. With their first attempt a misfire, I never understood why the writers remained so intent on making these Santa's Little Helper tales a regular occurrence, with a new one cropping up every other season or so (although they seemed to drop off during the Scully era). There was, however, always one major factor that might have stood in my way of being able to fully appreciate what these episodes had to offer, and that was my wholly dog-free existence. Until a year ago, I'd never owned a dog. I grew up in a cat household. Cats are what I related to. Over time, I grew bored with all the episodes centred around Bart and Santa's Little Helper and wondered when we'd be getting one about Lisa and Snowball II (the moral there is to be careful what you wish for). So I will freely admit that at least part of my coolness toward the Simpson mutt's repertoire was informed by the seeping grudge I felt on behalf of his feline compatriot, who is the real forgotten Simpson and not Maggie. As of September 2023, I've become the owner of a wonderful Chinese Crested, and now I couldn't imagine life without him. So maybe the time has come for me to go back and give the Santa's Little Helper episodes a thorough reevaluation through the eyes of a born again dog lover?

This isn't to say that the series' unabashed favouritism for Santa's Little Helper over Snowball II doesn't remain a sticking point. Ultimately, my sympathies are still with the Simpson moggy. Fact is, she was a member of the central household, and it strikes me as only proper that she should have been included a whisker more actively in their life and dynamics. Consider that it took until a Season 8 episode, the "Thing and I" segment of "Treehouse of Horror VII", for a script to even confirm the sex of the Simpsons' cat (IIRC - sure, the original Snowball was confirmed as a female in "Stark Raving Dad" of Season 3, but did they say anything about her successor before then?). For years, I'd automatically assumed that Snowball II was male (a reasonable assumption, because most solidly black cats are, or so I've heard) and remember being surprised when Lisa referred to the cat using female pronouns. Even then, I suspect that there wasn't actually a hard consensus among the writers on this point, given that Marge describes Snowball II as a male just a few episodes later in "Bart After Dark". Some fans will argue that Snowball II had little personality compared to Santa's Little Helper, but my response to that is they never gave her much of a chance to exhibit any. I think a lot of it comes down to how Santa's Little Helper was purposely conceived as an extension of the Simpson's own beleaguered doggedness, allowing him a more privileged position within the family pecking order. In "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", Santa's Little Helper was initiated into the clan on Homer's observation that, "He's a loser, he's pathetic, he's...a Simpson." A racing greyhound who struggled even to finish his races, he was a totem of everything that made the family themselves such lovable societal misfits. Snowball II, whose very moniker is a commemoration of a tragedy in the family's past, is a silent, ominous reminder that Death Is Coming For Us All. In her way, she's every bit as a reflective of the dysfunction of the Simpsons' household (right down to the "Snowball" part of her name being a grotesque misnomer), but in a slightly less endearing, more macabre way. I've no evidence that greyhounds became a more fashionable breed off the back of Santa's Little Helper, but I'm sure that (all things considered) he was seen as a positive representation of a former racer getting a second chance as a family pet. I doubt that Snowball II did much to bolster the public image of black cats, a feline class associated with a heap of negative superstitions and a reputation for being less popular among prospective cat adopters, and maybe that's to be viewed as a missed opportunity.

My catty grievances aside, there were a number of reasons why I'd feel a sense of disappointment whenever an upcoming Simpsons episode was revealed to be Santa's Little Helper-orientated. For one, they typically don't allow for brilliant plotting. Even when overshadowing Snowball II, Santa's Little Helper really isn't that strong a character, his range basically limited to looking cheerfully oblivious whilst harbouring the destructive urge to chew up every household item in his path. Matt Groening was vocally opposed to the presence of anthropomorphism in The Simpsons, believing it would undermine the reality of the series (he made no attempt to hide his disdain for the winking catfish on the commentary for "The War of The Simpsons"). He was probably right, but it did severely curb what they could feasibly do with the dog. More fatally still, Santa's Little Helper episodes have a predilection for the hackneyed in a way that feels at odds with the rebellious spirit of The Simpsons, their resolutions often falling back on the kinds of well-worn cliches you might expect to encounter in any number of "boy and his dog" type stories. Take Santa's Little Helper defending Bart from an entire pack of hounds at the end of "Dog of Death", or being asked to choose between Bart and the blind stoner at the end of "The Canine Mutiny". As for this episode, the development that saves the day is nothing short of an eleventh-hour miracle, and it's played curiously straight for a show that, right from its opening episode, regarded the omnipresence of miracles in television with a healthy leeriness.

But hey, the whole point of this review is to give the first Santa's Little Helper episode a fair shake, so I want to at least start by covering those aspects of "Bart's Dog Gets an F" that I find interesting and that set it apart from other episodes. It seems noteworthy to me that this is the Simpsons episode most likely to invite comparisons with one the show's earliest rivals, Family Dog. The CBS spin-off series created in order to get aboard the Simpsons bandwagon was then still stumbling its way through Development Hell (destined to eventually become a punchline in "Treehouse of Horror III"), but the original "Family Dog" episode of Amazing Stories will forever have the honor of beating the first Simpsons Ullman short to air by about two months, and can be seen as one of the first major heralds of the dawning age for primetime animation. Like Family Dog, "Bart's Dog Gets an F" makes the stylistic choice of showing us what a stranger, all the more alienating place whitebread suburbia becomes when viewed from the eyes of a displaced wolf descendant. Scattered throughout are a series of intermittent cuts that attempt to get inside Santa's Little Helper's head, usually whenever he comes into conflict with one of the family, and give us a glimpse of the Simpson household as perceived through his vacant peepers. Happily, The Simpsons accomplishes this without indulging the long-debunked misconception that dogs only see in black and white; Santa's Little Helper's vision is more colour-limited, but whoever was responsible for the design in these sequences was clearly aware that they can see blue, with the tints of Marge's hair and Homer's pants being discernible features (having said that, I think dogs can also see yellow, so the family themselves should have appeared as normal to Santa's Little Helper). The point of these POV shots is to get across the language barrier that prevents Santa's Little Helper from being a well-behaved pet; to him, every word that spews out of the Simpsons' mouths is incomprehensible blather, much as everything they leave lying around is either food or a chew toy for letting loose with his insatiable oral urges. They also create a fine balance between the dog as a fundamental innocent (like when he steals Homer's breakfast because he can't distinguish between Homer's food and his own) and the dog as a terrible, chaotic force that seems bent on sniffing out and destroying everything the family holds dear. Nowhere is the latter more lovingly illustrated than in the sequence where he commits his most egregious act of destruction, laying waste to the cherished quilt that's formed the basis of Bouvier family tradition across six generations, and when his inhuman gaze is momentarily transmuted into that of a slasher movie villain sidling up to a prospective victim. As Santa's Little Helper closes in on the defenceless quilt, a sound chillingly reminiscent of "Ki-Ki-Ki Ma-Ma-Ma" works its way into the soundtrack, cluing us in that the Simpsons have taken into their abode nothing less than the four-legged equivalent of Jason Voorhees.

Other moments with Santa's Little Helper are less overtly menacing, but firmly establish that he's no Disneyfied critter, a point made salient in the very first scene, which incorporates a moment obviously designed to recall Lady & The Tramp. Unlike Jim Dear, when Homer peers through the dog-inflicted hole in his morning newspaper, he's greeted not by the devoted eyes of Man's best friend, but the dog's rear end as he inspects his reluctant master's breakfast. He's also a duller beast than many of his television contemporaries, neither a heroic defender a la Spike from Rugrats, or in possession of any of the strange neuroses of Eddie from Frasier. He's instead content to ramble mindlessly through life, never missing an opportunity to make a nuisance of himself while remaining plaintively oblivious to the trouble he causes. A huge chunk of the first act is taken up by the random acts of havoc Santa's Little Helper inflicts, both within the Simpsons' backyard and around the neighbourhood when he slips his tether. These include such non-cute endeavors as ingesting a ladybug, stealing jerky from the counter of the Kwik-E-Mart and harassing ducks at the park. Eventually he finds his way into the Winfields' swimming pool, paving way for Sylvia Winfield's most protracted appearance (here voiced by guest star Tracey Ullman rather than her regular voice actress Maggie Roswell), when she telephones Homer and lays down her judgement that a lawless dog is but the extension of a lawless family: "There's only one family on this block - no, on Earth, inconsiderate enough to let a monster like that roam free!"

Already I find myself getting into the flaws of "Bart's Dog Gets an F", the most obvious being that the first act feels particularly slow, setting up the plot point of Lisa coming down with the mumps and getting to spend her days being initiated into the art of cross stitching by Marge, but otherwise belabouring the same point about Santa's Little Helper. There's some pleasant mother-daughter bonding happening in the subplot, but those moments too are a bit uneventful, and would have benefited from having a more urgent A-story unfolding around them. An amusing narrative thread emerges involving Homer blowing $125 (about $289 in 2024 money) on a pair of Assassins sneakers, a neat bit of satire of the Air Jordans craze that had consumers gripped at the time, for no other reason than to keep up with the Flanders. And yes, to partially agree with a point made by Nathan Rabin in his review on the AV Club, this interaction does feel like a relic of Ned and Homer's earliest dynamic, when Ned's aspirations were a lot more worldly and his role in the series largely involved stoking Homer's envy with his latest flashy purchase. I'd argue, though, that Homer spending that much money on sports shoes that he blatantly has no intention of using for exercise was always the point. As for Ned, I kind of like how much more balanced he was at this stage. They didn't call it "Flanderization" for nothing, I know, but it was nice how, even with "Dead Putting Society" already establishing him as a pious Christian type, this didn't immediately define all aspects of his character and he was still allowed to be a regular guy who got excited about frivolous things like designer footwear. Naturally, as soon as Homer gets a pair of his own those shoes are doomed, but it's surprising that they don't even last out the first act, rendering them something of a pointless plot diversion. There's a subsequent sequence where Homer attempts to return the savaged sneakers for a refund, only to be told, by that spiky-haired character who served as a predecessor to the Squeaky-Voiced Teen, that the warranty doesn't cover fire, theft or acts of Dog. Right after, something new catches his eye in the form of a Macadamia nut ^[1] cookie from Cookie Colossus, and this ends up being the ill-fated purchase that tips us into our third act conflict. No doubt it's all meant to be part of the joke that Homer weathers the loss of his designer sneakers but reaches his breaking point over a cookie that set him back by one measly dollar, but it leaves the story feeling as rambling and unfocussed as Santa's Little Helper's attention span.

This takes us into the other really interesting thing about "Bart's Dog Gets an F", and that's that it's a rare episode in which Homer is effectively cast as the villain of the piece, with the added nasty twist that he successfully enlists Marge to his side. Even with the shorter temper that accompanied his early characterisation, there aren't many other episodes that he spends in such a perpetually grim mood - when he's not viciously at odds with Santa's Little Helper, he's mostly either stewing in resentment toward Ned, being belligerent with Mrs Winfield, or being rude to a cookie salesgirl who is seriously only doing her job in offering him free samples before telling him where he can buy them. And, for all the vapidness of the first act, when Homer lays down his ultimatum at the end of the second (that the dog has to go), it genuinely hurts. Bart's flailing cries of protest ("I'll set fire to my clothes! I'll put sugar in the gas tank!") also hurt. The cruellest axe falls when Lisa appeals to Marge for support only for her to admit that nope, she's siding with Homer on this one. It becomes a matter of the kids versus the adults, a match-up that's bitterly skewed in that one side wields all of the power. For now, anyway. Homer prefaces his bombshell with the mean-spirited declaration that "We've never had a problem with a family member we can give away before", although that much isn't exactly true, is it? The family already hoisted Abe off onto the retirement home, a connection that was explicitly made in a later Santa's Little Helper episode, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", but here goes without comment. Lisa does, however, make Homer conscious of the likelihood that he could one day be on the receiving end of his offsprings' mercy, when she asks him if the implicit lesson being taught is that the way to solve a problem with someone you love is to get rid of them. "If they're ever going to pull the plug on me", Homer admits, "I want you in my corner." Thus, Santa's Little Helper gets a reprieve. If he can pass his course at the Canine College, he gets to remain under the Simpsons' roof.

The kids versus adults conflict is an interesting and relatable one, but the unmistakably sour tone of the parents' position is a major reason why I find this episode so difficult to warm to. I think it shows a very mean and petty side to not only Homer, but to Marge as well. I understand Marge being upset about the loss of the Bouvier quilt, but let's be real here - it wasn't Santa's Little Helper's fault. He's just a dumb dog, and he didn't know what the quilt was or why it mattered to Marge, any more than he could read Homer's stupid cookie missive. If you've got a pet with destructive tendencies, the onus is on you to implement a little basic damage control by not leaving precious items where the pet might get to them. Marge could have avoided the entire outcome if she'd just had the foresight to close the bedroom door before leaving the quilt unsupervised and within the dog's reach. She insists that it's not just the quilt, and gives a list of the various transgressions that make Santa's Little Helper an undesirable pet, but that all just makes me wonder how well the Simpsons are meeting the needs of their dog in general (the more unfortunate way in which this episode reminds me of Family Dog). Something that isn't brought up in the script but weighs heavily on my mind throughout is that Santa's Little Helper is an ex-racing dog, and as such he wouldn't have been raised to be a family pet. The Simpsons strike me as the kind of family who wouldn't necessarily do the research and take into consideration that a former racer is going to have had a very different background to a regular house dog (in light of the fact that this was an impulse adoption on their part), and that special attention might be needed to ensure that it can make the transition. Marge observes that Santa's Little Helper is "not even housebroken", which isn't so unusual for an ex-racer that hasn't before lived in a home environment. Factor in that Santa's Little Helper was very clearly mistreated by his original owner, and it's hardly surprising that the dog is going to have some behavioural problems. When Marge is scanning the telephone directory for a reputable obedience school, she passes over one run by Dr Marvin Monroe, with the philosophy that "Your dog isn't the problem, you are!", and let's face it, there are some uncomfortable truths in that.

Instead, the family enlists the services of starchy dog trainer Emily Winthrop, a parody of Barbara Woodhouse by way of a parody of Margaret Thatcher. She (like Mrs Winfield) is voiced by Tracey Ullman, the TV comedian who, to use her own analogy, had breast-fed The Simpsons during its germinal years (funnily enough, I think they were undergoing a messy divorce at around this time, with Ullman unsuccessfully suing the network for a cut of the series' profits in 1992...which didn't seem to interfere with her working relationship with James L. Brooks, given that she was later in I'll Do Anything). Ullman's bristly performance is by and far the highlight of the episode. Winthrop is not a particularly likeable character - she advocates flagrantly cruel methods for bringing dogs to order, instructing her students to yank on their choke chain whenever their mutt shows any inkling of disobedience (and there's a line of dialogue indicating that she would use comparable methods on a child) - but her vocal liveliness gives the torpid narrative a much-needed shot in the arm.

Oh hello Jacques. A random Jacques cameo is always good for a few extra points in my book, and naturally I appreciate the confirmation that he's also a dog lover (being the archetypal Frenchman that he is, of course he would have a poodle), but this is all we see of him at the Canine College. I've checked the other obedience school scenes thoroughly, and he isn't featured anywhere else (although his poodle's design is reused here and there). Just so we're clear, that's a GOOD thing. If Jacques doesn't reappear in any subsequent classes then it can be assumed that he dropped out after the first session since he didn't approve of Winthrop's training methods. Mind you, I don't think consistency amongst the background extras was ever a top priority during production. Martin is always seen with a Shar Pei, but pay close attention and you'll notice that Sam the barfly's dog changes with every scene he's in - first he has a large grey mutt, then a smaller terrier-type, and finally a bloodhound at the graduation scene.

Even with the stakes raised in its third act, "Bart's Dog Gets an F" never quite settles on what it's supposed to be about; again, it's that meandering focus that keeps it from attaining greatness. The title betrays what it perhaps set out to be, but didn't completely realise, implying as it does that it's intended as a companion episode to "Bart Gets an F", which dealt with Bart's struggles within a similarly indifferent educational system. Until Santa's Little Helper enrols at Canine College, Bart himself has a fairly minimal role in the narrative, seeming more interested in Lisa's mumps than in anything Santa's Little Helper is up to, but as soon as schooling enters the picture, suddenly he's the one on the firing line on with the dog. Sole responsibility for getting Santa's Little Helper into order apparently falls to Bart, who is the only family member seen working with him at the training sessions, and that's kind of messed up when you think about it. Bart's only 10; shouldn't he be due some parental oversight in all of this? Presumably, the underlying idea is that Bart feels a particular empathy for Santa's Little Helper because he's able to project his own feelings of academic inadequacy onto the dog; his telling Santa's Little Helper, "Sorry boy, you can't help being dumb", seems reminiscent of his despairing cry of, "I am dumb! Dumb as a post! Think I'm happy about it?", from earlier that season. Once again, it's insinuated that this lack of progress might have less to do with dumbness on the dog's part than with Bart's inability to work within another rote learning institution with little sympathy for individual difference. He gets nowhere because he's not willing to fall in line with Winthrop's vile methods, the use of which hurts him as much as it hurts Santa's Little Helper, and no doubt strikes him as redolent of the kind of daily chastisement he experiences at Springfield Elementary. It makes good sense to present the struggle to turn Santa's Little Helper around as a particularly personal one for Bart; he sees so much of himself in the dog.

This feels like it should have been the emotional hook of the episode, yet the script doesn't delve too deeply into it. For one, the connection is never explicitly raised; the single reference to Bart's own academic troubles comes when he attempts to sneak his remedial reading assignment into the pile of homework Lisa had specially requested for her sick leave. In "Bart Gets an F", there was also a sense that Homer and Marge weren't exactly doing a great deal to help Bart, which existed largely in the subtext of that episode, through a small moment where, after failing to ensure that Bart devoted an evening to studying (and in Homer's case, actively dragging him away from it), they wonder why he keeps on failing despite his good intentions. Their apparent disinterest in getting their hands dirty with Santa's Little Helper creates a similarly stark impression of it being Bart against the world, but comes with the added sting that, on this occasion, Homer and Marge are the final authority. Winthrop might be uncompromising when Bart implores her to go easy on them during the upcoming examination, but she isn't the one laying down the condition that Santa's Little Helper either passes or gets booted. While Bart is making his last-ditch effort to save his chum, there are a bunch of scenes with Homer already advertising the dog and showing him to a prospective new owner (although purposely concealing that this is a problem dog, which raises questions about how long Santa's Little Helper would have lasted in his new home). I suppose it makes the threat of losing Santa's Little Helper feel more real and urgent, but it adds an extra dash of mean-spiritedness to Homer's actions, as though he has a vested interest in seeing the dog fail.

Of course, in the end the dog doesn't, but it takes a remarkably convenient bit of plot development to facilitate that ending, with Santa's Little Helper suddenly becoming capable of discerning commands amid the usual human blather, but only after Bart has delivered a heartfelt speech about how much he's going to miss his friend. So what made the difference? Is the implication that Santa's Little Helper, sensing from Bart's tone that something is wrong, is finally giving his master enough focus to overcome their communication barrier? Is Bart's persistence in attempting to train the dog humanely getting a delayed payoff? Or are we merely seeing a last-minute miracle plucked out of thin air because hey, we've only got 30 seconds left, and obviously we're not interfering with the status quo, so let's just wrap this up happily (the B-story's solution, with Lisa taking it upon herself to start a new family quilt, lands a notch more naturally). An out and out miracle also played a significant role in the resolution to "Bart Gets an F" (as Bart said, at least part of his C- belonged to God), but there it came with a much more subversive double-edge, the snow day he was apparently granted via divine intervention becoming less a reprieve than another temptation - at best, he was being tested by the Powers That Be, and at worst, toyed with. Bart learned repeatedly that there was no easy way out of his predicament, and that's what made his success at the end feel so well-earned. Here, I suspect that hearing intelligible words come through on Santa's Little Helper's end was meant to be the payoff in of itself; how we got there is regarded as secondary.

Still, the graduation ceremony has room for a classic Homer moment, with his slow, grudging clap gradually giving way into a genuinely rapturous one, as he comes to terms with the fact that, deep down, he's glad to see the dog succeed. The part with the dogs casting off their chains like mortarboards is an equally nice touch. And then, the really subversive element comes with the Animal House-inspired epilogue, as a series of onscreen titles fill us in on what later became of the Canine College graduates. As it turns out, their futures weren't so rosy - Buddy the terrier (one of the three dogs seen with Sam) ran away from home, Martin's Shar Pei Lao-Tzu possibly died after eating a poisonous toad, and Santa's Little Helper continued his anti-social streak by biting the one hand that helped him through this entire ordeal. It's an admittedly unsettling note on which to end our story, with its insinuation that none of these dogs really benefited from that rigorous training, and that their feral leanings, possibly augmented by the hardships they endured at the Canine College, still found ways of acting itself out. That feel-good sentiment of overcoming the odds doesn't quite make it past the final hurdle, and it's in effect Homer who has the last laugh.

EDIT: Small correction - I've just remembered that Bart called Snowball II a "him" in "Treehouse of Horror II". Obviously it didn't stick.

[1] Those are toxic to dogs! Seriously, since becoming a dog owner, I'm shocked to discover just how many things are.

TACtics: Girlfriend (Upset, Outrage, Appal)

In 1989 the Transport Accident Commission joined forces with advertising agency Grey Melbourne, and created the 60-second television ad "Girlfriend" with the explicit mission to "upset, outrage and appal". This no holds barred assault on Victoria's cultural nerves was to prove a resounding success. "Girlfriend", a short piece about the perils of driving while intoxicated, might be one of the most important road safety ads ever made. Not only did it kick off a long and ruthlessly traumatic line of televised TAC campaigns, it also birthed the fantastic slogan "If you drink then drive, you're a bloody idiot" - here spoken in the ad's dialogue by a character identified onscreen as Karen Warnecke of The Royal Melbourne Hospital - which sent shock waves through Australia and beyond (we've observed from LTSA's "Gonna Get Caught" series how the phrase also caught on in New Zealand).

For all that, "Girlfriend" seems fairly subdued by subsequent TAC standards. As the campaigns went on, a particular point of notoriety garnered was in their predilection for raw spectacle - they weren't ones to shy away from showing you the accidents themselves in all of their lurid, jaw-dropping horror. Cars crashed, cars crunched, bodies within were brutally mangled. A TAC formula emerged, which could be broken down into essentially three acts - the deceptively innocuous build-up, the literal impact in the middle, and then the aftermath, with its inevitable overflowing of tears, hysteria and the gnashing of teeth. For now, TAC had no interest in those first two acts, leaping head-first into the protracted epilogue and showcasing the happenings in an emergency ward in the late hours, the results of a crash that has already occurred. "Girlfriend" isn't overly graphic when it comes to injury detail, the worst of it being a glimpse of a leg wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage near the start of the ad, but it is high on emotional anguish. With its repeated cross-cutting and intimate close-ups, it replicates a documentary format, the point seemingly being to give us a fly on the wall view of the stomach-churning messiness of the onslaught of emotion that arises at a time of calamity, here allowed to be a spectacle unto themselves.

Compared to the UK's contemporary "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign, the entry it most resembles is "Fireman's Story", with a few shades of "Arrest". Like the former, it centres on a monologue from a professional who is already well-familiar with the tragic consequences of drink driving - the aforementioned Karen Warnecke, who relates to the camera how anyone in her position has to learn to cope with the emotional devastation along with the physical. She maintains her composure better than Ken Stott's firefighter, but is blatantly just as perturbed by the things she's witnessed, hence her damning, campaign-defining final verdict. Meanwhile, her words are juxtaposed with one such example, as a critically injured young woman, Lucy, is wheeled into the emergency room while her unnamed boyfriend, the driver, staggers around uselessly in the foreground, a feeble, whimpering wreckage of a man. Much like "Arrest", we have the perpetrator attempting to navigate his way around an institution where everyone he meets regards him with barely-muted disdain - that is, until he runs into the mother of the woman he's harmed, who is far less inclined to hold back her anger. Karen herself has more of a low-key presence throughout these sequences, but for one fleeting close-up once Lucy's parents are brought up to speed on the possible consequences; her face slips into a harrowed frown, cluing us in that no matter how many times she's seen this scenario play out on previous nights, it still gets to her. The most optimistic thing you could say about the situation is that the injured party is, from the sounds of it, expected to live (at least, it's never suggested that she could die), although the full extent of the damage is not known - the ad fades out with a question mark still hanging over whether Lucy will get to keep both her legs or if her head hasn't suffered some serious trauma.

"Girlfriend" established TAC's approach as one that strove doggedly for realism, and to push the viewer uncomfortably close to the kinds of horrific incidents we'd prefer to convince ourselves could only happen to other people. While their devotion to overstatement could intermittently get a bit heavy-handed for yours truly, in this case there is a certain sense of knowingness to the ad's voyeurism, a feeling that we, like the driver, are intruders amid the family's displays of grief and suffering, witnessing more that we should perhaps be permitted - consider that moment where Lucy lies immobilised whilst subject to the indignity of having her clothing forcibly removed from her chest. A persistent narrative thread throughout the ad is in the boyfriend's efforts to get to Lucy, only to be continually barred, either by the medics or by Lucy's indignant parents - a reinforcement of his status as a persona non grata, and of the barrier we suspect this incident is likely to present in terms of their relationship going forward. Throughout the ad, we're encouraged to empathise with just about every other participant - Lucy, her parents, Karen - yet we end up cast out in the cold with the boyfriend, last seen weeping in the hospital corridor about how sorry he is, his patheticness a grotesque reflection of our own helplessness in the face of such misery. The point is clear - if we're not willing to be a part of the solution, we belong out in the sin bin with the problem.

Under The Skin (aka The Other From Another Planet)

Here's a thought experiment - I propose that you could swap out the titles of Jonathan Glazer's 2000 film Sexy Beast and his 2013 film Under The Skin and they would, in a way, make every bit as much sense. "Sexy Beast", the subject its own insoluble mystery in terms of where it fits in with the tale of Ray Winstone's retired London gangster, ceases to be a puzzle at all when applied to the odyssey of Scarlett Johansson's seductive night stalker. "Under The Skin", meanwhile, seems a pertinent allusion to the bestial realities forever throbbing below the interplay of Don and his desperately reluctant hosts - the violent past that Gal aspires to transcend but will likely always have a hold on him, which he defiantly attempts to bury deep beneath the surface of the earth. While we're at it, the title of Glazer's 2004 film Birth seems just as interchangeable with Under The Skin. The former picture has Nicole Kidman questioning if the soul of her deceased lover has re-entered the world and concealed itself inside the form of a 10-year-old child. The latter opens with a sequence that evokes a birth (light intersecting with darkness and morphing into something resembling an eyeball) and a human form coming into being. Like Birth, it could be a reincarnation story; at the beginning, the body of a young woman (Lynsey Taylor Mackay), who might be the protagonist's doppelganger, is retrieved from a roadside and stripped of her clothing by Johansson, who puts them on and seemingly sets out to walk the Earth in her stead. Throughout the film, she undergoes an internal transformation, one that suggests she is being born all over again, as she comes to experience the world through new eyes.

This is to say that Glazer's (sparse, but consistently strong) filmography, while encompassing an array of tones and genres, touch on similar themes - horrors that are unspeakable, the troublesome duality of human nature, an awareness of mortality as omnipresent as it is grotesque. Outwardly, Sexy Beast and Under The Skin couldn't be more different creatures. Sexy Beast is a wordier, more character-driven piece, punctuated by intermittent outbursts of violence and a hyperealism that seems reminiscent of Looney Tunes cartoons. Under The Skin has comparatively little use for dialogue, at least dialogue that can be readily understood. Numerous scenes are reliant on stretches of eerie silence, and on Mica Levi's piercing string score. Conversations are frequently muted, and in some sequences all speech is reduced to an incomprehensible babble. The characters therein are more vague silhouettes than individuals we particularly get to know, and most of them are not given names. Sexy Beast plays out mostly in the scorching Mediterranean heat, while Under The Skin unfolds amidst a chilly Scottish haze. Sexy Beast is intense and aggressive whereas Under The Skin is icy and cerebral. Yet there is more overlap between the respective arcs of Gal and Johansson's unnamed protagonist than perhaps meets the eye. Both are ex-patriots looking to abandon pasts that are dark and undefined in favour of a more secluded existence (Gal has settled on this path before his story has begun, while Johansson chooses it throughout the course of hers). Both are pursued by sinister figures who seem intent on reminding them that there can be no escape from the deadly forces with which they have already aligned. Gal is menaced by Don in the real world and by a monstrous rabbit in his dream visions, while Johansson is relentlessly followed by a mysterious motorcyclist (Jeremy McWilliams), who initially appears to assist in her activities but becomes more threatening as she grows more elusive. Early into Under The Skin, Glazer continues a gag implemented at the end of Sexy Beast, when Gal is abandoned at a bus stop in the company of an ad for a Bosch phone, commanding consumers to "Show Your True Colour", a playful allusion to the character's incongruous qualities. In a similar fashion, we see Johansson cruising the streets of Glasgow in her white van, passing several signs that clue us in to her true nature - among them, a poster promoting the video game Space Invaders and another advertising a stage production of Beauty & The Beast (roles that she jointly fulfils). An ad for a grammar school on the rear of a bus, meanwhile, tauntingly assures us that "It's possible".

Glazer's great achievement with Under The Skin is in creating a film that scrutinises humanity through the eyes of something that feels distinctly inhuman - in this case, a carnivorous extra-terrestrial who poses as a human female in order to lure unsuspecting men in the outskirts of Glasgow to their doom. Adapted from Michael Faber's 2000 novel of the same name, the screenplay, a collaboration between Glazer and Walter Campbell, uses few of the plot specificities of Faber's novel, stripping it down to its core element of an otherworldly female with a sinister agenda interacting with a world that is unknowable to her, but speaks increasingly to her sense of curiosity. Johansson is perfectly cast as the tantalising space vixen, exuding a beguilement but also a delicateness that is not quite of this Earth. Faber gave the protagonist a name - Isserley - which is never spoken in the dialogue of Glazer's film. His novel also went into greater detail about the nature of the alien race, and the gruesome fates awaiting the humans they harvested, the sole purpose of their covert Earth operations of course being To Serve Man. In Glazer's film, this much is merely hinted - the protagonist ensnares her prey by leading them into a black void and enticing them to remove their clothing, before leaving them suspended in an ominous pool, to be deflated like a balloon, leaving only their skin (is this a symbolic sequence? Or has she literally opened a portal to another dimension?). A queasy but revealing sequence momentarily transforms the process into something more familiar - a stream of bloody innards are seen moving along on what looks like a conveyor belt - and then back into something unfamiliar, as a beam of red light apparently engulfs them. Glazer's film regards the alien world as something that it is predominantly beyond our comprehension, but just comprehensible enough to enable another, macabre interpretation of the film's title, in that it is literally what is under our skin that these extra terrestrials find so appealing about us. It becomes a memento mori, a reminder that beneath it all we are just collections of flesh, bones and viscera - in this foreign species' eyes, little more than bags of offal waiting to be extracted, processed and consumed in some far-off planet's equivalent to a Happy Meal.

The implications are terrifying, yet this extra terrestrial perspective is a fascinating one to experience, for what skilfully unfamiliar work it makes of the familiar. The Glaswegian roadsides by night, stretches of tarmac beneath glaringly bright street lamps, are the kind of perfectly mundane location we'll have seen a thousand times over, but here become frightening, hypnotic and alien, a light show as beautifully realised and as awe-inspiring as any of the spectacles in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of The Third Kind (1977). The world we see in Under The Skin seems alive and intimate but also distant, cold and as impenetrable to its protagonist as any of those alien horrors would be to its denizens. The protagonist's pick-up ritual is as eerily detached; from inside her vehicle, she peruses the streets for prospective prey. Notably, she has just exited a shopping mall, turning her hunt into a dark reflection of the Earthlings' own consumerist rapacity. She ignores the women and carefully assesses each of the men, working according to a meticulous selection process whereby the men chosen are all young, walking alone and, as her chat-up ritual seems designed to establish, unattached. Despite the open reference to Beauty & The Beast, the fairy tale being evoked here is more a gender-reversed version of Little Red Riding Hood, in which a she-wolf seduces and effectively consumes the naive young men who can be tempted to wander astray. She purchases and dons a fur coat (another skin that has been gruesomely detached from its original owner), a jarring choice of attire that openly flaunts her beastly nature.

The allure of the protagonist, and her dark deadly portal, are not the only forces in the world that threaten to engulf its inhabitants, nor is carnal desire the single impulse that can prompt an individual to walk willingly to their destruction. Emotional attachment is shown to be its own slippery slope, prompting those affected to act in ways that are contrary to their self-preservation. The film's most disturbing sequence has little to do with the protagonist's hunting ritual, with which there is only incidental intersection. The protagonist is on a beach, talking to a potential new target in the form of a Czech swimmer (Kryštof Hádek), when her seduction is interrupted by a crisis from further along the shore. A family's dog has been caught up in the tide; the wife (Alison Chand) has entered the waves in an attempt to save it, but become caught up herself. The husband (Roy Armstrong) then follows to try and save her, but certainly awaits a similar fate. Meanwhile, the couple's baby is left unattended on the beach. The swimmer intervenes and manages to get a hold of the husband and drag him back to shore, but his heroic gesture is rejected; the husband immediately charges back into the waves, presumably to his doom. His devotion to his wife is such that he would sooner join her in her watery grave than abandon her - which might be more laudable if it didn't completely override his devotion to his infant child, who is left abandoned. The protagonist takes advantage of the swimmer's exhausted state to make a shortcut with her abduction process - she walks over, knocks him out with a stone and drags his body away, all while ignoring the distressed howls of the baby. The point of this sequence, so shocking and so gratuitous to so many viewers, is commonly thought to be to demonstrate the aliens' lack of humanity, a crying baby being the one thing that is practically guaranteed to arouse our human sympathies. When the motorcyclist later arrives on the scene to remove all traces that the swimmer was there, he too takes no interest in the baby, who is still there and still howling as the dusk sets in. Its prospects now seem harrowingly grim - either it will be claimed by the waves itself or it will freeze to death during the night. But there is another, more subtle purpose to this interlude that reveals itself slightly later in the film, when the protagonist listens to a radio broadcast reporting on what we presume to be the same tragic occurrence. The body of the husband has since been washed up on the shore and identified as a chemistry lecturer from Edinburgh University, while police continue to search for his wife and son. We might be so preoccupied with the open (although obviously inauspicious) fate of the abandoned infant that we might not immediately pick up on one individual's absence from this news report - yes, the dog, but there is also no mention of the swimmer, who would have disappeared at the same time, and whom we might have expected to be included in the police search. But then no one knew that he was there (any more than they knew about the presence of the protagonist), and the motorcyclist has acted to make sure it remains that way. Notably, this is the only instance in the narrative in which we hear any kind of commentary on a death we've witnessed after the fact. There are no news bulletins on any of the missing young men the protagonist has abducted, the implication being that their absence has not been noticed, or at least not deemed worthy of making the news. A distinction is drawn between the everyday chaos of the universe and the meticulously clean efforts of the aliens, who go about their business in a way that ensures they will not be detected. The motorcyclist ignores the crying baby because its plight has nothing to do with the protagonist's actions, and it is not on the aliens' agenda to intervene with Earthly matters that extend beyond their own practices - this is just universe being its typically indifferent self.

I wonder if Glazer included this horrifying sequence, which has effectively no consequence in terms of how the protagonist's story progresses (the news report is the last we hear of it), as a deliberate means of testing the viewers' sensibilities and illuminating our own empathic blind spots. We don't like to see babies, dogs and idyllic families become the victims of terrible tragedies. But perhaps we feel a certain indifference to the kinds of victims the protagonist seeks out - those who lack familial ties and (compared to the university lecturer) are not distinguished enough to inspire much concern. We might be disturbed by the squeamish fates awaiting her abductees, but do we necessarily feel the same sympathy for them as we do the drowning family? Are these character types that we are happy to treat as dispensable? In the grander scheme of things, there perhaps is little difference. The film moves on quickly from the family's tragedy, and we suspect the news cycle will also - the radio broadcast has already switched to a more cheerful discussion before we've cut to another scene.

Before his untimely, undetected demise, the swimmer imparts enough autobiographical information to establish himself as a prospective soulmate to the protagonist, and to Gal of Sexy Beast - he's another ex-patriot who, in his own words, is looking "to get away from it all". He does not specify what he is looking to get away from in the Czech Republic, but states that he has settled in this Scottish locale because "It's nowhere". His remoteness and anonymity, the very things that mark him out as viable prey to the protagonist, are to him defence mechanisms. Notably, he is the first character who says anything of genuine resonance to the protagonist, in letting her in on the possibility of escape. This possibility becomes increasingly relevant, as the more time she spends with the Earthlings, the more her perspective is seen to evolve and draw her away from her given directive. She begins to notice women and observe them from her typically chilly distance, but in a way that feels curious rather than predatory. Later, whilst walking, she trips and lands face-first on the pavement, and a group of passers-by help her to her feet. A dramatic change occurs; the world momentarily blurs out of focus, and suddenly she is seeing the denizens of downtown Glasgow up close, male and female alike, going about their nondescript business. She is seeing people, not prey, and from an intimate enough proximity to suggest that she feels like a participant in their world, not an interloping observer. Was it the kindness of strangers that triggered the change, or the impact of the fall? The most game-changing incident involves an encounter with a man with facial deformities (Adam Pearson), whom the protagonist talks into accepting a ride in her van and subjects to her usual seduction routine. We've seen this ritual enough times by now to know what kind of danger the man is in, but on this occasion the process seems particularly cruel. He admits that he has no friends, has never had a partner and shops at night because the daytime crowds would not accept him; she tells him he has beautiful hands. The cruelty is double-edged - are we more troubled by the alien's willingness to take advantage of this man's isolation, with kindness that is presumably feigned, or by the callousness of his fellow human in making him an outcast for his physical appearance? The man's lack of social connections make him an ideal candidate for the protagonist's deadly harvest, and yet this time she can not see it through to its conclusion. She lures him into her portal and entices him to undress, but ultimately leaves him alive (albeit to be picked off by the motorcyclist the following morning).

With that, the nature of the narrative drastically alters. The protagonist leaves the city and flees into the Highlands, abandoning her van and shedding her skin in the form of the fur coat. Her days of luring and ensnaring human victims now behind her, her new aspiration is, like the swimmer before her, to get away from it all and find some refuge in the world beyond. She is pursued by the motorcyclist - frighteningly, there is revealed to be more than one of them at work - yet they never quite get close enough to burgeon into an immediate threat, rather a distant but relentless one. For now, the greater dangers to the protagonist come from the people themselves, and from her inability to blend in with them. Minus her beastly coat, the locals  are aware of how she is ill-dressed for a Highland winter. Elsewhere, we see her attempt to adjust her diet. She visits a tea room and tries a slice of cake, but this is clearly, at best, going to be an acquired taste for her - her reflexive reaction is to noisily reject the foreign foodstuff, garnering her quizzical looks from her follow diners.

Man, meanwhile, might not necessarily be the warmest place in which to hide. A paradox emerges; the protagonist's latent capacity for empathy is what prompts her to break away from her alien directive and attempt to assume some kind of place among the humans (it is implied that she spares the deformed man because she identifies too much with his plight as an outsider), yet humans are not themselves shown to be a uniformly empathic species. They too are governed by predatory impulses, and seem just as primed to sniff out and take advantage of her loneliness and vulnerability as she is theirs. Shortly before her encounter with the deformed man, the protagonist narrowly avoids becoming the victim of a gang attack, when a young man approaches her van and gestures at her to wind down her window, and several accomplices descend violently upon the van's bonnet. Other interactions are more ambiguous, and it is hard to distinguish which are rooted in genuine benevolence and which conceal more sinister objectives. While caught in a traffic jam, a fellow motorist has a rose delivered to her by a roadside flower salesman, although his motive for doing so (a random act of kindness? An attempted seduction?) is never established. Later in the film, while on the run from her former life, she is approached by a man on a bus (Michael Moreland) who seems drawn to her vulnerability and offers to help her. He treats her with great compassion, allowing her to stay at his house and serving her food (although she is not seen to eat it), and taking her out on a day trip to the remains of a castle, where he delicately picks her up and carries her over a puddle. He also seems entirely ready to have sexual relations with this non-commutative and potentially damaged stranger, adding a question mark to the purity of his intentions. The attempted intercourse is ultimately thwarted, in a somewhat comical fashion, when the protagonist becomes preoccupied with her own (non-functioning?) genitals.

Before that, the man's attempts to integrate her into his domestic space lead into what I personally rate as the film's funniest, most quietly unnerving and most underrated sequence, when he introduces her to the televised antics of Welsh comedian Tommy Cooper. Cooper holds up a jar and a spoon and makes a barrage of incomprehensible stuttering noises. The man snickers. The studio audience is uproarious laughter. The protagonist stares blankly at the screen, unsure what she is even intended to be perceiving. I'd imagine that Cooper (certainly Cooper out of context) would be a baffling enough experience to anyone who didn't participate in the UK zeitgeist of the 1970s, but the scene touches on far more sinister nerves still. The focus on the protagonist's bewilderment and the continued roaring of the studio audience turns their laughter into a reaction to her reaction. That she isn't in on the joke makes her squarely the butt of it. These noises are a communal expression of emotion from which she is excluded; her status as a perpetual outsider renders her a subject of almost cosmic derision. There is a dark side to this communal expression that perhaps becomes more salient when we consider the circumstances of Cooper's unfortunate death; he collapsed during a live television broadcast in April 1984 and his audience responded with the same uproarious laughter, believing it was part of the act.

The universal characteristic that seems to lurk beneath the skin of the various individuals our protagonist encounters is not really empathy, but vulnerability. Each one is as intrinsically destructible as the next. The realisation that this vulnerability extends to her is what causes the shift in her perspective. Safety in numbers (consider the group of girls the protagonist meets outside of the nightclub) and membership within communities represent one of our most primal, longest-standing tactics for combatting our fragility as individuals. Under The Skin is concerned with the plight of the other, with those for whom such communities are basically impenetrable and offer their own oppressions in place of solidarity. The protagonist never overcomes her loneliness; the disconnect that keeps her from mingling with the humans is not something she figures out how to straddle. After her failure to physically connect with Moreland's character, she appears to give up on integrating herself into civilisation altogether, choosing instead to follow the swimmer's suggestion and to seek out her "nowhere" in a remote stretch of woodland. The solitude that made her human quarry fair game, and expendable in the eyes of their own society, now becomes her sole means of sanctuary.

(Spoilers now follow)

The climax of the film sees a return to the Little Red Riding Hood allusion, with the roles now completely reversed. Here, the wolf seeks refuge amid the seclusion of the woods, only to be greeted by a woodcutter (Dave Action), who attempts to engage her in ostensibly benign small talk. The clue that his intentions are anything but is in how reminiscent his tactics are of her earlier chat-up routine; crucially, he is looking to establish that she has come to the woods all alone. The protagonist is too fatigued or perhaps too fundamentally naive herself to pick up on this. She walks on and comes to what we presume to be the woodcutter's bothy. Curling up inside, she seems to momentarily find her peace; a dissolve shot juxtaposes her with the swaying trees outside, depicting her as a giant in the landscape, comfortably nestled in this perfectly impassive nowhere. This is interrupted by the reappearance of the woodcutter, who attempts to sexually assault her. She flees and he pursues. The reversal is a little further-reaching than the hunter becoming the hunted. The woodcutter is clearly positioned as the interloper in this scenario (the wolf was, after all, the one in its natural habitat), his hulking logging truck an alien vessel on the wooded terrain (one that nearly becomes another trap for the protagonist when she attempts to escape in it), his objective a threat to the equilibrium and to the trees that have provided cover and solace to our protagonist. When he wrestles her to the ground and starts to forcibly tear off her garments, the confrontation is carried through to its grimmest of fairy tale conclusions. Like the wolf in the story, she is physically ruptured; the woodcutter manages to rip open her human skin, giving him a misbegotten glimpse of the dark, uncanny form hidden underneath. He is so repulsed by what he sees that he sneaks away and returns with a can of gasoline and a lighter to set her ablaze. Tellingly, his reapproach is represented via a POV shot that regards his fractured prey with the same chilling detachment as she formerly did her own prospective victims. In aspiring to obliterate what is strange and incomprehensible to his earthly perception, he affirms himself as the inhuman one in the equation.

In spite of the protagonist's demise, the final sequence is not presented as a bleak outcome, but as one of unspoken triumph (a contrast to the more ambiguous ending of Sexy Beast). We see the motorcyclist standing out in the snow-covered horizon, scanning the terrain but apparently not locating her; she has evaded the grasp of her pursuer. We cut to the her charred remains, as smoke rises toward the sky and becomes intermingled with falling snowflakes; the final shot shows the snowflakes falling directly onto the camera, some of them visibly darkened with the protagonist's ashes. This closing image evokes the reincarnation theme of Birth, indicating that this is not the end but the beginning of a renewed cycle; the protagonist has fallen to Earth all over again and has finally found her place within it. It is the same place that awaits all beings that are subject to the same forces of death and decay - the frailty of the flesh and its inevitable breakdown a unifying process that keeps us bound within a natural rhythm as impassive and insurmountable as the thrashing tides, rustling winds and falling snow. Neither human nor other, she now simply is.

TACtics: Nightshift (Fatigue Kills)

"Nightshift", a 1994 road safety advertisement about the dangers of driving tired, gets my vote for the best production from Australian televisual trauma veterans TAC. This one has all of TAC's strengths and none of their weaknesses - and something genuinely unexpected into the bargain.

In general I have mixed feelings about the campaigning methodology of TAC, aka the Transport Accident Commission, a government-owned organisation that provides personal and financial support to those affected by road accidents in the state of Victoria. It would be hard to deny that they've had their share of psychologically-denting classics. Their first television campaign was launched in 1989 with "Girlfriend", and advertising history was born - this was the film that coined the immortal tagline "If you drink, then drive, you're a bloody idiot" (a phrase that doubles as a frank admonishment and an irresistibly fiendish pun), which proved so successful that it was adopted by similar campaigns in Canada and New Zealand. A pseudo-documentary set in a hospital emergency room, where a nurse commented on the lamentable happenings while the family of a critically injured passenger gave the driver a rollicking in the backdrop, "Girlfriend" cemented TAC's favoured approach as one of thoroughgoing realism. The weirder, artsier tactics from the later installments of the UK's concurrent Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives campaign were certainly not for them. What TAC do exceptionally well in that regard is to capture a credible sense of the calm before the storm; a signature TAC technique is to carefully establish each scenario and the doomed souls within via a sequence depicting the build-up to the accident. Nondescript people are shown going about their day in a seemingly nondescript manner, before a bad decision on someone's part causes things to flip over (sometimes literally) into the stuff of nightmares. The characters' interactions feel natural, the ways in which the seeds of their impending destruction are sown are deliberately low-key, cleverly positioning them as ostensibly small things with the potential to reap catastrophic consequences. TAC's forte is in illustrating just how painfully fragile is the dividing line between the everyday and the horrific.

Where I tend to have a harder time with TAC is in their favoured strategy once that dividing line has been breached, which is to say that they're very big on displays of raw, uninhibited emotion. The muted, austere nature of those earlier Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives PIFs was also not for them. With TAC campaigns you get ample instances of people in grave distress, sobbing about how sorry they are for their lapses of judgement, screaming for badly mangled loved ones, etc. It's not that this is an inherently ineffective approach (I'd rate "Tracy", an ad that's nothing but a driver in absolute hysterics, as one of their stronger entries), but it is absolutely the case that TAC prefer to overstate the emotive content of their ads, and overstated emotion is not something I'm inclined to respond to in a safety campaign. I'm of the opinion that the best campaigns are the ones that manage to exercise a little restraint, and to convey their messages in a sharply succinct manner that doesn't rely on beating you over the head with how distressing their cautionary scenarios are (ideally, that much should be self-evident). I think D&DWL was onto something in attempting to keep its emotional horrors as below the surface as possible - there, it's often the small things that sliver into your psyche and fester (the way Kathy breaks the fourth wall while her parents argue, the demonic background laughter at the end of "Pudding", the grimly sardonic "Cup of tea, sir?" at the end of "Arrest"). In pitching things at the opposite extreme, I find that TAC intermittently dampens the impact of their ads, having them come off as merely overwhelming, and at worst pushing them into the arena of gruesome sentimentality (see "12 Days of Christmas", a campaign I find so personally indigestible that I'm very unlikely to touch on it here).

"Nightshift" works as well as it does for its lack of any big emotional fall-out. It's a rare occasion on which TAC took the D&DWL-favoured route of less is more. Sure, we could have had an epilogue in which the mother of one of the crash victims, referenced in the preceding dialogue, is shown going to pieces on receiving news of the central accident, but why would we need to see that? Our imagination can fill in that blank just fine. The ad says all that it needs, through a subtle gesture from an innocent bystander after the crash has occurred - a gesture that's perhaps even more devastating, in its way, than the crash itself. As I say, it's the small things that should really stick with you in a safety campaign.

Before we come to that, "Nightshift" establishes itself, in classic TAC fashion, with a naturalistic sequence in which we get to know our characters and the thought processes that lead them astray before having to abruptly say our goodbyes. Our protagonists are a young couple - Shaun, who's been working a late shift in his job at a pizzeria, and his unnamed girlfriend, who comes to collect him in a combi van. The two of them are planning to take a trip over the weekend, and the girlfriend makes the sensible suggestion that they go home and get some sleep beforehand, but Shaun is intent on making the drive overnight while the roads are deserted. We can sense that he probably isn't up to it, having already admitted to having had a demanding shift at work. The most ominous early statement, though, comes from Shaun's boss, who makes the parting remark, "See you Monday". A seemingly innocuous pleasantry that seals his fate from the outset, cluing us in that Shaun, in all odds, won't be back at all. As with slasher movies, there's got to be a particular set of rules for surviving a safety awareness campaign; saying anything along the lines of "See you shortly" guarantees the recipient victim status.

Sure enough, as the night wears on Shaun finds it increasingly difficult to stay awake. He tries turning the radio on, but his girlfriend, who's attempting to sleep in the passenger seat, objects to the noise. He then asks her to talk to him, but she refuses, advising him to pull over if he's tired. Shaun, for whatever reason, is determined to keep going. Come dawn's early light, and he's reduced to a barely-conscious daze, blatantly fighting just to keep his face upright. At one point, it looks as though Shaun might have averted disaster; he accidentally drifts onto the right-hand side of the road, but a truck approaching up ahead flashes its headlights at him, spurring him awake for long enough to redirect the vehicle out of its path. Unfortunately, Shaun's sleep-deprived body can't hold out for any longer, and as the truck passes them, he looses control and veers directly into it. As crashes go this one is pretty, as Shaun himself would phrase it, full-on - the front-end of the combi completely crunches. The ad stops short of showing you any bodies or injury detail (it's one of TAC's lighter ads in that regard), but it's hard to imagine how either occupant could have survived that impact. The real moment of devastation occurs when the driver of the truck jumps out, his adrenalin clearly up, only to survey the damage and take in how hopeless the situation is, whereupon his shoulders droop forlornly. That shoulder-drooping, so subdued a gesture, says everything we need to know about the accident's emotional aftermath; the ad fades out on a moment of chilling silence, with the continued, eerily incongruous background ambience of the newly broken morn.

It's the smaller and sometimes incidental details in "Nightshift" that make it such an effective work. Take that brief shot of a Gumby doll positioned on the combi dashboard. It doesn't contribute anything significant to the story, but it's a quirky touch that adds a little extra character, both to the van's interior and to the film's broader atmosphere, giving us some insight into the lives of these ill-fated individuals.

Here's where we get to the ad's unexpected strength. This is not something I'm accustomed to saying about road safety advertisements, particularly ones featuring crashes as brutal as this, but "Nightshift" is actually a really beautiful-looking piece of film-making. Sure, once the combi goes into the truck it gets as grim and ugly as you would expect from a production of this ilk, but the preceding sequence in which Shaun and his girlfriend cruise along the Australian highway and past a lake bathed in the orange glow of the rising sun is so dazzling that the first time I saw it, it made me gasp. For a split second, I nearly forgot that I was watching a safety promotion that was gearing up to end in carnage. There's something so wonderfully deceptive about the calm and the beauty of that moment, almost as if we too are being lulled into a gentle stupor before the crash snaps us back abruptly into the reality of the situation. It also emphasises the implicit cruelty of the final outcome, with the freshness and promise of a new day getting underway with two young lives being tragically snuffed out.

"Nightshift" proved so indelible that it was partially remade in 2015 for an ad entitled "Then and Now", designed to illustrate how advancements in safety and technology could result in a happier outcome. The climax of the original ad was featured alongside its 21st century update via a split screen; while things play out as disastrously as ever for Shaun '94 and his girlfriend, their modern counterparts fare better thanks to the presence of safety barriers in the middle of the road, which prevent their vehicle from making contact with the truck. The car's dashboard then activates a warning, telling the driver to take a break after detecting that he's been at the wheel for too long. The update ends with the modern, more fortunate version of Shaun pulling over and asking his girlfriend if she'll take over driving for the rest of the journey, which she agrees to do.

That's all very swell, you know, but what the newer version sadly lacks is cinematography as gorgeous as its predecessor. In the 2015 version, the world looks comparatively dull and hazy - which seems ironic, given that our characters here live to relish whatever it may bring.

Oh, and a small disclaimer. You'll notice that here and in my review of "Gonna Get Caught" I've purposely avoided describing these ads as public information films, or PIFs, and that's because I'm not sure what the correct technical term would be for such films from Australia and New Zealand. (That might seem pedantic, but I'm mindful of how the terms "public information film" and "public service announcement", while regarded as one another's UK/US equivalents, are not as interchangeable as popularly assumed, and prefer to apply caution in using them.)  This 1999 study from the Monash University Accident Research Centre refers to TAC's output as simply "road safety advertisements", which seems a safely generic enough term to use for the time being. The study itself makes for an interesting read - even if "Golf", which would likely be my vote for the second best TAC installment, was sadly excluded from their research.

Urban Deer (Canon Come and See)

In 2014 Jonathan Glazer teamed up with  JWT London for Canon's "Come and See" campaign, a series of ads encouraging us to get out there and gape at life's marvels, so long as we were gaping through the lens of a Canon camera. The first of Glazer's contributions, "Gladiator Football", was a wordless celebration of Florence's tradition of Calcio Storico (in a nutshell, a form of football thought to date back to the Renaissance era, in which players are expected to beat the living snot out of one another). It was a roaring, full-blooded snapshot of the action and intensity unfolding within the sporting arena, taking us closer to the drama than I suspect most casual spectators would care to venture. His second film, "Urban Deer", looks to have been purposely conceived as the very antithesis of that. This is spectacle of a meeker, almost furtive nature, characterised by its stillness and its quietness. Compared to the brightly-lit brawling in "Gladiator Football", this is a phenomenon that prefers to keep to the shadows, revealing itself only to those with the patience to see it. Turning its attention to Canon's capacity for capturing nighttime images, its subjects are the fallow deer that are a familiar seasonal sight in the Essex suburbs near Epping Forest, at times of year when the grassy verges offer more attractive grazing opportunities than the brambles in their woodland home.

The spectacle here comes from the mismatch between the natural and the artificial; immediately, the deer seem out of place beneath the relentless glare of the suburban streetlights, and sauntering over the patterned terrain of zebra crossings, but seem totally at ease in going about their business in these paved environs. The atmosphere (unlike that of "Gladiator Football") is one of total calm, offering few sounds beyond the patter of deer hooves on the asphalt and the background hum of wind and traffic. In lieu of narration we're left to draw our own conclusions about the significance of what we're seeing. Is it a testament to the adaptability of the deer, or does it say something about the tensions between human expansion and the balance of nature? Are the deer to be viewed as interlopers, or as reclaiming territory that was formerly theirs? There is, potentially, a haunting underpinning to the images - captured largely in silhouette, these shadowy cervines might be perceived as almost ghostly presences, the spirits of a bygone time and place long stripped away and buried beneath cement - but more perceptible still is the faint suggestion of quirkiness in the ad's presentation. Glazer's film seems to capture a feeling of dry humor in the very notion of deer making use of the most mundane features of human development. Take that wide shot of a deer approaching a zebra crossing, as though preparing to use it with as much confidence and casualness as any of the estate's diurnal residents. The film also incorporates what might be described as a comical interlude involving an intersection between three different species and their apparent indifference to one another. A strutting deer, scent-marking fox and cat in a hurry are observed moving along their own private trajectories, uninterested and unfazed by the others' presence (that running cat, a further symbol of convergence between the wild and domestic, makes for a priceless visual punchline). The film' slyest gag comes from a slight interference to its ambience - momentarily mixed in with the soundscape are the muffled noises of a logotone and the opening phases of what sounds like a news announcement, presumably the overheard noise from a television (or radio) in an adjacent living room. There's a sense of two spectacles competing with one another; the loud bombast of the television (or radio) purporting to offer our all-important window into the world, juxtaposed with the actual world as it exists right outside our windows.

Notable in "Urban Deer" is the total absence of any direct human presence, with all representation going to its technology and its architecture. The closest we come is in the vehicle seen disappearing into the distance at the start of the ad, before the deer feel safe to emerge from the greenery. This sets up a circular narrative, with the deer later scarpering to the sounds of a vehicle getting uncomfortably near, although the ad closes before it comes into view. It is in the intermittent presence of those vehicles that we get a sense of conflict, and of immediate threat to the deer (for all their adaptability, maybe this environment is not so ideal a place for a deer to linger), and the calm is accordingly broken. Once again, Man Was In The Forest, even if on this occasion the "forest" looks deceptively like our own turf.

As with many of these advertising ventures, you've got your choice between full 90 second version and the 60 second edit. Alas, the 60 second version makes something of a hodgepodge of the overheard television jingle.