Intersections (Don't Worry, Be Happy)

What makes comparing road safety shorts the world over particularly fascinating are the cultural discrepancies that will occasionally arise. Take the issue of intersection safety, which is not a subject I've seen brought up too often in campaigns from the UK or Australia, but has an entire subgenre dedicated to it in New Zealand. I don't know what it is about New Zealand that would necessarily make their intersections any more dangerous than anyone else's, but LTSA and their successors certainly cranked out an awful lot of classic televisual trauma from the premise. Among them was this cheeky compilation, circa mid-00s, which was really an exercise in just how deliriously you can abuse the gentle warmth of Bobby McFerrin by matching it with the most flagrantly incongruous material imaginable. McFerrin's 1988 hit "Don't Worry, Be Happy" plays over clips of motorists attempting to navigate various intersections in Wellington and beyond, which starts out relatively serenely, but it isn't long before McFerrin is having to compete with a cacophony of horns honking, tyres skidding and metal crunching (along with, presumably, a few bones). I find that I'm deeply worried for quite a number of the persons involved, particularly the pedestrian and the motorcyclist who had the misfortune of getting caught up in the insanity. The results are expectedly horrific, but the presence of the McFerrin track gives the mayhem an unusually comic edge; we would expect road safety ads to be miniature horror shows, gravely undermining as the razor-thin line between the mundane and the catastrophic, but this one seems to be positively revelling in the absurdity of these stupid humans and the avoidable chaos they insist on creating.

What I can't quite figure out is whether the ad should be seen as pro or anti "Don't Worry, Be Happy". Is the song's stoic philosophy being viciously sent up by the accompanying carnage, or can it be interpreted as being somehow in on the joke? Whose narrative voice is is the track intended to represent? A good starting point might be to compare it to the Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives PIF "In The Summertime", which was very conspicuously anti the titular Mungo Jerry ditty. The song was part of the trap, both for the subjects and the viewers, the anthem for the hedonistic appetites that brought about the former's ruin, and the duplicitous host that greeted the latter before abruptly pulling the rug out from under them at the end. "Summertime" was designed to trick the viewers into thinking they were watching a more benevolent ad, with the upbeat familiarity of the track lulling us into a false sense of security, and then becoming part of the mockery once its true intentions were exposed. The words "Go out and see what you can find", heralding the haunting final shot, are put into a much darker context than the song itself originally implied, and yet an explicit endorsement of drink driving was already right there in lyrics - the outcome of the PIF is presented as the logical extension of what was already lurking within the song's lotus-eating soul. "Don't Worry", by contrast, doesn't use McFerrin to deceive the viewer, since the nature of the ad is established early on. The initial incidents are fairly minor, with build-up to the nastier accidents, but the sense of unease is instilled almost instantly. The effect of the song is double-edged, adding an obvious sense of humor to the proceedings, but also exacerbating our discomfort by emphasising the wrongness of what we're seeing.

A possible clue might lurk in the campaign tagline, "Take Another Look At Intersections", which serves as both at literal command, urging drivers to look more thoroughly before pulling out into the path of an incoming vehicle, but also asks us to reconsider our perception of intersections in a broader sense, as dangerous venues where all manner of chaos could potentially go down. With that in mind, it seems logical to interpret the song as illustrating the disconnect between the nonchalant assumptions of the drivers, who do not worry about the risks at intersections, and the stark reality, in which hardly anyone is finding much in the way of happiness. The song becomes the anthem of those who do not live in the real world, an outlook doomed to sooner or later bring them crashing down messily to earth. But that almost seems a bit too easy to me. By my preferred reading, McFerrin's song is being posited as a hopeful (if sardonic) ode to the alternative, the ideal that nobody can possibly obtain because everyone is in such a terminal frenzy. The problem isn't a lack of worry, but the perpetual sense of hurry and urgency that has everyone zipping in all directions, to the point where they don't have the patience to wait a few lousy seconds for their fellow motorists to pass. The song still represents the breezy ideal clashing with the grim reality, but it now becomes the moral locus. If we took life at a more relaxed pace, as McFerrin suggests, we might avoid bumping into one another and taking a further toll on our blood pressure (or worse).

As per the campaign blurb on the old LTSA website that I dug out using the Wayback Machine, failure to give way was, at the time, the third largest cause of death and injury on New Zealand's roads, but it's noteworthy that the issue is cited as being a relatively new one for LTSA's advertising. I also note that New Zealand's current road safety authority, NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA), doesn't cover the issue in any of its contemporary campaigns. Does that mean that the problem was at its peak in the 2000s? If so, I wonder what the story was there?