"This
is not a Hollywood production as can
be readily seen. The quality is below
their standards. However, most of
these scenes were taken under adverse
conditions. Nothing has been staged.
These are actual scenes taken
immediately after the accidents occurred.
Also unlike Hollywood, our actors are
paid nothing. Most of the actors in
these movies are bad actors and
received only top billing on a
tombstone. They paid a terrific price
to be in these movies. They paid the
price with their lives..."
Signal
30 is the radio call-code that authorities
use to designate a traffic accident with
fatalities. And that's what the majority
of this short involves; showing us --
without blinking, the results of metal
meeting metal at high speeds, and what's
left of the drivers that are pried out of
the resulting wreckage. Most of the
Driver's Ed shorts I remember watching
usually saved the real carnage for the end
as a final punctuation point to the dangers
found on the road. But not with Signal
30.
Heck no. Here, what borderlines as atrocity
footage is used as a hammer to bludgeon us
into remembering the Three-Es of highway
safety: education, enforcement and
engineering.
After
a brief look at police training, routine
traffic stops and violations and a couple
of near misses, the accident footage comes
fast and brutal. Most accidents featured
are due to driver's negligence, but the
indifferent narrator is so scathing in his
delivery that you question his humanity.
And
that's about it, really.
The
End
You
can keep your Faces
of Death.
I survived Driver's Ed!
My
first experience with this type of road
safety film was back in grade school. But
instead of four-wheels of death, we got the
watered down two-wheeled version on
bicycle safety. First came a lecture from
the creepy bionical "Mike the Talking
Bike" with his evil visage that lit
up every time he spoke -- his face was a
cardboard box, with a
smiley face carved into it, with a light
bulb stuck inside, mounted on a bike. It was supposed to be
friendly looking, but it sure looked
demonic to me.
After
that came the slide presentation on proper
bicycle use. Improper use usually resulted
in a comical accident that generated a
roar of laughter from the audience. No
dead bodies this time -- thank you, Lord.
It
wasn't until later, in high school, and the
dreaded Driver's Ed class that I caught my
first glimpse of blood on the asphalt. I
don't recall the name of the film, but it
wasn't quite as harsh and only concluded
with a few brief scenes of auto accidents.
My junior year, during what I like to call
my lawless period, found me arrested and
stuck in a diversionary program. (What
was I arrested for? I'll never tell -- but
it wasn't for an MIP or DUI.) And
it
was here that I saw Signal
30
for the first, and what I assumed, was the
last time until recently tracked it down
for this retrospective.
Even
for a Driver's Ed scare film there isn't
much of a plot to Signal
30.
Luckily,
the film is a fairly brief 28-minutes long
but about twenty-five of it is just
gratuitous. Any longer and some of us with
weaker constitutions -- when the carnage
is all too real, might have lost it.
Under
the guise of Educational Films,
the Mansfred, Ohio based Highway Safety
Foundation is legendary for it's mass
production of these orgies of death and
twisted metal littering our nations
highways: Wheels
of Tragedy,
Mechanized
Death,
and Highways
of Agony,
just to name a few more, were high on the
moralizing, overshadowing the lessons to
be learned, reinforcing these notions with
actual footage of real accidents and
mangled bodies -- topped off by the
moaning and wailing of the injured and
dying.
Under
the direction of Richard "Dick"
Wayman, these films pulled no punches and
were made with the assistance of the Ohio
State Patrol. Wayman was rumored to be an
insomniac, and with camera in hand, was
always ready, willing, and able to go and
film these accident scenes at a moments
notice.
The
HSF also dabbled in filming police
procedurals and training films. The
foundation gained some notoriety in the
'50s for assisting and documenting a few
late night police raids on highway rest
areas, bushwhacking rendezvousing
homosexuals in the restrooms.
Wayman
and the HSF later came under fire for
allegedly making porno films. It was
around this time that Signal
30
-- it's own kind of porn in a way, was
cobbled together. And there is a fine line
between trying to do good, and getting your
rocks off looking at death and
destruction, and this film kinda rubs you
the wrong way after awhile. They try to
sanitize it by taking the moral high ground with the police procedural and
family notification stuff, but I don't buy
it. The camera spends way too much time
lingering on the carnage, well after the
point is made.
Why?
Why would anyone force anybody to watch
this kind of stuff in the name of
education?
The
optimist would believe that the adults
have your safety in mind, trying to
teach you one of life's hard lessons that
actions have consequences. The skeptic is
-- well, skeptical, and thinks parents back
then were just as scared of their kids as
those kids are now terrified of their own
offspring, today -- and the only way to get
through to them is to scare 'em straight.
The
origins of these kinds of short films
actually began back in the '30s. Factories
owners, in cahoots with their insurance
providers, began to produce safety
procedurals for their workers. Did they
have the worker's safety in mind, or were
they trying to shift accident liability
from themselves onto the workers?
The
other shorts we've seen so far are easy to
laugh and poke fun at. These Driver's Ed
scare films are, too -- and I think The
Last Date
is the epitome of the genre -- until they
go over the line. When they start to
resemble a snuff film then there's nothing
really to laugh at as far as I'm
concerned. These are real people. And
these people are injured -- or dead. I find no pleasure in other
people's pain and misery. Sorry. If that
makes me a prude; fine. So be it. I'm cool
with that.
You
see, things change when they hit a little
too close to home. I lost my oldest
sister, Chris, back in 1978 when she died
in a car wreck. I was also the one who
answered the door when the police arrived
to notify us she was gone. I was also
unfortunate enough to see footage of her
flattened vehicle on the ten o'clock news,
and it's an image that was seared into my
seven-year-old brain and I'll never be
able to get rid off it for as long as I
live.
As
most memories of my sister fade away, a
clear mental picture of that flattened,
tan, two-door, Cutlass Supreme still haunts
me to this day.
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