Hrm. Nothing wrong with me as a human being, at least in that sense.

Guh.

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What really bothers me is the blame-the-victim message. It's one thing to tell people to be careful; it's another to say "there are no accidents." The device of having the characters talk about their fate as if it's their plan for the weekend is a very clever way to communicate a dubious message, which is that everything that happens to you is something you've essentially decided to do by not being brilliant enough to prevent it. Responsible people remember they're omniscient, calculate the trajectories of all the molecules in the universe, and choose not to make their loved ones suffer, tsk tsk! ...Fvck you, Yoda, there is Try, and sometimes things happen that you can't do anything about. To even hint that these people deserved what they got is horrible.

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Half-agreed. They're careful in the commercials to both point out something the worker did wrong, and something that the employer did wrong, that contributed to the incident.

But, yes, it's very much an ad from the "scared straight" school of moral hazard.

Also n.b.: I'd find it more disturbing in the sense you mention if this were an American ad, but part of the context I viewed it in is that this comes from Canada -- where things like worker's comp and nationalized health care are taken as givens. I'd be interested in data points here from the Canucks among us.

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I actually thought the ad was American.

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PSAs up here tend to err on the side of insufficient subtlety. This one's more into that camp than most (by a significant margin), but stuff intended for significant shock value is common enough that it can only be a little milder than these without raising too many eyebrows.

I ~never watch TV, but it's airing in Ontario, where I am for the year. I'm definitely gonna keep an ear open to see if I can't catch the roommates' reaction when they see it, though.

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True, but, on the other hand, it's the truth: most workplace accidents are caused by the employer neglecting something and/or the employee doing something they should know better than to do and/or the employer forcing the employee to work in conditions the employee may or may not know are unsafe. The number of honest-to-god not-really-preventable accidents out there is small by comparison.

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My brains just went "wtf".

And yes, it is creepy. Not sure if they were going for the 'shock' value (which many agencies seem to be using these days).

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Something you might find interesting...

http://community.livejournal.com/abandonedplaces/1165765.html

I know, it's not really related to the topic per se... but the concept feels similar.

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Also, I want to thank you for finding an example of something truly worthy of the assertion "if this television commercial doesn't make your skin crawl, there is something fundamentally wrong with you," because all week I've been seeing people say pretty much the same thing, but they're talking about sexy furries dancing around and drinking fizzy orange juice, and that really makes me afraid of people too.

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I, for one, would like to apologize for posting that link the way I did. It was thoughtless, and, in truth, not even reflective of my objections to it.

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You're welcome -- that is, if "you're welcome" can be an appropriate reaction to having made someone's skin crawl. ;-p

The annoying thing for me about the Orangina ad is that I agree with you 100%, but I still dislike the ad itself. For me, the immediate reaction is an instinctive red flag at someone trying to press hindbrain buttons in order to sell an unrelated product. As I tried to say in packbat's journal, the commercial essentially boils down to porn; and because porn cuts through so many of the layers of indifference we build up to cope with modern culture, my standards for its correct use are high. Before anything else, porn needs to be sincere ...

-- okay, obviously this is turning into a rant for my adult filter.

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Nope... not gonnna watch it. It would just make me angry. Am I the only one who gets offended when people try to avoid reason and jerk me around by calculated attacks of screechy, mindless emotionalism? It isn't emotion that bothers me, it's the malicious, emotionless attempt to pull MY emotional levers. If you're going to hit me with emotion, it had damned better be HONEST emotion.

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I'm honestly afraid to watch it. So many PSAs terrified me as a kid... scenes of children screaming because their family failed to check the smoke alarm batteries... ones that weren't even explicitly showing harm to people creeped me out. There's this one we had here in England up even until not too long ago, involving making sure food is cooked properly on the barbecuem that involves someone slicing open a sausage that's raw in the middle and being about to eat it... those things put nightmares into my head as a child. Extremely effective, though.

Edited at 2007-11-15 07:07 am (UTC)

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D:

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Alright ... I keep seeing that smiley, but this is the first time it's shown up directly on my journal, so I have to ask.

What the hell does D: mean?

I'm conditioned to read smileys with the eyeograph following the mouthograph as "left-handed smileys": tilt your head in the reverse direction to interpret it. So logically "D:" is a giant frown. But by conventional usage, "D:" seems to indicate amusement and/or positive reaction.

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Turn it to the right 90 degrees and it's two eyes over an unhappy looking mouth.

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D: is a giant sad face. ASCII doesn't have a reversed D, so you can't put the eyes on the left.

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Maybe it's just my background, but I laughed at both of these. The guy getting blown up and falling off the building was funnier though. But otherwise they looked every bit as fake as those 80's slasher or thriller movies like Nightmare on Elm street and whatnot I saw as a kid where horrible stuff like that happened and looked just as corny and fake.

I remember when I was in elementary school they showed us a street crossing and bicycle safety video and at one point this guy on a bike hits a car head on and goes tumbling head over heels across the car that struck him. The entire class roared with mirth for about 5 minutes and we all got detention for it too. Maybe I just come from a generation jaded by bad horror movies :P

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I remember the reaction of my Driver's Ed class to the Ohio Highway Patrol safety films (for those who may never have seen them, they use live shots of automotive accidents...bodies included. Gruesome stuff).

much of the class thought they were hilarious. I still don't understand that reaction, myself.

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Well that was real footage in the highway patrol one. In the bicycle one (you could tell it was a mannequin) and in these canadian commercials, it was obviously staged and fake. That's why I laugh at these. I know it's fake and therefore it can be funny because it's so over the top.

If it was real I'd be wincing rather than laughing. It just depends on the source.

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Here's the one on office safety.

Remember, a computer virus isn't an accident.

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I saw the video and read the comments have to say that as a PSA it's pretty effective - for kitchen folks anyway: 1. DO NOT pick up the stock pot of hot oil and 2. ALWAYS lay down the damn kitchen mats no matter how much of a pain it is.

I didn't feel emotionally jerked around. Accidents happen and sometimes they happen to people with finacees and sometimes the happen to people with no one. (Actually, the bit about being head chef in a year felt more contrived than anything. Generally the leap from sous to head chef involves changing restaurants.)

And in case anyone wants to know - at my school we are flat out not allowed to carry the pots of oil around. We leave it on the stove with the heat off and when it's cooled the kitchen stewards dispose of it for us. So Bax is in no danger of ending up with a disfigured wife due to hot oil.

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....oh-kay...first commercial, hell, both commercials = creepy as fuck O_o

(And this is coming from someone who found "Forklift Driver Klaus" amusing.)

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I'm not sure if my skin crawled, but I did find it quite uncomfortable. Then again, I live in Victoria, and we were bombarded with violent PSAs continuously for 5 or 6 years. When they switched to less violent PSAs, I found those more difficult, because I was waiting for the inevitable horror from the moment the ad started.

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bleah.

I didn't even watch the second one.

What Kady said... I got the message.

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Huh...

The assertion is, if I understand it correctly, that feeling nothing for these people - even in an exercise of empathy and hypotheticals - would make me a monster? Interesting.

Then I guess, I am a monster. I see the scenarios, and all I take away from it is the intended message. My survival is directly proportional to how much care I take in my actions and surrounding environment, at all times.

But as for the people? I think I am failing to connect on the level that they are 'working'. They're in their chosen place of employment, presumably aware of all that entails (what moron straps himself to highly explosive chemicals several dozen feet above the ground without proper understanding that the could, at the very least BLOW UP?) and through the culmination of situations that they are aware of, meet consequences.

I think I would be more 'moved' if it was a woman out shopping and walks in front of a bus, after loading her groceries into the back of her car. Or a child- well, adding adolescence and the lack of a grasp on ones situation makes ANYTHING the empathic equivalent of a ten-ton hammer, doesn't it?

I don't think I am a monster, though. Just acknowledged of the fact that there is risk in the work place. Risk held in check by safe practices and awareness.

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Oh, and a stalwart 'Survival of the fittest' kind of person. Not quite Darwinian... Like if Samuel Clemens and Nietzsche had a love-child with Annie Oakley?

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Only they couldn't tell which one was the actual father? And Annie off and got killed doing something patently absurd, but just so in line with her 'Live life to it's fullest' philosophy? And the child was raised by Sam and Fred, and they took turns teaching him to sarcastic and calloused to the vibrancy, until the kid breaks down and reminisches about it's mother, and forces them to both reflect?

Oh, wait... that was My Two Dads, wasn't it?

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Point is;

Walk into the world not expecting this kind of shit, and I am not a monster. You're just a statistic.

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The unit I'm on has no sound so I'm watching these sans sound & screams... and they are creepy. The trouble is you are waiting for the axe to fall.....
I recall a road safety film from UK TV in which a 20 something girl pedestrian gets run over and killed and we see her ghost fruitlessly yelling at the driver and his passenger.
Would have been better had we not just watched her do a sharp right into the carriageway off the pavement (sidewalk) under the van without looking or giving any warning of what she was going to do.....
Victim or no victim people that ask for it sometimes get what they ask for. As is pointed out in Health and Safety training... or should be.... YOU are your own best safety officer and YOU are your first line of defence against unsafe acts.

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Gah! Not the best thing to watch after waking up...

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I've seen these ads on television, and I have to say that their effectiveness is added to because ads are generally unpredictable. You could be watching Ellen, and it goes to commercial break, and there's a commercial for laundry soap, a Sears advertisement, someone dying horribly in a workplace accident, and a Nissan spot. Then back to Ellen.

Odd one out, anyone?

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They are supposed to be shocking, of course. This is year two of a campaign to get individuals to agitate for a safer workplace; you note both of the individuals in these videos start out with what they're doing wrong (I should have cleaned up that grease, I'm wearing a busted harness), and are just moving onto what their companies have done wrong (this grill is too close to-, those tanks shouldn't be-) when they have their 'accident'.

The previous year killed them right off the bat. Then they arose, with grevious bodily harm, and pointed out how their fatal accidents were no accidents at all, listing how they, their co-workers, and their companies all contributed to the events that killed them.

The guy who was electrocuted gives me the screaming jeeblies, personally - more so because his 'resurrection' isn't at the time of injury, but several days later. I see that one isn't on youtube any more. But if you know where to look..

There were a couple of drunk-driving commercials that took a similar approach - a guy trying out wheelchairs for 'later', a girl consulting with a plastic surgeon about her reconstruction after her accident-to-be. Spooky, but without the visceral ugh of the 'accident' - playing on the same theme, really, that many accidents can be prevented with a little foresight and attention ahead of the fact.

The new batch are nasty. I hope they're effective.

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There was a comment made to one of the YouTube clips that, unlike the sweeping majority of YouTube comments, actually has something resembling content. All of these commercials show directly the employee's mistake, only mentioning in the prose- if at all, as this recent batch has them cut off mid-sentence- the employer's contribution. A justification is that the audience is likely to have the most direct control over themselves, and they're likely to be employees. A better explanation is that this entire campaign is funded by business interests.

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Huh. Nightmare fuel! http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NightmareFuel

Only peripherally related, but...

I hate most comedy. That's because for whatever reason, I don't find wanton destruction and chaos funny. "My house/car/heirloom/life is totally destroyed!" has never made me laugh. Ever. Even the humiliation - nine times out of ten, I don't find it funny, I want it over with.

I read somewhere that one reason why people laugh at the whole my-hopes-are-ashes thing is because laughing at it puts a sort of divider between you and them- it's like saying "I'm not like you, this won't happen to me". Unless I have no reason to pity the unfortunate, my divider just doesn't work.

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Wanton destruction and chaos isn't funny. Rather, it's relieving when it doesn't happen to you. Haven't you ever wanted to laugh when you avoided misfortune by chance? Or chuckled at someone else's stories of past misfortune?

I recall watching X-men in the movie theater when it first came out, and there's a scene in the film where Wolverine is in a car crash, and suffers some rather grisly injuries, but it led to the audience chuckling. My brother turned to me and asked me why they were laughing, and I had no answer. After reflection, it's probably because they knew that he would recover from the injuries - a sort of "it's really OK' response.

"Violent humor" as produced by Hollywood will typically feature indications that things aren't real. "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is really themed around the issue of how 'real life' and 'film life' interact, or, if you're feeling more highbrow, you could go with "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

And, while Hollywood does sometimes produce violent comedies, it's really the violence in 'action movies' that really bothers me, especially when it's massively sanitized and marketed to children. (The recent Transformers film for example is massively violent in a sanitized fashion.) Most of the violence in comedies that I've been exposed to seems to be slapstick that is either blatantly faux, or shows an immediate recovery.

Honestly, it seems preferable to see violence presented in an accurate graphic fashion like these PSAs where people are actually affected rather than the 'yippie kai yeah motherfucker' bullshit we see in the action genre, where chaos and destruction is presented as a way to resolve problems.

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Hmm. Yeah... I guess I'm a bit of a hypocrite. The Darwin Awards are very funny, and they're all about people killing and/or maiming themselves in various horrible ways. It's during comedy movies that I wince.

I always thought that the Three Stooges(for example) weren't remotely interesting, but if I don't actually see it, if I just read about it and have no context, it can be funny.

... I guess I don't always see those cues between "violence to be laughed at" and "violence to be horrified by", when it's on a screen. Violence and chaos both - I absolutely hated the last two comedies I saw, "Are We There Yet" and "Cheaper By the Dozen", I was wincing the whole time - don't really entertain me. I cringed for Wolverine - but yeah, it wasn't a big deal for him, healing factor and all.

You've got a point about action movies. Bystanders there - maybe not innocent, but usually uninvolved - are pretty much on a level with mass-produced wax dolls. _Someone_ probably cares, but you don't see that, neither the reaction nor the later effects. They aren't supposed to be people, just images to make the setting look more convincing.

Going with Transformers - how does something like that ridiculously confusing final fight at the end resolve _without_ the world knowing about it? If the city had been evacuated, you might pass it off with some excuse (although there'd be investigations, and what to tell the folks related to all the dead servicemen), but it wasn't, there were people milling around the entire time. One of them got flicked by the bad guy with three or four names(I admit... I did laugh there. Just a little bit). How would this not get photographed and spread by all and sundry?

Wax dolls. I wonder if there is any media focused on the bystander?

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I'm reminded of when I watched a performance of "The Good Person of Szechuan" a couple years ago for a theatre class. One of the opening scenes is of the main character- a prostitute- appealing to the residents of the city for help; she is rebuffed at the first door, and beaten with a frying pan at the second. That's played in an intentionally ridiculous, over-the-top manner; Brecht's style of "epic theatre" is to intentionally break the fourth wall for a political point. It worked about the way it was expected to- the audience, including myself, laughed- right until another of the performers, one of the three gods in the show, seated on part of the equipment on the apron of the stage, started laughing as well- with a flat facial expression, while facing the audience and having never seen the scene behind him.

That shut me up pretty quickly. I'm not sure why that was so effective as a reminder of "what, pray tell, is funny about that?", but I'm even less sure why it seemed to have no effect on the remainder of the audience.

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The first one was troubling, yar. But the second? I may well watch too much Simpsons, but I was expecting him to fall into that truck going past and have it labelled as "Broken Glass and Barbed Wire Haulage Co." or similar.

I'm sorry, but it's what went through my mind. PSA's over here (i.e., in the UK) tend to go between disturbing and unintentionally hilarious. The older ones are more often in the former category, whereas newer ones are usually the latter -- when they're not being incredibly patronising and annoying, at least.

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*Quietly closes Photoshop and slides away from the keyboard*
Okay, maybe it was just a touch too far...

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Unfortunately, since I can't watch the videos (youtube traffic is not allowed here - likewise with googlevideo and other major video providers)...

I'm guessing that these horridly violent and disturbing PSAs have a point - not as a method of desensitizing anyone - but to grab one's attention (a job they seem to be doing very well). With that, in the short spot that they get to tell their piece, one sometimes has to measure the importance of the message conveyed with the power they deliver it...

A few other examples (that I will NOT share videos or pictures of, because they are the morbid remains of War, some of which I took myself during the initial invasion of Iraq):

Some of the footage and pictures we use when giving classes that have an immediate life or death impact upon the students (in order to get them to pay attention), I, and others who instruct use some of the most horrifying footage or photos we have to bring that message across.

As a war-hardened dragon, I am pleased to say that usually, in those susceptible to PTSD (or those who have it) usually wind up with an episode triggered upon them (we DO also tell them that they can leave the premises for the next 10-15 minutes), meaning that they aren't desensitized. Most of those who don't leave the room are likewise connected to the message and associate what they are learning as a preventive, or as a control measure, to the horror that they see before them.

It isn't often that something gets me thinking back to a few months of my life I can't seem to forget, but sometimes, like now, it's kinda cool. It was during the initial invasion (or perhaps just a couple days prior) that I first registered on Tlands and met Bax. It was also during the initial invasion that I discovered my Draconity.

Bax, thanks for this post (even if I can't watch the videos); you've inspired me to post something now...

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