9 - Pain Index, Plain Suffering and Blood Measure: A Victimology of Driving Safety Films, 1955–1975

Summary

Abstract

This essay examines the unique victims that populated early driving safety films in the United States. In these films, like Safety or Slaughter (1958), Signal 30 (1959), Red Asphalt (1960), Mechanized Death (1961), Wheels of Tragedy (1963), Highways of Agony (1969) and Death on the Highway (1971), the victims viewers see are people who experienced actual injuries, pain and death. In the collision-experiment films like Crash Research (1955), Crash and Live! (1955), Safety through Seat Belts (1959) and Safety Belt for Susie (1962), crash victims are most often stand-ins for the human body, crafted in plastic and metal: the crash test dummy and children’s dolls.

Keywords: automobility, car crashes, safety gore film, collision-experiment film, industrial films, crash victims

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 top billing only on a tombstone. They paid a terrific price to be in these movies, they paid with their lives.

– narrator of Signal 30 (1959)

You know the fallible factor in driving, don’t you? It’s you and me.

– narrator of Safety or Slaughter (1958)

For the first seven decades of the automobile, every accident on the road was the driver’s fault. At least, this is how it was seen both in the eyes of the public and the dictates of the law. Once behind the wheel, the driver assumed a responsibility, in essence, for every other person in every other vehicle on the road. It also meant that every other person in an automobile was a potential victim, and whatever their grisly fate, the driver was to blame, meaning the act of driving was always charged with a moral imperative.

This all changed dramatically in 1965 with the publication of Ralph Nader’s best-selling book Unsafe at Any Speed, which revealed that it was actually the automobile itself that was most often responsible for crashes. Yet before Nader, the voice of authority on such matters largely stemmed from a group of driving education films that began appearing in the 1930s.