Playing Dead: Mock Trauma and Folk Drama in Staged High School Drunk Driving Tragedies.MontanaMiller. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2012.

Abstract

Playing Dead: Mock Trauma and Folk Drama in Staged High School Drunk Driving Tragedies Montana Miller. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2012.In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain creates a memorable scene of Tom and Huck watching their own funeral:They felt like heroes in an instant. Here was a gorgeous triumph; they were missed; they were mourned; hearts were breaking on their account; tears were being shed; accusing memories of unkindnesses to these poor lads were rising up, and unavailing regrets and remorse were being indulged: and best of all, the departed were the talk of the whole town, and the envy of all the boys, as far as this dazzling notoriety was concerned. This was fine. (qtd. in Miller 100)A similar scene proliferated in high schools all over America in the form of the folk drama Every 15 Minutes (E15M for short), an elaborate two-day enactment of a fatal teen drunk-driving accident and its aftermath. In Playing Dead, Montana Miller investigates the gruesome educational event, which sprang up and spread quickly in the early 1990s as an attempt to prevent teens from drinking and driving, even though, as she contends, it not nationally organized or sponsored and has neither a precise origin or nor one 'official' version (1). Its name is derived from the often repeated, but now erroneous, statistic that one person is killed every fifteen minutes in a drunk-driving accident. The current figure, one every forty-five minutes, presumably lacks the punch of E15M. As Miller demonstrates, emotional effect, not reality, dominates E15M. But some participants get so caught up in the emotion that they forget they are acting. In the words of one frantic student who was playing the drunk who caused the accident that killed his friend, All of a sudden everything felt real (60).Miller's slim volume, the second in Utah State University Press's Ritual, Festival and Celebration series edited by Jack Santino, combines theories of play, framing, and folk drama with ethnographic research in order to find the meaning of this popular and, ultimately, very complex social drama. To research her topic, Miller attended dozens of E15M performances, conducted formal and informal interviews, did archival research, scoured YouTube and the Internet, and compiled a database that included hundreds of local versions of the program, from a California suburb to a tiny rural school in Maine (6). A specialist in folklore, she was interested in both the consistencies and variations in E15K enactments, as well as in the functions the performances served for students and their families, high school personnel, and the community. She determined the following common elements in E15M: The Grim Reaper who pulls students out of class to designate them dead; The Living Dead who are separated from their families and friends and sometimes taken away overnight; Obituaries, Cemetery; Death Notifications to Parents; Mock Accident; Victim's Death at the Hospital; Tours for the Living Dead; Retreat for the Living Dead, Letters to Parents; Assembly/Mock Funeral; and, finally, Evaluation, formal or informal, of the program (37-40). With no precise script to follow, students and administrators put their own marks on the performances, with variations in time, space, personnel, costumes, make-up, speech, music, touch, props, and other details. …