If this is how I go, then this is how I go…
 
Why did I have to learn about www.rideaccidents.com? As a seasoned roller-coaster and water park aficionado, I like to turn off the part of my brain screaming for self-preservation and enjoy the ride. Unfortunately, what I’ve always subconsciously known can no longer be denied: those things are hastily assembled deathtraps. But why would someone dedicate time to maintaining this sort of site? The description doesn’t allude to a personal experience of the owner, Jared Costanza, just a cryptic mission statement:

this site is intended to serve as a resource that helps identify circumstances that have either caused or contributed to accidents so that similar circumstances may be avoided. To all visitors, the information at this site is openly reported with the purpose of bringing awareness to the risks associated with amusement rides—an awareness that will translate into a safety-conscious respect for rides and a greater willingness to follow instructions, procedures and warnings.

What? I mean, sometimes the injuries/deaths are the result of improper safety procedures (seriously, don’t stand up when they tell you not to), but sometimes the water slide just splits in two and some one falls to a gruesome death in front of a bunch of families on vacation! That’s… life. The best/worst part of the site is the search feature, which allows visitors to look up the history of all their favorite rides and muse about all the times they cheated death for two minutes of cheap thrills.

Regardless, I won’t be eschewing the Cyclone anytime soon, even though I now know it to be a venerable murder-machine. When my time comes, I’d like my loved ones to be able to say I died how I lived—ignoring all common sense.

 
In 1979, the acclaimed French director, Bertrand Tavernier arrived in Glasgow to shoot his latest project - a science fiction film called Death Watch. It was a move away from Tavernier’s best known work - historical drama (Que la fête commence…), crime (The Watchmaker of St. Paul’s), and his scripts which focussed on the complex psychological interactions between characters.

Based on the novel, The Unsleeping Eye by David G Compton, Death Watch centered on a young man, Roddy, who is hired by a TV organization to have a camera implanted in his eye, in order that he may follow and film the last days of a terminally ill woman, Katherine. Tavernier developed this into clever and layered film starring Romy Schneider as Katherine, Harvey Keitel as Roddy, with a supporting cast of Harry Dean Stanton and Max Von Sydow, and early appearances for Robbie Coltrane and Bill Nighy.

For the cast alone should have ensured Death Watch‘s cult status, but it opened to negative reviews, and was quickly damned to obscurity in the growing multiplex world of The Empire Strikes Back, Smokey and the Bandit, Airplane! and Any Which Way You Can.

Tavernier had proven himself to be too clever by half and had made an intelligent and polemical film, which raised issues of the ethics and morality involved in film-making. Tavernier was also presciently examining the affects of Reality TV and Ob Docs, and questioning the role of media intrusion in our lives. Big issues, big subjects, and worth far more than comic book mix parped out by Lucas and co.

Almost entirely filmed in Glasgow, Death Watch captured the city at its most bleak and desolate - its heart ripped-out by unthinking town planners, who wanted to create a container city that mimicked an idealized America of freeways and skyscrapers. Their actions were akin to hacking off the legs of a prize winning racehorse, then entering it in the Grand National. Communities were destroyed, rehoused in high-rise, shoe-box apartments on the outskirts of the city, or scattered further afield in New Towns. The city’s industries were in fatal decline, the docks abandoned, ship-building almost gone. Yet, for all this, there is an inherent beauty to Tavernier’s vision, where Glasgow looks like a martian out-post, while at the same time capturing the mahogany warmth of its mythical Victorian past as the “Second City of the Empire”.
 

 
Previously on dangerous Minds

Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘Death Watch’

 
With thanks to Joseph McKay