WithPlaying Dead, Montana Miller has provided a study of a unique phenomenon: the imaginary deaths of high school students, theatricalized with a combination of verisimilitude and fantasy. Teenage death resulting from drunk driving is dramatized in a program called Every 15 Minutes Someone Dies, developed for high schools throughout the United States. In these programs, some students are chosen in advance to play the victims of car fatalities. The “deaths” are announced to the students as if real; police and emergency workers appear at the school as the unfortunate “victim” retrieved from the wreckage, staged near or on school...

As the first class period begins at a local high school, tragic events—prepared through months of careful planning—begin to unfold. Over the next hours the “Grim Reaper,” cloaked in black and carrying a scythe, will roam the hallways, pulling students from classrooms at fifteen-minute intervals to represent “one person killed every fifteen minutes by a drunk-driving accident.” Each victim’s eulogy will be read aloud by a police deputy, as classmates listen in stunned silence. Later, the twenty “Living Dead” will return to their classes, bearing white face paint and coroner’s tags, and they will remain silent for the...

The staged tragedy of Every 15 Minutes takes place against a backdrop of real carnage on American highways. Drunk-driving fatalities, as well as public concern about the problem, have been tracked over the years by various government, academic, and advocacy groups.

Alarming statistics are easy to find; in fact, the quantity and range of sources of information can be daunting. Countless websites trumpet the “cold, hard, sobering facts” (as AlcoholAlert.com puts it) about the deadly toll drunk driving takes. However, with new studies coming out regularly from a variety of reputable organizations, statistics are confounding and do not necessarily correspond...

In scholarly studies of play, “framing” has been used to understand how individuals make sense of their activities and interactions and how, based on their interpretations of frame, people communicate and express themselves in ways that can lead to collective action. In his 1955 essay “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” Gregory Bateson explained the idea of play frame in terms of the relationship of a message to its referent, as a map relates to its territory. Players communicate signals meaning, “This is play,” forming the message, “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions...

The momentum of Every 15 Minutes, as well as other related phenomena that target “impressionable youth” while sweeping entire communities into the act, embodies a surge in contemporary folk drama. These events’ theatrical elements are apparent, and in their participants’ own terms, they are dramas (despite ubiquitous exclamations about their “reality”). Through the staged tragedies of drunk driving, shooting sprees, sex and drugs and suicide, participants are intended to learn the lessons of experience. As we have seen, however, this particular kind of experience unfolds in a special space where realism and fantasy alternate and coexist.

A phenomenon like Every...

My research highlights participants’ attraction to the fun and creative elements of Every 15 Minutes, and their desire for the community attention—the “dazzling notoriety,” in Twain’s words—that they receive as players in the drama. The program’s promoters advance the premise that its entertaining aspects make it an effective means of combating drunk driving, grabbing the kids by the nape of the neck and shaking them. Yet my data suggest that the appeal of the program lies as much in getting attentionthrough itas in paying attentionto it, as people are drawn to the chance to play...

When Every 15 Minutes was a young program, it was carried by word of mouth from school to school, its emerging traditions passed on among friends and colleagues who knew each other through personal and workplace networks. Local and sometimes national newspapers and television stations put the occasional spotlight on the Grim Reaper and the Living Dead, so improbably macabre in their high school settings. But as E15M matures, its adolescence is taking place in a far more complicated media landscape.

I conducted much of the fieldwork on Every 15 Minutes between 1999 and 2003, when teenagers had fewer outlets...

Today teenagers all across America are acting out bloody scenarios of violence and death, as their teachers, parents, and mentors look on in tearful approval. Each year, under the banner of the various programs discussed in this book, more teenagers bleed and expire. They reenact fatal car accidents and attend their own mock funerals; they burst down hallways with machine guns and hold their classmates hostage; they scream under the knife in simulated botched Hell House abortions. Events are staged with great care and great gusto, along a spectrum from drill to elaborate narrative. As educational institutions (both religious and...