“Plastic Individuals” is an important kind of documentary about the state of our world. If and when it comes out (it debuted this week at SXSW), I urge you to see it, ponder its message, contemplate what it’s saying about how microplastics — plastic particles less than 5 mm in size, though the most important thing as well it can be microscopic – they have invaded our food, our water, our air and, especially, our bodies.
For decades, it’s been a trope of environmental cinema to show the ugliness of landfills and ask where all the plastic we throw away will ultimately go. “Plastic Individuals” has some of that. But his portrayal of what plastic is doing to us is far more painfully superior. Sure, the setting is hell (no small feat), but the essence of the film’s message is that plastic can poison us from the inside. It has been documented that the plastic particles we inhale or absorb can fuel diabetes, heart disease and many types of cancer, and the film presents powerful evidence that they seriously contribute to rising levels of infertility. Plastic disrupts our hormones and, in a single uncomfortable part, the film reveals to us a placenta with plastic particles. In its own way, “Plastic Individuals” is a horror film. It could have been known as the “Killer Polymer Heist.”
I believe you are alarmist? No. If anything, over the course of its final half hour (the film runs 80 minutes), it will get a little hippie-utopian in its defense of a post-plastic world. “We’ve become the first plastic-free neighborhood in North America,” says a resident of Bayfield, Canada, as children hand out reusable grocery bags and the owner of a takeout restaurant serves his tacos. Brussels sprouts in a plastic-free fast food joint. package. “Let’s turn the clock over, one piece at a time,” says one of the film’s announcers. Possibly, possibly not. The film has already reached the frightening level that plastic is so embedded in the material of our lives that the notion that we will purge ourselves of it could be a Luddite fantasy.
Directed by Ben Addelman, with Ziya Tong as co-director and interviewer, “Plastic Persons” offers an interesting history of plastic, showing us how the material gradually took over. It all started, in a way, with ivory – yes, ivory tusks, which were used in the 19th century to make brushes and all kinds of utensils; ivory was a really plastic substance. In the early 20th century, products like celluloid could imitate the hardness of ivory. Bakelite was a plastic from the early automobile era, and then in the 20s and 30s we saw the rise of petrochemical companies, which needed something to do with the waste from their processing. This became the basis for the modern plastics industry.
It is no coincidence that many of the large plastic companies are subdivisions of oil companies. Massive Oil and Massive Plastic are joined at the hip. The plastic companies we know today – Dow, Mobil, Dupont – had groups of commercial chemists developing materials for which there was no immediate need or demand (with the notable exception of nylons, which everyone needed because they could imitate silk stockings, which were very expensive). Plastic manufacturing increased exponentially during World War II. All of this set the stage for… the plastics of the 1950s!
The film offers us lots of expertly edited archival footage from the Atomic Age, showing us how in the post-war period plastics were used in sneakers, materials (Dacron, Orlon), household appliances, vinyl records, Naugahyde furniture and vehicles. When these products began to become a massive hit in middle-class properties, a completely new idea was pioneered: disposables! It was a very conscious technique. And that’s when the plastics business really took off. At a certain point, you start getting disposable versions of what have long been sturdy products like cups or lighters. Life magazine published a report entitled “Disposable Housing”. Perhaps the best example of how throwing everything away has become the new (poisonous) normal is our own adoption of disposable water bottles. Did you know that 1.5 billion plastic water bottles are purchased every day? That’s the kind of pause-giving statistic that’s sprinkled throughout a documentary like this.
A sentence in relation to the sentence plastic, which is full of connotations, none of which (like plastic itself) have ever gone away. First, it was this unusual new hardened chemical. So it was a brilliant and resilient miracle. Then, in the 1960s, it became a great metaphor – for the false quality of our lives and the greedy corporate culture that cradled it. This was the “Plastic” of “The Graduate” and the introduction of the notion that a middle-class insurgent like Dustin Hoffman’s Ben could “reject” the world of plastic. Norman Mailer wrote many eloquent passages about plastic: how it looked and smelled, what it did to our souls and our bodies. Mailer would have watched a movie like “Plastic Persons” and said, “Yes, I told you that 60 years ago.”
If Mailer was the preventative bard of the New Plastic America, the bard of the “Plastic Guys” is Rick Smith, the Canadian environmentalist and creator of “Gradual Loss of Life by the Rubber Duck: How the Poisonous Chemistry of Regular Life Impacts Our Lives ”. Well-being. “Microplastics,” he says in the film, “are probably the most serious type of pollutant our society has ever created. These invisible particles have been discovered in the finest mountains, in the deepest ocean sediments. And now we are discovering microplastics everywhere we look in the human body. And once these tiny particles are in our bodies, they exude their toxic elements minute by minute.”
Every plastic molecule ever created exists, however, somewhere on Earth. It doesn’t disappear. It simply goes from bigger to smaller and smaller. The conversion of oil into polymers has helped contribute to global warming, but oil companies, knowing that they live in a world that uses less and less fossil fuels, are looking for a way to maintain their income. So that they have a motivation, says Smith, to “improve the plasticization of human life”. That, he says, “is where the oil will go.” Oil companies are talking about tripling plastic production in the coming decades.
You probably, like me, already know a little about this. But one of the great values of a documentary like “Plastic People” is that it takes an issue you think you already understand and colors it. It takes your scattered data and merges it into a more complete view – past and long-term.
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