PLASTICS

Remember the first time you saw Dustin Hoffman? He was lying face down in the pool of his parents’ plush middle-class American home. He was being badgered, not only by his personal parents, but by his parents’ entire generation, to get a job. I guess he was the 1967 version of what we call slackers, people’s whose guiding principle in life is the pleasure principal. If it wasn’t for the Protestant Work Ethic, this could well be the dominant principle in all our lives.

So there he is, remember, sitting at the bottom of the pool blocking out all the chatter, all the meaningless noise spilling from the mouths of his seniors, his role models, his pater familias. I think of this futile gesture, this cowering from the inevitability of the modern world, whenever I’m contemplating what we have done to the environment and whether it could, as a result of some alternative past, be different. The exact bit I think of is where the friend of the family takes him aside and says one word, only one word ……. Plastics.

He speaks as if he has seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary as he urges Hoffman’s character to forge a career in the proliferation of synthetic polymers. This one word, for me, sets up the premise of the whole movie. The world is fucked and about to get a lot more fucked. Polypropylene has been in production for a decade and it’s about to take over the world as Benjamin, and the rest of 1960’s middle-class America, floats on a plastic air-bed in the Romanesque backyard pool of their suburban home. It will only take 50 more years to fill the world’s oceans with the detritus of this American life, which is of course, now the life we all lead.

Because I regularly replay this scene from the movie in my head, “One word son, Plastics!”, I for one was not surprised at the damning report by French Filmmaker, Vincent Parazio recently shown on Four Corners, which exposes the cumulative effect of ushering pretty much most of the 80 million tonnes of Polyethylene and 55 million tonnes of Polypropylene we produce each year, into the ocean.

No wonder Benjamin was paralysed by an inert sense of powerlessness. No wonder he failed to enroll in Grad School. No wonder he tore the cross from the wall and used it to lock his parents generation in the church while they made their escape to an uncertain future, the future that we are now living in so precariously. "One word - Plastics." Thanks a lot mate. I blame him!