Creative Writing: "Bag It!" Movie Review

Is Your Life too Plastic?

I’m typing this with a plastic-cased laptop. Maybe when you woke up this morning, you turned off the lamp with the plastic switch. And maybe you were changing the channel with the plastic remote. The TV was plastic, too, I suppose. Oh, don’t forget our all time favorite, the plastic bag!

What does Jeb Berrier, a middle-aged soon-to-be father, an average middle-class American, have to say about it? Bag It!

You’ve guessed it! The so-named movie is about Jeb’s attempt to reduce, or even to stop using, plastic (any kinds). But, worry not! This guy, who isn’t a tree-hugger, is none of our usual angry environmentalists seeking the deconstruction of civilization.

He first takes us back to the history of plastic bag in particular, which was yet so worldwide just five decades ago. The pluses and minuses covered, he departs on a trip around the world for a way to cut plastic bag use. An epitome would be Dublin, Ireland, which puts fee on plastic bags, resulting a decrease of 90% of plastic bag consumption.

Well, this isn’t the only sound statistic put forward here. The director, Susan Beraza, presents jaw-dropping numbers such as that 300,000,000 plastic coffee cups used (and thrown away) everyday in the U.S. only. Funky and cheerful music back-sounds such facts, still narrated by our Jeb, and this tones down the inconvenient, stressing truth, while also sings out the irony of the society’s ignorance, or perhaps even approval, of it.

Bag It! tries to tell us that we’re not powerless in this war. The crew follows Jeb to groups of people living outside the plastic bag, one of which is in Germany. But, the authority does not give in. The movie unveils the fact that American Chemistry Council (ACC) rolls out millions of dollars in order for plastic bag to stay in circulation. When nagged by Jeb through emails and phone calls for months, they just keep avoiding him, and we know what that means.

The cartoon-like graphics interspersing the movie takes us to a rather personal part of Jeb’s life. His wife, Anna, is conceiving a child. Later we will see the birth, but in between, Jeb demonstrates that using home products, dubbed ‘safe’, such as soap and even rubber duck, deteriorates his health in just two days. The cause, you-name-it chemicals in virtually everything does harm to human body.

This documentary then dives further to the oceans, especially Pacific. Plastics pollute our water bodies, and the central Pacific has been a giant ‘landfill’, to which gather tons plastic waste. Animals might eat them, if they don’t decompose. Well, they don’t! Let alone decomposing, recycling is according to Bag It! a ‘myth’. Only some plastic bottles are recyclable, in a low rate. Some others of a certain type are not even recycled at all.

So, bag it! Reduce our use of plastic, the movie invites us. Just like how the movie brings this serious subject in a light tone, so can we begin with little things around us. And just like our everyman host Jeb Berrier, we too are not powerless in contributing to the health of our aging planet.