Plastic Bag

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My shopping bag | Recycle my waste

[Plastic Bag] follows the lowly plastic shopping bag, from ‘‘birth’’ at a supermarket checkout aisle- through a happy life with his ‘maker’ (the woman who took her groceries home in him and used him for random daily chores) to cruel abandonment in a garbage dump’ after years searching for his maker, during which the human race disappears, the bag meets its final reward in the Pacific Ocean’s notorious ‘Garbage Vortex’- where it finds rueful solace among its dispossessed and stubbornly un-biodegradable tribe (Source: Hornaday 2010, np link).

[It] gives a bag a human voice. Plastic bags are essentially indestructible and end up getting blown into the ocean – but Herzog’s musing narration in his distinct near-monotone lends the message a particularly surreal edge (Source: Goodyear 2016, np link).

Herzog marvels at the beauty of nature while lamenting its supreme indifference (Source: Hornaday, 2010, np link).

And the darkness began. I don’t know for how long, and what did it really matter? That world’s decomposed. It was eaten by monsters, some too small for me to even see. Not me. I remained. I was strong and smart and I would find my maker. Ha (Source: Plastic Bag / Werner Herzog in Gigantic Studios 2015, np link)!

[Plastic Bag] is one of 11 films grouped together as Futurestates- a free online project by the Independent Television Service (Source: Michael 2010, np link).

The whole concept stands or falls on the performance of a plastic bag – an inanimate prop! Yes that’s right a plastic bag has to… carry the entire film. But rather miraculously, it does. And without digital effects, according to the end credits (Source: Kurosawa 2018, np link).

“his effect of being the voyeur peeking into the life of this bag makes it perfect for narration through the interior thinking of the subject (Source: Mobarak 2010, np link).

It takes a rare eye and heart to make something this moving, a saga of a bag that, by way of a ‘voice’ by Werner Herzog (that unmistakable Bavarian soul put into it) … What does this Plastic Bag do isn’t a concern as much as who ‘it’ is. This may sound pretentious, but the way it’s presented it’s done like a poem or a short story that on the surface is cute and underneath reveals much about the human condition. How would we want to live, or be, as a plastic bag, happy to be used and have an owner, upset by the competition of a dog, and then tossed aside in a garbage heap? It’s hard to describe how moving the film is, and how wonderful it’s shot and scored, until you actually see it (Source: MisterWhiplash 2010, np link).

So this is actually incredible. The subject being a plastic bag (!!!?) makes the premise sort of cute and funny, almost childlike. So what could have been a sappy, overly sentimental “lost love” story becomes … heartbreaking (Source: Sydney 2013, np link).

Werner Herzog’s Bavarian accent makes every film a better one, so it’s no wonder Plastic Bag posses a kind of magic and spell over its viewers. Following the complicated life of the titular object, this strangely beautiful and eerie film is at once humorous and dramatic, weird and realistic (Source: Gui 2014, np link).

This little movie is the pathetic fallacy taken to its extreme: shouldn’t a planet where consumer goods outnumber consumers be seen as populated by objects first, and people second (Source: Vishnevestsky 2010, np link)?

C’mon, pets are NOT people, let alone balloons or plastic bags, no matter how much film or bytes sophisticated movie makers waste upon anthropomorphizing them. As I type this, I have a dozen plastic bags stuffed into my pants pockets, since I need to use a few every day as spur-of-the-moment containers. I am NOT willing to think any of the bags squished below my posterior are musing in their droll Bavarian accents about revenge against me, or about “escaping” into the atmosphere to frolic in the breeze till they can choke Flipper in the seas. After glimpsing the mind behind Werner Herzog’s MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? (to which DVD the PLASTIC BAG short he narrates–as the bag!–is attached), I can just picture this dottie old Bavarian mesmerized by the view of an airborne bag beyond the windshield of his Jetta as he plows through a group of school kids waiting at a bus stop. It’s time to get real, folks ( Source: Charlytully 2011, np. link)!

A lovely and memorable short film (Source: Hovey 2017, np link).

We need to start thinking about our consumer behaviours and how to change them, and this is potentially the easiest change that everyone can make and can start thinking about (Source: Goodyear 2016, np link).

I will not use plastic bags ever again (Source: Ben 2012, np. link).

If we apply our human ingenuity and perseverance to our growing waste problem we can find a solution, a bright future is possible but it is up to us to pave the path that will lead us there (Source: Jenkins 2011, np link).