Plastic Bag

[It’s a b]eautiful and poetic eighteen minutes of mournful perfection describing the ecological disaster of modernity (Source: mxaqtlptl 2024, np link).

[It’s] an interesting commentary on the ongoing ecological debate, because it challenges the dominant ways of conceptualizing the problems with plastic bags, which are designed to arouse fear, anger, or a sense of helplessness in the audience (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.82).

[It’s a] 17 minute PSA telling us to recycle our damn bags (Source: Eli 2024, np link).

[This] is work of tongue-in-cheek genius and wicked humour, [which] is also rather affecting in spite of itself … (Source: Overstreet 2010, np link).

… [and] must be described as a true triumph in short film-making (Source: Gallagher 2010, np link).

The premise could easily have been utterly silly [,] … unbearably pretentious … (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

… [or] a bit weird or silly on paper … (Source: godb nd, np link).

… and instead it’s nimble, poetic, sometimes funny, sometimes profound, … always very stirring … (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

… [and] amazingly compelling (Source: godb nd, np link).

With its lonely, lyrical images adrift a post-apocalyptic world, ‘Plastic Bag’ offers a whimsical and strangely moving interlude, and it gets added resonance with [Werner] Herzog’s narration (Source: Hornaday 2010, np link).

[His] voice over humanized the bag because and made you care about the loss of it’s love (Source: Aaron 2013, np link).

[It] even manages to make you, uh, empathize with the bag a bit (Source: godb nd, np link).

[He’s] just a little guy who can’t b destroyed 🙂 (Source: ruby 2024, np link)

[Plastic bag is] a variation of the hero’s journey, in the form of a plastic bag, yearning to be more than it is, searching for its creator, and a sense of meaning in its immortal life. It is a nod to the non-biodegradable life that the plastic of our world has to look forward to (Source: Gallagher 2010, np link).

[It] follows [a] 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).

The prologue of the film finds the embittered Plastic Bag on the shore, abandoned by his maker and yearning for the Vortex he has been misled to believe is ‘Paradise.’ … [and] cuts from shoreline to supermarket, as Plastic Bag is pulled from the rack, expands and proclaims, ‘My first breath.’ This droll moment is also an inspired one, as Plastic Bag is inspirited and ensouled (Source: Palmer 2011, p.244-5).

[A] young woman, places her bought stuff into the bag (Source: Silva 2020, np link).

[The bag] has mistaken … [her] as his maker, for it is she who gives him companionship, acceptance, love, and purpose (Source: Palmer 2011, p.244-5).

Besides carrying stuff to the woman’s home, the bag carries various kinds of duties for the woman from going with her to the tennis court, helping her with ice to ease her ankle pain, and even bagging her pet dog’s shit (Source: Silva 2020, np link).

Faithful as a dog, [the bag] follows her everywhere, even if he doesn’t understand why she’s doing something (Source: Gobbin 2014, np link).

The bag is happiest when it feels useful, when it knows that it is needed. The woman uses the bag for her lunch, to hold her tennis balls, to hold ice to soothe her injured ankle, and the bag is content, not really understanding anything but happy to know that it fulfills some purpose. But when it’s discarded, used a final time to clean up a dog turd and then thrown out to be taken to a trash heap, the bag loses that happiness (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

But soon, after the magic of the beginning has dissolved, the bag becomes a self-evident, barely perceived object. ‘She spent less and less time with me,’ the bag once notes sadly. Sadly, it hangs on the shelf and almost looks like a lonely pet waiting all day for its owner to return home. Mutual love creates a one-sided dependence. After all, the bag suffers a similar fate, as pets experience again and again during holiday periods: it is abandoned. Not on a rest area, but on a garbage dump …(Source: Gobbin 2014, np link).

… for reasons he does not understand … [Here] he vegetates, crushed by a mountain of garbage until it decomposes (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.75).

[He realises he] has fulfilled and endured [his] function – the enrichment of human everyday life. [But he] is not entitled to an end in [him]self (Source: Gobbin 2014, np link).

When he finally realizes that ‘nothing can destroy him’, he begins his journey (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.75).

Desperate, [he] sets out in search of the one who rejected [him]. The piece of plastic flies across American natural and cultural landscapes: fields, forests, roads, track beds and empty, dilapidated buildings (Source: Gobbin 2014, np link).

[In] search for meaning and purpose in life, the once-useful shopping bag has unexpected encounters with mysterious creatures and experiences the effects of fleeting happiness … (Source: Baharni 2009, np link).

[This is] an endless existential journey, drifting across unknown landscapes to reach its final destination: the vast, blue ocean. In its search for meaning and purpose in life, the once-useful shopping bag has unexpected encounters with mysterious creatures and experiences the effects of fleeting happiness … (Source: Baharni 2009, np link).

… in a midair dance with a bright red bag, beautifully filmed (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

Slowly he circles her, dances with her without touching her, turning around himself. A shy courtship ballet of two lovers before the first kiss. Then they finally meet, touch each other. He snuggles up to them, two become one, from now on they move away in complete harmony. The romance of this wonderfully tender love scene is hard to escape – it binds the viewer emotionally, makes him feel with the protagonists: the two plastic bags (Source: Gobbin 2014, np link).

[T]his brief love affair is transitory because ‘the winds drifted us apart and I was alone again’ (Source: Palmer 2011, p.245).

[L]ater [he experiences] the sensation of being carried along in the circular currents of the water (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

He … is caught in a storm, experiences various descents and assents, learns to use, like Odysseus, the wind and water currents to his advantage (Source: Palmer 2011, p.245).

[The bag] 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: Herzog voicing the plastic bag in Rastogi 2011, np link)!

The film’s narration … concerns this bag’s journey through the world, a journey that is at first tangible and physical, a quest to be reunited with this woman, but eventually becomes metaphysical and philosophical, a journey to discover the purpose of this life, the purpose of the world through which the bag drifts, carried along by wind and currents. Over the course of this journey, the bag’s progress through the world becomes an obvious allegory for life itself: not knowing its intended purpose, not understanding its true place in the world, the bag tries to find happiness and struggles to divine its purpose in a world where it seems so inconsequential (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

When [it] reflects on metaphysics (‘Does my creator exist or did I create her in the mind?’), reflects the pain of being (‘Why are my moments of joy so short?’) or slightly wistfully thinks back to abandoned hopes and dreams (‘I wonder where these parts of me are now’), [he] takes on a clearly human perspective (Source: Gobbin 2014, np link).

Lost, lonely, without purpose, he is left to ask who he is and where he is going. He even has a brief encounter with his shadow, which leads him to ask, ‘Was that me?’ His crisis of faith is seemingly resolved when other tattered bags ‘preach about the Vortex,’ the paradise where he could be free and ‘born again.’ Reaching the Vortex, Plastic Bag, like all true heroes, has suffered trials and gained knowledge. He now experiences delight and wonder. Surrounded by sea monsters, he can move beyond fear and confrontation: ‘Over time, I came to like these monsters. Isn’t that one beautiful?’ But in the end, questions linger: ‘Did my maker exist or had I created her in my mind? Why were my moments of joy so brief?’ Plastic Bag soon realizes that the Pacific Vortex is not home and seeks escape (Source: Palmer 2011, p.245).

[Plastic bag] is … seeking the source of his origin. The bag is searching for ‘my Maker.’ He had a personal relationship with an entity that he conceived to be God or at least a demiurge. He believes he has been forsaken. He searches for reunification. Even in the depths of his despair and doubt, he is able to overcome the worldly utopian misguidance that is the pantheistic cult of the Vortex and hold true to his journey to return to The Creator (Source: Jardine & Livant 2010, np link)?

[U]ltimately he [is] unable to forget the Creator and decide[s] to leave paradise in the hope that he [will] be able to find her (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.75).

[I]n the final moments of the film, the bag wonders … why it has been unable to find others who had a use for it the way its first owner did, why it still hasn’t figured out the workings of the world in which it floats (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

A tragic ending – [the bag] discovers that the world has undergone a apocalypse and that all humans have disappeared. In a final moment of despair, it blows into a vortex of garbage in the Pacific Ocean (Source: Bhanoo 2010, np link).

He ends up permanently snagged on a coral reef, lamenting the external purgatory to which he’s condemned … (Source: Goodyear 2016, np link).

… [and] doomed to eternal suffering (Source: Gobbin 2014, np link).

As a metaphor for the human experience of the world, it is heartbreaking and strangely affecting (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

How can this not be a religious parable (Source: Jardine & Livant 2010, np link)?

Without using any human actors, save the obscurely seen ‘mother,’ Ramin Bahrani presents the life of a plastic bag … narrated by one Werner Herzog. Yes, that Werner Herzog (Source: Gallagher 2010, np link).

Plastic bags are essentially indestructible and end up getting blown into the ocean – but … (Source: Goodyear 2016, np link).

… [w]ith its combination of deep feeling and grim austerity [and] heavily accented voice infuses lines such as ‘I loved going in circles, in circles, in circles’ with absurdist humor and cosmic grandeur (Source: Hornaday 2010, np link).

Plastic bags are essentially indestructible and end up getting blown into the ocean – but Herzog’s musing narration in his distinct near-monotone[,] … (Source: Goodyear 2016, np link).

… [its] combination of deep feeling and grim austerity [plus his] heavily accented voice infuses lines such as ‘I loved going in circles, in circles, in circles’ with absurdist humor [,] cosmic grandeur … (Source: Hornaday 2010, np link).

… [and] a particularly surreal edge (Source: Goodyear 2016, np link).

Ultimately the bag makes it into places seldom seen by human eyes, with a combination of gravitas and wonder imbued by both Herzog’s diction and the music of Sigur Rós’ Kjartan Sveinsson (Source: Marshall 2019, np link).

What begins as a story about a talking piece of plastic ends up a deeply felt meditation on existence and one’s purpose in life (Source: Fox 2010, np link).

[It] questions the environmental impact of consumerism in a world that treats it like trash (Source: Bhanoo 2010, np link).

Unlike the life expectancy of humans, the plastic bag is immortal and destined to roam the earth forever, but what is he to do when life appears to have ended and all that remains are animals just as free as him (Source: Mobarak 2010, np link)?

The underlying story here is … the fact that petroleum-based plastic bags don’t really degrade – it takes between 500 and a thousand years for one of them to break down, and yet we throw them away without caring that they don’t really go ‘away’: they become part of our landscape, they strangle tortoises and choke birds and poison water in ways that can deform our hormones and lead to cancer (Source: Michael 2010, np link).

Did my maker exist or have I created her in my mind? Why was my moment of joy so brief? And yet, like a fool, I still have hope I will meet her again. If I do I will tell her just one thing: ‘I wish you had created me so that I could die‘ (Source: Herzog / Plastic Bag in Trent 2021, np link).

[That] final, haunting quote … tipped me over the edge emotionally (Source: Gallagher 2010, np link).

We can talk about sustainability issues, about plastic, about the earth, but the movie’s about something else, something more. … it’s about a journey (Source: Bahrani in Michael 2010, np link).

[T[he hero’s journey in Plastic Bag is as much exile (separation from the Great Mother) as it is quest. I can’t recall which acerbic Jungian writer once proposed a moratorium on the use of the word journey, but it was a futile call, since the hero’s journey seems to be that most persistent archetypal thread upon which we hang our own adventures, misadventures, and preoccupations. Our investment in this journey, so intimate and personal and so archetypal, carries an emotional impact far beyond its short running time (Source: Palmer 2011, p.243-4).

I conceived … ‘Plastic Bag’ with a dear friend Jenni Jenkins (who tragically passed away a year ago). She was working in media, sustainability and the environment and fostered these passions in me. She also educated me on food, as I was increasingly curious about what I was eating and where it was coming from, and she introduced me to Michael Pollan’s writing. Michael and I became email friends and he introduced me to George Naylor, a prominent figure in ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma.’ I lived with George on and off over the course of 6 months and learned everything that inspired the film (Source: Bahrani in Ebert 2013, np link).

Plastic Bag gives a bag a human voice … (Source: Goodyear 2016, np link).

… [which] adds a layer of humanity and existentialism to the film’s core environmental message (Source: Gui 2014, np link).

The sound of [German film producer Werner] Herzog’s voice is not without significance, which – in Bahrani’s intention – evokes the immortality of the Plastic Bag (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.74).

[It] brings, one might say, all the right baggage … [which] lends a gravitas to this film that allows nihilistic observations and big questions to be asked by Plastic Bag without the slightest sense of pretension (Source: Palmer 2011, p.244).

[In his] documentary oeuvre, … philosophical reflections and fundamental questions concerning human existence are often combined with deep concern for the environment (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.74).

We have heard this same voice asking similar questions in Herzog’s films … such … as La Soufriere (1977) and Lessons in Darkness (1992), … [and] the concluding shots of Aquirre, the Wrath of God (1972) (Source: Palmer 2011, p.244).

[His] voice therefore serves to contextualize and strengthen the ambiguous message of the film, but above all it lends seriousness to such a minor object as a plastic bag (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.74).

Bahrani originally planned to cast Alejandro Polanco, the wiry star of his 2007 film Chop Shop [as the voice of the bag]. Then his cinematographer suggested Herzog. ‘The film has an ironic humour that obviously he’s a master of,’ Bahrani says. ‘I liked his age, too. There’s just something about a plastic bag’s eternal life that is really emphasised by the weight of the voice of Werner Herzog’ (Source: Michael 2010, np link).

Herzog is in many ways a perfect choice to deliver the film’s narration, since his bleak worldview is such a natural fit for the bag’s pointless and aimless journey (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

[Film critic] Roger Ebert knew that I loved Werner [Herzog], and I emailed Roger and said, ‘Please, I would love Werner Herzog to be the voice of a piece of plastic.’ Roger hadn’t seen the film yet, but he said, ‘No problem,’ and 24 hours later, Herzog emailed me and said, ‘If Roger said I should do it I’m sure that I should do it.’ That’s a testament to how much respect I had, and certainly Herzog and so many people had, for Roger. I said, ‘Why don’t you watch it and make sure you want to do it?’ [laughs] And then, thank God, he said ‘yes’ (Source: Bahrani in Nakhnikian 2015, np link).

[Werner Herzog] is someone I’ve been admiring and loving as a filmmaker and a human being since I was a kid. I based a lot of how I work on how he works. I never worked in the industry. I just kind of did it on my own. For me, he’s one of the greatest filmmakers that ever lived, and I’m happy to say he’s now a mentor and a friend. I’ve learned so much and been so inspired by him (Source: Bahrani in Nakhnikian 2015, np link).

The film feels both fresh and familiar with a darker undercurrent than Albert Lamorisse’s Academy Award-winning The Red Balloon (1957) and with similar motifs (the dangerous journey, the loneliness, the despoiling of the environment) that structures Bill Mason’s Academy Award-nominated Paddle to the Sea (1966). In the guise of a child-like adventure, we, too, are sucked into a vortex of Plastic Bag and its probing of psychological, social, and even cosmic matters. This vortex is the perfect metaphor for our zeitgeist and for the political, corporate, environmental mess we have made (Source: Palmer 2011, p.243-4).

Seeing this film we were also reminded of [a] scene in Sam Mendes’s award-winning 1999 movie American Beauty – the film won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (for Kevin Spacey), Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography at the Academy Awards – where Wes Bentley’s loner misfit character Ricky Fitts has filmed a floating plastic bag, which he shows to his neighbor, Jane Burnham, played by Thora Birch. We’re wondering if Bahrani was moved by this particular scene and it led him to making Plastic Bag (Source: Michael 2010, np link).

Although a plastic bag already provided one of the emotional highlights in American Beauty (1999), it was ultimately about two people who come closer by looking at the flying carrier bag. … Bahrani, on the other hand, puts an end to anthropocentrism, with him the animated plastic bag is the focus alone. The people in the film can always be seen only blurred or without a face – and not by chance, mostly from undersight (Source: Gobbin 2014, np link).

[O]n its surface [this film] occasionally seems as simple as an expansion of American Beauty‘s famous video tape of a drifting bag. That’s an obvious but shallow comparison, in the end. The floating bag in American Beauty was about aesthetics, about finding the beauty even in prosaic man-made objects, in trash. Plastic Bag is about ideas — it finds beauty less in things than in the idea that life is aimless and pointless and ultimately incomprehensible, and that it can nevertheless be joyous, and fulfilling, and poignant. It’s about accepting the insignificance of a single life and at the same time exalting that life’s beauty and resilience in the face of an indifferent, alienating universe whose purpose we can only guess at lamely. It’s a film whose unassuming greatness lies in its discovery of profound ideas in the most unlikely of places (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

In Bahrani’s film, words work differently than images. While the main character’s story told in Herzog’s voice triggers the classic mechanism of identification, the images root the story of the plastic bag in materiality and open up a non-anthropocentric perspective. Therefore, in interpreting Plastic Bag, one must take into account the specific tension between the plot built with words and the visual layer that exposes materiality (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.75).

[A]t the level of verbal narration, [Plastic Bag] encourages us to take responsibility for plastic bags – monsters that we ourselves have created. However, focusing on the story itself would lock viewers into an anthropocentric optics and confirm their conviction that the plastic bag is incompatible with the environment, as well as in the tradition of binary thinking that has contributed to the ecological crisis. The film’s visual layer counteracts this, helping to break down the anthropocentrism built with words and giving the off-screen narrative a different meaning. The images confront us with the material dimension of reality: with the agency, vitality and relationality of the Plastic Bag. Their function is better seen when placed in a non-anthropocentric perspective and analyzed in the light of Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Timothy Morton’s dark ecology (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.77-8).

[The bag’s] persistent presence is a powerful reminder of the persistence of these toxic items that we throw away so freely. Linking it to an empathetic tale of love creates an emotional connection and embues it with sorrow. This gives indelible meaning to an act we do meaninglessly and allows us to reflect on the true consequences. The frequent juxtaposition of beautiful imagery of nature alongside a scraggly plastic bag says enough by itself. The narrator says the plastic bag loves its maker and wants to return to her. When we see it in nature we realise that we are the maker of this monstrosity and that it doesn’t belong here. The love story just makes it hit home (Source: Gillespie 2021a, np link).

The bag fundamentally misunderstands its true place in this world, believing itself to be more important than it is, and this idea is implicitly applied to humans as well: we give ourselves central roles in the dramas of the universe, but in all likelihood we’re as irrelevant to the real cosmic stories as this bag is to its ‘creator’ and the rest of the world. But what’s striking about this film is the streak of perverse hope and beauty that Bahrani finds in this seemingly dispiriting perspective. The bag, set adrift in a world whose scope dwarfs it, revels in the beauty all around it, and Bahrani’s camera does as well: even as Herzog’s voiceover insists that enjoying a beautiful sunset is not enough, the images belie this dismal philosophy, finding beauty and satisfaction everywhere within the world. The bag drifts through a world that seems destroyed and empty, dominated by ruined and abandoned houses, by seemingly closed factories and office buildings, by landfills and waters polluted with trash. But even in the midst of devastation and environmental catastrophe, there is beauty, both the pure beauty of nature – the white-hot glow of the sun, the verdant greens of meadows and trees – and the manufactured beauty of man’s constructions, which are beautiful almost in spite of themselves as seen through Bahrani’s lens (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

At no point in the film is there any political agenda voiced by the plastic bag. It simply is. While slightly anthropomorphized by Herzog, we are never bludgeoned over the head by the reality of what we are seeing. It almost seems too horrifying to be believed (Source: Gallagher 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).

It’s not just the voice-over that brings the bag to life; the cinematography plays a huge role. We get to see a blend of carefully framed long shots along with close-ups with a dreamy and soft depth of focus. The camera captures the plastic bag in such a way that it starts to feel like a living being, with gestures and movements that show intention. … The shots are long, they seem to be given time to breathe. Almost like giving the viewer time to reflect on the thought of this plastic bag being a real entity with thoughts and emotions; a psyche. As if it’s not just a piece of trash but something more. We also see sequences depicting to us the passage of time and the bag’s travels through various locations, giving a sense of His long, unending journey. Additionally, the film is mostly a montage around the bag, showing all the different places and surroundings he gets to witness. To witness is important here because that is a quality of the living. Due to the edit, the bag stays alive (Source: kritika 2024, np link).

The film’s direction by Ramin Bahrani is quite simple as it is largely shot from the perspective of this plastic bag in its close-ups and medium shots where a lot of it is shot on digital cameras. With wide shots to capture the many different locations and Bahrani doing a lot of his own editing in creating unique jump-cuts and cut-to-black for moments that play into the bag’s view of the world. … Cinematographer Michael Simmonds does brilliant work with the film‘s digital photography that captures a realist yet gritty approach to some of the close-ups of the bag as well as the beauty in some of the different locations in the film. Production designer Chad Keith and art director Adam Willis do excellent work with the look of the house that the bag lived early in the film as well as the disparate states it took in its journey. Sound designer Abigail Savage and sound supervisor Tom Efinger do amazing work with the sound to play into the different locations and atmosphere that adds to the bag‘s journey. The film’s music by Kjartan Sveinsson is fantastic for its mixture of ambient-based music and art-rock textures that play into the many moods that the bad would endure (Source: thevoid99 2016, np link).

In one of … buildings, Bahrani’s regular cameraman Michael Simmonds succeeds in a nice trick. We see how the plastic bag floats down from above in the direction of a puddle, but only notice when small waves form on the water that the camera does not look directly at the bag, but downwards at the crystal clear reflection of the bag in the water. Water plays a crucial role in this short film. When the plastic protagonist finally gives up the search for his former owner, he makes his way to the Pacific Vortex – a paradise legendary under plastic bags in the middle of the ocean, where millions of empty carrier bags and bottles meet. This wink with the ecological fence post is followed by underwater images and time-lapse scenes, and in an amusing visual association, Bahrani equates plastic bags with jellyfish by parallel assembly. Here, under water, the film really unfolds its power. The simple but effective piano accompaniment of Kjartan Sveinsson alternates between contemplative, sad and forward-pressing – her mood corresponds only in the second line with the pictures. It is determined much more by the voice-over comment of the plastic bag, spoken by Werner Herzog (Source: Gobbin 2014, np link).

What makes Plastic Bag so resonant is the light touch it brings to genuinely profound questions – environmental, existential, spiritual, and metaphysical – that each of us wrestles with in our more meditative, solitary, melancholy moods. Kjartan Sveinsson’s musical score (used only in the last two-thirds of the film) is a wonder. From the solo piano that, early on, captures the solitary world of the abandoned Plastic Bag to the rich, climactic orchestration that matches the fast motion and quick cutting of the Vortex scene, the music is haunting and nonintrusive. The narrative is alternately droll, reflective, hilarious, lyrical, quarrelsome, and questioning (Source: Palmer 2011, p.243-4).

Th[is] Plastic Bag … becomes an aesthetic object and creates various assemblages, for example with water or wind, which help it move, reach distant places and affect them. However, it is not presented by Bahrani as destructive, repulsive garbage, it does not arouse anger or guilt in the viewer, but rather curiosity or a kind of fascination with its strange beauty, agency and vitality. Even if it is difficult to free ourselves from negative associations (‘we have been taught to hate’ the plastic bag as an object indirectly responsible for the ecological crisis’), its dance in the wind or its loving union with another bag must have an affective effect on the recipient. And every affect, as Gay Hawkins reminds us, can be ‘an impulse to create new relationships: a motivation for a different ethics’ (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.81).

[Although] it was a human who wrote the script, delivered the monologue, recorded and edited the subsequent shots, arranging them into a linear story … and [it] does not aspire to offer a post-human experience[,] Plastic Bag can … modify the attitudes of its recipients. The film’s causative potential lies in its affective effect: enchanting the viewer with the beauty of the plastic bag encourages reflection on adopting new, post-humanist perspectives and changing cultural ways of conceptualizing disposables (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.81-2).

Are we in the middle of a short‑film revolution? Not long ago, if you wanted to catch short work by exciting new film-makers, you had to travel to a festival, hunt down a compilation on DVD, catch a charitable showing on TV or, if you were uncommonly lucky, before the main feature at the cinema. Now all you have to do, assuming you have internet access and a passing familiarity with video-hosting websites, is switch on your computer. The curious thing about short films is that, regardless of audience and financial incentive, people have continued to make them with great enthusiasm. This is in part because the short has come to be viewed as a practice space for student film-makers or a calling card to show that those involved are fit to make a ‘proper’ film, ie a feature. But shorts can be much more than exercises or glorified showreels; innovative, daring, thought-provoking things can be done in two minutes – or 12 or 22 – that simply wouldn’t work at feature length. The past decade has seen an explosion of video online. The rise of YouTube and more high-brow sharing sites such as Vimeo means that, now, the humble short has a mainstream, global audience. A film that strikes a chord can be watched by hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, who will offer feedback and support and perhpas recommend it to their friends. … From attention-grabbing promos to thoughtful documentaries, a new crop of directors is creating innovative and daring pictures that are cheap to make, easy to share, and finding an audience as never before. Here, we speak to those responsible [including Ramin Bahrani] for some of the best (Source: Fox 2010, np link).

Playful, poetic, shot through with equal doses of deadpan humour and spiritual longing, ‘Plastic Bag’ has become a hit on the Internet since appearing on YouTube and the Independent Television Service Web site a month ago (Source: Hornaday 2010, np link).

[I]t was [also] an extra on the DVD of Herzog’s My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done (Source: Howard 2010, np link).

In the end I was surprised at how poignant the film was as both a sympathetic life story and an eco–message without one compromising the other (Source: Kurosawa 2018, np link)!

Its funny, sad and ultimately carries a potent environmental message, but in a completely original way (Source: Holgersen 2013, np link).

It is a heavy subject – existential angst – and in the form of a plastic bag’s personification, definitely absurd (Source: Sondhi 2010, np link).

It’s strangely poetic while indeed being hard to watch on some level (Source: Shagrotten 2018, np link).

[T]his strangely beautiful and eerie film is at once humorous and dramatic, weird and realistic (Source: Gui 2014, np link).

It’s a wonderful and thought provoking reflection on purpose and mortality, and it still manages to be extremely funny (Source: Stafford 2018, np link).

[S]illy … surreal … extraordinary (Source: Doyle 2013, np link).

Ridiculous (Source: Nerissa 2016, np link).

The flight of the titular Plastic Bag is almost magical and his journey is equally engaging (Source: Dauphin 2013, np link).

[T]he film is a mesmerising experience (Source: Hovey 2017, np link).

[It’s a]mazingly shot to personify such a disposable inanimate object (Source: Prupsicle 2011, np link).

The cinematography is lovely and, more importantly, conveys the filmmakers’ message without resorting to preaching (there is exactly one statistic). You see the beauty of the natural world contrasted with human trash and the rusting hulks of derelict buildings (Source: Michael 2023, np link).

That is perhaps the film’s biggest achievement: It never becomes preachy or annoyingly unilateral (Source: Anon 2014, np link).

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).

[This film] is deeply and profoundly moving, the gradual way Bahrani weighs the tragedy of this bag – I cannot believe I just wrote that – making it a more engaging character, and its journey a more emotionally absorbing one, than most movies ever manage to muster (Source: Doyle 2013, 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).

Through Bahrani’s lens, the sight of a plastic bag being endlessly pecked and experiencing moments of blissful flight and excruciatingly dull stillness when the wind dies becomes a poetic view of life itself. Everything is sunny and wondrous at the onset of being, only for maturation and moving into solitary life to bring the hardship of feeling as if the world casually steals pieces of you. Worse, it has no reason to do so, no way to use those bits it strips from the flesh and soul (Source: Anon 2010, np link).

[T]his is actually incredible (Source: Sydney 2013, np link).

I absolutely loved this (Source: Stafford 2018, np link).

I’ll never see a plastic bag the same way again (Source: Shreffler 2011, np link).

[It] is so moving and brilliant, even spiritual (Source: Friedkin 2016, np link)

I never thought I’d feel so much emotion for a plastic bag (Source: Prupsicle 2011, np link).

I never thought I’d feel sad for a plastic bag (Source: LaszloK, 2011, np link).

My friends literally start sympathizing [with it] (Source: Yang 2017, np link)?

[I n]ever knew a short film about a plastic bag could bring me to the verge of tears (Source: @SaiaraMashiat 2025, np link).

This almost made me cry. :/ That just goes to show how brilliant it is, that it can evoke such emotion for a plastic bag. (and also how weird people are, that we fall for it) (Source: Escheria 2011, np link).

Plastic Bag made me cry (Source: Anon 2011, np link).

Yes I cried (Source: Captain Howdy 2013, np link).

I can’t believe I was crying over a fu*king plastic bag (Source: Iain 2016, np link).

[It] literally had me shaking, with tears in my eyes as I flew alongside the bag, and as I swam alongside it deep under the sea, to its eventual encounter with the ‘vortex’ (Source: Gallagher 2010, np link).

This is all of my despair about parting with inanimate objects, and desperation to let them know I love them, and appreciate them, that they did a good job, that we’ll see each other again (Source: Null 2016, np link).

If you’ve seen Toy Story 2 you’ve survived the tragic sequence where Jessie flashes back to playing with her former owner while Sarah McLachlan sings When She Loved Me. Then you understand the basic concept of Plastic Bag as well (Source: Captain Howdy 2013, np link).

As someone who recycles her garbage and thinks that’s good enough, this got me thinking about the drawer in my walk-in pantry stuffed full of plastic bags, especially after Herzog intoned ‘I wish you had created me so that I could die’ (Source: Shelly 2023, np link).

[T]he moral seems to be that plastic bags are immor[t]al because they each contain a consciousness that bonds to the first person they encounter, cursed to outlive the only love they’ll ever know. I guess I need to go apologize to the bag of plastic bags in my kitchen (Source: Talcott 2024, np link).

C’mon, … plastic bags … are NOT people … 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)!

I was … surprised by the half-joking, half-serious Freudian aspect of the maker/mother figure. It takes a lot to get away with that sort of thing these days but I think the film managed to touch on all its ideas – Oedpial complexes, man vs. nature, feelings of insignificance, the worry of mankind’s effect on the environment with all that trash – with such delicate poetry that it ends up being one of the more evocative films I’ve seen this year (Source: Jake 2010, np link).

Omg this is what katy perry meant [in Firework] when she sang ‘do you ever feel just like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind, wanting to start again’ (Source: alina 2018, np link)?

I imagine Mary Shelley writing this after a Katy-Perry-induced yassified epiphany (Source: matisbv 2024, np link).

Katy perry is shook (Source: Lucien 2016, np link).

….said no bag ever (Source: TroggyDoggy 2013, np link).

Stuuuuuuuupid (Source: Hartigan 2017, np link).

I did enjoy the part where the bag finds jellyfish and thinks they are the same as he/she/it is (Source: Horst_in_translation 2015, np link).

The bag’s recurring use of ‘monsters’ to address non-human creatures is reliably funny (Source: Sondhi 2010, np link).

This [trash] vortex is the perfect metaphor for our zeitgeist and for the political, corporate, environmental mess we have made (Source: Palmer 2011, p.243).

What makes Plastic Bag so resonant is the light touch it brings to genuinely profound questions – environmental, existential, spiritual, and metaphysical – that each of us wrestles with in our more meditative, solitary, melancholy moods (Source: Palmer 2011, p.243-246).

This 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).

Plastic Bag asserts what is first heard as heroic indomitability, but must ultimately be regarded as a deeply ironic line, ‘Nothing could destroy me’ (Source: Palmer 2011, pp.243-246 link).

I’m passionately anti-plastic, especially plastic bags and bottles, and as a nature lover it’s hard for me to watch, but it’s very moving at the same time, and Herzog’s narration is great, as usual (Source: Crom-dubh 2018, np link).

At times it felt like a parody so I understand the critics a bit (Source: Decayingteeth 2013, np link).

I’m sure there’s a joke in here somewhere about the acting ability of this plastic bag versus the abilities of some flesh and blood actors (Source: Kurosawa 2018, np link).

Awwww, it thinks it can talk (Source: BHCcorp 2017, np link).

‘Incredible acting by the plastic bag.’ – my film professor (Source: jowa9 2025, np link).

Probably the bag’s most significant on-screen work since American Beauty (Source: Horner 2021, np link).

The reclusive star of American Beauty makes its long awaited return to cinema (Source: Darin R 🎬 🎥 2024, np link).

American Beauty would have been so much better if the plastic bag had been played by Werner Herzog (Source: Christof 2020, np link).

Werner Herzog in his most daring role to date as a plastic bag (Source: Cinema Language 2021, np link).

From now on, a plastic bag will always have a German accent for me (Source: Madeddu 2010, np link).

Plus I could listen to Werner Herzog talk for years (Source: Stafford 2018, 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 (Source: Gui 2014, np link).

[His voice] could make anything entertaining (Source: @maryanngarcia3080 2025, np link).

Please get Werner Herzog to voice every object in existence, thank you very much (Source: Rorjak 2020, np link).

How? How did they get Werner to do this? … Good god is he weird (Source: @cunegonde4 2022, np link).

(Read in Werner Herzog’s voice) maybe [Plastic bag] isn’t that good. But I have much empathy with (inanimate) things. I wouldn’t even need to hear their thoughts to feel with them. Sometimes I have even more empathy with things than with humans. Is this a symptom of me being raised in a capitalist society? What would have happened if the Soviet Union never fell apart? Would a plastic bag’s lonesome dancing in the wind still make me feel sad (Source: Malina 2016, np link)?

Was really hoping I would finally hear Werner Herzog say the word ‘poop’ (Source: Scottirvine 2018, np link).

but the bag had poo on it. i’m sorry mr. werner herzog bag but you must be a fool if you want me to keep you when you’re poopy (Source: Caleb 2024, np link).

If some day u see me crying over my dog’s poo bag no u didn’t (Source: Wallace 2023, np link).

Thankfully for the viewer not the same bag was used throughout as otherwise the imagery of a bag smeared with dog faeces blowing around in a blue, sunny sky might not have the same artistic effect (Source: AdmitOne 2021, np link).

Nice try, Werner Herzog, but I am not going to empathize with a dog-shit covered single-use plastic bag! I won’t do it! I WON’T DO IT (Source: Harris 2019, np link)!

This would be a fun short film if it was just about a creepy, obsessed plastic bag. But casting Werner Herzog as the voice of the creepy, obsessed plastic bag is a stroke of genius that elevates it even further (Source: Christof 2020, np link).

The most interesting thing about it is probably Herzog’s narration (Source: Horst_in translation 2015, np link).

His voice-over works wonders and adds another layer to this short that without it, would probably come off as just a pretentious bore (Source: FarrierCollins 2022, np link).

[I]t’s a movie where a man often considered one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation plays a plastic bag, which means it’s inherently kinda funny (Source: Pincus 2017, np link).

[T]he natural existentialism his voice emits turns the comedic premise into something with genuine depth (Source: Abbot 2021, np link).

If you heard everything he says without the pictures and video, you would never expect that this is about a plastic bag (Source: Horst_in translation 2015, np link).

Plastic Bag is fantastic story regarding the search for meaning in one’s existence. Love, community, fleeting joy and loss are all touched upon (Source: Dauphin 2013, np link).

The plastic bag becomes a symbol for humanity. Like the plastic bag we can feel lost and abandoned to ourselves on this planet. The bag is looking for his maker, or in other words: God. Is there a God? Why did he create us? Why did he put us in such a hostile place (Source: Anon 2014, np link)?

It’s about past relationships, the longing for the ex-partner, but also the future and finding new love. … You don’t need to be religious to appreciate this film. I am not, myself. I also really liked the ending with the comment about mortality (Source: Horst_in_translation 2015, np link).

[T]he emotional punch comes from the poetry spoken by Herzog, and the incredible score by Kjartan Sveinsson of Sigur Ros (Source: Goodyear 2016, np link).

[T]he music from the Sigur Ros guy helps make it even more moving (Source: Shagrotten 2018, np link).

The film … is a success as education and entertainment (Source: Sondhi 2010, np link).

Cute and nice sentiment but cringey ass music (Source: AMELIA 2023, np link).

Aside from Werner Herzog, this has the emotional impact of a detergent commercial (Source: SpicySmith12 2023, np link).

This kinda sucks mega duper hard (Source: Willis787 2024, np link).

so fu*king stupid (Source: sammie 2023, np link).

Garbage (Source: bulzgis 2023, np link).

[T]hat lady got way more use of that plastic bag than I think most of us ever do (Source: doodlerman 2024, np link).

I can’t believe she kept reusing the same plastic bag (Source: @shanehof1022 2023, np link).

Who THE FU*K uses a plastic bag to carry dog food over to a dish (Source: Willis787 2024, np link).

[W]e do NOT use plastic bags that many times before throwing them out (Source: olivia 2025, np link).

I’d throw away the plastic bag if it narrated its life like Werner Herzog too (Source: Cable 2021, np link).

Not even Werner Herzog can make this movie not boring (Source: TheRoux 2023, np link).

He ate his own shoe once (Source: Gillespie 2021b, np link).

I wish instead of the suave, trying to be profound, voice of Herzog they had gotten someone with a more uncertain voice or more shy. It would’ve made this a better experience for me. I just don’t like this sort of thing I can’t quite put my finger on it (Source: anesa 2022, np link).

I think subtitles would have been more impactful than the voice (Source: AMELIA 2023, np link)

This would’ve been great without the sentimentality or narration. Not to say that Herzog’s voice was bad, but the writing… worn-out splat that spoils viewer interpretation (Source: Ibrahim 2018, np link).

This blew me away the first time I saw it. This time around, I found it a bit too long (Source: doodlerman 2024, np link).

This is 18 minutes of my life I will never get back, but required by school (Source: @kristinsaucier1099 2022, np link).

[I] was struggling to stay awake while viewing this in class (Source: brewster 2021, np link).

[A]t 16 minutes it’s twice as long as its concept can sustain itself (Source: Hakuin 2023, np link).

Part of me thinks it went on a bit too long but it was a fun ride so I can’t really complain (Source: Lucy 2017, np link).

I wish they took the ending a little further (Source: Craftymethod 2010, np link).

Is there a shorter version? I want to share it but I’m worried that people will be turned off by the 18 minutes or won’t watch it until the end (Source: Ellen 2015, np link).

You clearly didn’t get the profound double metaphor, for that bag is both every human’s own quest, and our collective destiny. Most people struggle to attain that 18 minute film’s worth of meaning through their entire lives (Source: @dgo4490 2023, np link).

I agree … it was a bit slow compared to common movies but that is just a plus according to me. Movies tend to have too little reflection and thought accompanied with them – but i suppose that has to do with money and the fact that most people do not have the patience or personal strength to watch a film like this and get something positive out of it (Source: Mujahed 2011, np link).

Look, we just saw the journey of a conscious plastic bag that can survive for 500 years that we have created, and I found myself in it. God gave us imagination, compassion and conscience. But in this age, it seems that we have completely lost those virtues (Source: NumaiHristos 2018, np link).

Even so, through, with a final line as profound as the one given here, you can’t help but place your own life into the trajectory of this bag and see where you’ve gone wrong, learning that perhaps it is time start over again, put all your stresses behind you, and just be (Source: Mobarak 2010, np link).

it’s a terrible film held back by some seriously awful narrative and formal choices. Feels like something a high school student would make in a media arts class. the score is one of the nastiest stock meme scores i’ve ever heard, you will legit probably find it available to purchase for 10.99 on every stock music site on the internet. holy moly this thing is genuinely garbage, lol i’m sure you’re thinking ‘chill dude it’s just a silly little short film bringing light to the great existential threat that our species has inflicted upon itself’ and to that i say, yeah I know it is, but i wanted a motherfu*king plastic bag opera, i wanted to see the fu*kin magnum opus of the simp w the camera from american beauty. I wanted this meme to get dark and to directly to confront my plastic using dumbass with my own extinction. I wanted some tarkovskian poetic cinema up in here and instead this knucklehead filmmaker gives me a 20 minute long meme (Source: FV Jr. 2021, np link).

[It s]tarts out feeling pretty strained and desperate to keep up the concept of characterizing the plastic bag, which means over-extending its use value. (Using a plastic bag for an ice pack? Why doesn’t she just fill up the dog food bowl and bring it out rather than using the bag to transfer it? This woman is a total alien to me.) Eventually, it settles into its own meditative flow, which isn’t half bad, except that I think it would all work a lot better without the narration, leaving it up to the audience to characterize the plastic. I think it certainly would have been a superior way of approaching the tension that Bahrani finds between the purely observational, enigmatic, transient beauty of ‘nature’ and the horrific implications of the plastic bag itself as just one small particle of a deeply destructive phenomenon. Finally, though, the melancholy crescendo of the incredibly bland narration and Kjartan Sveinsson’s equally bland score deflates positive feeling. It all comes off a little phoned in, and if the objective is to promote environmental awareness, well… (Source: Carsia 2022, np link).

I almost think it would be better to come into this film not knowing it had an underlying environmental message. I caught myself at times spotting themes rather than just enjoying the story. I tend to enjoy films with underlying messages to first be good stories with a hidden message that is a more an undefinable feeling rather than any particular lines of dialogue or moments. I think it also makes for a stronger message – one that is self-discovered rather than lectured (Source: Allen 2010, np link).

[T]his film is somewhat interesting as a mythic environmental satire, but it also simultaneously feels aggressively 2009 (Source: foxmuldered 2024, np link).

[I v]ery much appreciate the environmental message and parts of it are rather poetic but the narration, the music and lots of the shots are so damn corny, so ridiculous and the whole thing feels unoriginal despite being it’s own thing. I’m starting to think Ramin Bahrani might be a bit of a hack (Source: Skittlethorpe 2021, np link).

[E]very time i watch one of those annoying, up their own ar*e sundance-y poetic shorts, i’m going to think of this (Source: damosuzuki 2021, np link).

[But, i]s it any different than Wall-E, another film with a similar environmental message (Source: Sondhi 2010, np link)?

In one way it kind of struck me as this generation’s entirely worthy answer to the classic ‘The Red Balloon’ (Source: Holgersen 2013, np link).

[T]he only thing that upset young me … was the concept of inanimate objects as sentient beings, an idea that I think mainly took root thanks to a ‘94 Animaniacs cartoon about a rejected piece of fucking wrapping paper, entitled Gift of Gold (story by GUESS WHO, MR SPIELBERG HIMSELF). That Pixar short about umbrellas falling in love only made things worse. … [It p]airs well with Bag It (2010) and Gift of Gold (or Toy Story 3 or Brave Little Toaster, if you wanna go all the way with this thing) (Source: Katrina B 🐈 2021, np link).

It’s funny, I was only aware of this movie via osmosis because it was parodied on FAMILY GUY. … Bahrani’s plastic bag really is just a variation of the white feather in FORREST GUMP, signifying an ‘incredibly benevolent force that wants me to know there’s no reason to be afraid,’ resigned to the ‘natural’ chaos in which we are adrift (Source: Carsia 2022, np link).

The film itself is gorgeous in its visuals, lending that ‘Planet Earth’ documentary style to a work of fiction (Source: Mobarak 2010, np link).

It expresses love, sorrow, anger, fear, pain, bliss, exhaustion through motion, framing, lighting. Credit to Michael Simmond’s cinematography which is lovely. Also to whoever controlled the air currents or pulled the bag by wire – honestly I have no idea if it was controlled at all or how (Source: Kurosawa 2018, np link).

The only gripes I have are that in some scenes you could see they attached a wire to the bag to control it, and I didn’t think the score fit tonally with some scenes (Source: Johnson 2021, np link).

I can’t take this seriously because all i can think about is some guy running around with a camera, filming literal garbage (Source: Rebekah 2018, np link).

I remember watching this in a film class several years ago and thinking how elegant the premise was, but how difficult the execution could prove to be – shooting hours of plastic bag footage hoping to hit the right spots in the bag, the right snatches of daylight, etc. It’s brilliant in both its simple premise and in, what I’m sure was, its arduous editing (Source: Kim 2020, np link).

We all need to watch Plastic Bag, listen to what Werner Herzog is saying, and we need to remember – this is a fun little film, but the message here is not funny: we’ve got to figure out better ways to carry things around from one place to another. Plastic bags are a drag (Source: Michael 2010, np link).

[So] reuse your stuff, folks, and remember your short life is valuable. (Source: Katrina B 🐈 2021, np link).

hope capitalism ends soon before all my favorite ecosystems collapse (Source: squambus 2021, 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: Vishnevetsky 2010, np link)?

Giving the Bag a voice allows us to see plastic waste as something more than just a sinister entity responsible for environmental destruction that must be eliminated. Among the procedures that modify the view of the plastic bag, it is also significant that the Plastic Bag, experiencing dilemmas, strikingly resembles the monster of Doctor Frankenstein from Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel. This trope seems particularly interesting when compared with the interpretation by Bruno Latour, who in his essay Love Your Monsters pointed out an aspect most often omitted in popular interpretations of the novel: the creature became a monster not when it came to life in Frankenstein’s laboratory, but only when it was deprived of love and rejected. The same applies to the plastic bag: it too becomes toxic waste not at the moment of its creation, but through a lack of proper care and abandonment, which forces it to wander the world. Such an interpretation complicates the essentialist assumption that disposable plastic bags are inherently evil. The constantly expressed longing for the Creator can be interpreted as an appeal to take care of plastic bags. While the dominant messages emphasize the necessity (and assume the possibility) of completely eliminating plastic bags, the film at the level of linguistic narration seems to convey a different message: it is not so much the use of plastic bags that is unethical, but their irresponsible disposal. The director’s decision to call the user of the Plastic Bag the creator, and to omit the producers of plastic bags and the system that sustains this production and manages waste, seems controversial, however, because it may lead to the erroneous conclusion that only individual consumers are responsible for environmental degradation (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.75-6).

It is [also] difficult to speak on behalf of things without imposing a human perspective. The story of the Plastic Bag is therefore not so much a posthumanist story about itself, but an anthropocentric story about man and his duties. Another issue, emphasized in her interpretation by Pamela Mackenzie, also seems problematic. The story of the Bag revolves around the desire to find the Creator, and in this way sustains the myth of the meaning of man and the belief that as a species we have managed to create an indestructible substance, thereby transcending our own mortality. Meanwhile, disposable plastic bags are not immortal: although they are not biodegradable, they are photodegradable. It is also known that some organisms can feed on plastic – this applies to certain species of fungi (Pestalotiopsis microspora) or the larvae of some insects (Plodia interpunctella or Galleria mellonella). The ‘arrogant claims to eternity’ that people as creators of plastic bags make are therefore in no way justified (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.76-7).

Based on the assumption that no (human or more-than-human) actor ever acts alone, [philosopher Jane] Bennett defines an assemblage as an emergent set of diverse (human and more-than-human) entities. The properties of an assemblage cannot be reduced to the sum of the agency of its elements, because their relations create new, variable, and not fully predictable effects. Vital Materialism, breaking with the Western tendency to perceive things as inanimate and passive entities, also shapes a posthumanist ethics that assumes a more responsible establishment of relations with the world and the more-than-humans inhabiting it (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.78).

A truly ecological, environmentally friendly attitude will therefore be characterized by openness to such dark, sometimes disturbing, but inevitable connections. Noticing them, although at first it may be depressing, will ultimately allow us to ‘tune in’ to the complex, changing reality, helping us find new forms of coexistence with the world. Left to our own devices and lost, plastic bags can (and will) create more hybrid connections, causing monstrous and unpredictable consequences. Therefore, we should actively observe the networks of relations they create and remain ‘with the dying world’, observing the birth of a ‘new monstrosity’ in which – if only we get rid of fear and disgust – we will be able to find a place for ourselves, in equal ranks with other-than-human beings … [This may] potentially also result in the emergence of more ecological ways of production and consumption (Source: Mieczkowska 2022, p.82).

[I] watched this bc a phil prof i had in college did a podcast episode where he referenced this in advancing the notion that humanity’s longest lasting relics will not be our art or culture or architecture, but our waste. what rituals will be invented and ascribed upon us to explain the heaps upon heaps of plastic left behind when everything else rots (Source: L 2024, np link).

I can’t believe I pay my university teachers to show me movies like this. I might have liked it when I was 5, but I’m not 5 anymore. I wasted my time watching it and I’m going to waste my time writing an exercise on it. It’s useless (Source: sara 2024, np link).

i would have liked this more if i didn’t have to write an essay on it (Source: chelsea 𝜗

I came here because I’m also writing a documentary script about bags and I was looking for info about plastic bags. This is such a masterpiece (Source: @jysiow1975 2023, np link)!!

If you liked [Plastic Bag]… Check out The Majestic Plastic Bag, an eerily similar film voiced by Jeremy Irons, which cropped up online last month. Coincidence (Source: Fox 2010, np link).

Academy Awards winner Jeremy Irons, Heal the Bay’s ‘mockumentary’ video shows the stark reality of California’s plastic bag pollution situation. Heal the Bay, alongside a coalition of environmental and public health experts, pushed the State of California to pass a ban on single-use plastic bags: Prop 67 passed on Nov 8, 2017. But this plastic waste reduction legislation is only the beginning. Heal the Bay is on a mission to ban all single-use plastic (Source: Heal the Bay 2010, np link).

All in all, a great success that makes me curious about Bahrani’s new projects (Source: Horst_in_translation 2015, np link).