Plastic Bag

Ramin Bahrani’s Plastic Bag is a film concerned with the ways everyday objects can become mirrors to human beings' own fight for meaning in the world. Bahrani makes his various points by placing the audience in the mind of a plastic bag, as voiced by director Werner Herzog, as it attempts to find its way back to its ‘maker’ – a faceless woman who had inadvertently become the bag’s mother/creator after picking it up in a department store.

Plastic Bag is a very thoughtful film, focused mostly on the natural rhythms of the world through which the bag passes. Sound and shot design both reflect this simplicity. An apocalyptic event is referenced halfway through the film, but throughout we have heard no human voices, only the bag’s voice, poetic and introspective. The camera seems to follow a simple choreography, gently floating and following the bag with the wind, and emphasizing the brief moments of excitement in between, as when the bag reaches the ‘vortex’ – the North Pacific Garbage Patch – to unite with its fellow travellers.

The film puts the audience into a peaceful state, not at all hysterical, which is a surprise considering the troubling subject matter. The director skilfully avoids making an environmental film, while showing us the heart of the problem with our wasteful society. By taking such care to portray a throwaway item like a plastic bag, Bahrani opens up a kind of empathy for the natural world, and for items like the bag, who have been detached from that world, and transformed into trash. 

Plastic Bag is also unexpectedly emotional. The bag’s search for its lost ‘maker’ – a woman who apparently barely registers the bag’s existence (as is normal) – becomes poignant as the bag realises the futility of its own existence, and accepts its place as an observer of the natural world. Bahrani seems to be suggesting that although objects and animals will reclaim the earth eventually, it will, in the end, be a sad victory.