Ruined Nature

Werner Boote's documentary Plastic Planet is a very visually charged film. The bias of the director comes through in many ways, from who he interviews to what he says about plastic, but I think the strongest way it shows itself it through a visual tug on the viewer's emotion. He begins his film with a wide spanning view of the mountains, a beautiful shot of nature at its purest. As this shot pans out, Boote's voice plays in the background, saying that no nature is left raw, no nature is left untouched by plastic. Throughout the film this is his strategy. He shoots long shots of what would be gorgeous deserts or beaches, but appear more to be rubbish dumps. They are covered in plastic garbage. There is nobody that does not like to look at a beautiful nature shot, and when it is covered in plastic bags and bottles, just about anyone will become angry or sad. 

 Another way in which Boote plays the viewer's emotions is with visually caused fear. He shows plastic molecules as little, angry faces. People drink from plastic bottles, and these mean little faces invade the drinker's body and invade the cell system. Now if there is anything that people don't like to think about, it is a parasite invading their body. Boote displays the plastic as an evil little parasite just waiting to hop into someone's mouth and take a ride in their bloodstream.

Although this film is biased in many ways, and the director influences the viewer using more than just this one strategy, I found this one particularly interesting. I am a very visually centered person, so this technique was very effective on me. I realized that it didn't matter what was being said in the film, there could have been constant voice overs stating dramatic statistics about how plastic is going to save the world, about how it is humanity's salvation, and still I would have come out of the film hating it. As a lover of nature, this was a very powerful film for me, and I am now truly quite frightened when I actually look around with an opened pair of eyes and really see how much plastic there is everywhere.