Container for water: useful. Potential for ecological degradation: high. Metaphor for cultural decline: true.
Very few individual words, taken out of context, can instantly evoke a piece of creative enterprise. Plastics, for good or bad, is one of them.
I’m referring, of course, to the legendary scene from Mike Nichols 1967 film “The Graduate“. In it the young protagonist listens to an older businessman share his personal view about how to achieve success with one singular word. You can watch the scene right here.
That culturally indelible moment has deep metaphoric resonance to this day, not least because plastics may be part of the accelerating degradation of life on earth. Every day we read stories about plastics infiltrating the biosphere, showing up in the food chain, even influencing the chemistry of our own bodies. Not only are micro plastic particles getting into everything, but also the chemicals that make plastics are also getting into everything. And let’s not forget that at the base of that chemical origin story we find petroleum, the nemesis of responsible climate stewardship. In other words, plastics are no joke, and despite that ironically famous scene from The Graduate, they most certainly are not the key to success for life on Earth.
But in a case where the author (that’s me) is fully aware he has buried the lead, I’m going to pivot sharply and declare that this essay is actually not about plastics, per se. This essay concerns the metaphor of plastics in terms of modern media.
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I love movies. To me they are one of the primary food groups. (Let’s see: there’s air…water…pizza….books....movies….yep! That about does it.) As a movie fan, I’m an avid student of how the medium has changed since its earliest days when it printed images on celluloid. Back then a movie required a hot lamp to shine light through a long skein of moving film, casting shadows on a reflective screen. Very quickly the craft of making and presenting movies evolved. Lighting, cameras, even the development of a vernacular grammar about how movies communicate all contributed to an evolving art form. Part of that process included the advent of special effects, starting with clever practical sight gags done in front of the camera. Another part of that process involved different ways to move a camera through a scene, or illuminate a shot so that it didn’t look like a stage play. In short, movies prompted creative people to invent new methods for telling stories. Audiences knew that a giant, angry gorilla had not, in fact, climbed up the Empire State Building, but a willing suspension of disbelief was the whole point. People went to the movies to see things we knew were not real, from gigantic gorillas to spaceships, sports dramas to star crossed lovers against the world, and more.
As happens in all industries, advances in technique and technology changed the state of the art over time. New ways of doing things transformed what’s possible. 2001: A Space Odyssey looked tremendous in its day, but its grandest outer space scenes pale compared to even ordinary shots done for episodic television today. These days when you flop in front of your TV, you don’t give these kinds of shots a moment’s thought.
The pressures to make a buck have always and inevitably been the wolf at the movie producer’s door. To be clear, producers aren’t alone in their interest to make money. Screen writers, directors, actors and production designers also want to get paid, along with everyone else on the crew. The difference, generally speaking, is that craft professions—the “makers”—start their days as artists first. Producers, alternatively were born to make bank. That means if something can be done less expensively, it often is. And that leads us back…to plastics.
Just about any show or movie you watch these days, from Brobdingnagian tentpole productions like House of the Dragon, to character driven dramas like The Diplomat, have turned to computer generated sets for seemingly ordinary scenes. So many things are shot on various kinds of virtual sets that actors and directors less frequently get to fully steep in a sense of place. That doesn’t mean modern creative teams can’t do good work; they clearly can. But over time, I think there’s something eroded in the foundations of culture every time a prop or a throne room gets inserted electronically by work done in a quiet computer lab isolated from the living, breathing crew.
I recognize there are grounds for immediate protest here. Obviously there were no dinosaurs walking next to the actors in Jurassic Park. There was no jump to lightspeed with elongated stars shining through the forward screens of the Millennium Falcon. It’s arguable that the modern use of artificial everything is simply a continuation of a trend that started long, long ago. My concerns here are not so much about the growth in technical capabilities, but rather the lack of awareness about what the implications are when artificial production aspects begin to dominate the creative process rather than simply dress the creative process.
It’s getting harder to tell what’s what every year. In 2024 I can sometimes tell where a car crash or flock of birds or crowd of extras have been artificially placed in a shot. I’m aware because I work in this business and I recognize the “tells”—thin halos of lighting imperfections around hairlines, geometry that looks ever so slightly off, odd shadows. But to be clear, most of the time I can’t tell at all. The technology and the artists who use it are good enough that oftentimes it’s tough to tell if a scene was shot on set, on location, or in the nowhere void of a CGI volume.
As these technologies get better, they will take over more and more of the screen. And as everybody knows, as soon as artificial intelligence evolves a few more generations, they will replace many actor roles as well. Then — don’t roll your eyes—it won’t be too long before artificially generated scripts begin to filter in to the media landscape. Think of it: synthetically scripted productions, created with realistic looking AI actors, captured on sets that don’t exist in the real world anywhere. Think that’s far off? Nope. Consider this real world example. There were real, human writers (at least), but you can see where this is all going.
We’re dealing with plastic media. Just like plastic bottles, toys, automotive dashboards, and a million other things, these are all artificial, effectively lifeless creations, and they pollute the cultural environment. That doesn’t take away from the fact that they were invented by expert, perhaps even superb media wizards who could cook up new substances in a lab. It just sidesteps the same question as what we should do about plastics entering the ecosystem. In much the same way as physical products have unintended consequences, one has to ponder how plastic media may be poisoning the creative ecosystem. The less we as creators actually exist in real spaces, even if we are creating those spaces in our own imaginations, the more we lose our connection to those real spaces.
I also chafe at the financial pressures inherent to this trend. In the short term everyone saves money, makes money, floods the marketplace. In the not very long term, once can easily imagine a marketplace flooded with flotsam, infinite mediocre supply chasing finite, unenthusiastic demand.
I don’t want to walk among artificially generated Redwood trees. I want to walk among actual redwood trees. I don’t want to just get the idea of sun on my shoulders while walking amid ancient Greek ruins on a Mediterranean island. I actually want to smell the salt water and feel the grit of ancient sands on my feet. The more I start to feel that real-world, human aspects of creative work are becoming secondary considerations, the more I feel that we are all in the process of being melted down and molded in to useless bits of plastic. Like recycled plastic bottles, we may be able to contain the contents of story, or sound, or whatever is being presented, but in the process, we may be losing ourselves to irrelevant content without soul or feeling.
If that becomes the norm, the real question for all of us will soon be, “How will we be able to tell the difference about what really matters if we all just accept artificial worlds as real enough?”