Plastic is Shrinking America’s Dicks - Book and Film Globe

Mass audiences of film and television shows seem constitutionally incapable of understanding systemic problems. In the face of a deep-pocketed and politically entrenched petrochemical industry, the numerous documentaries about Rise St. James and Louisiana’s Cancer Alley (from Story of Stuff, from Mutual Aid Media, from DOC NYC documentarians) have had little discernible effect on the constant production of toxins that are poisoning that region. If, in fighting the pervasive plastic production and use that is killing Americans and strangling the planet, America doesn’t care about the descendants of enslaved people who, freed from plantations are being poisoned by petrochemical plants, what do they care about?

The Plastic Detox★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Josh Murphy and Louie Psihoyos
Written by: Mark Monroe
Running time: 92 mins

The answer that — deliberately shockingly — directors Josh Murphy and Louie Psihoyos came up with for Netflix’ The Plastic Detox was: “dicks” and “babies.” As well as the macro harms to our environment (clogging up the oceans and killing turtles), plastic contributes to cancer, heart attacks, strokes, obesity, neurological disorders like ADD and autism as well as infertility. This latter is caused mostly by the endocrine disruptors that are found in plastics we use everyday which find their way into all  of our bodies, then into reproductive systems. In those systems, as well as causing a precipitous drop in sperm counts (a drop in 50% over 50 years), they are also causing a significant reduction in penis sizes.

Expert Dr. Shanna Swan, who is at the heart of this documentary, explains the scientific reason for America’s new genital epidemic  but, in short [sic], endocrine disruptors mess up fetal development so the whole genital region spends less time growing in utero, thus growing less. Swan, now 90, has been trying to tell the world this for decades but no one has listened — so, she says, this is why she’s going public in this way. During the clip of Swan on the Joe Rogan Show displayed in the documentary he says, in wonder, “you’re the Paul Revere of tiny scrotums and taints.”

There are essentially three films in one here. There’s a feel-good reality TV show where six couples who are having trouble conceiving — possibly because of the plastic intake — are counseled by Swan. They try to raise their sperm count and improve their fertility by removing plastic from their lives. I won’t spoil the show by telling you whether any become pregnant but, as you can tell, a statistical sample of six is totally inadequate to be of any scientific significance. It’s just for the babies. In this section of the documentary, the couples talk a lot about “choice” and the fact that the profusion of plastic making them infertile is taking away their choice. This is a rhetorical choice by the directors to try and generate affect and effect: maybe the audience will pay attention, after all, Americans love choice, dicks, and babies.

The second film intercut into The Plastic Detox is a quick overview of the system of poison for profit in Cancer Alley and the environmental scandal that Sharon Lavigne has been fighting to reveal through her grassroots activism at Rise St. James (i.e. St. James parish). Swan, a reproductive epidemiologist who is Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is understandably not involved in this part of the film. Maybe because Lavigne has been so much the figurehead of the movement and because so much of the rest of the film revolves around an older female protagonist, the filmmakers interview Reverend Lennox Yearwood Jr. at length about the ongoing petrochemical disaster stretching from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. If you don’t know about Cancer Alley, shame on you, this will teach you the basics.

The third part of the film is a different step-back contextualization of the struggle for Green Chemistry and an understanding of the harms that chemicals can cause in our lives. As an epidemiologist, Swan can introduce us to that problem. Though in broader strokes it dovetails to some extent with the problems of chemical production that we see in St. James, she is more concerned with the chemistry and its social effects (cancer, infertility, micropenises). This is where Science (capital S) is mobilized in support of her arguments and we have lots of Scientists’ testimony. Most notable of these is John Warner who has established the field of Green Chemistry which tries to make sure that the scientists who are developing new compounds might have a sense of how they might harm humans. Also, his child died tragically young of a rare syndrome at a time when Warner was working on regular toxic materials in his lab — could the death have been chemical-related?

The reason that Warner needed to set up this field of study is that research has demonstrated lots of harm from known substances, but there are suggestions that more harm could be caused by the billions of tons of thousands of chemicals we are simply not testing. Only a tiny proportion of chemicals are tested, many of them are only tested by the manufacturers, and the lies of petrochemical companies about its recyclability mean they have little credibility.

It’s difficult to weigh the evidence in a movie like this — and, indeed, this movie is more about making impact (babies! dicks!) than making arguments. However, the evidence has been made clear for a year after a year decade after decade that not only is plastic bad for the environment as a whole and bad for people near the manufacturing plants — it’s bad for us all. Also, since plastic production is increasing year on year, plastic does not degrade and is not being recycled the problem will get worse and worse if we don’t do anything. We are drowning in it.

Maybe it will move the needle, but if it achieves anything, The Plastic Detox lifts the veil on quite how pervasive plastic is in our lives every day and how we can reduce that as consumers. Maybe too it explains how even a tiny presence of endocrine disruptors can cause a threat to human fertility. But the astroturf opposition is already out — the paid-for pro-plastic faux-grassroots pumping out lies about how plastic is amazing and good and healthy. In the end, The Plastic Detox is just one more movie facing up to a trillion dollar business and if we can’t stop global petrochemicals from murdering Americans in Louisiana, this show will not complete that job.