In cinema, does plastic really have a dream plastic?

In cinema, plastic seems to have no history. From the end of the 1950s, it spread quietly in indoor environments, discreetly inviting itself into kitchens, furniture, clothing, utensils of daily life. Filmmakers and screenwriters did not immediately become aware of the arrival of this new material in post-war industrial societies, at best they made it a purely decorative element, if not a guarantee of modernity. It is therefore as an accessory that something of the plastic undeniably marks the “pop” aesthetics of the 1960s, dressing them with its ideal curvatures and its colored transparencies. Little by little, it becomes a fetish element, as in Barbarella (1968), Roger Vadim’s intergalactic pochade, where the adventurer played by Jane Fonda wears extravagant plastic breastplates molding her silhouette.

Only rare directors, the most critical of consumer society, take a real look at it and start playing with it. Jacques Tati is one of the first to make fun of it, placing it among the vain trinkets that came to encumber France with the “glorious thirty”. In My uncle (1958), his character of Monsieur Hulot, a gentle awkward dreamer, is placed in the Plastac factory, which manufactures pipes. A pitiful supervisor of a production unit, he allows kilometers of red tubing to flow out, as if laid with a shovel by a machine that has become uncontrollable. No doubt: for Tati, plastic is a kind of “faecal” material for advanced productivism.

Universal paste

Ten years later, the Italian Marco Ferreri, a great Rabelaisian satirist, takes things from an even more absurd angle. In Break-up, eroticism and red balloons (1968), Marcello Mastroianni plays the role of a chocolate factory manager who is derailed by a stupid piece of elastomer: an inflatable balloon which he wonders how much air to blow into it before it bursts . This question takes on delirious proportions, so much so that this promotional object, in itself useless, seems to contain all the nothingness of its condition. According to Ferreri, the new moldable and adaptable materials like plastic, which are used for everything and above all for nothing, inaugurate, for modern man, the era of metaphysical emptiness.

According to Marco Ferreri, the new materials that are used for everything and above all for nothing, inaugurate, for modern man, the era of metaphysical emptiness.

If the cinema has not often put plastic into a story, it remains a good observatory to measure the extent to which perceptions of the material have evolved, from the jubilant promise of a universal paste capable of reproducing objects ad infinitum. , signifying the demiurgic power of man over matter, up to the current saturation of his planetary waste. This involves considering two emblematic films, nearly sixty years apart, and observing the shift from one to the other that has taken place.

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