Just One Word: Plastics

Arguably the most resonant moment in any American movie of the past thirty years occurs in the opening scene of The Graduate, when a Babbittish family friend confronts the film's eponymous hero and offers him unsolicited advice about his postcollegiate career. "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word," he intones portentiously: "plastics." Audiences howled and the line instantly passed into the folklore of late-twentieth-century America. With its connotations of the imitative, the shoddy, the unnatural, and the inauthentic, this single word seemed to condense all the disquiets that were coursing through American culture in 1968, the year of the film's release. And yet, of course, at the very moment that audiences were hooting at this synecdoche for contemporary culture, they were also using more and more of the stuff itself, so much so that in its omnipresence plastic had paradoxically become nearly invisible. Their infants were swaddled in polyvinyl chloride pants to keep diapers from leaking, their older schoolchildren sat at imitation wooden desks of melamine-phenolic laminate, and they themselves dressed in polyester-blends. At home vegetables maintained crispness in polystyrene drawers, while elsewhere in the refrigerator styrofoam containers sheltered eggs and milk was stored in polyethylene bottles. After meal preparation, commonly on a Formica surface and perhaps in a tetrafluoroethylene Teflon saucepan, leftovers could be stored in a Tupperware container or discarded into a polypropylene garbage can. Such an inventory of plastic's applications was almost infinitely extendible. By 1979 more plastic than steel was being produced in the United States, and this measure only gauged weight; a volume measurement would have made plastic's margin exponentially greater. Practically no branch of human activity escaped plastic's grasp, and it is impossible to overestimate the degree to which it has transformed the material structure of everyday life in the 125 years since its first contrivance. In American Plastics: A Cultural History Jeffrey L. Meikle undertakes to chart this transformation and, as his subtitle indicates, to explore its effects on culture and consciousness. He makes a convincing case that the half-century