The problem with descendants of the inventor of the world’s first plastic, #Bakelite, bankrolling a film about the paterfamilias is that a critical distance is unlikely to be achieved. That is precisely what is wrong with John Maher’s All Things Bakelite: The Age of Plastic, an otherwise entertaining, made-for-TV (59 minutes format) documentary about Belgian born American chemist Leo Baekeland, who invented Bakelite in 1907.
Emigration
Baekeland’s story undoubtedly deserves attention; he is a giant among the inventors of his time, the equal of far better-known contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. And Maher takes a professional and smooth drama-documentary approach to his subject, with sequences on the stubborn and curious little boy, always asking questions as he grows up in Ghent, studies chemistry at university, and marries his professor’s daughter, Celine.
Feeling stifled by the expectations of his father-in-law, the young Leo emigrates to America and is taken on as a chemist by a manufacturer of photographic paper. A financial and health crisis that lays him flat on his back gives him the pause to understand that he needs to concentrate his energies on one subject if he hopes to make something of his life. He chooses a better, faster way to develop film and Velox photographic print paper is born, which when sold to George Eastman’s #Kodak Corporation sets up Leo financially.
It is this freedom that allows him to address the pressing industrial issue of the day – coming up with a reliable synthetic alternative to organic compounds or rubber as an electrical insulating material.
Baekeland’s story undoubtedly deserves attention
With gusto
Maher takes to the chemistry and chronology of this period with gusto, introducing a host of top chemists to explain processes and setbacks in finding better ways to secure copper wires than #Shellac – an organic compound made from resinous secretions from the Asian lac bug. Entertaining archive footage, musical interludes and cartoon capers are added to the dramatised sections of Leo wandering around his laboratory in Yonkers, New York, or scribbling in his diary.
The film is a rollicking tale with narrative by one of Leo’s great-grandson’s (Hugh Karraker, also the film’s executive producer) and voiceovers in a decidedly dodgy Belgian accent from Leo’s own diary entries.
Leo – and many others – is already experimenting with creating an artificial resin from phenol (derived from coal tar) and formaldehyde (a gas derived from wood). It is a process beset by problems of run-away reactions and erratic results. But Leo is nothing if not stubborn and he keeps running experiments before finally realising that the secret lies in using a vulcanizer – a heat and pressure barrel – to create the first step of the process before a more controlled second stage to come up with a product that can be ground down to a powder and then formed into any shape one wishes with the application of a cast and more heat and pressure.
Bakelite is born and Leo beats an English rival to patenting his process by a day.
Maher takes to the chemistry and chronology of this period with gusto
The birth of the monster
This is all thrilling stuff, and the atmosphere of early 20th century industrial rivalry, the patent court cases, the scaling up of industrial production, the birth of industrial design, and sheer breadth of products that can be made out of Bakelite (telephones, distributor caps, radio bodies, fans, cameras etc etc) is exciting and fascinating.
But the film is all an uncritical glorification of a man whose legacy is a product that does not bio-degrade and has given birth to the hydra-headed monster of plastic that is killing the planet today.
All the voices in this film are basically champions of plastic – an elegant professor of art and design from New York’s Pratt Institute, Katarina Posch, purrs that Bakelite is «the soul of America»; Burk Wagner, a research chemist, calls plastic the «worst and finest expression of humankind» and only in the last 10 minutes does the film introduce some attempt at addressing the perilous environmental consequences of Leo’s invention, through a song with lyrics that include: «It won’t decompose, where the hell will it go? I may be wrong, I may be right, but this whole mess got started with old Bakelite».
But bring on the good chemist to defend the synthetic substance, with Wagner intoning that the problem is a «human, not plastic failing».
The film ends with the good services of Prof. Posch, telling us that «plastic is the material of dreams» – yes, perhaps if you are the great grandchildren of Leo Baekeland, still enjoying the fruits of the vast family trust funds to pursue what are described as «largely artistic lives».
But for those of us despairing as #climate change# begins to run riot and pollution strangles the planet – while rich billionaires indulge their useless egoistic yearnings in space – this is not really a film for these times.
