“Out of Plain Sight” Reckons With Choices that Cannot Be Undone
Out of Plain Sight offers a haunting image in the first few minutes of the documentary. It’s difficult to figure out what exactly has been captured by the camera, but it’s an object that has been dumped into the ocean. A barrel, rusted and crusty, sits somewhere along the seafloor off the coast of Catalina Island in Southern California. Out of Plain Sight, co-directed by Daniel Straub and Pulitzer Prize finalist Rosanna Xia, is an exposé on a monumental scale of an environmental disaster that was decades in the making, with repercussions that will last for generations to come.
During and after World War II, DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was touted as a miracle pesticide. It was widely sprayed to control insects and stop the diseases they carried, like malaria and typhus. The World Health Organization relied heavily on the supposed miracle of DDT in their anti-malaria campaign in the ’50s and ’60s. Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller, who discovered DDT’s effect on insects, won the Nobel Prize. In the years after its heyday, Rachel Carson emerged as a voice for the environment. Her book, Silent Spring, chronicled the impact DDT had on the environment. Now, six decades later, Rosanna Xia is another voice that is critical of DDT’s lingering effects. In an article for the Los Angeles Times, Xia writes about that discarded barrel off the coast of Southern California. It wasn’t just one barrel, though. Half a million barrels of toxic waste are in that area of the ocean right now. The contents of the barrels are leaching into the water and having a profound and devastating effect on the wildlife and the world as we know it.
Courtesy of Out of Plain Sight
“Man is a part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself,” Rachel Carson says in a clip of archival footage shown in Out of Plain Sight. The film’s title comes from the saying, “out of sight, out of mind.” These barrels were dumped because that solved the problem in the most basic sense. DDT was banned, so it needed to be disposed of. It wasn’t done as a shady, under-the-table practice, but that also doesn’t mean this was the right way to fix the problem that humans created. In fact, Out of Plain Sight emphatically proves that these barrels, wasting away in the ocean, are the wrong way. It’s a decision that’s causing more problems that are creating generational ripple effects no one predicted. In the film, one of the subjects touches on the idea that the introduction of DDT immediately had an impact on three generations. Because of the prevalence of spraying the chemical from the 1940s to the early 1970s, an unknowably large number of pregnant women in that time were exposed. Not only them, but their fetuses and their germ cells that will become another generation.
courtesy of Out of Plain Sight
Out of Plain Sight is a masterful documentary that tells the decades-spanning story of what is essentially a Pandora’s Box of forever chemicals. There’s an archival footage section toward the beginning of the film that shows how ever-present DDT was for those who grew up after it was banned. It’s an unshakeable montage that puts things into perspective in a stark, unsettling manner. And it’s a reminder that the earth’s memory is far longer than that of any human, but the actions of people in their short lifetimes can have compounding, monumental repercussions. Out of Plain Sight could have taken an extreme, alarmist tone, and it has every right to, but instead the audience is presented with the facts in an even-keeled manner. Emotion comes into the film with some of the subjects, and how could it not? They’re experiencing firsthand a problem that was made before they were born and that will likely stay after they’re gone. How do you reckon with the fact that you cannot un-dump a barrel of forever chemicals into the ocean?
You may be asking why someone isn’t just lifting the barrels out of the ocean. The problem there is the pressure. When pulling a barrel out, the change in pressure could cause it to explode, potentially creating an even worse ecological disaster. Humans have spent a lot of time hurting this planet, and until decisions are made thinking first of the Earth, we will continue to do so. Out of Plain Sight is investigative documentary journalism at its finest and most urgent.
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