The documentary ‘Trashed, with Jeremy Irons’ focuses on how the waste management industry is having deleterious consequences on human and animal life on this planet. By using case studies from around the world, Jeremy Irons takes the viewer on a narrated journey from Lebanon, to the UK, to Vietnam, and to the North Pacific, all with the objective of demonstrating how the ways in which humans get rid of waste: through landfills, incinerators, and oceanic dumping, are harming human health, destroying people’s livelihoods, and adversely affecting animals’ welfare. Irons concludes this dismal narration of the anthropogenic harms of the waste industry with an uplifting look at the positive changes that grassroots organizations are effectuating in the disposal of waste.
Ultimately, this film is incredibly successful in getting its point across in its 93 minutes running time; that humans must change the way in which we deal with waste. This success can be attributed to how skillfully Jeremy Irons exploits
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An example of this is when Irons interviews the Vietnamese family with an adorable daughter who happens to be severely disabled, born lacking arms and legs. This is very poignant to the viewers as it allows them to connect with the harms of dioxides on a human level, building empathy for the family that suffered and associating dioxide use with disability (even though the level of dioxides present in agent Orange are infinitely larger than those released by an incinerator). Another way that the documentary uses this technique of emotional manipulation is through imagery of cute sea life affected by plastic, showing a compilation of dolphins, seals, whales, and turtles entangled in bags and plastic rings. The majority of people feel empathy towards these helpless creatures and thus are emotionally impacted by their