Movie Review: Dark Water by Todd Haynes

Ever since I started cooking I’ve been feeling slightly uneasy while using Teflon coated frying pans or other utensils. I felt off one day when I found the coating of one of my utensils chucking off the surface. I asked myself what if this flake could get mixed with the food and enter my body? The answer was obvious… that my body would try to break the chemical components of this flake through metabolism. Although organic chemistry was never my area of confidence, I had an intuition that it would be difficult for the body to break this material down… thanks to my glorified ignorance… I never double-checked.

The third movie in my quarantine watch list, Dark Waters directed by Todd Haynes and starring Mark Ruffalo (yes the Hulk guy), is an eye-opener for me and probably for the millions who use Teflon coated utensils. This movie follows a class-action lawsuit by a Cincinnati based corporate lawyer against a US chemical giant called DuPont for polluting the environment and poisoning the people with their industrial excrement and products alike while mass manufacturing Teflon despite knowing (hence covering up) the fact that Teflon (taken more than 1 drop in water the volume of an Olympic sized swimming pool) is harmful to all living animals. It was found that they were letting the natural water reserves get contaminated with 6 times more the compound such as PFOA than it’s authorized by the health standards. PFOA or Perfluorooctanoic acid is toxic and called “Forever chemicals” as the human body cannot break them down through metabolism hence they get accumulated in the human blood over the years of consumption, resulting in various diseases ranging from organ failure to cancer.