The documentary adaptation of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire looks at our relationship with plants-from the plants' perspective.
Bees, as we all know, unwittingly help flowers reproduce as they collect nectar. But humans have a strange and symbiotic relationship with plants, too-and it's one in which we are manipulated more than we realize. That relationship is the subject of The Botany of Desire, a documentary adaptation of Michael Pollan's eponymous 2000 book that will air on PBS on October 28.The film, directed by Michael Schwarz and narrated by Frances McDormand, is a two-hour survey of man's relationship to four plants: apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes. For Pollan, each plant tells a different story about human desire. The apple exemplifies our desire for sweetness. Following a path from the mountains of what is now Kazakhstan to the fields of New England, the fruit-with a sweetness rarely found in nature-promised a caloric bounty for our foraging ancestors. The tulip, which could sell for millions of dollars during the Dutch tulip craze of the 1630s, stands for our infatuation with beauty, order, and color. Through marijuana, Pollan explores the human desire for intoxication, our need to forget, and our obsession with altered consciousness. Lastly, the humble potato provides an example of our desire for control, for absolute control over our sustenance.