Review of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox (2007) by Nicole V — 07 Oct 2009

It's Just Soap, People!

You know, part of the issue may well be my mother's age. It's kind of a disconnect when I talk to my friends about our parents and our upbringings. Gwen talks about how her mother's strongest awareness of the Kennedy assassination was that her mother only internalized it because Walter Cronkite was crying. My mother was almost old enough to vote for him, would have been just two months shy of voting for him in '64. Most of my friends' parents were still in elementary school. Or at least my in-person friends; my online friends are generally older. My mother was also raised Catholic and middle class. I honestly don't know her parents' politics. In short, though, my mother was not a hippie. Wouldn't have been even were she younger, I suspect, but she was a college graduate by the time the movement really hit. It is because of this, I suspect, that I'd never heard of this soap until I read a Straight Dope column about how, to be blunt, crazy Dr. Emanuel Bronner was.

Emanuel Bronner came to the United States when the Nazis came to power, apparently the only member of his family to survive. (His last contact with his family was a postcard saying, "You were right.--Your loving father." Which is kind of horrible, really.) He came from a long line of soapmakers--though not, from what anyone can tell, any relation to Albert Einstein, no matter what he claimed. The movie is about his son, Ralph Bronner, passing along the gospel of his father, the "All-One-God-Faith." He's also passing out soap. There's a lot of making people vaguely uncomfortable and delighting people, the difference apparently being whether they've heard of the soap or not. There's one guy who actually knew Dr. Bronner (actually, he wasn't a doctor, but let it go); they used to talk about his opposition of Communism. Ralph gives him a pamphlet which includes the writing on the label, all of it, and signs it for him. The guy's kind of happy about getting the pamphlet, because it's certainly better than squinting at the tiny print on the bottle, but I'm not sure he gets why Ralph is autographing it.

The fact is, Dr. Bronner actually was crazy. Whether that's a cause or result of the electroshock is probably a matter of some debate; I suspect it's a little from column A and a little from column B. The film shows his FBI file, presumably released under the Freedom of Information Act, and the FBI thought he was a crank. Looking at their files, I can't disagree. He would call on a daily basis to complain about fluoridation and its Communists links. The mind rather boggles at how many other people were doing just that in the '50s. Probably some still are now. But anyway, he railed against Communism but seemed to have certain Communist ideals for all that--the family has set a cap on their salaries at five times as much as the lowest-paid people in the company make. And I tried to read that label a while ago, and I still have no idea what he was going on about. Certainly he seemed to think soap would unite the world.

Once again, we are dealing with people who don't realize how insane they are. Ralph Bronner is shown making a woman who works in a newsstand very uncomfortable, and neither he nor the camera operator seem to realize that. Dr. Bronner keeps being shown in archival clips talking exactly the way the label is written. It almost reads like beat poetry in places, which is entertaining after a fashion. It's very clear that these people--everyone who's shown to have used it--really likes the soap. Heather does, too. It's apparently good soap. On the other hand, apparently he also gave the advice that you should use lemons and Vaseline as a contraceptive, and that's horrible advice. He also referred to the mental hospital from which he'd escaped as a "concentration camp," despite a very clear awareness of what actually happened in the camps. His parallel is that they made him mix cement--apparently true--despite his very strong approval in other places for manual labour. Okay, again with the electroshock. However, he survived--he was able to escape! Possibly he knew someone who did not, but there are very few comparisons.

Okay, this being me, the thing that bothered me most was the sign that said "botteling room." However, I think the whole thing is more than a little disturbing. Yes, all right, really great soap. Excellent soap. All-natural ingredients, though I have certain issues with that particular label. The DVD comes with a featurette about the fair-trade olive oil they use, which is awesome, and apparently, they're really involved in the idea of sustainability and so forth. Great stuff. I really approve. However, I really hate the whole "Spaceship Earth" thing, and I don't think any unity of the world will come through religion. I think there's a lot of impracticality in the way some of these people think. I distrust any self-applied doctorate--he said that he'd done the equivalent work of a PhD in chemistry, but who tested that? The family says they won't change the label except as the government requires, which is a nice kind of tradition thing, but it's still a label full of crazy talk. I also have to tell you that I don't believe his bucket-of-urine poured over him story, because he claims those boys saved up an awful lot of urine.