A story sealed with a burp

A film that will tell you more about the subject than you realized there was to know, “Tupperware!,” which airs tonight on PBS as part of the “American Experience” series, is not just the story of an unbreakable plastic bowl (and the subsequent tumblers and plates and so on). It’s the story of an unbreakable plastic bowl with an airtight, watertight lid -- the patented “Tupper Seal,” which, when broken, produced the “Tupper burp.”

But it is also more than the story of an unbreakable plastic bowl with an airtight lid. Indeed, there is surprisingly little Tupperware on display here, though with its candy colors and edge-of-the-space-age lines, it is a particularly photogenic product. This is social history, rather: Introduced halfway through the last century, Tupperware stands at the intersection of three great themes of the age -- sales, science and sexual politics.

“Tupperware!” is not so much about the thing itself, then, or what it did for the people who bought it -- it kept their food fresh longer: no small affair -- as it is about the selling of the thing, and what it did for the people who sold it. And it is especially about the woman who took Tupperware from a product to a phenomenon, the charismatic Brownie Wise -- a name coincidentally but conveniently redolent of both magic and brains, of intimacy and authority.

A charismatic leader and tireless worker who kept a typewriter on her bed should an idea wake her in the middle of the night, Wise convinced Earl Silas Tupper to pull Tupperware out of the stores and sell it exclusively on the “party plan,” and in doing so she helped transform the lives of thousands of women -- the Tupperware ladies, something between a sales force and a force of nature. They came from city and suburb and countryside, from every race and creed, women with ambition, not content or not able to stay at home, forming a network that was vast, familial and not a little evangelical.

Like Tupper, a secretive tinkerer who personally designed every piece of Tupperware, Wise was born poor, but dreamed big. The first woman to grace the cover of “Business Week,” from 1951 to 1958 she was the public face of the company, and it’s not surprising that her relationship with its actual (male) president finally began to fray. Tupper’s flirtatious notes to “Brownie (“anyone that cute has no right to be so smart”) became chilly ones to “Mrs. Wise,” raising questions of accountability and control, and she was eventually expelled from the paradise she created, even as her sales force was selling Tupperware faster than it could be manufactured.

“There goes my life,” Wise said, as the company consigned her to oblivion, removing her pictures from the wall and literally burying, out behind the Florida headquarters, the remaining copies of her book of motivational essays, “Best Wishes.” Not long afterward, Tupper sold his company to the Rexall Drug and Chemical Company for $16 million, divorced his wife, gave up his citizenship and bought himself an island in Central America. Tupperware itself has, of course, gone on -- though now the line includes nonstick skillets and Dutch ovens -- and so has the Tupperware party: According to the closing title card, there is one held somewhere in the world every 2.5 seconds.

Combining archival footage, interviews with Tupperware veterans and original documents -- Tupper’s sketches for early inventions, including a no-drip ice-cream cone, and a “fish-propelled boat,” which is just a boat strapped to a big fish, are strangely moving -- director-writer Laurie Kahn-Leavitt has done a fine job of telling a complicated story in a short space. (A little too short, perhaps -- I was left wanting to know more.) Kahn-Leavitt is never condescending to her subject; even the strangest, silliest old footage comes across with dignity. Tupperware -- as strange as it sounds -- changed lives, and this fine tribute is touching, inspiring, and not in the least plastic.

*

‘Tupperware!’

Where: PBS

When: 9-10 tonight

Rating: The network has rated this documentary TV-G (suitable for all audiences)

Narrator...Kathy Bates

Producer, writer, director, Laurie Kahn-Leavitt