![]() ![]() They come in with dump trucks and bulldozers and ship them off in “scoops.” They don’t scoot activists into unmarked minivans. The cops don’t mount tanks and urban assault vehicles in Soylent Green. It is because the scenario looks so commonplace. The reason it is more frightening is artistic. Half of New York City is unemployed and living in poverty, and when they take to the streets, it is only slightly more frightening than the militaristic police response to protestors we’ve seen in the past few years. ![]() It is like Amazon, Wal-Mart and probably Tyson Chicken combined, and the top earners live in protective custodial-ship to the starving masses. Soylent is one giant corporation which has the power to exacerbate global hunger. The dead man’s safe place includes not only the most deliciously decadent edibles, but it has the latest in post-post-modern “furniture.” That’s what sex slaves to the wealthy are called in the film and the ever-dazed, tarot card-reading Shirl, played by Leigh Taylor-Young, could service parties in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (or the most insane conspiracy theories of QAnon followers today). Thorn is investigating the murder of Soylent Corporation executive William R. The one-percenters don’t shoot themselves off into the stratosphere in the film’s 2022 they isolate themselves in luxury penthouses. Yet some people starve and others suffer from obesity. Mass production means we make enough foodstuff to feed the entire world population, with a surplus. The food shortage prediction is actually true, depending on economic and geographic factors. In one very effective scene, Thorn and Sol savor a thin steak, an apple to the core, and a leaf of lettuce. ![]() It is, however, available on the black market. Only the wealthy can get their hands on real food, especially produce. Heston’s character, NYPD detective Thorn, explains how a year-long heatwave created by the greenhouse effect poisoned the water, polluted the soil, decimated plant and animal life, and burned everything up. Soylent Green was one of the first mainstream films to bring climate change into public consciousness. Some of the eastern hemisphere is currently facing an aging population crisis because of the efforts to curb youthful sexual enthusiasm. But the nightmare was also averted in the interim as fertility rates plummeted on a global scale, and China issued its national one-child policy to counter the growing birth rates which the world found so frightening at the time. Manhattan island might sink under the extra weight before this could happen. In the beginning of the film, we learn that New York City’s population is 40,000,000. While Soylent Green underestimated the overall world population of today, it did inflate some of its numbers. During the 1970s, fears of a “population bomb” were rampant, and warnings came from such disparate sources as Public Broadcasting System specials and songs like Jethro Tull’s “Locomotive Breath.” It was a common belief humanity was breeding too much for the natural world’s ability to sustain it. Heston, who saw man as merely a superior monkeys’ uncle in 1968’s Planet of the Apes, and the earth go zombie in The Omega Man in 1971, had real concerns about overpopulation when he commissioned the script for Soylent Green. Sludge and filth cover the perimeter of human existence in Soylent Green, and plague and famine eat humanity out from the inside. The face covering in the montage actually increases exponentially as the 20th century tumbles past into our own modern nightmares. The historical montage which opens Soylent Green, based on real photographs from the 20th century, shows how industry and population colluded to form a dystopian future where too many people struggle for too little food, gag at the air, and wear masks on a daily basis. Store shops in the 1973 science fiction classic Soylent Green were so mobbed on Tuesdays that riots started every week in this dystopian vision of 2022. But when Charlton Heston first uttered that anguished warning, it might as well have been a supermarket can-can sale promotion. Of course the line “Soylent Green is people” is now an insta-spoiler meme and trope. Why settle for tacos when Tuesday can be Soylent Green Day? Far more nutritious than Soylent Red or Yellow, the green stuff is made with a secret ingredient that makes it a real delicacy. ![]()
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