Images from the montage that sets the stage for Soylent Green.

December 27 , 2006

It’s 2022. The earth has been completely degraded and overpopulated. Society is given over to class warfare and corruption all around. All that’s left is grimy city, masses of filthy humans, and acres of burned-out cars. Not a blade of grass remains and no one except the oldest citizens even remembers the taste of strawberries or the sight of tulips waggling their heads in the breeze. Naturally, farming is a thing of the past, and it appears that the vast preponderance of food production involves the recycling of organic matter—including human bodies.

This is the vision of the future proposed by Soylent Green, a science fiction movie from 1973, with Charlton Heston in the lead role as police detective Robert Thorn. How things got this way is not spelled out exactly, but the hints are broad enough to deduce that the scenario is in fact still relevant to our own predicament. Greenhouse gases, people say; we’re burning up. And a montage at the beginning of the movie shows a few idyllic scenes followed by mechanization, oil fields, street cars, air travel, cities, giant car parks, cities, powerlines, crowds, more crowds, tenements, traffic jams, crowds, highway interchanges, tenements, garbage, industry, pollution, crowds, soldiers, protests, gasmasks, garbage, traffic jams, pollution, more soldiers, and finally a smoldering city—the stage for Soylent Green. What makes the montage particularly effective is that it's done entirely with photographs, that is, with images of things that are already true.

A few items from the climate change scenario we are now familiar with are missing from this litany. There’s no mention or evidence of rising sea levels, for instance. In other words, the disaster that strikes the world of Soylent Green isn't quite what lies in wait for us given current population patterns and energy consumption. But what's remarkable is not that it doesn't hit the mark, but rather how incredibly close to bull's eye it is. And its vision of the social changes to accompany the environmental changes is anything but idle speculation.

The image of daily life that Soylent Green depicts is credible enough:
- Gas and electricity are essentially gone. Whole car parks have been transformed into shanty-towns, because makeshift housing is all they are good for. If you want a light to read by, you’ll have to produce your own electricity. (Edward G. Robinson's character pedals a stationary bike to run up a charge on a dynamo, for instance.)
- There will be critical food shortages. People wait in endless lines to buy food, and riots break out when scant supplies fail altogether.
- Drinking water is in such short supply that people have to collect daily rations.
- Class oppositions will sharpen, as the haves barricade themselves into luxury enclaves away from the have-nots and enjoy the occasional piece of beef or jar of strawberry jam that goes around on the black market.
- Sexual oppression will intensify into outright slavery. For instance, pretty young women—known as "furniture"—are attached to luxury apartments and passed from tenant to tenant in much the same way that the appliances are.

Interestingly, racial discrimination appears to be a thing of the past in Soylent Green. Blacks appear in roles that could just as well have been played by whites, if in small numbers. This is unexpected, as racial and sexual oppression generally vary in tandem, given that conditions that favor the one will generally also favor the other. Of course it's possible that the apparent absence of racial inequality in the movie is simply the result of an effort towards more equitable casting in 1973, rather than an intentional prognostication for the social situation in 2022.

While its predictions are right on the money, the execution of these ideas leave something to be desired. This is not the pinnacle of inspired film-making. Soylent Green is especially weak on characterization. Consider Thorn. He is very much a man of his time. He's on the take without qualm or stealth. When he investigates the murder of a wealthy victim, he simply stuffs the booze, the beef, the soap, the books, and other goodies into a pillowcase and walks away with them. He sleeps with the "furniture" on another occasion, just because she's appetizing.

So far, so good. But then he's still supposed to be a hero and a stand-up kind of guy. The sordid situation with the "furniture" blooms into a romance, of all things. Somehow a finely-honed sense of ethics blinks on, and Thorn slaps around the apartment manager for slapping around the other "furniture." If we got something that would suggest a moral awakening in the middle of all the sleaze, it would be a lot easier to take him seriously

And Thorn is not the only thing difficult to take seriously in Soylent Green. A riot is quelled by “scoop,” for instance: big shovels scoop up a stroppy crowd in the process of starting a food riot and dump the people unceremoniously into their holds. It’s probably meant to convey that the authorities have nothing but contempt for the masses, but if you compare the scooping to the atrocities reported daily in the newspaper, it’s simply risible. We are also meant to be afffonted by the fact that dead bodies are unceremoniously plopped into the hoppers of regular garbage trucks. But the fact is that the packages emerge from the trucks in pristine condition, shrouds snowy white and shapes unchanged. Such perfunctory staging is distracting, and it's more tempting to laugh than to be horrified.

Eventually Thorn follows the bodies into a vast processing plant where, after a variety of heating and drying operations, the corpses get dunked into a giant vat. Next thing you know, they bobble along on a conveyor belt as neat little green wafers. Definitely not what you’d been hoping to find on your plate for dinner, but it's actually a real challenge to share Thorn's sense of outrage.

Undoubtedly we've become very lazy, spoiled on movies that leave nothing to the imagination and milk every scene for the last ounce of squirming horror they could possibly convey. Today, we’d see blood, bones and entrails all over the screen. That's not necessarily preferable, but it would make it a little easier to see the point. In the end, though, it only means we have to work a little harder with Soylent Green than we have become used to doing in the movie theater.

No, in the final analysis, the real problem with this movie is the focus of its outrage. The recycling of humans for food is by no means a state of affairs to be looked forward to, and Soylent Green does in fact work pretty hard to make the situation abhorrent. It doesn’t help that it's a secret: people have been told those little wafers are made from soy and plankton. And the old folks who are tired of life and decide to make an end of it—which, frankly, strikes me as far more humane than the lingering death I am possibly looking forward to myself—are not told that they are participating in the food cycle either. Not good, by any means. The fact that the Soylent Corporation appears to be making a profit off the practice doesn't make it any more acceptable either. Thorn yells in the final scene of the movie that before long they’ll be breeding people to support the food supply. Obviously we’ve landed on a slippery slope, and the practice is becoming more difficult to defend with every bucket of oil poured on the flames.

But think about it for a moment: why isn’t it slavery that finally incites rebellion? How about universal corruption? Class warfare? Environmental depredations? Or think about it from the other direction. If Soylent stopped recycling dead people, would this society somehow be okay to live in? The real problem is not with eating dead people, but with an economic and political system that creates a world in which, among many other loathsome phenomena, there's nothing else to eat.

In the end, Thorn is essentially a whistle-blower who exposes a nefarious practice rather than the revolutionary hero such a world requires. His heroism is not an effort to stop the political forces that create environmental disasters and mass exploitation but rather an effort to tell folks that among all the miseries they experience, there’s just one thing they shouldn't put up with.

In other words, here's another vision of the future with an understanding of the problem and not a clue about the solution.

Marijke Rijsberman