Last night I watched the timeless 1973 movie, Soylent Green, again and was again impressed (unfavorably) by how much the futuristic world that it depicted mirrored the world we’re headed for now. The temperature of the overcrowded New York of the future was a constant 90 degrees; the oceans were dying (presumably from overfishing and pollution, they hadn’t heard of acidification at the time); and the world was running out of food..
Spoiler Alert:
Set in 2022, the film opens with a slide show of earlier eras, back when the Earth was covered with forests and open fields, and there were only a few scattered settlements of people who travelled in horse-drawn wagons.
As the images pass quickly by, we see the first automobiles (tail pipes spewing toxic climate-changing carbon gases), followed by a massive blacktop parking lot jam packed with Model Ts. The pictures begin to flash almost more rapidly than we can focus, but we catch glimpses of factories with smokestacks billowing and crowds of people barely able to
move without trampling one another. (Come to think of it, what we are witnessing looks a lot like the inside of an average modern-day poultry barn, where chickens and turkeys are forced to live out their lives in intense confinement.)
The first scene of action takes place in a cramped little New York City apartment, the dwelling of the film’s two main characters, Thorn, a semi-corrupt detective, and his elderly room-mate and research partner, Sol, who is constantly going on about the good old days—a world that Thorn can’t possibly envision or relate to.
They are among the lucky few; most people sleep on the stairways or in the hallways or anywhere they can find shelter from the oppressive heat caused by an out of control greenhouse effect. We overhear a program on their worn out old TV which is an interview with the governor of New York, touting a new food product called “Soylent Green,” ostensibly made from the ocean’s plankton. (Everyone in that day and age knows that the land is used up, but they’re told the oceans can still provide for them).
Food in this depressing, human-ravaged world comes in the form of color-coded wafers, distributed under strict government supervision. Hordes of people stand in line for their ration of Soylent yellow or blue made from soy, or other high protein plants grown behind the fortress-walls of heavily guarded farms.
Signs remind the throng that “Tuesday is Soylent Green day.”
The multitudes are exceptionally unruly on Tuesday. Brimming with anticipation, they can’t wait to obtain a ration of the special new product. When the food distributors run out of soylent green, people start rioting and things get out of hand. “Scoops” (garbage trucks fitted with backhoe-like buckets on the front) are called in to scrape up the angry masses and haul them off…
By the end of the film, Thorn learns that the oceans are dead and the actual ingredients of Soylent Green are something a bit harder to stomach than plankton. In the final scene, a mortally-wounded Thorn is carried away on a stretcher as he desperately tries to tell bewildered onlookers, “Soylent Green is People!” “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing, they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food!”
Could it ever happen? Could the human race ever stoop so low? If the scenario seems too hard to swallow, consider this: the conditions animals are forced to endure on today’s factory farms would have seemed unimaginable to people living a hundred years ago.
Exposing the Big Game 
The human sense of specialness, the center of the Universe, created by God in his image, maybe not: Soylent Green, 1973 movie in which the setting is 2022, oceans are dead planet dying, and unknowingly the governments are feeding us Soylent Green, which is made of people. It is good movie to remind us of where we are likely headed (extinction). It seems inevitable and was probably the case at the Dawn of Civilization. Another movie, The Day The Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves. points out: We are a destructive species to the planet, animal life on the planet and each other. We sense it, know it, but cannot help ourselves. Keanu Reeves plays an alien coming to save the Earth from us by killing us. It seems that half the people in this country deny science and driven by primitive belief systems. Most people are indifferent and ignorant and care little to change their ways. We are doubling down on greenhouse warming fossil fuels, doubling down on animal farming, doubling down or animal sports killing (aka hunting), overfishing the oceans, and we are breeding like rabbits, 7 billion of us humans now headed to 10-11 billion by the 21st century barring disasters, maybe natures way of saying enough! Maybe another relevant movie is Melancholia in which another planet crashes into to us annihilating Earth and us, and maybe pointing out that we are not the center of the universe and that the universe is indifferent to our existence.
The original “Predator” movie was a good example of a wake up call as well. It seems terrifying to us that something far more technologically advanced could take pleasure in killing humans for the sake of trophies.
Hard to imagine
“Soylent Green”, like “Silent Running”, was an amazingly prescient science fiction movie from back during a time when the problem of human overpopulation was being taken seriously, before the “Moral Majority” and the Vatican managed to get it erased from the political agenda. Now, about the only one on the national scene who seems troubled by it (present company excepted!) is Dave Foreman. Ironic that Soylent Green’s star, Charlton Heston, went on to lead the most detestable collection of murderous, death-worshiping, anti-conservation thugs the world has ever known, the National Rifle Association. Kind of like Ben Kingsley becoming fuehrer of the American Nazi Party.
I just finished reading Dave Foreman’s book, “Manswarm.” It was a great overview of where we are, and were, in regards to the overpopulation crisis. Unbelievable how far people have backslid since the late ’60s/early ’70s when those films came out and when folks weren’t afraid to talk about overpopulation. Another Heston, pre-NRA classic, the “Planet of the Apes”, was full of animal rights messages, but they were lost in the mire of humanism in the Marky Mark remake.
Those were my thoughts exactly when I first saw “Planet of the Apes” in 1968. How could anyone miss the analogies, the subtext. But, “ka ching”, the underlying message about how humanity treats other Earthlings seems to have gone entirely over the heads of both contemporary and modern day film reviewers. It was too profound, apparently, for even the star of the movie, Charlton Heston, to grasp if you can judge by his later descent into scumbaginess..
Now he stars in Planet of the Scumbags. Anything good he ever said for animals was scripted by Rod Serling, who clearly understood the problem of speciesism, yet the only reference to animal rights regarding the film is way down on the list (under all other humanist themes), on Wiki: “Animal rights – intentionally or unintentionally, this is suggested by the film too, as the apes treat the humans with contempt. Likewise, some humans deny any degree of intelligence or emotion in other species.”
Wow! I didn’t know that. Disgusting
In order to fully understand the messages in Planet of the Apes you would have to go to the source, Pierre Boulle’s book La Planète des Singes. The movie doesn’t capture the essence of this underrated book.
Thanks for the insight, I’ll look for it.
I lived in NYC in 1978 and it looked disturbingly close to the depiction in Soylent Green. It did get better, but it’s only a matter of time. What was Calcutta like before it became overpopulated? Or Dacca or Guangxo or Mexico City? Probably much nicer than we can imagine right now.
Soylent Green is People
Reblogged this on Exposing the Big Game.
The human species stooped as low as it could get a long time ago.
Modern prophets–scientists, artists, and film producers–aren’t being heeded any more than Isaiah and Jeremiah were in their day.
We’ve been warned for decades on the dangers of overpopulation and excess consumption. Now the whole planet is at risk. But conservative political ideologues deny, Wall Street and Madison Avenue demand more growth, and religious groups declare every fertilized human egg is a person.
The planet will do the work of reason and determine our fate.