
I would all like you to give another warm welcome to my guest here at CRR's!
Maria is a writer interested in comic books, cycling, and horror films. Her hobbies include cooking, doodling, and finding local shops around the city. She currently lives in Chicago with her two pet turtles, Franklin and Roy.
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Soylent Green - Energy from a Forbidden
Source
Soylent Green is a film both highly integrated into
pop culture and entirely opaque to many regarding its deeper implications,
especially when it comes to energy crisis and environmentalism. While most
people are aware that Soylent Green is made of people, they don't know why
that's so horrifying nor in what context it came about. That being said, this
film from the 1970s still remains relevant in its themes and motifs to this
very day. In fact, it may be even more so.
The story of Soylent Green is a murder mystery set in
New York of 2022. The population of the city has risen to an unsustainable 40
million people who live in cramped quarters and line up for water and Soylent
Green - a high-protein food source supposedly made out of plankton. When a top
level executive in the Soylent Corporation is murdered, Charlton Heston's Detective
Thorn is called in to solve the case, a twisting caper that leads him to the
famous and terrible conclusion that Soylent Green, the primary food source for
the city, is not made of plankton but rather of people: dissidents and
undesirables that are processed and fed to the rest of the population.
Part of what remains valuable about this story is that it
works both as social commentary and pure science fiction. Harry Harrison's
novel Make Room, Make Room! is expertly translated to the screen by
director Richard Fleischer in potentially his greatest work. The stark
direction that presents a New York that has been neglected more than anything else
is complemented by powerful performances from Heston and Edward G. Robinson as
Sol Roth - a man who still remembers the days before this dystopian
nightmare became reality. Even Paula Kelly in a somewhat smaller role stands
out for her believability and the sympathy we can assign to her.
But while this is a cinematic titan, it also speaks to
problems that concerned people in the 70s and still should concern people
today. According to NASA, global
temperatures have continued to rise over the course of the last century with a
direct correlation between the increase in temperature and an increase in
carbon emissions from less than 1000 parts per million at the beginning of the
20th century to nearly 10,000 parts per million today. A big portion of those
emissions is likely from agriculture, forestry, and other land use related to
unsustainable practices that might one day make standard food production
methods unfeasible or even impossible. While it is less likely that
corporations would turn to cannibalism as a solution to this problem, rationing
and the limiting of food varieties are both possibilities that humanity might
have to contend with, especially considering our out-of-control population
growth.
Soylent Green joins a number of eco-horror
films in the cinematic canon. From Godzilla to The Day After Tomorrow,
there are a number of movies that discuss how human activity leads to our
inevitable downfall, but most present an outside force that comes to punish us
for our indiscretions. Part of what makes Soylent Green stand out is
that the villains are humans who have abandoned humanity. There are no aliens
or monsters or weather patterns causing the central problem: the finger is
pointed right at people who contributed to the squalor of New York and have
chosen to feed the population to itself, literally, rather than find a humane
solution.
It's somewhat disappointing to know that so many people know
of Soylent Green but do not understand the deeper implications of the
film. More than just a melodramatic declaration about the contents of Soylent
Green, the film addresses serious environmental concerns that still threaten us
all.
3 comments:
Never seen it
Thank you Maria!
I've seen Soilent Green and I think that scenario (cannibalism) is completely viable. I know it might be a bit too dark but look what's happening in e.g. big pharmaceutical companies.
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