Part of an ongoing series of recommended movies, shows, books, music, or other form of artistic expression.
Title photo by Veronica Lorine on Unsplash
Remember Charlton Heston?
He was a post-war, gravely-voiced, masculinity-is-the-point Hollywood he-man who portrayed Moses in The Ten Commandments, and the time-warping astronaut battling for homo sapien rights in the original two Planet of the Apes movies.
I also remember him as the old white guy holding up a revolutionary war rifle at the NRA convention in 2000, challenging then presidential-candidate Al Gore to pry it from his cold dead hands.
He wound up having a niche for a while in mid-century sci-fi dystopian flicks. Including Soylent Green, which I vaguely remember as something I found boring and skipped past on t.v. movie channels as a kid.
Turns out Soylent Green, the movie that gets tongue-in-cheek culinary references throughout pop culture, is way more interesting than I realized.
Have you seen it? If you have, has it been a while? Oh, friends, it is so worth the (re)watch.
**SPOILERS AHEAD**
New York City, 2022
I find it superfun that so many dystopian stories written so many years ago are set in the decade that we are currently living. It’s hilarious to see how much they got wrong… and morbidly fascinating to see how much they got right.
Soylent Green sets quite the prescient scene from the get-go.
It opens with a slide show of old-timey black and white photos of bucolic life in America. Small town life, abundant small farms — then the photos come more quickly. Assembly lines churning out Model Ts, smokestacks belching out poison, clogged highways, swarms of people, and trash littering the landscape and water. It is a rapid-fire depiction of industrialization, commercialization, consumerism, capitalism, and the decay of communities culminating in the presumed death of the natural environment.
Oh, Hollywood.
The opening title finally arrives at New York City in 2022, with a population of 40 million people (the actual population of the New York City metro area in real 2022 was 18.8 million people. Which is almost halfway there and still A LOT.)
It’s a mess. Everyone is poor, there’s little infrastructure, it is perpetually 90 degrees (and people in this movie are perpetually sweating), and there is a serious problem with housing. People are sleeping in cars and stairwells. Most people are wearing cloth masks, probably due to smog, but it is eerily on the nose for NYC in this decade.
Oh, and food. Food is also a big problem.
As in, there isn’t enough to go around. But there are rations of Soylent, which are little wafers that come in different colors for different nutritional values. Soylent Green, a crowd favorite which you can get on Tuesdays, is made from “high-energy plankton.”
Because, you know, the earth is pretty much not producing anymore.
BTW, Soylent, a major corporation that includes a soy-based food business, controls the food supply for half the world.
Of course they do.
Silent Spring
It’s great when popular art can amplify an idea so loudly and clearly that something actually changes.
The only reason real New York in 2022 is not, in fact, a barren landscape is because people — scientists and concerned citizen activists — sounded the alarm more than half a century ago.
Soylent Green came out in 1973, just eleven years after the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, marine biologist and environmentalist Rachel Carson’s science-backed warning of the coming impacts of pesticides and pollution-fueled greenhouse gases on the natural environment.
During that decade, New York also saw the rise of a campaign to clean up the Hudson River, which had become so toxic from the sewage, pesticides, and industrial waste routinely dumped into it for nearly a century that the captains of wooden vessels would sail into it just to delouse their hulls. True story.
Look, I know this is a lot of set up.
And I haven’t even gotten to the acid rain problem documented as poisoning the Adirondack lakes, rivers, and streams, the first Earth Day in 1970, and how, also in 1970, the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency basically saved North America* from looking exactly like NYC in Soylent Green.
*Why is the link to a Time magazine article? Because I’m not convinced www.epa.gov has longevity.
Anyway, you get the picture. Back to the movie.
Police Beat
So, we open with our guy Detective Thorn (Charlton playing it ruggedly, of course) starting his day by sponge-bathing with water from one of those iconic giant McDonald’s drink coolers as his partner Sol sets out breakfast – spoiled margarine and a soylent yellow wafer. Before Thorn leaves, Sol hops on an exercise bike to charge up the battery that powers their light bulb and hot plate.
Sol Roth is a professional partner, specifically a Police Book.
This is such a cool concept: Sol, a former* full professor, is a knowledge keeper, a walking library, and researcher running down the facts that Thorn needs to do his job (mostly because actual books are no longer printed). Sometimes he goes to the Exchange, where other 75’ish year-old folks who are also Police Books gather to exchange knowledge. It looks like an old public library and the head Book, their Judge, is a woman.
*Why is he not anymore? Well, it sure looks like a world where education (higher or otherwise) was gutted.
The day unfolds as Thorn is assigned to solve the murder of a super-rich guy. We, the viewer, already know that Simonson’s death was a hit. It’s pretty obvious that he knows some corporate dirt and that dirt is meant to stay swept under the rug.
“Are you fun?”
Simonson’s apartment is peak luxury – it has running hot water, air conditioning, a video game console, and a stocked food pantry and liquor cabinet. Thorn conducts his interviews of Simonson’s associates while, well, looting the place. Everyone seems to be a little corrupt in 2022 NYC.
Simonson had something else that came with his apartment: Furniture.
Yes, the funky mid-century kind, but also Shirl.
See, Soylent Green puts an interesting spin on something else: Sex trafficking.
In this secured, upscale apartment community for the uber-rich, the units come with a live-in comfort girl (there solely to provide sexual favors), referred to as ‘Furniture’.
The assumption here was that it was straight men who would be the owners. Hey, this movie was made in 1973, a full year before The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 which finally allowed American women equal access to loans, credit cards, and banking accounts. So of course Furniture was women-in-servitude meant to benefit men.
Anyway! Shirl was Simonson’s well-cared for Furniture. During the murder, she was out with his bodyguard doing the grocery shop, which was a visit to a gated store to buy fresh-ish food that looks like what you might find in a grocery dumpster these days. At $279 for about a half bag of items, it wasn’t too far off from a grocery bill in chump’s America.
And OF COURSE Thorn likes Shirl, and predictably, as written by men in the early 1970s, she likes Thorn.
Fine Dining
Just to underscore the dire state of the food system, we the viewers are next treated to a meal Sol makes with Thorn’s looted bounty. They dine on a crisp lettuce leaf apiece, and a stew made with an onion, tomato, a single rubbery celery stalk, and a piece of real beef that brought Sol to tears. Dessert was an apple apiece. All washed down with real bourbon.
Sol was so transported to better days (Thorn is too young to remember those), it’s almost as if this was a dying wish of a meal.
Then it’s back to whatever it is that got Simonson killed.
Scoops
This is the part in the post where I pick up speed, because I’m not in the business of writing a movie synopsis. But there are some key scenes to note:
1/ After his sumptuous meal, Thorn heads out to another indulgence compliments of Simonson: A to visit Shirl. Their conversation weirdly and smoothly segues into a booty call followed by a shared shower scene. As if Thorn feels entitled to using Simonson’s furniture since he can’t use it himself. They’d like to run away together, but where can you go when everything — farms, waste disposal plants, Soylent factories, and plankton ships — are so closely guarded. As Thorn says,
“There are idiots in this world that want to take away everything we’ve got.”
2/ Thorn visits a church Simonson attended just before his murder. This church is housing the poor and sick. Like, every inch of the sanctuary is stacked with cots. Which gives me the impression that this is definitely NOT an evangelical Christian church. It’s hard to believe it’s Catholic, but Father Paul does hear confession, and it was Simonson’s that’s given him a 1,000-yard stare as he murmurs, “It’s destroying me.”
3/ After refusing to sign-off on Simonson’s murder as a simple home-invasion, Thorn is put on riot duty. Because it’s Tuesday, Soylent Green day, and everyone comes out for those tasty green wafers.
But they run out. Typically.
So, the scoops are sent in — garbage trucks with front loaders that literally scoop up the inconvenient, unhappy, hungry masses and dump them in the back of the truck. Nice.
4/ Sol figures out a corporate secret. Something shocking from reviewing the official Soylent Corporation 2015-2019 two-volume oceanic report Thorn looted from Simonson’s apartment. It’s a grave thing, this secret, all of the Exchange agrees. It may or may not involve a super-rich politician. But how can they prove it?
Going Home
This movie is only 90-minutes, but it is a tense 90-minutes of sweating men with bad 70s haircuts. Maybe it’s the state of our world today that heightened the experience. After all, the preciousness of eggs is mentioned at least twice.
The culmination is Sol deciding to Go Home, something alluded to in the first scene.
And it’s not returning to the suburbs to hang with the grandkids.
Sol heads over to the going home place, an air-conditioned spa-like facility with a lobby full of the old and infirm signing in. Or signing out. Depends on how you look at it.
Sol is led to a private room by an orderly, reverently tucked into a cushy bed, and given to sip from an elegant goblet. Then he is left alone as a giant screen flashes beautiful images to the accompaniment of light classical music. Hi-def video of fields of flowers, wildlife, verdant scenes of abundance, clean water, flocks of birds and schools of fish.
His wonder is palpable. Obviously, because none of this stuff exists anymore
What is the secret of Soylent Green?
Thorn shows up in time to say goodbye to Sol (yeah, it’s that kind of going home), and to hear Sol’s pained whispers about this big secret he discovered.
BUT WHAT IS IT??
Usually, you find out by following the money. But in this case, you find out by following the body (Sol’s). Which is exactly what Thorn does. In a tense set of scenes with very little dialogue, Thorn sees Sol’s body loaded with dozens of others into the back of a garbage truck. Lines of these trucks roll into the waste disposal plant, where the bodies are unloaded onto conveyor belts.
It’s a little bit like the opening sequence of Laverne and Shirley, except its white body bags instead of bottles of Shotz beer.
The bodies travel along until they dump into a vat, and then … wait a minute? Is this a factory?
Have I mentioned that all this time the conspiracists are trying to get Thorn, too? Yeah. Chases ensue. Blows are exchanged. Shots are fired.
Thorn ends up back at the church, badly hurt and bleeding. His Chief rushes there, hot to find out what this secret is, this tale of corporate corruption in a dying world where the poor are expendable pawns.
In Thorn’s desperate lamentation, the secret is this:
“It’s people … Soylent Green is made out of people! They’re making our food out of people, next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”
dET. tHORN, sOYLENT gREEN
Find Soylent Green on streaming services, or choose not to give them your money and check the DVD out of your local library like I did.
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