Film Friday: Soylent Green (1973)

Tuesday is Soylent Green day... and I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, Soylent Green is a fantastic dystopian film about a world destroyed by overpopulation and pollution. Unlike its contemporaries, it is a shocking, visceral film that can bring real emotion. On the other hand, it’s an unpleasant film to watch with unlikable characters, lousy ideology, and the surprise has long been spoiled.

Plot

Soylent Green takes place in 2022. The world is massively overpopulated. Forty million people crowd into New York City alone, and the film suggests that the East Coast cities at least have grown together into one huge mega city. Overpopulation has caused the world to collapse as people now live in overcrowded dilapidated apartments. The homeless crowd into churches. The government has no control and can’t even begin to stop crime. Making this all the worse, pollution has destroyed the land and food is scarce. Humanity now depends on processed plankton for food. That plankton is processed by the world’s food company, called the Soylent Corporation, which provides Soylent Yellow, Red and now Green to the people through the government. The story takes place against this backdrop.

Charlton Heston is NYPD detective Robert Thorn, a “good” cop. He’s called in to investigate the murder of a rich man named William R. Simonson. Simonson was a director of the Soylent Corporation, but political pressure is soon applied to make Thorn drop the investigation. Thorn refuses to stop and soon learns that before his death, Simonson told something to a priest, which the priest says is “destroying him” – he seems almost delusional by the time Thorn speaks to him. Thorn then gives his friend Sol (Edward G. Robinson) a book he discovered in Thorn’s apartment titled: “Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report, 2015 to 2019.” He wants Sol to examine it. When Sol grasps the conclusion in the book, he decides to end his life, so he goes to a euthanasia center. Thorn races there when he finds out what Sol is doing. He is too late to stop the death, but Sol tells him what he learned and he tells Thorn to get proof and expose this. It is a horrifying moment. Thorn then follows Sol’s body to discover the horrible secret.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

In some ways, this is easily the best of the 1970s dystopian films. Indeed, where this film succeeds and so many of the others fail is in making the overpopulated, overpolluted world feel real. The writer very smartly draws constant references to the details that give you a visceral feeling for what this world is like: a horrible uncomfortable world of absence and want. Society has exhausted its resources, so things like cars (and even buses and trains) are a thing of the past. Food vendors hawk crumbs and broken bits of house wares on the street. The apartments look like slums and seem to have been furnished from garbage dumps. We are constantly reminded of the heat wave, the poisoned air, and the fact that most people have never even seen the foods we take for granted. For example, Heston compares a pair of breasts to a grapefruit, only to be reminded he’s never seen a grapefruit. He needs Sol to taste a spoon to tell him what the little bit of food he’s found on it is – strawberries. He hasn’t had a hot shower in living memory. And when he sees the short film showing the images of the world long gone, e.g. trees, animals, fields, he breaks down and weeps because he wasn’t even able to image what the world had been like.

This is where the film excels, and where you feel the oppressiveness. The government is brutal, murderous and oppressive (though it still wants to pretend to follow procedures) and it has absolute power over all aspects of society. The cops are like Gestapo agents in a way, that they can simply walk into your home and take what they want. Yet, society is also beyond the control of the government. There are too many people to police. There are too many people to control... to protect... to feed. This is a world without freedom or safety or order. It is oppressive in other ways too. There are so many people that life is intolerable. In what is truly a great scene, you see Heston struggle to chase a man who has shot at him, but both are barely moving as they force their way through the crowd. As you watch this scene you feel physically sick knowing this feeling of being caught in a crowd and how confining that can be, and then you realize... that is life in this world every day for these people.

This is a polluted word too where the air is dirty and green, and where a constant heat wave burns your body up. And there is no escape. You can’t go home to escape this because you live in abject poverty, without electricity or water and with almost no food... yet, you need to lock your doors and be careful not to venture out alone because someone will attack you to take the almost-nothing you do own.

Three things make this world completely believable and make you cringe watching it. First, there are constant references to these conditions. This isn’t a film that mentions this and then forgets about it to tell its story. Every single character in every scene makes some reference to the conditions under which they live, and that keeps it constantly on your mind. Secondly, everyone accepts this reality. The government admits that it’s incapable of changing things, the people take the world as normal, and even the rich live in somewhat similar conditions. Yes, they have running water and air conditioning and modern apartments, but those things are minor. They have no cars, no estates, and not much more food than everyone else. That’s actually the key point to selling this. No possibility of escape is shown because there is no other world to escape to: this is not a tale of two worlds, nor is this a world caused by a villain who can be defeated and the world freed... this is the world.

Finally, the most important piece is Sol’s death scene. Up to this point in the film, everything has been grim and dystopian except the luxury apartment where Thorn spends a couple days with the concubine (something which suggests a very different set of morals in this world, by the way). What this has done is adjust your expectations so that you see the luxury apartment as the ideal world compared to the horrible world outside. Then Sol is shown the video of our Earth and nature in all its glory, and it strikes you how horrible this world really is that the tiny, sparse luxury apartment is viewed as paradise. This is enhanced by the death of Sol, who is the one character who gives Thorn hope. (As an aside, this is a powerful scene made all the more powerful in that Edward G. Robinson was dying of cancer when he filmed it – it was his last scene – and only Heston and Robinson knew about this. Heston claimed the scene haunted him for years and it really is easy to feel the emotion within the scene.)

Then the other shoe drops. Having had your eyes opened by the short film, you are suddenly shown the secret. Not only is this secret horrible, but even worse, you realize right away that knowing it changes nothing because there is no other food supply... this is their fate. At that moment, you truly realize what genuine dystopia is. No other 1970's dystopian film comes close to this. To the contrary, all the others, like Logan’s Run are about worlds where people seem happy until they learn they aren’t truly free. That’s kind of a piddly complaint compared to the hell on Earth that is Soylent Green. Even something like Planet of the Apes lacks the punch of this film because it seems so implausible and like it can’t happen to us. Soylent Green feels like it can. And that makes this a special film.

Ok, but that brings up a couple problems. First, this film feels like it rambles. Had this film been made with modern storytelling techniques, it would have been a much stronger film... think the style of Minority Report. Secondly, this is a hard film to enjoy. Heston is not a likable character; he’s an abusive cop. It is an ugly film to look at. And it posits a horror, but without a solution so it is frustrating to watch.

Further, the film is ideological crap. This film was made in the 1970's when Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” was the big seller among liberals. They were convinced that humans were going to breed themselves into a polluted, overpopulated, starving world. But their ideology was deeply flawed. They ignored the fact that population growth, like other growth, is not straight-line growth... it peaks and then falls again. They wrongly assumed that “overpopulation” leads to poverty – to the contrary, some of the richest places on earth are the most densely populated (Tokyo is as large as the nightmare city in Soylent and is one of the most prosperous on the planet). And they utterly failed to grasp how vast the Earth really is. That makes the message here of culling the population before the peons breed rather obnoxious.

If you can set those things aside, however, this is a super smart and well-made film. It is one that everyone should see, even if you know the ending. Just try to forget the ending and imagine the shock of realizing the twist for the first time... and that there isn’t a thing those people can do about it.

In any event, remember that Tuesday is Soylent Green Day. Yummy.