So let’s say the ravings of an injured Chuck Heston get picked up by the press and publicized.
It was made clear that the reason “they” are pushing SG is that there isn’t anything else left to eat. All the crops have died, the oceans are barren. There are no other sources of protein (or likely, of ANYTHING).
But people who eat only people is not a sustainable food chain. There is still going to be a net loss. The population could not increase, and will most certainly decrease, even with 100% SG consumption.
With SG, the population will decrease, but humanity will survive. Without SG, there will be a huge famine with something like 70%+ fatality rate (maybe even higher), both from famine, and the rioting. Maybe no one can survive, if there aren’t any seeds or animals to repopulate.
Despite the movie’s attempt at a hopeful ending, there’s none in store, is there? It’s hopeless.
But recycled people, with no other sources of food, is a losing proposition. Basic thermodynamics. There’s always a net loss. Plus, without a balanced diet or at least supplements, people will start developing deficiencies.
Presumably the Soylent Corporation is adding mineral supplements, and they should be able to extract most necessary vitamins from fresh human flesh, naturally. The larger problem is with the dieoff of ocean life, the phytoplankton that produce most of the oxygen in the atmosphere will disappear and CO[SUB]2[/SUB] levels will rise. The future of the world of Soylent Green is a suffocating and overheated one, regardless of food sources.
Marketers can sell anything. I started a thread a while back about how I believe we will be eating bugs within a decade because food companies will want it and marketers will figure out how to make it happen.
So the “big twist” at the end of that movie spoiler alert is that soylent green was people. But I never got why it was such a big deal. Sure, it shocking to hear at first, and people have a right to know what they are eating, but it’s not like they are murdering people to make it. Or were they? It has been a while since I saw it, but I seem to remember them implying it is made from fresh, willyfully-suicided Edward G. Robinsons.
The big reveal is actually that the Earth’s oceans are dead. That’s what Sol (Edward G. Robinson) discovers from the oceanographic survey that Thorn (Charlton Heston) finds in the apartment of the murdered industrialist. That they are making Soylent Green out of processed corpses is a visceral shock, but the fact that the “World Ocean” is no longer able to support the plankton that Soylent Green is supposedly made from is the real kicker. The Earth is essentially dead and the human population is reduced to feeding on one another which is obviously unsustainable.
Ah yes. I forgot about the whole “dead planet” thing being the entire point of the movie. I generally remember the “Soylent green is people” thing, “Edward G Robinson’s suicide and last movie” thing, the “trucks scooping up humans like so much garbage” thing, and the “women being referred to as furniture” thing is casual conversations about the film.
Somewhere, for the rich, there was decent food. Remember the girl eating a jar of stolen strawberry jam?
And the furniture girl went to a secret market, to purchase a piece of beef. You also saw celery and apples, when Heston pilfered stuff in the apartment of the executive who was murdered.
I was always struck that the murdered man was born the same year I was.
Why do you think that was an attempt at a hopeful ending?
I figured it was like many other films of that era, bucking the stereotype and NOT having a happy or cheerful ending.
Bless the Beasts and the Children
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
Griffin and Phoenix
etc.
The thrust of Mad Magazine’s satire of the film at the time it was released was that everyone already knew it was made out of people, and everybody was okay with it. Heston’s character was the only one who didn’t know.
Cannibalism was not unknown during the siege of Leningrad (one of my Russian teachers told me there was a family in her neighborhood that was found doing it), and for a percentage of the population, eating other people would be preferable to dying. Others would just lose the will to eat and pass away. If it was properly disguised as in the film (cannibalism is not a feature of the novel), and it was properly introduced through a government propaganda campaign, I think a lot of the population in the film would be okay with it.
One of the subtle features of the film, I think, is that it is not clear what happens to the crowd during the riot sequence when the people-mover trucks come through and start dumping bodies in the back. They may just empty them like dump-trucks when they are done, leaving people with broken arms and legs, but there is at least an implication that the rioters may be taken to the Soylent Green plant.
Watching it again recently, it was interesting to see that there was no Internet (of course) or cell phone network (ditto), although the call box Thorne uses has a wireless phone in it. Although those weren’t in existence when the film was made, it would make sense given the rocky energy supply - running a server farm would be next to impossible. The government would also want to keep a lock on information, for obvious reasons.
One part that never worked too well was that the majority of the population looks pretty well fed, including Heston (although you would assume the police and military would get priority on food). If I were to remake it now, I would just cast really skinny people like triathletes - although there is a fair amount of obesity in the chronically malnourished, paradoxically.
It still packs a punch, I think. It’s a view of the death throes of a planet.
Just FYI the novel Soylent Green is based on “Make room! Make room!” is really good sci fi that isn’t much like the movie (which is good in different ways). For one thing, in the book Soylent isn’t people; it’s Soybeans and Lentils hence the name.
The murder mystery that s central to the movie is a small part of the story and it is a really good depiction of a resource stressed over populated New York.
Mostly because 1) it was 1973, and Hollywood didn’t make a lot of total downer endings in mainstream movies, especially mainstream films, 2) Heston had hopeful endings in his two other sci fi downers (In Omega Man, his blood gives hope that humanity can rebuild, in PotA, he and Nova ride off and maybe they have a chance (BtPotA kinda put the kibash on that though, with the doomsday bomb going off at the end and all)), 3) my take on the end is that Thorn seemed so sure that getting the word out would cause a change, stop those madmen, rather than the actual fact that what he is saying is that humanity is doomed. That realizing that SG is people(!) means that that is the last step before the demise of humanity. He’s singing the death song of humanity, not saving it.
(But on the other hand, I was 12 the first time I saw it, and it is possible I just missed that doom was the point of the ending. And that initial error has remained uncorrected.)
For a data point of Hollywood just not understanding the implications of its own created worlds, in Waterworld, without the intervention of Mariner, the movie is the literal last days of the island society. When a superiorly armed hostile people come in conflict with an inadequately armed peaceful people, the lightly armed don’t live very long. There’s no reason for the smokers to have spared the island folk, so within a day or so they’ll all be dead.
And so, that is why I think that the makers of SG might not have realized that the world is doomed within a year after the movie ends. They just might not have thought it through.
I’ve thought that was the case from the first time I saw the movie. Though that interpretation doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the movie.
For one, if no one knows that SG is people, then they wouldn’t know they are in danger of becoming people chow. but yet, they must know beiong picked up by the scoops is not a good thing. So what do they think happens?
Having the scoops actually be about carting people off to the rendering plants is something that would happen after word gets out about SG. When everyone knows the state of the problem, they’ll take steps to make sure they don’t get scooped.
Eventually, it will get so bad people will just be taken at random for processing. And it still won’t be enough. I see a uge propulation drop no matter what happens.
And I hadn’t even considered how the lack of sea life affects the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere.
That scene plays like a paranoid conspiracy thriller. The scene implies there is a THEY that are doing this. That THEY are going to (as Thorn says) breed us like cattle. That THEY are evil, doing this TO us. And that doing this to us will benefit THEM.
But there isn’t a THEY. There’s only us. The THEY Thorn refers to are doing the best they can to keep humanity alive. They suppressed the news not to enrich themselves, but because the news would cause mass panic and riots.
Yes, it seems likely that people will start to suffocate in a CO2-rich atmosphere in the near future. It would seem likely that the Amazon is dead, dying, or cut down, as the presence of a small greenhouse in Central Park is seen as remarkable.
The novel’s author, Harry Harrison, did some free consulting for the film and had them change some things, like not giving out plastic bags in the butcher store to which Shirl goes (no petroleum for plastics) but bringing a cloth bag.
Harrison wrote a short story (“We Ate The Whole Thing”) that appeared in the first issue of Vertex and is, I think, in his collection The Best of Harry Harrison) that seems to be somewhat of a sequel, or prequel, or at least happens in the same world as his novel “Make Room! Make Room” that was the source material for Soylent Green. It’s a remarkably bleak little piece.
