Soylent Green

So...I just finished watching the movie Soylent Green starring Charlton Heston. It's a 1973 scifi flick set in the year 2022 (which is really funny because all the tech like tvs look like they are straight out of the 70s, not at all what modern electronics look like and certainly not what they'll look like in 2022 even if the world stops progressing at this very moment.) Heston's character is a detective who is investigating a mysterious assassination. It turns out that the guy who has been killed was on the board of directors for a company called Soylent that makes these colored rectangle slabs people eat in lieu of real food that is no longer available to most of the masses. The big mystery, stop reading now if you don't want to know, is that Soylent Green is made out of dead people. Now, I found myself watching and thinking, so? In this future world, the oceans are dying, there isn't farmland, there are too many people (masses sleep on all the stairwells for some reason, so Heston is always jumping over them to get anywhere). Now, if there were no other source of food and the makers of Soylent weren't killing people, just using people who either died naturally, were murdered/had an accident/etc., or chose to euthanize themselves, why not eat it?

This big secret was the least disturbing thing that happens in the movie in my estimation. I was more horrified at the way women are treated. If you want to have a nice place to live, you basically become a glorified prostitute and come with the apartment that a man might move into, you are referred to as furniture. The man can choose to keep you or get a new piece of furniture. You cook, clean, and service the man's needs, he can even beat you if he so chooses. Heston pretty much immediately makes the dead man's furniture have sex with him and she is ok with it because that's just how things are. The movie makes absolutely no mention of men being furniture, apparently women, who were definitely moving towards liberation in the 70s have taken a good leap backwards.

Another disturbing aspect of this movie is what seems to be the cause of this messed up future. At one point, for about one sentence, Heston cites global warming as the cause of the unnaturally hot weather. People are constantly complaining of the heat and cozying up to air conditioners throughout the movie. Thirty five years ago people were already worried about global warming and climate change. And yet, its often feels like climate change is a relatively new idea with the way our government and the population as a whole treat the issue. Hey, maybe if we don't shape up and stop potential climate shifts, we'll end up eating Soylent Green too.