Soylent Green (2007, DVD)

When organic foods start to look uniform, be scared.

For example: eggs. We all know what an egg looks like. They all look pretty much the same. Yet no two eggs are exactly alike. They are laid by chickens who have different bodies, different cycles, different mates. There is no internal cookie cutter or mold that shapes their eggs. None of them have a built-in electronic egg timer. The eggies come out when they're good enough to sit on and hatch on their own.

Egg McMuffins, on the other hand, all look the same. Between the prefab muffins and presliced squares of processed cheese you know what you're getting, every time: a perfect hockey puck of egg white, marred only by the imperfect circle of yellow yolk in the middle. It's so perfect you start to believe that they are made that way -- that the eggs that McDonald's harvests are somehow magical enough to be handy little disks. You imagine what fun it would be to pry apart a disk-shaped McHardboiled Egg. Or how much easier it would be to chuck one of 'em when egging your neighbor's house. You wonder what sort of chickens would bare such diskette-fruit and what sort of offspring they might actually hatch, if it weren't for Ronald McDonald's quick plastic-gloved farm hands. And then you realize: it's all plastic. It's all artifice. It's all over.

Soylent Green (1973) is a good science-fiction film because it has a social conscience. As a cautionary tale, its lessons are crystal clear, giving voice to doubts and anxieties we all have about our culture. It's a film about corporate uniformity, overpopulation, and human suffering. It's about the way the subjects of mass culture are seduced into thinking death can be pleasurable, because it's the only pleasure left in a culture of greed and economic peril. And it's about power: who controls how we survive?

You've heard the catchphrase. You know what the movie's about. You might even remember the stunning climax yourself, watching Heston's incredulous face scrawl with the agony of realization, just before he screams his final words: Soylent Green is people! It's a cannibal film. The moral of the story is simple: we're eating each other alive.

In hindsight, Soylent Green is obviously a critique of its era: the shortages of gas, the overcrowding of the cities, the rise to power of multinational corporations...the film's future is just a mirror of its present day. And considering that the "future" of Soylent Green is 2022 -- just a generation away from now -- it's a good time to think about whether anything has changed or if we've simply fallen into the looking glass.

In the film's future, in the year 2022...

~~~ Global warming is playing havoc with everyday life, turning the city into a sweltering pit of hellacious torture. Many die from heat exhaustion. ~~~

~~~ The government rations out perverse Eucharists for the overpopulated planet to survive -- green disks composed, they say, of soy. ~~~

~~~ Soylent green disks are composed of dead human beings mixed in with the feed. ~~~

Today, in the year 2001...

~~~ Global warming is playing havoc with everyday life, creating schizo weather patterns and random acts of Godlike violence. ~~~

~~~ On St. Patrick's Day, McDonald's sells green milkshakes composed of prefab vanilla shake mix and green colored dye. ~~~

~~~ If they're lucky, school children get as much soybean product as meat when they eat hamburgers in the school. "Natural" foods, like fruits and vegetables, contain trace elements of both pesticides and preservatives. And the kids just want to eat Twinkies anyway. ~~~~~

~~~ "Mad Cow" disease is causing widespread panic. The cause? Mixing dead cow brains and other cow parts in with cattle feed. Cattle Chow is Cow!!! ~~~

Food for thought. Brain food.

You can't watch Soylent Green and not be bowled over by the way this work of fiction tells more truth than the nightly news. The sheer desparation of the culture it presents is scary; the dystopia of its vision is pure genius. Rent this movie and watch it with your eyes wide open and your mouth slim shut. You are what you eat. Leave the popcorn in the microwave. Leave a light on...look carefully at what's on the end of your fork. Invest in a good fan this summer. Think twice and watch your back.


-- unheimlich, 3/01