Soylent Green is People! You’ve probably heard that before.
“Soylent Green” is a 1973 film envisioning a dystopian future on an earth ravaged by overpopulation and pollution. In that future world, a climate crisis of massive heat waves has depleted resources and threatens starvation.
Most of the food is manufactured by Soylent Industries, with the main product being “Soylent Green,” supposedly made of plankton from the oceans. Charlton Heston stars as a detective investigating the murder of a corporate executive with connections to Soylent Industries. In the process he discovers that Soylent Green has some strange and unexpected ingredients.
Spoiler alert! Well, what does it matter? The film dates from 50 years ago, and if you haven’t seen it by now you’re probably not going to. So you might as well allow me to cut to pull back the curtain on the plot.
The climactic scene is at the end of the film with Charlton Heston being carried out on a stretcher yelling, “Soylent Green is people! You’ve got to tell them!”
The film was made in 1973.
Guess the year in which it was set?
2022
That’s right, kids. In 1973 we imagined that this was the year we would be so desperate for a food source that we would be (unknowingly) consuming food made of recycled human remains.
Fifty years in the future. So, dystopian films have had appeal for a long time.
The only thing more depressing than the premise of the film is that I’m old enough to remember seeing it on its release in 1973! I was 16 years old at the time. My friends and I were enjoying the delicious freedom of newly-minted drivers licenses and access to family cars. I remember watching Soylent Green at one of several drive-in movie theaters that then existed in Salem, Oregon. We probably watched it two or three times over that summer, as we did with other films. They didn’t seem to produce and release as many movies in those days, so we tended to watch the same ones over again.
Little could I imagine in 1973 what life, and my own life, would actually be like almost 50 years later. At least we’re not eating Soylent Green. Not yet anyhow.
It was easy to expect that things would be a lot worse in the future, because, well, it was the future. Full of dark unknowns. A tendency we still have. These days, it is also tempting to imagine that the past was better than the present. Well, if you didn’t already know, 1973 wasn’t all great either (unless you were 16 years old with a newly minted drivers license, then life really was pretty great).
That year, and the several years preceding and following it, saw innumerable challenges and problems. The Vietnam war was winding down, leaving a divided American with more than 50,000 American families grieving, and more than one million Vietnamese families doing the same. We had suffered political assassinations and attempted assassinations (Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Wallace, Gerald Ford, among others). In 1973 we were in the middle of the Watergate scandal. Just several years earlier we had experienced the 1968/69 flu epidemic, resulting in the deaths of more than 100,000 Americans, and many more worldwide. Not as bad as COVID, but still a plight. The first middle eastern oil crisis was in 1973, resulting in gas shortages and long lines at gas stations just to get a rationed amount of gas at inflated prices. Soon there would be double digit inflation, interest rates, and unemployment. Known as the “Misery Index” in the Carter administration. The Cold War with the Soviets was in full steam, and the threat of nuclear war seemed very real indeed.
James Reston published an article for the New York Times on December 26, 1973, entitled, “So Long, ‘73, and Good Riddance!”
Wait, isn’t that what people say at the end of EVERY year?
Or did we think that the “good riddances” just started recently? That things are worse now than they ever have been?
Yeah, those were just a few of the big-ticket problems and challenges of that era. And just when we thought things couldn’t be worse, the 70s also had disco, leisure suits, and platform shoes. Oh, the indignity. But sure, there were lots of good things too (especially if you were age 16 with a newly minted drivers license). I’m just trying to remember what they were.
Oh yeah, the 1970s were (in my opinion) one of the greatest sports decades of all time. There’s that. We had Olympic swimming champion Mark Spitz, whose gold medal record stood until Michael Phelps surpassed it. There was Muhammad Ali. And Secretariat, along with three horse racing Triple Crown winners. We had Reggie Jackson, Billie Jean King, and Julius Erving (Dr. J). We had OJ Simpson and Pete Rose, who both had, you know, Problems later on. But they sure were great on the field. Heck, even my hometown Portland Trailblazers won an NBA championship, something that has eluded them ever since.
The United States bicentennial celebration was in 1976. It provided a bright spot of optimism in a rather clouded era. Who could then imagine what life would be like fifty years hence? The USA will celebrate 250 years of independence in 2026. What will life be like just four years from now? What will it be like fifty years from now? (many of us won’t be around to compare)
And we had great music in that era, for sure (disco not included) and some pretty good movies too. I wouldn’t consider Soylent Green as one of them, but it does provide a window into that time, and maybe some insight into ours as well.
We like to think that when we turn the calendar from one year to the next, things will be better, simply because it is a new year. But the calendar is just a way of measuring time, not a guarantee that something is going to change one way or another. We need perspective.
It is easy, and often strangely satisfying, to worry and catastrophize about the future. Much as Soylent Green prodded us to do in 1973 (and nearly constantly every year since). It is likewise easy to look back and think that the past was somehow better than the present. Just because it is the past. I notice that tendency anytime I read the comments on 60s and 70s music on YouTube. Younger people longing for that era, wishing they had been born then, saying that times were better. Maybe, maybe not.
We can focus on the bad and think that times are now worse than they’ve ever been. But the past wasn’t always as good as people often assume or “remember” it being. And the future may not be as bad as we fear. Realistically, once we’re in it, some of the future may indeed seem worse, and some will seem better. That’s the way it always goes.
Welcome to 2022
Now, if I start to see Soylent Green appear on the shelves at my local grocery, yeah, then I’ll worry…
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Related posts:
https://cliffordberger.com/there-is-no-normal-life-theres-just-life/
