Notes from the Couch: Soylent Green and the World of the Now

*Spoilers* however, if you haven't seen a movie that is older than I am, that's really not my problem...

  About New Years, a reference I didn’t know crossed my social media timeline. Someone mentioned Soylent Green. Me not catching a reference isn’t particularly a new thing. I don’t have any children, so I have to actually work to find out new generational catch phrases and references. This was different, however—the picture was an old 1960s or 1970’s style movie poster—so it inspired a Google search. I then found out that Soylent Green was an old Charlton Heston movie from 1973. I had never heard of this movie before—and I am also not much of a Charlton Heston fan—but a couple of other actors in the movie did peak my interest:  Edward G. Robinson and Joseph Cotten. Double Indemnity is my all time favorite movie and Edward G. Robinson was in that. Gaslight is also very high up on the list and Joseph Cotten was in that, so I decided to give Soylent Green a try.  

You may have noticed that the two movies listed as favorites of mine are both very old movies of the Noir variety, and both movies are from the mid 1940’s. I love my old noir.  But the age of the movies shows that both of those men were getting on in years by the time they were in Soylent Green. In fact, Edward G. Robinson was very sick at the time of filming and died a little over a week after he finished. His character’s assisted suicide scene is the last thing he ever filmed. I did a little digging and it seems that he couldn’t even hear much anymore at the time of filming so he had to get used to the cadence of the speech of the actors around him to react correctly to what they were saying because he couldn’t hear them.  If that is the case, he was an even better actor than I ever thought. I also loved him in The Woman in the Window with Joan Bennett—he had many other movies, too, since he made 101 feature films. I knew he was a powerhouse, but just such a brilliant performance in this movie. Charlton Heston was of a later generation who made a name for himself in the late 1950s I think.  I just know that Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments were from that time period.  At the time of Soylent Green, Heston was about 50, playing a 40 year old. A fun fact about Charlton Heston is that he was in the movie that scared my child self the most (even though I’m pretty sure I saw it edited for television): Planet of the Apes.

Heston did a few of those futuristic movies that didn’t speak highly of our society and where we were heading due to our own foibles. He was also in the Omega Man for example. Interesting noting his very Republican politics in his later life…although maybe not. After all, he was in Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments, too…so anyway…

Soylent Green was immediately intriguing to me because it was about a dystopic future due to the greenhouse effect, making a hazy, hot world where everything was ‘burning up”.  And it was 2022. The general populace was forced to live in cramped quarters without even such comforts as air conditioning or real food. They had to wait in lines for chips of the popular food Soylent Green, that due to shortages, were only available—and in limited supply—on Tuesdays. Beef was rare, and only available for the rich.

When a wealthy businessman is found dead in his apartment, Detective Thorn is called in to investigate. He is lead down a rabbit hole, finding out a truth about the origin of their food source that he never could have imagined.  

The story is about finding out, in terror, what the wealthy of the world are feeding poor people.  But when I came to the end of the movie, it felt only half done.  OK, now that we know what is happening, that something needs to change, what happens now?  But that never materializes.  The horrible realization—although hinted at a couple of times earlier in the movie, where we find that other people know, and either haven’t done anything about it, or figure now is a good time to check out, is the bitter end of the movie.  In that moment of horror at the end, Heston cries out: “It’s people! Soylent Green is people!” Sadly, the ending left me cold. What happened AFTER THAT? Can Thorn really trust his boss that seems on the take to tell the world? Or will he protect the system? The ending credits make me question if Thorn, when taken away, was brought to that assisted suicide facility and euthanized, protecting the secrets of the wealthy and allowing for the poor to continue to be used for labor and fed their dead. And what is worse—there has never been a sequel.

This is too bad, as there are so many things about this movie that remain pertinent to today. Of course there are some incredibly dated things about this movie, too. But a remake could work on cleaning that up—or at least presenting something to work with to bring this into modern times.

When I first look up a movie in IMDB, I will often look to see what viewer reviews say about the movie. One person who wrote a review back about 15 years ago said he found it “interesting” that men and women had such different feelings about this movie—that men seemed to love it and feel it was a great sci fi movie, but women seemed to hate it. He didn’t understand why the sexes viewed it so differently. Being a woman I noticed right away that women hold no positions of power in this futuristic dystopia. In fact, I see very few older women at all. Most of the women we see are young, in their twenties maybe, and are so seen as fixtures for the men with power and position that they are actually called “furniture”. The woman with the dead businessman tells Thorn that she will go to the next tenant of the apartment, if he will have her. Apparently the well furnished apartments include a beautiful young woman.

But I suppose that is to be expected—men are used to seeing movies from their point of view—maybe how they fantasize being rich and powerful would be? Soylent Green was based on the book Make Room! Make Room! written by Harry Harrison, published in 1966.  The movie came out in 1973. At the time when the book came out wealthy businessmen were just that.  Wealthy businessmen.  At that time, women couldn’t even have credit cards without their husband’s permission and unmarried women were habitually denied access to credit and loans.  Women’s financial freedom didn’t come until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. As we get further and further away from that time, it becomes more and more difficult to even contemplate that time.  Anything written/filmed then seems horribly dated.  

But more about the vantage point and that the people writing the stories and telling the stories were predominately male. The entertainment industry and the publishing industry were male.  They were making movies from their point of view and their idea of what was right and wrong.  And that’s to be expected. When you have a movie industry (or a publishing industry) that hires male writers, male producers, editors, directors, etc, you are going to get the male perspective. And really, I wouldn’t want them spending too much time trying to write the female perspective. And let me explain a little bit why.

A movie that I am a little obsessed with is Dante’s Peak.  I can’t even guesstimate how many times I have seen it. This movie, like so many mid 1990’s movies, really started to show some kick as female characters. Linda Hamilton, after playing Sarah Connor in 1984’s Terminator, and particularly buffed up her second time around playing Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 in 1991, really seemed the reigning queen of bad ass women.  In Dante’s Peak, she played the mayor of Dante’s Peak, all the while running a restaurant and taking care of her family, as a single mother of two. She was a legend, a BOSS—but the more I see this movie, the more I notice all those cheap tricks that were stuck in to make her character more palatable—less scary—more acceptable, if you will.  She wasn’t very put together—she seems like she wouldn’t have her head on straight if it wasn’t for her daughter, she still attempted a relationship with her ex mother-in-law, and she was not assertive—like at all. She wasn’t even really the lead—the main storyline was with Pierce Brosnan’s character, Harry Dalton, who had to learn to love again after losing his fiancee some few years before. Rachel Wando’s story is spoken about, but not shown in the tragic way Dalton’s story is shown in the beginning. It’s more about bringing her into his story than the other way around. The writer of this movie was a male, the director was male, and the industry was still very male at the time. Who am I kidding, some changes are being made, but the industry is still very male centered.

When I am writing, I am always worried about how I am capturing the male experience. Not being a man, I can only glean things from what I’ve seen and what I’ve been told. I’m always afraid that my male characters aren’t round enough, meaty enough. I read recently that F. Scott Fitzgerald was not happy with how his female characters came out in The Great Gatsby.  He felt that they were too flat.  I agree with him on that. But I feel it is a common problem. How do we as writers fully capture the essence of a character that is unlike us?  That is someone who is the opposite sex we identify with? Has a different ethnic background that we have?  Someone who has a disability?  We can say that we all share in the human experience and that is true. As an actor we have to learn to put ourselves into other people’s shoes, other people’s truths, but there has been much talk recently and casting decisions going more toward an authenticity of experience.  But I still wonder how that translates into writings. I don’t feel I have the background to tell a uniquely Native American story for example because I am not Native American.  But what if I want to create a native America character in my story? I don’t know if I would feel equipped, or even in the right, to write a story with a Native American lead character because I question whether any amount of research I could do would do that person justice or if I even have the right to tell the story that should be told by someone who understands that experience. But this way of thinking, if we take it to the extreme, also could lead to a fear of writing any diversity into the stories we tell and that isn’t what we want to go for either.

This is really just an open pontification on the nature of writing stories and how best to bring in representation. Obviously writing in a committee isn’t always going to work, so the experience of the writer is going to be the focus. With that I understand that for movies like Soylent Green, creating a world that women are the afterthought to the main theme makes sense, albeit not something that particularly works for me.

I think that leads into what is so exciting about what is happening with writing now. From movies to books, there are real pushes toward opening up the game to many different voices to obtain many different perspectives. Certain female actors are refusing to do movies on women not directed by women to get in that female perspective. Reese Witherspoon has created Hello Sunshine to push women’s publishing and agency. There are so many stories to tell from many perspectives other than the ones that have been presented to us over the last 100 years, including such movies as Soylent Green.

To be fair, as I mentioned before, there are some things about Soylent Green particularly interesting to today’s society and still, sadly, not as outdated as one would hope they would be by now. Soylent Green discussed the dangers of the greenhouse effect, which although is sometimes used interchangeably with climate change, is defined by NASA as “the way in which heat is trapped close to Earth’s surface by “greenhouse gases”. These greenhouse gases are given as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides, and water vapor. The levels of carbon dioxide have been rising due to the usage of fossil fuels and the deforestation of the rain forests trapping that additional heat and causing the temperature to rise.  I read somewhere else that greenhouse effect is an early indicator climate change. The movie has the whole of New York City draped in this green fog to show this greenhouse effect. The heat around the world is even causing the sea plankton to die out, showing the loss of food supply and stifling hot weather of the dystopian 2022.

Soylent Green’s other big statement was about class distinction. The rich would soon essentially be breeding the lower class for food—at the time of Soylent Green, to feed the working class, and as the world became more and more destroyed from the greenhouse effect, to then most likely feed the wealthy as well. I’d love to see this movie redone from the perspectives of today. But maybe that is a story to think upon another day…