Welcome to another day of the A To Z Blogging Challenge. My theme is future dystopias. Today’s post looks at Soylent Green. Made in 1973, this film was one of the first ecological dystopias, portraying a world suffering from severe overpopulation, dying oceans, starvation, poverty and insufficient water, food and clean air. People riot regularly as a call for food. The rich, of course, live very differently with enough food and water to indulge and keep concubines and slaves they call furniture. Like many dystopias, corporations run things.
Soylent Green starts off as a mystery and the police are key players in uncovering secrets. The police get involved when a prestigious Board Member of Soylent Green industries, a large corporation that provides a fabricated protein to feed the population, is murdered. When trying to solve the murder, they also discover what soylent green actually is – its human flesh.
If your stomach is heaving, mine is too. The film creeped me out, in many ways because of how frighteningly plausible. the idea was. Even though other future dystopias such as H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Firefly, one of my favorite shows, have cannibals in their worlds, this is world-wide – corporations using the eating of flesh as a solution to human problems. While I love Firefly, because this element is contained and considered bad, I was repelled by Soylent Green by its integration into day to day existence. And its this level of horror that makes it such a powerful dystopia – because it crossed a line too easily, and too casaully and you could see how they could come up and implement it given the chaos and starvation in the world.
What do you think?
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