Soylent Green film/reading discussion

Soylent Green is a 1973 film remake of the 1966 dystopian novel Make Room!Make Room!, regarding overpopulation in specifically New York City. The film has a cheapo-1970s feel to it, and Charlton Heston’s acting is often unbearable, but the film does a decent job to convey concerns found in the novel. There are stairways in decrepit buildings coated with human beings with nowhere else to sleep, food riots after rationing shortages and the poor rioters are scooped up into the backs of dump-trucks, and one of the best scenes where Thorn (a name that doesn’t help the film’s general feeling of mild sleaze) manages to sneak into the Soylent Green factory itself and sees the truth behind the manufacture of Soylent Green: piles of white-covered corpses being liquidated into food-form. 

The scenario of the film and novel unfortunately does not seem very far-fetched: corporations, who by default or otherwise are in control of food production, decide upon, or are forced to take an extremely immoral decision due to extreme overpopulation, making food that is made of dead human beings to feed the “wretched refuse” that is the “teeming masses” of hopeless, living human beings. Would many people even want to know what it is that they are eating? Even people today, in times when, in the United States at least, there is an overabundance of food choices, often people want to remain ignorant of what it is they are eating. So its plausible to assume even if, and its left indeterminate at the end of the film if the public will ever know Soylent Green is made of dead bodies, people are starving and desperate, that they would choose to eat Soylent Green despite knowing what it is. The film makes a great effort to show the suffering and inhuman misery that the people of a hopelessly overpopulated New York City are going through. Which might not have been far from the real suffering of NYC during the time period the film was made. 

In each of the films and the novels that they are based on, and also the novel Feed discussed in the Fahrenheit 451 essay, a major theme or facet is a dominating power of corporations/governments, and their power of being able to maintain a total manipulation over unsuspecting people. This is the same too in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which is also discussed in the essay. Soylent Green does a good job of showing the differences between the realities of the rich and the poor; how in the posh apartment of the murdered elite William R. Simonson things can be found like soap, liquor, beef, and real vegetables, while out in the world these things are impossible to find and the great majority of people are even being fed dead human beings.