MINDLESS MUSINGS

SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Well thank the heavens it hasn’t happened…yet. The future the film was predicting took place in 2020; phew! We dodged that bullet. Unfortunately, we are continuing down the exact path that will land us in a similar predicament – fuck. Overpopulation, global warming and pollution are still on the increase with no signs of slowing down.

The movie was released in 1973, based on a novel written in 1966. So, to the writers, 2022 seemed like long enough for us to fuck things up. The population of New York in 1973 was 16 million. In 2026 it is 20 million. That’s half of the predicted 40 million in the film’s 2022. So, I suppose we managed to keep the global warming and pollution at bay too…for now.

In this dystopia we have successfully fucked the entire planet – ecocide. The water supplies are strictly rationed and food as we know it is a distant memory. People eat processed food wafers produced by the Soylent Corporation. Shit! Imagine having a monopoly on what everyone eats! Overpopulation = more profits! You bloody beauty!!!

Soylent yellow was their first product, made from soy and lentil. Its successor, Soylent Red was made from krill. Soylent green is the new kid on the block; tastier and more nutritious! Imagine existing on a diet of wafers; no variety whatsoever. Eat it or starve, we don’t give a shit.

The film is based in New York where housing and room in general are nightmarishly scarce. People live in absolute squalor, and civilisation is hanging by a thread. People have to queue with containers at public taps and then cart the water back to their hovels. I assume bathing, at least in clean water, is a distant memory too. Can you just smell it?

Naturally, the elites still have spacious apartments along with access to running water and fresh food; these are now some of the greatest status symbols on earth!

“Hey did you hear Tony had steak and salad the other day? Talk about opulence!”

These buildings are heavily fortified and patrolled by armed guards to ensure the riffraff don’t try and pinch a bit of lettuce – the scum! I am guessing that the main clientele here would be the executives of that fucken Soylent Corporation. Must suck to have been climbing the ladder in McDonalds only to see the entire food chain turn to shit.

These upper-class assholes even have concubines! They call them furniture and share them around like toys. No human rights, who are you going to complain to anyway? Plebs down on the filthy streets eating shitty crackers and struggling for mere survival, while these pricks have sex-slaves, real food, ample water, air conditioning, plenty of room and privacy and access to whatever entertainment is still available. What more could you want? Perhaps your own personal bodyguard just in case some disgusting commoner makes it across the moat, past the armed guards and through the security system and then has the gall to ask for a crumb – impudence! They do have bodyguards just in case you were concerned.

It is a genuinely horrific vision of societal collapse; made even more terrifying by its possibility. It was not caused by a nuclear war or pandemic. It was the result of business as usual. We just continued on wrecking the joint and reproducing ad nauseum. People protested, recycled, turned vegan (I’m not sure how far the solutions had come by 1973) and whatever else, but they could not prevent the relentless march of ‘progress’. No cataclysmic event, just a slow, grinding decline with no hope.

The tragic result of “endless growth on a finite planet”. Corporations need ever expanding growth. Nations need constant GDP growth. So, we take and take ever more resources to create wealth. What the fuck is wealth anyway?

I was going to quote lyrics from “King of Pain” by The Police here, but I reckon they deserve their own post, so I’ll go with a more famous and apt quote:

“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish caught will we realise we cannot eat money.”

“Native American saying”

This movie IS that fucking realisation! Or maybe just a few steps before it. The elites still have a tiny stash of goodies for themselves. Only time will tell if they will runout entirely first or the furious masses will tear their ivory towers to the ground. Either way the end is near. After the masses consume any and all excess provisions from the stash…best not to think about these things.

If you still hold the tiniest sliver of optimism for ‘civilisation’, how about this? When the inevitable and frequent riots break out among the street trash the powers that be have an extremely effective response that leaves no doubt about their sentiments; a cross between a bulldozer and a fucken garbage truck! Have you got that image in your mind? Streets packed with rampaging rabble and an armoured garbage truck scooping people up and tossing them into the back like filth.

It seems the only dignity left for the downtrodden in this hellscape is the assisted suicide offered at government clinics. Euthanasia is treated much like giving blood is to us these days. Let’s be brutally honest, anyone applying is doing the world a favour at this point.

So, there you have it, the dismal destiny of the human race as predicted in a 1973 film. I wouldn’t worry too much though, we’ll probably get wiped out by some unforeseen catastrophe long before we sink that low.

Oh, I almost forgot; the title of the film; the new and improved Soylent Green. This one is made from plankton apparently. Yeah, we’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. No crop production possible on the land we’ve ruined, therefore no food for breeding animals on top of no more ingredients for Soylent Yellow. We fished the oceans and waterways so thoroughly that only the tiniest creatures are left for us to pilfer for sustenance.

Just one problem; there is no plankton left in the oceans either. That’s correct folks; we’ve stripped the world’s resources completely bare. Not even so much as a speck of nutrients left. Except for…

“SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!”

The infamous line from the film’s climax. You heard it right; like starving castaways on a desert island, we are down to cannibalism. Unknowingly for the majority of the population as the credits roll, but the truth is out – eeeewwww!

I reckon it might be tough getting a booking at those assisted suicide clinics for a while after that news breaks. I also reckon plenty of people will go on regardless:

“Maybe things will improve with a few million less people.”

“We didn’t kill them”

“At least they get to give back to society in a small way”

“Kind of like being an organ donor”

“I’m sure it’s all done hygienically and we won’t get sick”

What do you think you would do?

Is this the ultimate doom scenario for our greed and misuse of the planet or what? We succeeded milking the earth so well that there was nothing left. We took so much and grew so big the only thing left to eat was ourselves. Holly shit!!!

I have two questions though:

1. Did we actually eat all the insects?
2. Are we sure there’s not at least one colony of shifty rats hiding out waiting to claim victory after we’re gone?

That’s all. Cheers.