Soylent Green
Director: Richard Fleischer

MGM 1973

By Hunter Stephenson

The image of bulldozer-slash-dump-trucks scooping up tens of living people snared in the herd-esque calamity of overpopulation is one of several brilliantly fucked notions of our progressing depersonalization on view in Soylent Green. Where Mike Judge’s Idiocracy uses the medium of film and the genre of frat-comedy to present his splatter house of anecdotes for a cynically satiric take on our future circa 2505, seen as patient devolution through the demise of eugenics, Soylent Green jogs a barely there, ‘70s-pulp murder-plot through a visceral 2022 where humans-are-things is the subtly damning weight and realization.

What is so enthralling about the future of Soylent Green is how the how is barely referenced – an ecological collapse and an NYC stocked with 40 million people – instead, it steers casually and subliminally into the mind’s grasp of the inevitable. The problem of food, which births the eponymous brand fed to the disenfranchised majority, brings the city’s richest to their knees like philistines enraptured by the rarities of a good cutlet, a ripe strawberry, a bourbon, a hot shower and “furniture” (women, natch). Add dining tracks by Dimitri in Paris and it sounds more than a little like South Beach, no? Subtract those amenities and you basically have AIDS in Africa.

With the rise of the Internet, the Bush administration, social networks, blogs, digital photography and VICE, all of which leaves only the most fringe of niche acolytes to feel like consummate individuals – Zoo anyone? – there is the coming revolution/revelation where the have-nots pile-up in the stairwells devoid of their once championed “spirited” hustle, united in respired doom like the 50 passengers aboard Das Boot, awaiting charges from god-knows-where, only devoid of the emotions of surprise, passion and survival. Queue the dump-trucks.

Soylent Green is where people have stopped moving and started waiting. It’s where animals-as-things become us-as-things and the only thing that remains separate is suicide, presented here accessorized wiith smooth champagne flutes of Beethoven and Grieg and a panorama of the world we had always faked grasping.

This discourse of Soylent Green is written by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.