The Confused Prophecy of Soylent Green

Rather than seeing Soylent Green (1973) as some prediction of a dying future, I would rather see it as a prophecy broken and spoken by lips unable to comprehend fully the meaning of their own utterance. The film falls to us from across time as a sort of confused rush of ideas and words, all hanging in a odd green mist present in a world confused by near-random acts of violence. It’s prophetic in places, absolutely poignant at diagnosing the hemorrhaging thing we call society at times, but all together a cobbled mishmash of ideas in it's totality. It's broken nature, it's half-spoken half-realism, lends the film well to being read — or more accurately heard — as prophecy. 

We take prophesy here to mean a foreshadowed future or a divine interpretation; the prophesy is intimately linked to a future not yet known, built from what is felt as a cataclysmic present, one demanding near-divine interpretation (if not intervention). In this sense, we might see Soylent Green as a film pulling inspiration from a dark unforeseen future; it levels itself in the face of a dark future one which is always ahead, but also intimately present. The future it identifies — the death of the planet, loss of food sources, overpopulation, etc — is so intimately the source of the films inspiration, yet it fails to fully realize the full gravity that these impassible problems will entail. On the one hand, the film feels produced from the reality of the 70's, extrapolated from a specific temporal socio-politcal zeitgeist, while, on the other hand attempting to attune itself to a future it can never know. Thus, to the modern viewer, the film feels much like a near present, familiar present, channeled by an unseeing past; Soylent Green flung out a half-seen vision to warn us of problems we are more intimately familiar with, yet still find ourselves scrambling to comprehend.

In slightly different terms, we might see the film as both a sober patient near-objective view of it’s alternative present-future, while also representing a panicked out-stretched hand, grasping for anyone’s ear who might hear tell of the terror at the heart of modern living. In parts, it feels like a world nearly business as usual, nearly what we might consider a normal. The film takes these moments very seriously, nothing feels particularly out of place. Critics themselves, upon seeing the film in ‘73, noticed how the film does not try to sell its own futurism; it did not — and still does not — feel profoundly futuristic, like it's set 50 years in a future. Our understanding of our world thus fits with the world created in the film, in a perverse way: nothing changes, or perhaps nothing will change, and the film highlights this fact in it's anachronistic feel. In this sense, we might see the film as a fatal reminder of the real future failure of capitalist progress, a failure which we are currently experiencing. The riot control feels profoundly current era, the sliding doors and video games feel rather simple, the TV's look like behemoths from a lost age. Further, it is in moments of objective depiction that we feel most distraught. One of the best examples of this: the moment when Thorn rides the disposal trucks to the Soylent facility. There is no moralizing here, no tone, only sober cuts leading us towards a discovery we are already beginning to expect; no meaning is made with the discovery, only a short burst of violence followed by a quick escape. There is nothing profoundly futuristic in this moment: gleaming industrial pipes, steam, vats… they all feel present. In these sober moments, Soylent Green feels like it takes on a near pompous air, at least, to the modern viewer — a resounding “I told you so” might be heard. In the end, things happen without much question: people have sex, things get stolen, people get killed… as sober a-moral demonstration of a world which we are currently living, a world profoundly unchanged and perverse, as it has always been. The prophecy, in this sense, is a fatal one — nothing ever changes, there is no escape — but at the same time, a prophecy of logical conclusions — the very real changes in form that increase our perceived stakes.

We also must find the manic call that emanates from the screen. In part, it’s a call towards us today, a society which very well might be on the brink of our own — albeit different — food crisis. In some respects, things are not quite that bad yet (at least, for the citizens of New York) and thus we feel the film pulling at our ears, trying to gain our attention before the problem gets worse. We are reminded of food (really life itself); we are reminded of ingrained misogyny; we are reminded of our distancing relationship to death; we are reminded of the mistreatment of the poor. “Soylent Green is people!” is not a call for the obvious fact, but rather a call that our life — our food, our friends, our world — is being melted down around us, pumped through tunnels of gleaming stainless steel, compressed into neat green squares for our ready consumption. The prophecy the film gives us — to interpret and meditate on — is the core metaphor itself: we are not literally consuming the flesh of our families (yet) but rather the capitalist machine has begun packaging people as part of our general consumption, our general happiness. In its own garbled way, it spits a sort of half solidified metaphor — one which feels like it might manage to cover so many different social and ecological issues — one which takes on a variety of panicked forms. Simply seeing the film for it’s reality: “Soylent Green is just people!” is missing the point, entirely. This line falls seemingly, into the twisted extreme logic that capitalism seems so ready to follow — the fact that we have prison labor, and child labor constructing our phones and detergents and license plates, the fact that our food is industrialized. The film prophecizes the logic of the system, creating a simple metaphor to entertain an entire trajectory. Yet, in attempting to call for action through it’s sober moments, Soylent Green ends up feeling all the more confused, as all of the desperate points of critique feel lost under an unpronounceable weight of problems the Thorn can never overcome.

I wonder if this is the nature of the filmic prophecy. It’s broken, yet infinitely more valuable that way. It’s convoluted, but manages to describe, through it’s random twists and turns, the reality that Thorn faces at the end of the film: the impossibility of explaining the horrific repetitive, yet novel reality of death. Prophecy is an outstretched hand, grasping for any ear to listen to the half-real message which will fall upon that ear deafly. It seeming merge of time, its apparent failure to assess what we see as the present in any meaningful way, its confused tone, its foggy green smoke… they all lead us back to an uncomfortable reality: the cobbled together, anachronistic reality built on prophecy and failure; the same problems deferred forever, new social structures to restructure old problems. In it's confused paradox it becomes the mis-heard prophecy of our time: it's out of time nature, it's apparent simplicity, yet it's innumerable accounts of capitalist consumption of human beings leave reaching at people who will never hear fully what it tried unknowingly to say about our paradoxical world.