Soylent Green & the Unchecked Masses

(2021)

Soylent Green is a 1973 film that takes place in a hot, bleak, and overpopulated New York City. The year is 2022 and the runaway effects of population growth and greenhouse gas emissions have turned the once prosperous city into a living hell. We follow NYPD Detective Thorn as he investigates the death of a former board member at Soylent, a company which provides food for more than half the Earth’s population. Broadly speaking, Soylent Green is meant to caution its viewers that their current way of life is not sustainable. The film, and the book it was loosely based on, Make Room! Make Room! predominantly emphasize the perceived danger of unchecked population growth and the world that it might create.

In an opening montage, we see images that lead us from some time in the 1800s to the industrial revolution all the way to the time of the film. As it progresses, we are shown a rapidly growing number of people as well as an increasing presence and quantity of technology. Finally, we see an establishing shot that tells us we are in New York in the year 2022, and the city’s population is 40,000,000. From here, we follow Thorn on his case, seeing sweaty people crammed in stairwells, riots breaking out when food rations run low, and only the rich having access to things many of us take for granted, like apples and running water.

Thorn lives in a small apartment with his co-worker and friend Sol. (there might be a paternal/romantic dynamic there, too) After Sol does some research and Thorn does some investigating, it becomes increasingly clear that the death was an inside job by Soylent. Upon realizing a mysterious truth, Sol goes to a euthanasia clinic and Thorn secretly hitches a ride on a truck carrying away the dead bodies. Here, he discovers what Sol already figured out: Soylent Green, people’s favorite food ration, is made out of those very dead people. But this harrowing revelation only hammers home the message we’ve been getting throughout the whole film: uncontrolled population and production will turn the human population into disposable livestock. Thorn too, realizes this, saying “Soon they’ll be breeding us like cattle.”

Throughout the film, the mass overpopulation is framed as an accidental problem, one seemingly already looming in the year the film was released. Even Sol, who saw it all unfold, asks, with tears in his eyes, “How’d we get to this?” He hints at an answer a bit later when he says that “People were always rotten, but the Earth was beautiful.” This implies a sort of inevitability to the problem. People are bad, and at a certain point, there’s enough of them that the Earth reaches a breaking point. There’s really no solution, at the time of the film or in the events leading up to it, that doesn’t involve controlling the human population. No one is accountable except for the masses themselves.

But the elephant in the room is what Soylent, the immediate antagonist of the film, represents: powerful, oppressive companies that feel no empathy towards those masses. From a (non-fictional) twenty-first century perspective, the film almost seems remiss for not letting such a company play a role in humanity’s demise. The closest they come is in depicting just how much influence Soylent has at the time of the film, assassinating a former board member of theirs and simply paying off the police to close the case. It isn’t hard to see how they benefit from the hellish conditions of the world. Their entire business, after all, is producing bland food pellets no one would ever even want in better times. But the film doesn’t go quite so far as to blame Soylent for this fall. The company’s only fault is taking advantage of the situation to make money in unethical ways.

In a way the film is almost mildly sympathetic to Soylent. Right before a wounded and shaken Thorn delivers his iconic line in the final scene (“Soylent Green is made out of people!”) he remarks: “ocean’s dying, plankton’s dying.” This is learned from Sol’s research into an oceanographic report made by Soylent. It sets up a rational, understandable reason for Soylent to turn to the dead as a food source. They simply can’t meet the demand any other way.

The year is 2020, and it doesn’t seem like we’re headed for a world like the one depicted in Soylent Green anytime soon. According to U.S. Census data, New York’s population was about 7,895,000 in 1970, three years before the film was released. Instead of a population increase of more than 32 million, the city has failed to grow by even 1 million people in that time. Where it was accurate was its portrayal of climate change as a serious issue. Perhaps the mismatch comes from its failure to acknowledge the reality that wealthier people and nations leave a far larger environmental footprint than their poorer counterparts. So in a way, by blaming unchecked population growth over the overconsumption of the wealthy few, the blame was pointed at the wrong people. Today, it is better understood that the problem is more complicated than a simple relationship between population and production, and that social justice plays also an important role in decreasing our impact on the planet.