Saturday, September 15, 2007



"Soylent Green": more prescient than we'd like to admit?
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Soylent Green? It's people!!!

(sorry, couldn't resist...heh!)

1:17 AM
Anonymous said...

"more prescient than we'd like to admit?"

Yeah, I'd say so. Human by-products are already being recycled in some regions, I'll bet. Just not for food. Yet. Maybe. John Shirley's essay is so good, I have to quote part of it:

"Second, this film does have some correct predictions–in 1973 it was talking about “the greenhouse effect” slowly “burning the world up”. That’s exactly what they say in the film! And they talk about the death of the oceans leading us to desperate measures to find food. And though we’re not as overpopulated as some feared, the third world is very like the New York City of Soylent Green, and as the population doubles by 2050, and as resources undercut by global warming get scarcer, the rest of the world may soon resemble the third world…just as this clunky old film predicted. And it’s not unlikely that in our resource-challenged future, something like the film’s perfumed and solicitous euthanasia center will be commonplace.

"The nuanced, character-driven movie also predicted the loss of natural beauty–and it dramatizes the disparity between the rich and the poor, and the callousness we’re developing, even now, as we get daily reports of car bombings slaughtering hundreds in Iraq, and tens of thousands dying of waterborne diseases in India…

"This is a recent quote from a real-life article at the Planet Ark site: “Climate change could have global security implications on a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken, a report said on Wednesday. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) security think-tank said global warming would hit crop yields and water availability everywhere, causing great human suffering and leading to regional strife.”

"A woman with a toddler leashed to her arm dies on a church steps. That’s the vision of Soylent Green. And Charleton Heston did very well to shout, “We’ve got to stop them–somehow!”
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We've got to stop US, somehow!"

1:29 AM

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