Soylent Green

B-movies are wonderful creations, providing slightly disjointed and thus deeper insight into the culture of the times than their polished expensive big budget blockbusters.

Guess what, if you just wait long enough even the glossy fancy movies inevitably start to look like B-movies. Watch ET again to see the phenomenon in action.

The other day, we watched Soylent Green, another dystopian future flick from the 1970s. 

The movie sparked a brief debate about why "dystopian" and "future" go together like "succulent" and "lamb", and there is not much value in writing about the well worn arguments of stereotypes in language use.

The movie is set in New York in the year 2022 and features a governor named Santini, the namesake of a great, gentle Rottweiler of a friend back in the States.
That same friend commented on the portrayal of the NYPD in the movie with a laconic "exactly the same as today, without the uniforms".

In the movie, humans are turned into food, purportedly a seaweed food called Soylent Green, and our hero finds out the horrible truth.

In the final scenes of the film, as the main character is being dragged away, he tries to alert his fellow citizens with the repated cry "Soylent Green is people".

Chillingly, or rather B-movie chillingly, the wink and nod comical sort of expression that is acceptable performance in the category, nobody pays attention to his warning.

In the world of the movie, people will go on eating little processed, cracker sized squares made out of people. Wonder what the Catholic church said about that when the movie first came out.

We are just glad to live in our best of times, worst of times.

Life in a Soylent Green world would be sheer horror, even more so if people knew what the crackers are made out of. If we extrapolate our present day mainstream media obsessions with all things celebrity and irrelevant, that Soylent Green world reporting would very likely feature big controversies such as front page news about a crazy guy who claims his cracker contained bits of Dickson Cheney.