Soylent Green
I woke up today and intended to work on my PhD Qualifying Exam. I was reading a paper of Stratified LD Score Regression and decided since it was the morning to put on Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite №1, Op. 46, yes that one, the morning song.
As I listened to it and got around a minute in and the orchestra swelled I was instantly transported back to Soylent Green. That movie shook me to my core. If you have seen the movie you know exactly what scene I am talking about. If not, please take a look here.
In the clip the old man on the table, Sol, has decided his time up and went to an assisted death center where he has just drank some poison and is now lying down waiting to die. The process is painless and to help soothe the process they play some nature scenes. His close friend, Frank, tries to stop Sol but is mesmerized by the nature scenes. In the scene we can hear this exchange:
“I told you” — Sol
“How could I know? How could I ever imagine?” — Frank
In the world of Soylent Green overpopulation and pollution has wiped out most of nature to the point that most people have not seen a fresh fruit or vegetable and instead must eat synthetic Soylent bars. Yes, the company Soylent based their name off this movie since like the movie, the company claims Soylent is all you need. But if you really think about it, it’s kinda disgusting since in the movie Soylent existed only because we messed up the environment. It is sad to me that most people don’t understand the reference and as a result just soak up the marketing. Capitalism I guess.
Anyways I digress, back to this exchange. With this in mind, watching the tears in Sol and Frank’s eyes as they see what we take for granted shook me. When combined with Grieg’s Morning mood I can feel the contradiction in the scene. Morning is the rebirth of something yet it is playing when Sol is dying. Morning represents the start of life but we are in a world devoid of most life because we killed it all. So why play Grieg’s Morning Mood?
Maybe it is that people living in this dystopian future without the environment or nature are not really living, just surviving. Soylent Green is making the argument that without nature around us to enjoy we really cease to live our lives. Instead we go on trying to survive day to day with our Soylent Bars and artificial TVs without ever experiencing true life. Frank grew up in this world and so doesn’t know he is not living, but Sol knows. So to Sol dying and leaving this world is not really dying. To him, this is the first day of his life. Leaving this horrible horrible world to the sight of nature is the first step towards living a better life.
One can go down a deep deep rabbit hole claiming Soylent Green argues in favor of euthanasia, or the idea that people have the right to end their lives in a painless process if they just don’t want to live anymore. However, I would argue that this misses the point of the scene. Soylent Green at its core is a movie about environmentalism. This scene is supposed to be a stark warning for us all to preserve the world around us or risk having our children grow up in a world like Soylent Green. In a world where the only time they can ever see a zebra or a forest is in the pages of books, the screens of a computer, and … in their final moments.
It may be a message we are all used to hearing but keep in mind this movie came out in 1973 and to me is one of the most poignant depictions of the dangers of not preserving our planet. And with that I should go back to working on my exam, till next time!
