When Charlton Heston died the other week, I paid respects by
downloading his dystopian trilogy: Planet of the Apes (1968), The
Omega Man (1971), and Soylent Green (1973). I hadn't seen them since
the 80s, when they were mainstays of weekend programming on Boson's
UHF stations. I was curious how they'd look through adult eyes, and
wondered if they passed the sci-fi test of holding any precise
predictive power.
Of the three, the one that feels the most contemporary is Soylent
Green, even if The Omega Man was just remade as a Will Smith vehicle
(I Am Legend). Everybody knows that Soylent Green "is people," but
more interesting and less commented on is why the U.S. government in
2022 is making the green Cheeze-It-looking wafers in the first place.
The reason is climate change. In the film's opening scene, New York
City detective Robert Thorn (Heston) listens to his elderly roommate
Sol (Edward G. Robinson) kvetch about life in 2022. "How can anything
survive in a climate like this?" spits Robinson. "A heat-wave all year
long. A greenhouse effect. Everything burning up."
Midway through the film, there are food riots exactly like the ones
that erupted from Haiti to Indonesia a week after Heston's death.
Various factors, climate change high among them, have in the past year
doubled the price of some staple grains. But he echoes of Soylent
Green aren't just general: In the film, riot cops are attacked during
the food riots; two days ago in Haiti, a UN peacekeeper was shot and
killed for his ration. It was the first killing in the four-year
history of the UN's current mission in Haiti.
A high-profile Soylent Green scenario was laid out in careful detail
in a 2002 World Bank study of current demographic and environmental
trend lines, "Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World." The report
warned that unless the global economy switched tracks onto a more
sustainable path=97and fast=97the results would be social and
environmental chaos during the current generation, with a return to
scarcity the defining feature of this dystopia. Five years later the
fundamental changes called for in the World Bank report seem as
distant as ever, with the Soylent Green reality it warned of coming
rapidly into focus.
Charlston Heston was a legendary force in film for a lot of reasons.
Now we know he had impeccable timing and a sense for the dramatic even
in death. Here's hoping our own Soylent Green, if it comes to that,
will at least be made out of potatoes.
Alexander Zaitchik, April 19
http://www.exile.ru/blog/detail.php?BLOG_ID=3D18824&AUTHOR_ID=3D
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