Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

Maybe the only thing most people know about this movie is the big reveal. It’s probably more spoiled than Citizen Kane but less than Darth Vader’s true identity. So what else do I know about it? Well, there’s a lot of other colors Soylent comes in, and Green is the newest. I think before I saw the poster just now I could’ve said we’ve already passed the future date of the movie.

I do have to say that naming a real life nutrition company “Soylent” after the fictional megacorporation committing brain-breaking sins against humanity is one of the most direct examples of geniuses who missed the point of their favorite story deciding to build the Torment Nexus.

After watching the movie:

In the not too distant future (2022 AD), the world is pretty much totally used up. Overpopulated, overheated and overpolluted, but also underemployed and underfed. Fortunately for the shambling masses, the Soylent Corporation has stepped in to provide cheap processed food tiles to the starving who have likely never seen naturally grown meat and vegetables. In the population 40 million New York City, Robert Thorn is a police detective living in a tiny shack-like apartment with the elderly Sol Roth, once a college professor and now a researcher for the police, working in partnership with Thorn. Sol is old enough to remember when natural food wasn’t only the provenance of the rich, but now all there is to eat is what the Soylent Corporation provides, featuring Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and they’re eager to announce the new Soylent Green, which they report is made from bountiful ocean plankton. The NYPD assigns Thorn to investigate the death of William Simonson, a member of the Soylent board killed in an apparent robbery where nothing was taken, leading to suspicion of assassination. As Thorn tracks down the clues and openly swipes everything he can lay his hands on from Simonson’s apartment, he finds Simonson was in possession of an oceanographic survey, which he takes to Sol to pore over while questioning Simonson’s “furniture” girl Shirl, who is property of the building and possession of whatever tenant lives in the luxury apartment, getting very close to her and the extravagant lifestyle of an apartment with cold air conditioning, hot showers, and real food, while suspecting Simonson’s bodyguard of being the inside operator in the hit. Meanwhile Governor Santini puts pressure on the NYPD to close the Simonson case as a basic robbery gone wrong, and Sol finds evidence of a horrifying truth someone is covering up.

Of the ways the world is used up and run down, the best communicated is the divide between the elites and the masses. The rich people live very 1970s aspirational lives, while everyone else’s clothes are drab, rumpled, and threadbare. Not even the police have impressive uniforms, in fact I’m not sure they have uniforms at all. No money for it, the governor has to have a penthouse. We have some massive crowd scenes, but a lot of the action takes place away from the masses, so we don’t get to see the overcrowding that much. And the death of the natural world is really only communicated through the stated scarcity of food that isn’t a processed wafer. Thorn and Sol do a lot of ecstatic moaning when they taste the real thing, but while that feels overplayed I’m not sure how you would depict tasting flavorful, natural food for the first time in your life since I’ve never spent my whole life eating nutritional wafers. 

The Furniture Girls aspect of the world seems like a particularly 70s power fantasy, and I was very hard pressed to think of any women in this movie that weren’t Furniture. (The main librarian that Sol consults with at the end is an elderly woman, and there are women service providers at the clinic he goes to directly after). I was never fully clear how much Thorn’s casual initial use of Shirl’s skills while questioning her was to illustrate an abuse of police power or whether that’s just what everyone understands is expected of furniture girls. We do know that it’s expected that the police will casually steal stuff from crime scenes, so maybe it’s both, and he does come to respect at least the girls’ physical safety and when it suits him, choice. Except for the only Black woman in the movie whom he beats up for defending Thorn’s suspect from an attack, and it’s implied she may be on more equal footing with her partner than furniture.

The aesthetics on screen may not call to mind film noir, but the plot in total does seem to. There’s a murder mystery, a distracting woman, and powerful forces opposing Thorn’s investigation. Probably the best way to categorize this movie is “late capitalism noir”. I would’ve liked a more slow burn approach to Thorn being seduced by the rich lifestyle he’s gained access to in the remainder of the month Simonson’s lease lasts for, and apparently so would the author of the book this was based on.

I’m very tired of 50-year old dystopian fiction feeling not only still likely to come true, but much closer to reality. I can think of one contemporary critic who considered it so far-fetched I’d make her eat her hat if she was still living. The riot control dump trucks may be pretty goofy, but otherwise, I see more parallels in today’s state of affairs than I care to.