Soylent Green – FLNWO #04

by | Apr 15, 2013 | Film, Literature & The New World Order | 21 comments

This month on Film, Literature and the New World Order we talk to James Evan Pilato of MediaMonarchy.com about Soylent Green, the 1973 sci-fi movie based on the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. We discuss the differences between the book and the movie, the eminent personage who wrote the introduction to the book, and how the story has been used to predictively program some of the favourite memes of the eugenics propagandists.

Next month: The Catcher in the Rye

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Suggestions for Further Reading:

Video: “Soylent Green” Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUslj86R2xo

“Soylent Green” on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/

PDF: “Make Room! Make Room!” by Harry Harrison (w/ Paul Ehrlich’s Introduction and Suggestions for Further Reading)
http://ur1.ca/ddytn

“Make Room! Make Room!” Review by Paul Tomlinson
http://www.iol.ie/~carrollm/hh/n07.htm

“The Population Bomb” by Paul Ehrlich
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/760870.The_Population_Bomb

“Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food” by Warren Belasco
http://books.google.com/books?id=7a5XPNRFt3IC&pg=PA51

R.I.P. Harry Harrison, creator of the Stainless Steel Rat, Bill the Galactic Hero, and Soylent Green
http://io9.com/5934884/rip-harry-harrison-creator-of-the-stainless-steel-rat-bill-the-galactic-hero-and-soylent-green

Stanley R. Greenberg, 74, Television Screenwriter
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/01/nyregion/stanley-r-greenberg-74-television-screenwriter.html

IMDB Boards: “is it really so bad,modern thought”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/board/nest/169288584?ref_=tt_bd_2

Video: “Soylent Green” Opening Sequence
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlVczvB4FQk

Soylent Green: Soundtrack – Main Theme
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DlZD3003jk

21 Comments

  1. I well remember all the advertising of “Soylent Green” prior to its release in ’73. It was hyped bigtime and profiled well-known stars of the era like Chuck Connors, Charlton Heston, and Edward G. Robinson. During this era that was a lot of attention on pollution, and in some parts of the U.S. it was bad (acid rain).

    During this era, Japan was often cited as an example of how it had an uncontrolled population growth and would eventually smother in people. Here is a graph of Japan’s population growth 1950-2017. Notice that by 1990, the acceleration slowed and there was an eventual decline. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/population

    But people in the U.S. during this era really didn’t notice a huge crowding of population. Some Anglos were concerned that the black community was growing too fast. The U.S certainly did not have the ethnic diversity it has in 2017. In 1973, the U.S. was mostly white with some Blacks and fewer Hispanics and even fewer Native Americans (who were still being sterilized).

    Movies during the 60’s & 70’s The film industry was more independent during this time. Remember, there were over 12,000 drive-in theatres. This was a golden age of drive-in. All types of genre were produced from “Billy Jack” to Blaxploitation. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Blaxploitation+films
    “Billy Jack” (right-on brother! 90 seconds) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1QVYjwa2M8&feature=youtu.be&t=35s
    (Billy Jack was re-released in ’73 after a 71 distribution flop. The drive-in saved it.)

    Joe Bob Briggs is the king of the Drive-In Theatre. He has reviewed “Soylent Green”.
    Joe Bob Briggs warns us about JAPAN. (one minute) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGN0-Y40hdI&feature=youtu.be&t=4m56s

    Depopulation Agenda and Joe Bob Briggs link
    https://www.corbettreport.com/watch-me-commit-a-heinous-thoughtcrime/comment-page-1/#comment-36318

  2. I’m curious why you didn’t even mention Soylent, the real food product (without the “green”). Not as an ad, but just in passing as a cultural artifact.

    As I recall (and I may be wrong), the inventor was a featured interview on the Stephen Colbert Report, and explained that Soylent was a 100% nutrition powder that you would make milkshake type smoothies from. Like those old people drinks, it has everything you need to survive. It’s pretty bland so they also sell flavours or add your own stuff. Soylent is not cheap (yet?). It is designed to be a basic but full fundamental sustenance food product for anyone (geeks? robots?…) who don’t like the bother of shopping, cooking or gourmet food, but still want health and full nutrition without additives. I’m sure I’m not selling it well. Full disclosure: I have no interests in promoting the product, though I wouldn’t mind a free sample or lifetime supply.

    https://www.soylent.com/ “Food that frees you.” “Food 2.0”

    Also, unrelated, but of cinematic conspiracy note:
    Most of Hollywood is connected in some way to the deep state and it’s propaganda. Brad Pitt seems to like the “good” fight against Nazis in Inglorious Bastards, Fury, and Allied (which I just saw) – yet these movies do not promote (avoid?) the Holocaust narrative. Does he intentionally select material that is less controversial, or has he just never had the (mis)fortune of propagating a big lie? I know Brad Pitt builds houses in New Orleans for people, but who really wins and loses? Disaster capitalism or genuine charity? Is there something to this or am I as crazy as Pitt in 12 Monkeys?

    • In Allied (2016) at 1:03:35 Brad Pitt’s character is reading Graham Greene’s “Brighton Rock”.

    • While I would still like to try the Soylent product, it makes me so sad to know they endorse and use GMOs in their product. Next thing you know they’ll be using stem cells then a slippery slope to people too. I wonder how that would affect flavour?

      Clone High – Baby Eater Political Campaign Spot:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93kkEMIXu5s

  3. Maybe I missed it, but it seems obvious that this “Soylent Green – FLNWO #04” audio interview should also have a prominent link to the new/updated/revised video version. This is a feature that would be good across all audio to video updated interviews, especially when all the video commentaries/discussions have been rerouted to the original audio pages.

  4. Any thoughts about sharing the Corbett Report website-map so I may create a fan’s open-source array of Episode Lists including topics, meta tags, subjects, etc., all linking back to TCR on InfoGalactic.com, the free mirrored fork from Wikipedia without censoring rigged rules against “fringe”, “fancruft”, and politically sensitive subjects. If you don’t like http://www.InfoGalactic.com I’d do it where ever you prefer.

  5. Hello, James!

    You asked James a little about the music and got no reply. So, i thought i’d hazard a few remarks.

    Outside of the opening music and Sol’s suicide, the music is rather nondescript. Fred Myrow doesn’t seem to amount to much more than a b-list composer at best, and imdb doesn’t connect him with much that i remember. This, however, is more than enough.

    So the opening credits begin with music rooted in gospel. It then moves to a few choruses of jagged blues with some string and orchestral work in a different, dissonant, style on top. The music then returns to the opening theme. As the credits give way to a disjointed urban scene, this opening musical sequence provides a parallel aural depiction of what we see, with just enough sense of cyclic return to realize that we may not want to see this day, again.

    The music accompanying Sol’s suicide tops the opening credits, making it even more disturbing in retrospect. Three pieces are used, one of which i recognized: Beethoven’s 6th Symphony (also called Pastorale), Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony (also called Pathetique–meaning Pathos, not pathetic), and Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite (which was originally incidental music for Ibsen’s play about a “peasant anti-hero”). All of these are easy to connect to Sol’s character and the scenes surrounding him as he embraces death. By the way, am i the only one who connected the voluntary end of Sol’s life with the suicide parlors in Brave New World? He can also be seen as the hermit who kills himself at the end of Huxley’s novel, too. i was waiting for either you or James to stumble towards these observations.

    But back to the subject. Notice that the only beauty in the entire movie, whether visual or aural, is connected with Sol’s death. Much can be made of his name, too: Sol Roth, or Red Sun. This is seen at sunset or sun rise. For Sol himself, he is the setting sun of the old world, the last who knows. Thorn sees, though, and for the first time, rather like Plato’s cave inverted. He only sees flickering images on a wall (and through a looking glass), but they are more real and inspiring to him than anything else he’s ever seen or heard. For Thorn, the sun rises. But things don’t end well for him, so his rising sun might also mean, “Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.”

    Well, that seems to be enough. Thank you for the podcast and FLNWO series. Please extend my thanks to James, too.

  6. I was a bit stuck by the mention of greenhouse effect in the movie, aka global warming, aka climate change. It’s mentioned directly once in a conversation, and there are many other offhand references to it like the fact that temperatures are in the 90s (32C) and the bit where they want to crank up the air conditioning.

    In the credits I also noticed the technical consultant, Frank R. Bowerman, being director of environmental engineering programs at the University of Southern California, and president of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers. Sounds like an interesting guy. A quick search says that the academy seems like a club of select environmental engineers. They seem mostly focused on various aspects of land and water management, but I wonder if they also dabble in geoengineering.

    The first results I get when searching for Bowerman is a landfill named after him in Orange County, California. The names of the companies backing the projects in that landfill are interesting: Prometheus Energy, and Montauk Energy. Didn’t find anything on the guy himself or his work yet.

  7. Sunday January 9th, 2022 – The Washington Post
    In 1973, ‘Soylent Green’ envisioned the world in 2022. It got a lot right.
    https://archive.md/qpkQ9

    EXCERPTS
    The year is 2022. Our overpopulated planet is experiencing catastrophic climate change, megacorporations have excessive power over the government, and clean living is a luxury only the 1 percent can afford.
    It may read like a scan of the front-page headlines, but these predictions were laid out half a century ago in the dystopian film “Soylent Green.”
    Hundreds of films have attempted to visualize the future; ..,

    …But “Soylent Green,” released in 1973 and based on a novel by Harry Harrison, was even more eerily prescient. It’s set in the then-far-off future of 2022. It stars Charlton Heston — known for playing Moses in “The Ten Commandments” (1956) and for being the five-time president of the National Rifle Association — as Thorn, a New York police detective. And the planet he inhabits looks a lot like ours…

    …But let’s examine which of the film’s social predictions have come true now that we’ve reached the year of its setting…

    …Synthetic food…
    …Rob Rhinehart’s real-life Soylent meal replacements in 2013. Soylent today is available in powder and bar form. It “meets the Food and Drug Administration’s standards for a whole raft of healthy claims,” Ars Technica reported in 2014. Soylent Nutrition did temporarily stop sales of its powders and bars in 2016 after reports of gastrointestinal illness…

    …Overcrowding…
    …There are similarities between the movie’s universe and life in the Big Apple today…

    …Climate change
    Perhaps influenced by the 1972 heat wave in the Northeast and the first oil crisis of the early 1970s, “Soylent Green” imagines a sweltering future where the temperature never dips below 90. Margarine spoils in the fridge, and a sickly fog, similar to London’s historical “pea-soupers,” hangs in the air, forcing the city’s last remaining trees to be shielded under a tent…

    …Assisted dying…

    …Screen time…
    …a more novel way to unwind: video games. In the luxury apartment of a Soylent board member, a sleek cabinet contains Computer Space, which in real-life 1971 had become the very first coin-operated arcade game…

    …Unlike in “Threads,” we’ve avoided pushing the big red launch button. We’re happy to keep pushing the buttons on our digital devices instead.

  8. Other movies to look at for this film, literature and the new world order are:
    The 1960 film The Time Machine
    They Live
    Omega Man
    1981 movie Early Warning
    The Last Chase

  9. On the Full Movies Odysee Channel

    Soylent Green (1973) – Full Film
    (1:36:48)
    https://odysee.com/@fullmovies:3/Soylent.Green.1973:7
    DESCRIPTION
    In 2022, Earth is overpopulated and totally polluted; the natural resources have been exhausted and the nourishment of the population is provided by Soylent Industries, a company that makes a food consisting of plankton from the oceans. In New York City, when Soylent’s member of the board William R. Simonson is murdered apparently by a burglar at the Chelsea Towers West where he lives, efficient Detective Thorn is assigned to investigate the case with his partner Solomon “Sol” Roth. Thorn comes to the fancy apartment and meets Simonson’s bodyguard Tab Fielding and the “furniture” (woman that is rented together with the flat) Shirl and the detective concludes that the executive was not victim of burglary but executed. Further, he finds that the Governor Santini and other powerful men want to disrupt and end Thorn’s investigation. But Thorn continues his work and discovers a bizarre and disturbing secret of the ingredient used to manufacture Soylent Green.

    Director: Richard Fleischer
    Writers: Stanley R. Greenberg(screenplay), Harry Harrison (novel “Make Room! Make Room!”)
    Cast: Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young

  10. “Food For Thought”… 😉
    (American slang just magnified its definition of “cracker” in the UrbanDictionary)

    Wed Feb 16th, 2022 – SYFY Wire (Mainsite: SYFY)
    Is eating people a solution to world hunger? The science behind ‘Soylent Green’
    https://archive.is/vhRXZ

    EXCERPTS
    …CONVERTING CORPSES TO CRACKERS
    Supposing, of course, we decided we wanted to transform our lost loved ones into food, we could definitely do it. The infrastructure already exists. After all, humans are just meat, no different from any other animal at the end of the day.

    The easiest way to do it, but the least palatable — particularly if you’re trying to hide what you’re doing, as was the case in the film — would be to treat humans the way we treat livestock. Establish a butchering process, package the cut meat, put it on the shelf. Job done. But we suspect that if we’re going to eat people, we’ll want at least the illusion that we’re eating something else. So, let’s think of other options.

    If you’ve ever looked at a seasoning packet you’ve probably noticed they list chicken, beef, pork, or other meats as ingredients. Yet, when you look inside, all you’ll find is powder. Where’s the beef? It’s in the powder, of course. And if we want to make a human biscuit, that’s probably the way to go.

    Meat powders are fairly simple to produce. Typically, the skin and bones of your chosen animal are removed. Though, in a pinch that may not be strictly necessary. After dressing, they go through a dehydration process either using a dehydrator or cooking over a low temperature for an extended period. The aim is to remove as much moisture as possible. Finally, the meat is ground into a powder and sifted to remove any chunks which were missed.

    At this point, your Soylent people are unrecognizable and ready to be baked into crackers or used for soup bases. The possibilities are endless.

    WOULD SOYLENT MAKE A GOOD FOOD?
    Nutritionally, sure. Human bodies are made of the same sorts of things as other animals. You could get protein and fat, albeit at different distributions than other animals. All things being equal, eating human meat is a perfectly efficient way of calorie exchange. Certainly, other animals have done it throughout our history.

    Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on if you’re being eaten or doing the eating — things aren’t equal….

    • “…..things being equal, eating human meat is a perfectly efficient way of calorie exchange….”

      The prion disease would also help keep population down as a bonus. Lol

  11. Hmmm… let’s see…

    Silent Spring
    Soylent Green

    Beyond the obvious parallels in rhyme and word construction,
    we have two powerful works; one a book and one a movie.

    Perhaps a connection was made consciously, perhaps it was made subconsciously, or perhaps Stanley Greenberg titled his screenplay as he did just by chance.

    The first (Silent Spring) written in 1962 by Rachel Carson took the world by storm exposing the devastation that Big Chemical’s DDT was doing to ecosystems (both plant and animal) around the world.

    The second (Soylent Green), the movie released eleven years later in 1973 predicted what a dystopian future might look like on this planet if Big Corporations started controlling life in over-crowded, resource-starved cities.

    Eleven years after that we arrived at 1984, the year George Orwell had set his famous novel to occur in which depicted an even more dystopian future.

    Fast forward 35 years later and we arrive at technocracy’s Salient Scene set in a wet market in Wuhan, setting the stage for the Great Reset.

  12. Sadly we may already be experiencing a real life ‘soylent green’ today!

    As sick as this sounds, how appetizing do you find it to ingest food grown with a toxic biosludge
    fertilizer made of human remains and excrement?

    Do you think I’m kidding?

    Check this out.

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