Why Soylent Green and the serious sci-fi of the 1970s predicted social collapse
Here’s an excerpt from (chapter 4 of) my new book on how classic science fiction films predicted the future we’re increasingly living in.
“They’re Running Out of the Damn Green Again!”: Why Soylent Green and the Serious Sci-Fi of the 1970s Predicted Social Collapse
Soylent Green (1973) is the motherlode of 1970s moviemaking, encompassing dystopian sci-fi, environmentalism, urban malaise, social unrest, political corruption, and dark conspiracy. The 1970s saw a series of socially critical, and sometimes dystopian, science fiction films. Soylent Green’s setting reflected a growing environmental consciousness over the previous decade, from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, to a raft of new environmental regulations and the first Earth Day in 1970. Crucially, these concerns were shared by conservatives. But then a divide began to develop, between the new left’s adoption of a critical environmental conscious that pointed to the destructiveness of industrial capitalism, and the emerging new right that identified the threat from this consciousness and fought back fiercely. Like the shocking truth revealed in the famous ending of Soylent Green, the truth of industrial civilization was too uncomfortable to face.
“How Did We Come to This?”
It begins with a montage of archive photographs, charming scenes of people enjoying nature, accompanied by a slow waltz. Then there’s industrialization, a sense of optimism and progress, the music speeding up. The population grows rapidly, smokestacks, cars rolling off production lines, urban crowds, affluence, and consumption. Followed by pollution, overcrowding, war, famine, disease, the screen splitting into multiple images at once, the music now frenetic. Finally, the music slows down, over wastelands, destroyed forests, barren industrial sites, ending on a thickly polluted New York cityscape. It’s the story of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century – all in two minutes.
The opening titles by Charles Braverman are among the best ever made in establishing the context for the film – a dirty, broken future – and how we got here. Soylent Green is an early 1970s ecological dystopian detective conspiracy thriller (there’s a combination), directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, and Edward G. Robinson. It’s loosely based on the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, who wasn’t at all happy with the substantial changes made to his story by screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg. But what was kept was a dystopian future of dying oceans, year-round humidity due to the greenhouse effect, over-population, pollution, poverty, and depleted resources (Richard H. Kline’s photography uses hazy green filters to vividly evoke a poisoned atmosphere). Welcome to 2022.
Soylent Green wasn’t the only one. The 1970s saw a series of socially critical, and sometimes dystopian, science fiction films, many of which seemed to share a sense of urgent alarm about the future we were heading towards. What was going on?
To the author, architect, and academic Douglas Murphy (Last Futures: Nature, Technology, and the End of Architecture), what happened in the 1960s and 1970s was possibly the last chance we had of creating a decent and environmentally sustainable society. The radical movements that developed in these decades – the writer Kirkpatrick Sale called them the “awakened generation” – believed that other futures and new ways of living were possible, even inevitable.
But Murphy also emphasizes that this was a generation that had a strong sense of disaster. In the late 1960s the world was faced with impending doom: it was the height of the Cold War, the coming end of oil (it was thought), and the seemingly irreversible decline of great cities around the world. Out of these crises came a new generation that hoped to build a better future, influenced by visions of geodesic domes, walkable cities, and a meaningful connection with nature. Scenarios of doom and gloom were accompanied by radical but serious ideas to solve the problems we faced (most of which would be largely unrealized futures, it would turn out). This is the story of this chapter – of this era’s most interesting sci-fi movies, the analyses that inspired them, and the warnings that we needed to change course before it was too late.
“How Could I... How Could I Ever Imagine...?”
There had been a handful of eco-disaster films before Soylent Green, mainly monster movies, but none were as relevant or urgent as Fleischer’s film, and none presented so bleak a picture of the human misery that could result from over-population, global warming, and food and energy shortages (this is a film made in the early 1970s that includes climate change, so we really, really can’t say we weren’t warned).
But it wasn’t alone. More serious, thought-provoking science fiction films were released in the 1970s than in the forty years before, and arguably ever since. Soylent Green was just one of a slew of American sci-fi films in the 1970s that, more than imagining the future, reflected the present and its problems, which is of course what sci-fi can be so good at doing. Among them were Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), The Omega Man (1971), THX-1138 (1971), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Silent Running (1972), Westworld (1973), Zardoz (1973), Rollerball (1975), A Boy and His Dog (1975), The Stepford Wives (1975), Logan’s Run (1976), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Quintet (1979), and Alien (1979) (we’ll discuss Colossus and Rollerball in later chapters).
The so-called ‘new Hollywood’ took advantage of sci-fi, among other genres, to tell different stories, address social issues of the time, and explore new perspectives. Younger American filmmakers also responded to storytelling and stylistic developments in European cinema, notably the French New Wave, treating their films as cinematic statements and social commentary, reflecting their artistic vision and broader worldview.
Not everyone enjoyed this output, however. Only a few of these films were commercially successful. And some commentators bemoaned the inward turn in science fiction film to America’s increasing social and political problems. For example, writing in 1978, Joan F. Dean complained “all that the science fiction films of the early seventies offer in the way of [traditional sci-fi staple] extra-terrestrial life were bacteria, David Bowie, an invisible civilization, and a few perverts.” Dean dismissively regarded the era as witnessing a dearth of futuristic films, but we remember it now as a particularly rich period of social seriousness in mainstream sci-fi, in large part because of what was going on here at home…
Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out now from Lexington Books. You can read more about it here.