"It's the Year 2022"
So says the poster for "Soylent Green" -- which was made 49 years ago in 1973. I post this on January 1, 2022.
My personal "lead in" on Soylent Green is that I saw it -- in a movie theater -- on its release in 1973. And so I am amazed today. Back then (I was a teenager), 2022 seemed impossibly far ahead in the future, almost inconceivable to imagine I would live til then. And I did.
Along the way, I watched as other famous book, movie and even song title dates came and went:
1984. (We seem to have missed the Totalitarianism, though there are still risks.)
2001. (The TV phone screens have come true with Skype and FaceTime; the space travel and stations....sort of, but not really.)
1999 (Prince's song is from 1982! And 1999 seemed way in the future; Now, both 1982 and 1999 are BOTH way in the past.)
2010 (The sequel to 2001 but nobody much waited for that year to come)
...and here we are at 2022. It's the year 2022, warned Soylent Green...did it come true?
No, not really. There are some good posts here about WHY the things warned about in Soylent Green did not come true. Overpopulation? No. A reversal to a decline in births! Food shortages? No.
But I'm no expert. I suppose there are food shortages SOMEWHERE. Over-population SOMEWHERE. Not so much in the US.
And yet: in the past year, I have visited the small city I lived in when Soylent Green came out in 1973, and while the streets aren't FILLED with overpopulated masses...there sure are a lot of grimy looking tent cities. EVERYWHERE. Under freeways, in parks -- and not just downtown. The real grimness has been seeing these tent cities set up near the high school I went to, next to strip malls from my youth and dilapidated shopping malls. Or just people sleeping right on the sidewalk. THAT's Soylent Green but for reasons other than over-population. Since most of those tent cities were nowhere to be found in suburban locations in 1973, I wonder what happened to bring that many people to the streets. Housing costs? Unemployment? Drugs? Mental illness? Lack of education? Lack of family? Its a mystery, but yes 2022 is a BIT like Soylent Green in that way.
And of immediate alarm -- if not of long range danger yet -- is a "supply chain breakdown" that has indeed emptied shelves of SOME foods (cat food in my experience)...and evidently inflation has raised prices on ALL food. Still, it is not at the nightmare levels (NO food) shown in Soylent Green.
The movie understood in 1973 that the rich would perhaps always be richer and live better and "above it all" than the poor and the working class. True in 1973, perhaps more true in 2022. I mean, California has the ultra-wealth of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and yet...massive tent cities and poverty in Los Angeles and in inland pockets of the state.
The women aren't "furniture" yet, though. 1973 was also the year of women's liberation. Oh, there are some beautiful women who (by their own choice?) play the roles of the furniture in the movie but...no.
And so, overall and in the main, 2022 is not the Dystopian nightmare as portrayed in Soylent Green, but SOME of it has come true, "around the edges," and perhaps for different reasons (the people living in the streets for instance.)
Still, overall, the message is a good one. It's the year 2022 and its not half as bad as they said it would be in 1973.
Struggle, but enjoy.
PS. By the way, when I saw Soylent Green in 1973, I thought it was a pretty cheapjack movie, not well made enough. It was made at MGM, then a dying studio run for a few years by a really villainous cost cutter named James Aubrey, who in the same year, cut Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" to pieces to get it to theaters quickly. Robert Redford said he would do The Sting...as long as it was NOT done under Aubrey at MGM. And indeed, 1973 was a GREAT movie year with the more major movies released in the second half of the year long after Soylent Green: Enter the Dragon, American Graffiiti, The Paper Chase, The Way We Were, Serpico, Charley Varrick, Magnum Force and the Big Two: The Exorcist and The Sting.