Edward G. Robinson says this line in 1973's sci fi eco-dystopia cautionary tale SOYLENT GREEN, while lamenting the good old days of air conditioning and top soil, never once realizing the irony that in fact everything else is rotten, but thanks to state of the art of preservative-enhanced freeze-drying people are the only things left that ain't rotten: They stay fresh and delicious almost forever...
That famous quote, "Soylent Green is people!" is the purloined letter of the film and I don't feel guilty giving it away because it's part of popular culture, along with the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, which also starred Chuck Heston. Taken together, these two films are Earth Day sci fi eco disaster bookends, a time-loop Greatest Story Ever Told, wherein the grim future of SOYLENT is the distant past in APES. At least, we thought, the planet would eventually recover after we overpopulated ourselves to extinction. Yes, even in the 1970s, overpopulation was a problem, or at least they had the guts to think about it! There was also LOGAN'S RUN (everyone dies at 30), ROLLERBALL (bloodsport sets the trends); that forgotten Bruce Dern film SILENT RUNNING (the last plants kept alive in a remote orbiting spaceship), it was all cascading out of our growing awareness that throwing your McDonald's trash out the window when driving home was wrong! There was that 1970s crying Indian. There was Pogo Earth Day poster. These things made an impact. We kids of the time still remember them...
What's fascinating about GREEN in the end isn't the inevitability of cannibalism in a society choked on humans and starved on everything else, but Heston's flare up of morality and outrage over it all. Why it's so important to keep the terminal truth of 'you are what you eat' from the general public shouldn't be his concern. The Soylent Corp. is, to my mind, doing a public service by hushing it up. After all, they're the last gasp of food production in the face of global starvation! They should be thanked for working so hard to disguise the long pig... they're keeping the secret to save mankind from feeling worse than it already does. Why not tell the delusional Donner party matron shivering in the back of the hogan that its venison, if it gets her to eat it? By the same token, there are cancer-stricken old ladies dying right and left because they don't want to smoke pot since its illegal and therefore poisonous... why not mix it in her brownies and tell her?But cop Heston doesn't want to hear my rationalizations. Near the end he even sneers to his chief, "soon they'll be breeding us like cattle," and it's fitting that the stupidity of that remark is completely lost on him. One asks: With what, Chuck, will they be feeding these human cattle? If there were any feed or grass left, people would be standing in line to be bred like cattle. And 'breeding' us kind of defeats the whole point, doesn't it? Like breeding locusts to feed an incoming swarm of locusts... or carrying coals to Newcastle, wherever that is... I assume a place that's already rife with coal.
But for every perceptive, accurate, and nihilistic prediction in GREEN, there's a few that have dated, badly. Dig that the film is not racist--Heston was on point in such matters, even marching with Dr. King in '63--but it is most definitely sexist. In the future, it seems, women are all sluts, heh heh, that are called 'furniture' because they don't move or pack anymore; they just stay behind for the next man who moves in, and none of this is in the novel by Harry Harrison, which is perhaps why it comes off so half-baked, if you'll forgive the expression.
I also wish to further point out the hypocrisy of Heston's outrage over the Soylent secret when earlier in the film he brings home a pound of confiscated fresh beef to Edward G. Old enough to remember when beef was ubiquitous, Robinson weeps when he sees it. No one even mentions the rough, tough sole-survivor cattle that died so Eddie and Chuck can have their purloined steak! I wonder if Heston's relatively young cop (who doesn't remember the time of ubiquitous beef) would get outraged if he know that the meat was from a cow. I can seem him being both NRA and PETA, why not? "Beef is.... Cows?! Damn you, apes!"
He should relax, man. Stress makes people gamey. We all should relax and put our outraged moral muskets down and admit we're fascinated by cannibalism. We've eaten each other in some distant primordial pre-language miasma past, and may end up doing it in the over-populated future, so why not recognize the true enemy isn't our capacity for survival but our own antiquated morality? All those meat sticks starving because they only eat cows and we ran out of grass to feed the cows are the worst kind of hypocrites. To paraphrase that Dylan's Idiot Wind, we're lucky we can even eat ourselves. After all, nearly ever other species of carnivore probably does it, when they have to. Sharks do it. Know what happens to the principled objector to cannibalism in starvation conditions? Sharks on the other hand, still going strong even through epoch-ending asteroids.
But amid the hypocrisy in SOYLENT is a very touching and moving sequence I need to talk about, involving the disillusioned Eddie Robinson's trip "Home". It's the real climax of the film and if you haven't seen it, stop reading here as it could count as an AMBER SPOILER ALERT!
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| I got this off some Christian blog, hence the hilarious subtitle |
Upon entrance to "Home," a man and a woman in white flowing robes let you pick the color of the blazing light you want to subsume you in the chamber, and the line to get a chamber isn't very long at all! And you get a full 20 minute film to bask in, kind of like one of those surround screen exhibits at Epcott Center. I want to encourage the building of just such a room in every hospital, as a place not just for dying, but for tripping, instead of the usual clinical hospital setting where most legally approved medical experiment therapeutic tripping is done.
Most of all, I wish my 100 year-old granny could have access to an assisted suicide set-up like that one; they won't let her just die in her nursing home and she's fairly healthy for a 97 year-old. She can barely hear or see anymore, and can't walk because of a bad hip, and can't really think straight for long periods but she could be good for another 5 or 10 years. I know she'd at least like to have the option. Her own mom died at 107--and the last 17 years (!) kind of sucked). Her words.
And the scene where Heston says good-bye to Robinson in the chamber is so beautiful and touching it contrasts the general misery of the rest of the movie to such an extent we can hardly bear to return. And there's a reason it's some of the best acting Heston has ever done:
"This was the 101st and last movie in which Edward G. Robinson appeared; he died of cancer twelve days after the filming, on January 26, 1973. Heston was the only member of the crew that Robinson told of his cancer (immediately before filming the scene of Robinson's character's death), knowing that this knowledge would deeply affect Heston, and therefore his playing of the scene. Robinson had previously worked with Heston in The Ten Commandments (1956) and the make-up tests for Planet of the Apes (1968)." (WIKI)John Nesbitt at Old School Reviews put it this way:
Those ARE real tears falling from the Chuckster's eyes when he gazes upon Sol's poignant farewell. Heston need not resort to his Ben Hur technique of burying his eyes to feign heartbreak; this time the tears flow . . . effortlessly and honestly. Immediate "method acting" is forced on Heston naturally since he knew that Robinson truly was dying and that this would be the last scene that the legendary actor would ever perform. Thus, the tears are real—a gut wrenching fusion of fiction and real life drama. That alone makes the film well worth examining.
Robinson's devotion to his chosen craft was full and total so it's fitting and courageous that he uses his impending death to transform what might have been just a so-so or even hammy moment into something very, very beautiful. The film never spells out directly what's to come as Robinson enters "Home" but we have a pretty good idea and it makes the kindness of the assistants and the air conditioning extra vivid. For all the sorrow and misery in the rest of the film here, finally, is some grace. Just knowing that Robinson will at least have a beautiful 20 minute drugged-out trip into the yawning blazing white yoni light of death is enough to make us happy for him. He can finally appreciate his legacy, like a painter who at last steps back to see the big picture.
It's in that spirit that I feel right about mentioning my last golden moment with my dying dad, a week or so ago, down in North Carolina, drinking and watching LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, shivering in the air conditioning and stark brilliance of each actor, their ebbs and high tides of drunken dysfunction rendered into black magic poetry under Sydney Lumet's alchemical care. If the the "Home" sequence in SOYLENT was lengthened into a whole three hour film it might look like this. Lumet creates in this tight, long film something eternally free and yet crushed before it has a chance to fly. It's tragic, poetic in its defiance of death, a reverse funhouse mirror to mine own family (two brothers, alcoholism, one's a poet, one realizes he's going to maybe die very soon, etc.). Anyway, my dad and I bonded big under the black and white brilliance of it all, attuned to each others' rapture in a way that brought us together as film always had, from when he first showed my GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTER on afternoon UHF TV when I was five, up to now.
And during a pause button moment he told me about how his doctors wanted to give him an enzyme treatment that might extend his life by as much as a month (and maybe not at all), but he had decided to save Medicare the $200,000. price tag. I thanked him on behalf of America. Without the staggering power of Lumet's film that conversation might never have happened. I was proud of my dad for his decision, and it seemed the magnificent, brooding dysfunctional drama unspooling before us was inspiring us to unleash all our boozy courage and wit to bear on the most painful and eternal of all topics...
And then the next morning I couldn't even say goodbye as he was in the shower when I left and my mom was hustling me to the airport. The next time I saw him, he was white ashes.
If he came back as Soylent Green, I'd have a few honorary nibbles. I'm not fussy about food. Why the hell shouldn't my dad get the same sacramental props as the Big Jesus with his blood red wine? Farmers can bond with their future breakfast, it's not that hard. Are you saying my Big Daddy's not as tasty as a cow or Jesus? (PS - I get my sense of gallows humor from his side of the family, so don't worry about me offending him).
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| Long Day's Journey into Night (1962) |
The hypocratic oath and fundamentalist bible thumpers would never let "Home" happen, of course. For them death must be a desperate, miserable, lonesome ordeal, every last inch of ground and time fought over, all so doctors can bankrupt our unborn grand children's Social Security. I say Euthanize the Vote! Naked Lunch of the future, it's time to write your last menu and testament. Then again, the doctors of our world do dish out opiated hospice-strength cocktails to the truly terminal (my mom crushed up and threw away all my dad's before I could swipe it, alas), and there's angelic visiting hospice nurse Phillip Seymour Hoffman, in MAGNOLIA (1999), pretending to light LONG DAY's Jason Robards cigarette as he dies of cancer. I hope someone does that for me.
Like Robinson in SOYLENT, Robards was really dying during the filming of MAGNOLIA and to see him transmuting his real-life dying pain into a deeply, terribly moving final extended death scene is once again to marvel at the deep courage our best actors show in using their immanent real life death in their art. Maybe we can use his and Robinson's examples to encourage our medical establishment to go a little deeper with the idea of assisted suicide and the chance for death to be more than just an ugly abject bodily function. To paraphrase Bing Crosby, death is agonizing, inevitable, a heartache either way, but beautiful... If we ever find the courage to actually look it in the twinkling eye, I imagine we'll find it all but irresistible.
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