Soylent Green

Built around a critical but unhurried police investigation, Soylent Green allows its viewers to take a brief holiday in a near future choked with people. Richard Fleischer's film begins with a peppy montage, detailing the industrialisation of the land christened America. We see lush expanses ground underfoot by the relentless reproduction of grim, agitated looking humans. We see fledgling cities and endless manufacturing landscapes, initially separate but eventually intertwined and overwritten. Consumptive wealth, expressed as enormous concrete flats filled with identical motorcars, give way to poverty and destitution.

At first this introduction seems to be positing mankind's lot as cyclical, drawing a link between The Great Depression and the calamity just over the horizon. When an upswing fails to materialise, it becomes clear Soylent Green foretells entropy. Waste, destruction and total pollution accompanied by a docile, numbed humanity. Set in 2022, the film presents a tomorrow in which basic social niceties have completely collapsed. A green smog hangs six feet off the ground, seeping into everybody's face. Interiors are shot to be inspected, the audience asked to discern personal space or a lack thereof. Even the rich and powerful inhabit pokey, clinical apartments. Everybody sweats constantly.

Charlton Heston's cop, Thorn, has one ragged outfit, focused around a wringing wet neckerchief. Thorn billets in a box room with an elderly man, Edward G Robinson's Sol, who computes his roommate's cases. Sol is the brain. Thorn is the fist. Given opportunity to inspect crime scenes, Thorn creeps around, hoovering up knick-knacks and luxury items. This looting seems to be expected, a perk of having the kind of job that allows limited access to these rarefied spaces. Luxury apartments come with live-in mistresses who are referred to as furniture, Thorn assuming a sexual relationship with Leigh Taylor-Young's Shirl as brusquely as he pockets a bar of soap. All human interactions are positioned as openly transactional, operating on rules and customs out of our grasp. Everybody has submitted to this horror.