Setting aside the twist everyone already knows, this might be one of the best and most interesting dystopias ever created
Lets take a look back at the dark days of 2022... and see why the world still needs Soylent Green
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Soylent Green might have some of the best world building I've ever seen
Every time Detective Thorn leaves his tiny apartment he has to hop/crawl over 30 people who pay/are subsidized to sleep in the hallway and stairwells instead of freezing or getting murdered on the street
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Likewise even the poorest building has permanent armed security lest it get destroyed and looted by the homeless masses outside.
A man's time and life goes cheep in an overpopulated New York with 20 mil unemployed. but even the most rundown building is precious.
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The corruption we see from the police is astonishing.
Thorn hardly enters a crime seen and he'd already looting it of valuable.
Linens, fruits, real meat, booze, books...
soap
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I've rarely seen a work were the sense of poverty, in characters nominally middle to upper-middle class is so pressing.
Thorn gets into fights and steals from people over things as small as a jar of strawberry jam
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And the sexual politics...
Every beautiful woman we meet is employed as concubines for the elite that come attached to high class rental units.
They're called "furniture"
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And the disturbing thing is... its not that far off actual 2022.
Sure the greenhouse effect has failed to live up to its promise, and our processed crappy food is still under 10 part per 100,000 human protein
but having watched rent soar and apts shrink, its uncomfortable
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We do live in a world were reasonably employed aging men increasingly have to have roommates or even subdivide studios to afford to live in major cities.
I've known girls who've gone on seeking arrangements or onlyfans to make ends meet
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There's a recurring motif where the older characters just break down weeping at what the world's come to and the decency they knew as kids being gone
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The younger characters dismiss this talk of the world going to hell and how everything was once better... much as we would:
Old people's delusions about the past
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In a lot of ways you could argue Soylent Green was the first properly cyberpunk film... the dystopic future, the corrupt blend of corporate and state power, the deprivation, the profiteering protagonist with principles under his cynical exterior...
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And yet its futurism is too accurately unoptimistic.
There is no wonderous high tech in this future. The one piece of tech is an arcade console surpassed by 84.
And yet its terrifying predictions are eerily pressing...
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Assisted suicide as a cure all for social problems, Police brutality against regular citizens, a normalized prostitution of middle class young women, refugee and migrant crises forcing 1st world citizens to live like sardines...
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This is a film that doesn't feel like a scifi movie anymore...
Just something further along the dark path we turned down in the 70s
P.S. I have a blog:
The degradation of legacy media is obvious for all to see... but once you start digging into it you realize most media companies aren't even in the media business... And they no longer die when audiences stop watching:
Tolkien is capeshit wearing the skinsuit of the Anglo-Saxon tradition.
Contrast Beowulf, Le Morte De Arthur, the Germanic Eddas, the Odyssey, The Aeneid... And you can see none of the structure or values or the stories are at all comparable. Tolkien never wrote a single revenge cycle.
But rather his values and stories resemble nothing so much as Modern Marvel movies.
A sexless world of Eternal Children and equally sexless bearded men, with no meaningful desires except for trinkets and Macguffins meant to show their virtues are sins and they should have had no desires at all... and villains who when not faceless beasts and disposable vermin, have committed the crime of... Wanting something.
Not a single one of his heroes has a rivalry or hatred of any of his villains, and certainly nothing familial, personal, or romantic such as is the case of every classical and anglo-saxon story.
One wonders why Gandalf went to Bilbo at all... So Bilbo could find a wife? Found a new hobbit Kingdom with his fortune? Avert some terrible destiny? Slay an enemy or rival?
No! So he could just come home and do nothing for another 50+ years.
For all the shit GRRM rightly gets for Game of Thrones devolving into feminist/social justice anti-narrative and plodding hopeless misery (Name any children BORN during A Song of Ice and Fire and the war of 5 kings who live? Indeed it contradicts his own worldbuilding, since half the cast was born or married and formed families as a direct result of the earlier Robert's rebellion)... inspite of all that Game of Thrones is far CLOSER to traditional western storytelling and values, with named characters with families and hopes and dreams, and lusts and rivalries and children and revenge cycles on all sides.
By contrast Tolkien, very uniquely even by the standards of the 40s and 50s, creates a sexless world where pretty much no one has families, romances, lusts, hopes, desires, etc. Save some abstract desire to "Save the world" or "defeat evil"
Name a single Tolkien Character who has a significant Relationship with their father, mother, or wife?
The only exception is Denathor... Ie. A Mad King to be overcome. Arwen doesn't even appear in the main text of the books
But what about...
Are you going to reference something published by JRR Tolkien? Or Christopher Tolkien?
I agree Christopher Tolkien was vastly more in touch with the Western Tradition than his father.
Hanania makes Casey Affleck at the start of "Assassination of Jesse James" seem normal and well adjusted
There is something deeply wrong with any figure who decide to interact with him and pretend the most unsettling thing ever seen isn't happening right in front of them
Every inflection is wrong, every muscle spasm, every lip movement, every reaction, every part of his face that's unusually plump, smooth, and youthful, or that's strangely aged, worn, & thin
Every part of him is disingenuous, faking something human or concealing something alien
he's 39... Yet not a single trait of him is 39... He combines the most bizzare traits of an autistic 10 year old and 90 year old jewish woman... As much an age that has never existed before as Madonna post-plastic surgery.
Young white men are so damned close to terror and ethnic cleansing it is unreal.
Having every rule rigged against them, their every institution betray them, and then called losers by the people their tax dollars subsidize and the boomers their childhood suffering gave peace to
That a full moratorium on all immigration for 15 years and complete repeal of the 1964 civil right isn't the opening bid, is a the sign we're headed to hot civil war.
An entire generation of boys sees Hitler as the only figure in history who didn't want them enslaved and killed
I will ask @ThomasEWoods and @BobMurphyEcon who for some reason are defending Elon and Vivek.
Why do you want you children enslaved, immiserated, disenfranchised in their homeland, reduced to a minority, and inevitably killed by ethnic enemies?