Thread by @FromKulak

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My god is this movie incredible!

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:

anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/why-is-legac…