Musings from Soylent Green

So after reading Jonathan's blog, wherein he encouraged his readers to watch Soylent Green right away, I did just that. I went online, found a free streaming of the movie, and watched the 94-minute film. Here's the most important thing I got from the film: It's no wonder feminism expanded so rapidly in the 1970s.

I mean, seriously. Yeah, the movie didactically tried to make us as humans feel both responsible and guilty for global warming, overpopulation, waste, and pollution, with perhaps the hope that we might change our evil ways as humans and learn to live as the deer do (probably among the deer, too). I'm sure at least one person took the message in this novel-adapted-to-film and responded by setting their car on fire, doffing their clothes, and screaming out passages of Silent Spring to shocked motorists waiting for the light at a freeway off-ramp. But I'm not here to write about all that tree-hugging stuff, cause there is something in that awful film that I feel even more strongly about.

I'm not a crazy feminist. I just happen to be a feminist and crazy...at the same time...no connection between the two. And the pro-male attitude in this film was not only blatant but rather appalling. Now I understand that when we look at history, we have to look at it through contemporary eyes, or we might be prone to cast unfair judgments on the people of the age. That being said, ho-lee-crap. The anti-feminism in that movie was so obvious, it made me cringe and actually heavily distracted me during the film. Twice I paused the film to begin typing a blog, but I decided to watch the entire thing before casting judgment. The ending certainly did not justify the unfair portrayal of women in this movie.

Here are the offensive events that I can recall from the movie:

Charlton Heston plays a rough cop in NYC who lives in a dying society, so, sure, he's a bit jaded. We see that by his actions during a murder investigation. While questioning associates of the deceased, he goes about the ritzy penthouse, stealing anything he sees as valuable. That gives us a fair idea of the kind of character he has. And I don't know if we're supposed to sympathize with him, or hate him (I hated him) or just pity the sad, sad state the world was in, but he was what he was and that is not the point.

The murdered man was very wealthy and rented a fancy penthouse complete with whore. I think her name was Shirl and she was actually a contracted part of the apartment, which is why most of the men in the film called her and her associates "furniture girls". I hate when people call grown women girls, but that is the least of the offenses within that phrase. She seemed perfectly okay with the terms of her employment and indeed, her lifestyle.

So Shirl stays in the apartment with a bunch of other whores while she waits for a new tenant to take over rent, residency, and her. One day Charlton Heston comes a-knockin', supposedly because he has some follow-up questions, but when he sees all the furniture girls comforting each other around the apartment, he takes someone's glass of alcohol, steals one of their cigarettes and then commands Shirl to talk with him in the bedroom. No one stops him or even protests as he dominates the apartment.

Very matter-of-factly, Shirl goes into the bedroom and, at his command, answers his questions while undressing and getting into the bed. After all, for a hired whore, this is just day-to-day business, and it means nothing to her that a man who has no authority over her actions (since he is not a tenant of the apartment and therefore not the renter of the "furniture") commands her to sleep with him. She does so without complaint.

Meanwhile, the landlord comes bursting into the apartment, finds all these women in there, and begins shouting for them to get out, the harlots. He punches one in the stomach, slaps another, pushes another, basically causing all the women to helplessly begin sobbing like children since obviously it never occurred to any of them to fight the douche, even though he was vastly outnumbered and a coward besides. No, nothing happens until Charlton Heston, fresh from his "questioning", comes out of the bedroom in his rumpled clothes and confronts the landlord, who immediately calms himself and apologizes for creating a scene. Charlton, like the very great hero he is, claims that he called all those girls into the apartment to question them and the landlord backs off, but not before Charlton walks around to the beaten, sobbing women and threatens the landlord that any of these "girls" might press charges. After examining one bruised woman's face, he shrugs and says, "Maybe not." Well, thank goodness Charlton Heston made the decision not to press charges FOR the furniture girls, so now the landlord can rest easy! I guess it wouldn't occur to any of the women that they could press charges withOUT the permission of a sexed-up, crooked cop.

Anyway, the fun continues and lots of dumb investigating goes on where Charlton Heston discovers more and more about the murder and its ties to the Soylent Corporation. He's getting too close, so his commander tries to make him sign a form, giving up the investigation. Heston refuses because he has just enough honor about him to refuse breaking the law. Riiiight. If he had given up, there would have been no movie, but nothing about Heston's character up to this point has proven that he would have had any qualms about signing that statement. But moving on.

Later, Heston's on riot duty, trying to calm the hordes of hungry people who came to collect their food rations on the day that a large shipment of soylent green didn't come in. Anger ensues, a mob forms, pushing against the police, and one angry citizen keeps trying to take a shot at Heston. Because of all the people, the gunman misses Heston twice, hitting two women instead. Of course. It's okay to accidentally shoot a woman, as evidenced by the fact that once those women drop, no one pays them any mind, including the movie audience. Luckily, the gunman later gets squashed by a "scooper"--a giant bulldozer used to scoop up people and dump them into the back of truck and out of the way.

Well things are going badly for Heston, so he seeks comfort in Shirl, sleeping with her again, letting her bandage his ankle when he gets injured, etc, etc. He's about to leave when she confesses that she doesn't like to be alone because it frightens her. He doesn't care, so she tries to entice him with real food, with soap, and then with a hot shower, which finally grabs his attention. Sleeping with a beautiful woman for nothing isn't enough for Heston--she's got to promise to rub him down after a hot shower first. I just love that she--as a piece of unfeeling furniture--begs him to stay with her when she's supposedly indifferent toward all men who aren't renting the apartment. I loved it even more when Heston was persuaded to stay only on the condition that she make him a big breakfast in the morning. This scene may be my very, very favorite.

Well, I promise I'm almost done with my list of grievances. Stuff happens, Heston gets closer to the impossible truth that "Soylent Green is made from people!" And as he's chased by bad guys, Shirl suddenly completely changes her personality and inexplicable develops a connection with the scuzzbag cop who slept with her repeatedly. She talks to him about running away together and he shuts her down with the excuse that there's nowhere to go. She asks him not to call her furniture anymore (you'd think he would've stopped that ages ago, but maybe he hadn't disassociated her from the refrigerator or the sofa or the other pieces in apartment yet. After all, he was busy being a crooked cop) and he surprisingly complies. Hooray! It's true love!

Close to the very end, Shirl meets the new apartment tenant, who is interested in the apartment and to a lesser degree, her. He asks her, "So tell me: are you fun?" We don't hear her answer, but the look on her face expresses her dislike of the new tenant. How dare he treat her like that! Yeah, right--when did she start caring about how she was viewed by men? She personally admitted multiple times that she had been "with the apartment" for "a long time". She was attached to the apartment by contract and it suited her just fine before the rugged cop raped her and hypothetically made her think more highly of herself.

So Heston's being chased by gunmen from the Soylent Corporation, and he knows he's going down. So who does he call? Shirl, of course. Somehow in between fornicating with the "furniture", he grew feelings for it as well. Completely inexplicably out of character. So he calls her and tells her to stay with the apartment forever, because the people who take over those ritzy places can afford real food, whereas the poor have to eat the soylent green squares. She protests, saying that she wants to run away with him, but he commands her to stay, so of course she promises. I would've thought that with her sudden transformation from submissive doormat to willing harlot, she would've grown enough spine to fight for the things she wants in life. But maybe it was too soon. She was just barely getting to hate the new tenant, after all.

Then Heston gets beat up real bad and is carried away on a stretcher, professing to the masses that soylent green is people. The end.

Well, I feel edified, how about you? All of these interactions with the women in this lame-o movie (and Shirl was the only significant woman--there was one other woman in the main cast, but she had, like ten lines) just oozed with male dominance and authority. And it was all a silent assumption, like the audience was supposed to be just as accepting of the way women were portrayed, treated, and how they behaved in the film as the men were in the film itself! H-E-DOUBLE-OTHER-LETTERS NO! I am more upset over the world as it was in the 1970s than over the preachy, false, exaggerative message of the movie! So for those of you who don't believe in radical feminism (myself included), we can probably admit that the feminist uprising of the 70s may not have been the absolute solution to male chauvinism, but it was better than leaving things the way they were: completely--wrongly--one-sided.