The Black Pill Trilogy: Soylent Green

Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, and Solyent Green. These were the black pill films of Charlton Heston.

Virtually all actors get into politics to one degree or another, although the reasons vary greatly.  For most, it’s just another resume line item; “I can sing, dance, rollerskate, sword fight, and protested Trump’s closure of the Andrea Dworkin Trans Shelter for the Exceptionally Gendered.” For some, it appears to be yet another venue for inflicting their Cluster B malignant narcissism on an underserving public (see Alec Baldwin and Jada Pinkett). But there are a few who feel that with stature comes with responsibilities; these are rare, in fact, they are pretty much extinct, the current incubator system does not favor people who can act, let alone ones that are given to introspective consideration. 

Charlton Heston was one of the latter.  An Army Air Corps side gunner who did the starving artist thing in New York City when he got out.  He hadn’t wanted to do film work at all, but when you are living on $100 a month, it’s kind of easy to find good reasons to compromise your unbreakable principles in the face of a big paycheck.  “Maybe just one to find out what it’s like.” 

Heston did return to the stage frequently as he felt it revived him as an artist.   He was always notably dedicated to his craft.  Enough so that other actors frequently found his rigid isolation, diet, exercise, and walking around his house in full costume bellowing out his lines to be offensively self-righteous. “his prodigious work habits (are) feats of enterprise so above and beyond the call of duty as to border on betrayal.”

His politics were an expression of his foundational beliefs and, I think, much like Ronald Reagan, a Midwesterner’s outlook and background.  Fairness and niceness matter in the Midwest, but not to the point where someone else has the right to pick your pocket. He was liberal in the fifties and sixties because he felt it was how America was supposed to work, so he would do things like march with MLK.

“That march, which was an example of peaceful, lawful civil demonstration, was a responsible act. It was a democratic process, in a way, and if you believe in democracy, then you have to believe in the way it works. As for Hollywood, hell, this is no longer the bad old days.”

That last refers to the actor’s strike he and Ronald Reagan led in 1960.  Heston followed most of the American Left’s causes but stopped dead in his tracks when it came to Communism. That was the bridge the small-town boy from mid-Michigan couldn’t cross. The fundamental unfairness of “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” was fingernails on a blackboard to a Son of Martha. 

However, the button-down grey suit liberalism of the fifties and early sixties gave way to the Baja Hippy poncho leftism of the LBJ years..  The Silent Generation and then the Baby Boomers handed the reins of the causes he’d believed in wholeheartedly to Marxist professors.  

His left-wing idealism gave way to disillusionment, then outright disaffection. In 1972, Charlton Heston would do the unthinkable and publicly endorse Richard Nixon for his second term. 

I’ve said this before, but I’ve got new readers, so I’m saying it again, the Greatest Generation lived through twenty years of trauma. An American boy born in 1922 would have spent his first eight years in a time of unrivaled prosperity. Then had it all ripped away at just about the age when you can first understand what’s going on in the world. He would have been eating wilted vegetables and meat that tasted funny because that was all that was available to eat, assuming you had even that. Your Dad, the strongest man in your world, would have you all pile into the basement and hide there when a man who had a legal right to demand money that he didn’t have pounded on the door.  One day, you came home to see your mom crying and your dad stiff-lipped with anger as the sheriff pounded a notice to the front door of a house that was no longer your home.  By the time you turned eighteen, you were wondering when the draft notice would arrive, or would you just be better off enlisting because volunteers got preferential treatment?

Then in 1946 it was all over.  Two of the three greatest sources of evil had been crushed under America’s heel. The Pacific Ocean was an American lake, we (and we alone) commanded the power of the atom, the factories were ALL hiring and paying stupid money to get wrench turners and that’s, assuming you didn’t want to go to college on Uncle Sam’s dime. A great cigar cost a nickel, your Daddy was rich and your Mama was good-looking. 

But you knew, bone deep knew, it was a rug that could be pulled out from under you at any time.  The bomb was given to the Russians by Communist traitors.  Your kids hated everything you’d worked hard to give them. You spent the next twenty years craving rock-solid security, but after 1968, you knew it had all come to nothing. 

Charlton Heston’s newfound cynicism matched his generation’s and found expression, naturally enough, in his art. Today, I will look at the last of the Charlton Heston Black Pill Trilogy of movies. The Three dystopian films that very much reflected the dejection of that post-1968 world.

Soylent Green had a brilliant marketing campaign built around a question: 

What. Is. The. Secret. Of. Soylent. Green?

***SPOILER***

***AL-ERT***

It was an advertising campaign that wouldn’t have survived the first internet comment today.  

“Soylent Green is people!”

You absolutely had to have Charlton Heston to shout a line like that.  Nobody else could have carried it. 

Soylent Green takes place in a population bomb scenario where the Earth’s population has reached 7 billion by the year of three years ago. Civilization is at the breaking point, the population is barely kept from starving to death by giving them an artificial food called Soylent. There are three flavors, Red, Yellow and the newest flavor from processed plankton called Soylent Green. 

The ecology of this world is failing.  There is no wild life left, it’s all been eaten, trees are only in a few very private parks. The elite now live in fortress communities, protected by armed guards and serviced by contract concubines called furniture. 

One of the directors of the Soylent corporation has been murdered.  A police detective named Thorn (Heston) has been assigned to the investigation. He’s about as happy to have this job as a Moscow militia detective investigating a disappearance in Stalin’s Russia. Nonetheless, he puts this murder at the top of his in-basket and heads out to investigate it.

It becomes obvious to Thorn that this was a political assassination. He follows the trail to the director’s haunted priest, who is bound by the seal of the confessional. He won’t break the seal, but does direct him to take a look at an Oceanographic Report.  He turns that over to his researcher, Book, played by Edward G. Robinson in his last role. Book discovers that the oceans are basically dead, and there is nowhere near enough plankton to feed the human race. Book correctly surmises what Soylent Green is and reports to the nearest suicide booth.  Thorn follows his friend’s body to the Soylent factory and finds out the truth for himself.  He gets into a shootout, is  wounded, and as Thorn is being carried away, the film ends with Charlton Heston’s second-best-known tag line. 

Overpopulation and resource scarcity are the overarching themes of this film.  It became a leftwing panic issue when an entomolgist named Paul Ehrlich shit himself when he got surrounded by a crowd in india.  His bout of ochlophobia resulted in and very profitable career as a panic monger. He set a very ugly fashion of poluted science with this.

The environmental concerns were much more understandable.  By 1970, you only had to look at the outdoor dumpsters that highway ditches had turned into to see that problem. A hunter could spend a week in the woods and never see even sign of a deer.  There was a reason that Cherokee was crying on TV. 

The film was based on Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison. Which was reason enough for most people to have never read the book.   There was no cannibalism in Harrison’s novel and book ends on the horrifying statement that the United States population has reached 344 million.  Moving on to anything that doesn’t involve Harry Harrison.

Heston delivered a standout performance.  That was a man who never phoned it in. Edward G. Robinson’s twilight role let him stretch himself in a number of ways that he must have found satisfying. His death scene in the euthanasia chamber is haunting because it wasn’t conceivable back then, and showed the principal receiving a far more dignified send-off than what is now being provided in suicide clinics in the West. 

The reviews were mixed, and rightfully so.  There were too many scenes that were a bit over the top even by 1970s standards. The riot police using earth movers, however, has become iconic. 

As a dystopian film, it’s not as silly or far out as the other two of Heston’s Black Pill movies.  The class divisions in America have become much worse since that film was made. Although whites becoming the despised outgroup minority was missed. And it was right on target with institutionalized euthanasia as well as the state sponsored erosion of human empathy.

But there was one part it got dead wrong.  The part where everyone would be horrified by cannibalism.  Not only is there a substantial portion who would eat Soylent Green knowing what the secret was but would feel quite pleased with themselves for doing so.

 All you have to do is make eating it a source of fashionable left-wing status.  Get Neil deGrasse Tyson telling people ‘you are smarter than Trump voters for eating it’ and have Kim Kardashian swoon over how it’s totally organic, Gluten Free and non-GMO. I guarantee hoards of mindless NPCs would gobble down the compressed remains of their fellow man like pigs at the trough.

NEXT UP: The Omega Man

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