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ABSTRACT
Not just a reductionist representation of overpopulation, Soylent Green offers a nuanced critique of capitalism. In the course of the film, audiences learn that the seaplankton of which soylent green is supposedly composed no longerexists. The audience is horrified to discover by the end of the film that “soylent green is people.” While seemingly horrific, the notion of humans cannibalizing themselves in order to survive functions metaphorically for the system of capitalism, where human lives are cannibalized, wasted at ever accelerating rates in order to procure the most profit possible. In this respect, Soylent Green offers avisual representation of what Jason Moore calls the end of cheapfood. Yet, even as Soylent Green offers a powerful representation of capitalism’s crisis state in the era of the end of cheap food, the film asks audiences to re-invest in hegemonic white masculinity, a system of power and oppression intimately linked to capitalism. In particular, the film embodies what Hamilton Carroll writes about as white male injury, a new form of white masculine identity politics. Even as the film offers up a powerful critique of capitalism’s crisis state, it simultaneously does so through reproducing a discourse of white male injury.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Sarah Tracey and Rachel Vaughn for their work on this Special Issue as well as Rachel Lee and Daniel Gerling for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thank you also to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Moore (Citation2010) writes about how neoliberalism is the most recent recuperative strategy following the 1973 economic crisis; that this strategy has been about stealing wealth. Of course, filmmakers in 1973 could not know that the post-1973 accumulation strategy was going to be neoliberal.
2. More recently, there has been a resurgent engagement with the notion of overpopulation, but through a feminist science and reproductive justice lens that is otherwise lacking in a text like The Population Bomb. See, for example, Clarke and Haraway (Citation2018).
3. Carroll’s (Citation2011, 9–10, italics in original) fundamental argument is that the “true privilege of white masculinity – and its defining strategy – is not to be unmarked, universal, or invisible (although it is sometimes one or all of these), but to be mobile and mutable; it is not so much the unmarked status of white masculinity that ensures privilege, but its lability.”
4. The way that ecological crisis and climate change are used as recuperative strategies for the re-privileging of white masculinity can also be seen in more contemporary films like Interstellar (2014) and WALL-E (2008). See Yates (Citation2018).
5. Woodard (Citation2014, 6) importantly points out that historians have traditionally denied and dismissed the parts of slave narratives that disclosed stories of black consumption by white Americans.
6. It is interesting to note that at the turn of the twenty-first century, popular Hollywood film begins to re-imagine lifeboats for people, namely white people, via films like WALL-E (2008) and Interstellar (2014). See Yates forthcoming .
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Michelle Yates
Michelle Yates, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Humanities in the Humanities, History, and Social Sciences Department at Columbia College Chicago. Her research interests include ecomedia; feminist ecology; ecological Marxism; and waste studies. Dr. Yates has published in peer review journals, such as Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography; ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; and Science Fiction Film & Television. She is also the co-founder and co-director of the Chicago Feminist Film Festival.