Hollywood Utopia

scientific minds of the investigators who can only comprehend organisms that
conform to planetary ecological rules. Consequently, had the president acted on the
scientists’ logical deductions to wipe out Piedmont (the pre-designed site of the
accident) with a nuclear deterrent, the alien life force would have used this negative
energy to increase and multiply instead of being destroyed. Classic narrative
demands are rewarded, however, when the individualised, jumped-up medical
doctor (considered the lowest risk and therefore given the awesome responsibility
of controlling the ignition key to nuclear destruction) deduces that the fast
breathing of the baby who survived the incident somehow serves the process of
avoiding contamination. Finally, the investigators correctly deduce that driving the
microbes into the oxygen-rich sea can destroy the enemy. The inbuilt defencemechanism
of the Gaian earth system serves to protect and save human life as
opposed to the man-made, destructive power of nuclear fission. Like the human
body’s immune system, the earth’s more potent immune system is fully
dramatised, allowing audiences the filmic space and time to deduce its ecological
potency.
This is also clearly present in the overtly eco-conspiracy text Silent Running (1971),
directed by Douglas Trumbull, 29 which is symbolically set in the year 2001 and
adrift in space in a ‘Garden of Eden’ capsule that was intended to refurbish an
Earth devastated by nuclear war. Bruce Dern refuses to destroy his private world
when ordered to and instead, with the help of his robot drones, tends his garden
and finally ‘sends it out into deep space to seed a possible second chance for
mankind’ (Milne 1998: 789).
The historical transformation of the Cold War consensus already discussed can be
recognised most clearly through a reading of Logan’s Run, together with equally
popular paranoid texts like Soylent Green from the 1970s. In particular, Doherty’s
final assertion concerning the movement ‘from nuclear to digital’ and from ‘fears
of extinction to intimations of obsolescence’ (in Grant 1996: 183) becomes fully
articulated in these films. The source of ecological corruption remain firmly within
the body politic of their respective futuristic environments and the demand given
to the heroic agents is to break through the dystopic corrupting environment to a
more ecologically harmonious and ethical vision.
Soylent Green
Soylent Green (1973), directed by Richard Fleischer and based on Harry Harrison’s
novel Make Room Make Room, reflects on the contentious issue of population
control coupled with food shortages. New York in the year 2022 is depicted as a
run-down ghetto teeming with hungry masses and Charlton Heston plays an
embittered cop, Detective Robert Thorn, who investigates the activities of the food
company ‘Soylent Green’.
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