Hollywood Utopia

170 Hollywood Utopia
a scavenger based environment presented as the antithetical norm in Soylent
Green.
By accidentally witnessing this private spectacle, Detective Thorn at last begins to
appreciate the potency of such symbiotic representation of nature. The baton is
finally handed on to a new generation as he listens through headphones to the
secret conspiratorial knowledge, which his friend makes public, thereby also
making his life fruitful and useful for others. With the aid of these sublime
experiences Heston receives the strength to carry out his quest to expose the
inherent pollution and cosmic corruption in the body politic.
This reading projects the text beyond a mere localised, ideological interpretation,
which crudely exposes a Marxist base/superstructure model of societal control.
Here a form of mythic witnessing, through the development of a non ego-driven
individualising agency, helps to expose a more universal message involving deep
ecological and ethical parameters for harmonious living.
The ecological problem of overpopulation and scarce resources is resolved through
an extreme form of genetically modified human food production and rationing. A
signal of such corruption and non-ecological contamination is made in the opening
sequence when a senior official is killed. He is literally taken away by men in black
uniforms with balaclava-type hoods covering most of their faces. While the body is
placed in a waste-disposal van, all the investigators are observed taking a financial
cut, reminiscent of hyenas after a kill. One character observes in passing how there
used to be some form of ritual and ceremony for the deceased but now bodies are
merely disposed. Normative ethical eco-values have little currency in this future
dystopian environment where nobody can be trusted and the majority of the
population is treated no better than inanimate ‘furniture’ and slaves to the system
rather than individualised symbiotic beings.
Not surprisingly, because the issue of human population control is so divisive and
emotive, it is less often addressed in ecological texts. Within more recent post-Cold
War paranoiac texts, however, issues like this became more explicit, especially
within the displaced environs of science fiction future worlds. While 1950s science
fiction concentrated on taboo subjects concerning ideological divisions between
humans under the continuing threat of nuclear annihilation, 1970s examples began
to articulate more problematic discourses, like the effects of social engineering
over life and death. Logan’s Run also addressed the contentious issue of population
control but moved beyond class inequality as a means of addressing the problem of
scarce resources. In this apparently utopic world all human desires and needs are
actualised within a technologically controlled environment.