By Michael F. Duggan
I was reading the news this week and thought to myself: with what character from a dystopian novel or film do I most identify? For me it’s Solomon Roth, the Edward G. Robinson character, from the 1973 movie, Soylent Green.
I was reading the news this week and thought I would throw it out there: with what character from a dystopian novel or film do you most identify? For me it’s Solomon Roth, the Edward G. Robinson character, from the 1973 movie, Soylent Green.
When I first saw the film (now dated, with some epic overacting by Charlton Heston) as a young person, it struck me as plausibly prophetic: an overcrowded, overheating world quite literarily devouring itself, with a small, insular, elite at the top. It is set in 2022. Prophecy indeed.
But then there is Sol Roth, the old guy (65) in a black beret, who remembers what was good about the old days, before everything went wrong. The younger Charleston Heston character rolls his eyes at him and his old-school gentility and what he suspects is the older man’s sentimentality and nostalgia. That is, until he (Sol) checks out via a spectacular, customized, multimedia show (at the all-too sanitized and accommodating Soylent factory) amid scenes of natural beauty set to “light classical” music (“guaranteed” to satisfy and to last 20 minutes). It is then that the younger man–the man of new age–realizes what has been lost, as he learns that “Soylent Green is people!”
According to the film, Roth is born in 1957, making him about six years older than me, and although I have no plans to visit the Soylent Green factory any time soon, our respective ages are in the same ballpark.
The scene in which Sol dies is especially poignant because this was Robinson’s final role. He died 84 days after shooting wrapped.