The article explaining Make Room! Make Room!, the novel by Harry Harrington, and the film Soylent Green, are extremely similar, mainly because as it says in the article, the novel was adapted for the film Soylent Green by MGM. Both illustrate horrific living conditions, where people take refuge in the worst possible places. In addition, food and water are rationed, crime is abnormally high, and society is severely oppressed in various ways. Set in the near future (the setting was the year 2022, keep in mind this film was released in 1973), the film depicts a city with over 40 million people who are forced to feed on minimal resources. The majority of Earth is dependent upon Soylent Industries for their food supply, a company who manufactures 'food' out of various organisms from the oceans. As i watched this film, I kept getting the idea that an overpopulated society was way worse than the society from Fahrenheit 451, simply because with so many more people in such a concentrated area, crime would skyrocket, people would starve, and things could easily get out of control. People slept in stairways, on the streets, and packed into the church as well as other places that normally people wouldn't reside. Some women are looked at as 'furniture', meaning they are part of their respective apartment, and are to satisfy each succeeding tenant, similar to a concubine or a courtesan. Poverty is extremely prevalent, and the only way to really live comfortably was if you were rich. Throughout the film, the audience can easily tell that the rich were privileged with things such as AC, real food, liquor, and running water, which nowadays we would call nothing short of a normal household (if you are over 21 that is!).
Detective Thorn, a NYC cop, is assigned to investigate the murder of a Soylent board member named Simonson. When Thorn visits the apartment, he notices a few inconsistencies at the scene of the crime. For example, he observed there was a faulty alarm system; nothing was taken from the loft, even though it was a suspected robbery gone wrong; and the bodyguard was not present at the time of the murder. Thorn was also able to tell that Simonson did not put up a fight.
Later in the film, Thorn is assigned to riot duty, where things get heated in the streets once all the Soylent Green has been consumed. The police call in the scoops, vehicles similar to a payloader. The 'scoops' would literally scoop up members of the mob, and drop them on the back of the truck. This was meant to break up the riot, and actually worked pretty well.
Roth, Thorn's partner, was an older man who didn't do much field work. He did however study up on Soylent and towards the end of the film paid a visit to the exchange, a group of researchers. They confirmed that the ocean is not responsible for what Soylent Green is comprised of, and agree that the processed 'food' is made from human remains. Roth proceeds to go home, (not in the conventional sense, however) a place where he is laid to die while watching a weird video of nature while listening to classical music. Thorn attempts to stop him, however arrives too late. Before Roth dies, he urges Thorn to expose the truth about Soylent Green. Thorn is led to the Waste Plant and witnesses the transformation of dead humans into Soylent Green (i typed evil music into youtube and this was the first thing i found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8Kyi0WNg40 ).
Fahrenheit 451, a film released in the mid 60s, sheds light on a different type of oppressive society than what we saw in Soylent Green. In F-451, all books have ceased to be manufactured. Possession of any books are strictly forbidden by the government. The typical 'fireman' has an extremely different job in this society, as their top priority is to seek out people who disobey the laws about owning books. Once they are informed of who may be breaking the law by civilians or informants, these so called firemen are sent to the civilians' homes and are allowed to search throughout the home to find the hidden books. Once they unravel any sort of forbidden evidence, the firemen burn all the books (451 degrees fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper will burn, hence the name of the movie) in front of the public. Towards the beginning of the film, Montag, (the protagonist, but more importantly) a fireman, meets a woman on a train that says she believes they are neighbors. From that point on everything about Montag's life changes. The neighbor, Clarisse, asks Montag if he ever reads the books before he burns them. Usually, Montag never gave it much thought and just proceeded to do his sole job of burning the books, however after speaking with Clarisse, Montag decided to begin hiding some of the illegal works in his home, to his wife's dismay. Later in the film, Clarisse narrowly escapes the firemen and tells Montag she is going to run away to the woods to join the 'book people', an underground group that has each member memorize a full book, in order to keep the memory of that book alive. Montag struggles on deciding whether or not to leave, but ultimately has a plan to hide a book in every fireman's home to make the system eat itself from the inside-out. When Montag goes to the Fire Captain and expresses his desire to resign from the force, he is convinced to stay for one last job. Without telling him, Montag's wife informs the firemen of his betrayal, and the last job he goes on happens to be at his own home! The Captain gives Montag the flamethrower and instructs him to burn the books himself. Montag then proceeds to burn the Captain alive, and escapes the other firemen. Montag runs away to the book people, and decides to memorize the Tales of Mystery and Imagination written by Edgar Allen Poe.
When reading the article which compares and contrasts Fahrenheit 451 and Feed, one paragraph stood out among all. "There remains a substantial minority of individuals who secretly hold onto their books, and thus presumably to their humanity. Indeed it is this very fact that makes Montag's job as a fireman possible. Of course, this job continually puts Montag into contact with books and 'book people' ultimately resulting in his own rejection of the official culture of his society and acceptance of book culture." The fact that people in the film hold onto their books, gives them something to live for. Many characters in the film were 'zombies', as Montag eloquently pointed out to his wife and her friends, and one could tell that the people who kept hidden books seemed separated from society, in the sense that they were not only thinking what their government made them think. So to say, the people with books were able to voice their own opinions throughout the film. The fact that Montag was around people who actually thought for themselves, combined with Clarisse and her nosey personality, helped snap Montag out of the oppressed mentality, and into a mentality of life that promoted free-thought and the teaching of books through oral tradition.
In the article On Dystopia, Booker cites Lyman Tower Sargent (a utopian scholar), when describing "coherent terminology for utopian and dystopian fiction". Sargent defines dystopia as 'a non-existent society..that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which the reader lived'. Furthermore, both films Soylent Green and Fahrenheit 451 epitomize the definition which Sargent gave for a dystopian society, as both films incorporate an extremely oppressed society which can easily be viewed as worse than the society in which we live in today.
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