Based on Books - "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison versus Richard Fleischer's Soylent Green

Full of spoilers, as always!

Make Room! Make Room!, one of the best predictive science fiction works of its time, and one of the most underrated too, foresaw in 1966 that the end of the century would be a time out of hell for New York City, opening the flood gates to an even more hellish new millennium: Climate change and scorching heat burning the planet down; the world bursting at its seems with extreme overpopulation; serious food and housing shortages; barely any water to drink and as a consequence, the lack of a vital infrastructure pushing the masses into crime... Not an ideal place at all. The book shows how people from different backgrounds cope under these utterly dire living conditions.

Against this hellish backdrop we focus on Andy, a police detective tasked with investigating the seemingly mysterious death of the ultra rich mobster Mike O'Brien, Big Mike, who in fact has been killed by Taiwanese-American street boy Billie Chung in an attempted robbery. During the investigation Andy starts a relationship with Big Mike's hired lover, sugar baby, live-in sex worker, whatever you want to call her, Shirl, who then moves from Mike's gloriously luxurious house with running water and food aplenty into the poor, two room shack he shares with his roommate Sol, an older man who produces his own electricity by riding a wheelless bike.

Meanwhile there are uproars outside, especially the older generations are constantly rallying against the system. The way older people and their political understanding are portrayed is utterly interesting, especially for our times; this exact generation which back in the day was quite revolutionary is being dismissed and looked down on now.

As lead character, Andy is actually quite bland, to be honest, he is kind of an everyman and replaceable with many. He holds values like integrity and honesty and has traditional expectations from his relationship with Shirl; he is kind of a romantic expecting to find a true love he can provide for and take care of (but does not have the financial means to do so). Too bad Shirl is a tough and realistic business woman disguised as a naive young girl, and who is only following the rules this cruel new world has taught her in order to survive - namely to go with whoever can provide for her, pay her money for her company, which Andy can't do. To make it clear; I'm not saying it's my own opinion that men should provide for their lovers or that they should be financially well-endowed in order to do so.

Sol, on the other hand, is created to be every reader's dream character - old, wise, funny, smart, and familiar with the time and conditions the reader lives in, a time where food is not scarce, where running water and electricity are not luxury goods, but basic human needs. So being a person who knows both how wonderful life could be and his harsh reality, he possesses the kind of clarity the other characters lack. As he states, the crux of the matter is birth control. Since the invention and growth of modern medicine, or death control as he calls it, the number of people on Earth has been multiplying uncontrollably, causing the current state in the book. All the sadder that today we are again moving backwards, moving away from the need to control birth on this planet (as we control death) and finding a way to distribute resources so that every person can live in dignity. We're nearing our catastrophe by the minute actually.

By using as many characters as possible from different backgrounds, Harrison also presents the survival options for the groups in question; Billie Chung, for instance, as a young man of Asian background living in a type of China Town, leads a much harder life than Andy or Shirl, the latter, as a pretty white girl, has found the option of sex work for herself to live in luxury. She too has to pay a price and keep company to men who aren't always nice to her and the sexism she encounters and faces smiling politely is infuriating. Still, it's her job. Then there's Billie's mother, who leads a life of extreme poverty as an Asian woman and mother. Tab the bodyguard stands for a black person.

Everyone is miserable and as the new millennium is rang in, it is a bitter sort of new beginning which offers neither hope nor joy.

Soylent Green (1973) is loosely based on the book. I'm not very fond of this term "loosely based", as I think it is either based on a work or not and it's used to excuse greater divergences from the original work, for which case "inspired by" seems to be a better word, but whatever. You know what I mean.

The back story remains the same, we still are very much in this infernal world trying to sustain every single overpopulating human, but the attention is shifted towards food shortage more than anything.

Big Mike isn't Big Mike anymore, he's the wealthy and influential William R. Simonson, a member of the Soylent Corporation's board and his death is directly related to the big secret which is being theatrically revealed at the end of the movie:

"Soylent Green is people!"

The popular food, allegedly made of soy beans and lentils, is in reality made of people, thus the system has made cannibals of us all. The food Soylent is barely mentioned in the book, by the way. Taking the opportunity to hit the audience with a nice sensational big reveal, director Richard Fleischer confronts us with a secret, a mystery towards which everything moves. It was probably shocking in its time, though compared with the book, it's nothing but a cheap thrill, sensationalism.

Considering how horrible the world they're living in is, the weather, the scarcity, the famine, the drought and overall shortages, the fact that they have been eating the flesh of people already dead (no one is being killed for the purpose) is, in my humble opinion, the least of their problems, unnecessarily puritanical pearl-clutching.

Although the main divergence from the book is the cannibalistic element, there are other major differences too, and not always favorable ones.

Glam rock cops!

Let's start with Andy, who is called Detective Robert Thorn now, played by Charlton Heston. Possibly my own subjective perception, but casting the role with Heston gave Robert an extremely macho/wannabe masculine vibe, which is but hinted at in the book. His moving around like he owns the world admittedly gives an additional dystopic, curroptional element, but we also see that the closer he comes to discovering the truth about everyone's favorite food, the more he mellows out, reaching his weakest moment in the final scene where he suffers a physical and psychological breakdown.

Shirl is treated as nothing but a commodity in the flick. Robert often calls her "furniture" as she actually is being rented with the apartment, until she asks him to stop calling her that. After the death of her sugar daddy, the rent of the apartment is already paid for the month but the tenant isn't alive anymore. So, Robert just takes his place sleeping with Shirl, showering daily, eating meat with Sol, living the life. By choosing to put Shirl in the position of being rented together with the apartment, the movie removes a lot of the character's own autonomy, as book Shirl at least decides for herself to move in with Andy, while movie Shirl, beside continuously speaking in whispering ASMR-mode, is successively passed around from one man who is finished with her to another, with her ending up, in contrast to book Shirl, unhappily with a man who hints that he and his friends like having fun and winking, implying gang-rape, and begs Robert to get her out of there. Book Shirl, on the other hand, readily goes from Andy to other guys who pay for her sleepover without really thinking much of it.

There's a lot of white washing going on too. I'm not sure if the casting of black or Asian actors and actresses was such a big deal in the 70's. I have in mind Night of the Living Dead (1968) by George R. Romero for which the casting of a black lead was kind of a sensation even though Romero thought it shouldn't have been a big deal, so I guess reactions were mixed. In any case there is no Billie Chung in the movie and no Tab the bodyguard, so the notion of people from different racial background going through different challenges in this dystopia, as Harrison carefully constructed eight years before the making of the movie, is being ignored. A big loss, if you ask me, as it is kind of the point of the book.

Ultimately, my verdict movie or book? Harry Harrison was an author with exceptional foresight and his heart in the right place which is reflected in the book. So, the book wins this time.