Book, the 70s the great shift in American Culture as our main textbook. So, when i refer to schulman, that is what i am talking about. Tonight, we are using the 1973 film soylent green, starring charlton heston, as a window into both the Science Fiction film genre and into some of the most difficult domestic challenges of the 1970s, where all of the president ial administrations, but particularly for president jimmy carter. So that is why we are using soylent green. A quick synopsis, this film is set in a dystopian future. It is not a utopian ideal. It is dystopian where everything is terrible future. The big problem is overpopulation. New york city is wildly overcrowded with a population of 40 Million People. By way of contrast, the Current Population of new york city is 8 million. Were talking five times the normal population of new york city, which is outrageous. The Soylent Corporation oversees the citys food supply. So that is where we get our title soylent. The food supply mostly consists of processed wafers of various kinds, dried vegetables, dried protein and so forth. The newest food the corporation has introduced is soylent green, which they advertise as made from the oceans, plankton, is something particularly nutritious in these dire times. Theres soylent red and yellow, but soylent green is the big one. Charlton heston stars as a new York City Police detective who is assigned to solve the murder of a Soylent Corporation board member. Thats where the plot comes in. Throughout the film, the audience sees some of the worst consequences of overpopulation, and, at the same time, they also learn the terrible secret about soylent green. So, spoiler alert. Soylent green is people yes. Its made from people. So, this is the twist, this is the terrible secret. But soylent green is so many other things. It is a great window into the Science Fiction genre. It is a great window into some of these vexing political issues of the 1970s. So, lets talk about film and Science Fiction. Science fiction had long been a standard literary genre, but as far as film goes, it had never really managed to get out of the b studio or the b pictures of the old hollywood studios. It just did not have the prestige as much as other films did. And there were some films that were actually quite successful at the box office. These are two examples. Invasion of the body snatchers, and the blob. But they were extremely lowbudget movies. They were definitely coming out of the b picture unit of the major studios. So they just had not developed a kind of gravitas as the rest of the films. But the advent of new hollywood would bring prestige to the genre. And a lot of this had to do with technical innovations, improvements in technology of all kinds, and that would improve the visual, what they could do with the cameras as well as special effects in terms of what they could do with characters and so forth. Of course, we have talked about 1967 and 1968 as being the key years in terms of the shift of old to new hollywood. And the same is true of Science Fiction. There are two films in particular that were really important to the development of the Science Fiction film genre. Something that had Box Office Appeal and could have big budgets and so forth. The most important is 2001, a space odyssey, directed by stanley kubrick. What was really impressive about this movie was its realistic portrayal of space travel. So, look at this picture, i mean, there are hundreds of beautiful stills from this film. Here it is 1968, one year before the moon landing. Theyre coming up with these beautiful designs and beautiful concepts. It was the highest grossing film of 1968. It garnered four Academy Award nominations, and it won one of those Academy Awards. So that was really important in terms of the prestige of the film genre in terms of scifi. Another important transitional film, also starring charlton heston, is planet of the apes. This tells the story of an astronaut crew that crash lands on a planet, they do not know which planet it is. And the planet is dominated by these apes that have superior intelligence, superior speech. They seem humanlike, even though they are clearly apes, right . But it was a huge commercial success. It launched a franchise of planet of the apes sequels. This film is particularly seen as groundbreaking in his in prosthetics in terms of the ape heads, i guess is what we want to call it. So this was before computergenerated imagery. This is all makeup and special effects. , theort of interesting film makers they approached charlton heston, he said, i dont know. You have got to let me see the ape faces first. I dont want to be in a film that is totally ridiculous. When he saw what they had designed, he was really impressed and said he would be in the film. Those two films help with the transition in terms of the scifi genre. One thing to note about the success of planet of the apes, is it did lead to somewhat of a career shift for charlton heston. He was mostly known for his biblical and historical epics, movies like the 10 commandments and ben hur. Also a fair number of westerns. After planet of the apes, he sort of became a cult scifi hero. He did another film called the omega man, then soylent green. He shifted careers and helped further along the scifi genre. That sort of reflects what was happening in hollywood itself. Especially when you think about the western. A couple weeks ago we talked about the decline of the western by the late 1960s. And some of the reasons for this. One thing is there had been so many westerns, the sheer number had sort of exhausted itself. There were too cliches and too many stereotypes that were becoming repetitive and so forth. And it was also sort of the fundamental assumptions driving the western that led to its decline. The assumption that the west is this wild place that needed to be tamed by whites who could come in and civilize the native americans, tame the land, and so forth. And some of those assumptions had come into question, had fallen into sort of unpopularity. Some film historians have argued that what we see is sort of the scifi genre replacing the western. The western was clearly in decline with movies like mccabe and mrs. Miller. Robert altman directed. This movie is just this slow, incredibly slow, sad story. It is not the actionpacked kind of western audiences were used to, about a brothel owner. He tries to keep corporate interests out of his town in washington state, and he failed and he dies in the snow. Thats the end. Its a slow story. And then of course, blazing saddles, parodies the western and calls out the racist practices in the west. Pokes fun at the Film Industry for its contribution to the mythmaking. The western was in decline and scifi seem to be replacing it in some ways. Some film historians have argued that the scifi movies are transposed westerns in some way, and youd you have similar characters and settings. You have lone heroes trying to fight the wild forces in desolate settings oftentimes. So, i thought these two pictures helped bring the sort of, this argument out. This is from stagecoach. This is john waynes breakout role in 1938. Then this is from star wars, in 1977. They have a lot of similarities. The landscape is similar. Its this starkly beautiful landscape. Got the same pose, the open pose, ready to conquer the situation, whatever it may be. The clothing even seems similar with a holster and then the gun. So, in a lot of ways, we could even argue that the flavor of the western in this new setting helps explain the popularity of the scifi genre and helps explain the popularity of star wars in the 1970s. One more hallmark of the Science Fiction genre is its tendency, not always, but it is pretty common, for it to use very extreme settings, whether it be alien invasions or dystopian future, or people are turning into monsters or so forth. Using those extreme settings to make social commentary on the present day. So this is sort of a trademark of Science Fiction. Like i said, not all of them have to do that necessarily but it is a common theme. In the case of soylent green, even though it is set in 2022, the film references some of these domestic difficulties in the 1970s, which makes it pretty easy for audiences to relate to in a lot of ways. Even though it is very extreme. Including concerns about the environment, which were put on dramatic display on earth day. So lets turn for the historical context, in terms of the Environmental Movement, the first earth day takes place in april 1970. It took place all across the country and cities and towns, universities and so forth. And it basically was concerts, lectures, and demonstrations about the environment. Heres a couple of pictures. A senator addressing a crowd of students in philadelphia. And then this is kind of a demonstration, planting flowers in new york city. And you will notice this guy wearing the mask. That was pretty common amongst the demonstrators on earth day. It was a comment on pollution and the air being difficult to breathe and so forth. A lot of people could be seen wearing them. So precipitating earth day were a number of really dramatic environmental events. Here are two of the most shocking environmental disasters the year before. These will help precipitate earth day. One was an oil well exploded off the coast of california near santa barbara. There was this really horrific oil spill in 1969. 20 20 miles of beaches were covered in oil. There was trash out there. It was really difficult to clean up. Americans were shocked by the oil spill and disgusted by the oil spill, and this quickened the Environmental Movement in a lot of ways. Another shocking one, kind of, was the fire of the Cuyahoga River in 1969. I say kind of because this is like the 12th time this had happened over the prior 75 years or Something Like that. So i remember when i was a kid, i was not alive when that happen but i remember my mom telling me about it. I was like, i cannot wrap my mind around it. How does water catch on fire . It is ridiculous. It does not seem possible. But if you have a bunch of chemicals in the water and pollution in the water, dead fish and dead plants in the water, turns out it can catch on fire. This is another dramatic event that really disgusted people. These were two of the worst. There were other signs of environmental decline all across the country. Places where you could not swim, places where you could not fish. 20 years prior you had been able to do those things. More locally, the james river in the 1970s was kind of shut down from swimming and fishing because of chemicals in the stream. Even though these were probably the most wellknown and shocking, there were other versions of the same events going on around the country. So there is a lot of concern about what is happening to our environment, and this is what really helped quicken the pace for some sort of event. And the person kind of behind earth day was wisconsin senator gaylord nelson. He said we need to have a teachin for the environment. There had been teachins about the vietnam war. That was an important part of the Antiwar Movement. He was like, we need to have something similar for the environment, and it really caught on. 20 Million People were involved. So because of the disasters, because of the radicalism of the period, i think a lot of times people think of earth day, they think of hippies, and they think of peace and love and mellow behavior. That is not really what we are seeing in 1970. There is a lot of anger and fervor and apocalyptic warnings about the future of the planet. You can sort of understand it but it woulduff, not have been, i mean, there are all sorts of scientists saying all sorts of things about the end of the earth. The earth is going to end in 15 to 30 years. The world as we know it is going to be destroyed and so forth. So there are a lot of apocalyptic visions. This sign sort of helps capture it. If pollution does not kill us, overpopulation will. Earth day. There are not too many gas masks in this scene, but there were in a lot of others. So some of the issues talked about at earth day. Pesticides was a big one. Pollution was a big one. Nonrenewable resources, things like oil and gasoline, but the super big one, the thing that really overshadowed that first earth day was the prospect of global famine due to overpopulation of the earth. So overpopulation was kind of the issue of 1970. Not the first time that people talked about overpopulation. We have to go all the way back to thomas malthus, who rose to prominence in 1798 with his theories. In 1798, he published an essay on the principle of population, in which he argued that population increases geometrically. So the green line is population. Exponentially. Geometrically. While food and other resources increased more from an addition sort of perspective. So heres food here. It is at this point where one crosses the other that you reach a crisis point according to malthus, and then, after that happens, you have no chance. How are you going to stop it, how are you going to arrest these trends . This theory would wax and wane, but it regained in popularity after world war ii. There is another kind of population boom after world war ii. And a number of humanitarians and philanthropists were talking about the issue of population. Here are two of the most prominent. John d. Rockefeller iii, he was the founder of the population council. And hugh moore, the founder of dixie cup corporation. He also founded the Hugh Moore Fund for international peace. They were addressing population matters in different ways. It was moore who coined the phrase population explosion and population bomb. And here is one of his leaflets demonstrating that. Here is the earth. It has got a fuse. It is about to explode. They bring in the population control scissors to defuse the bomb. We will hear this expression, population bomb, again in 1968 because it is the title of paul erlichs book the population bomb. So, i mean, you can tell it is a pretty alarmist book just by the cover. Population control or race to oblivion. Then my favorite part while you are reading these words, four people will have died from starvation. Most of them children. If thats not a gripping tagline, i dont know what is. And then you open it up, the very first line of the book the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Hes talking globally, not just in the United States. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. And heres erlich speaking at earth day, using a similar kind of argument and rhetoric. So even though soylent green seems so extreme in some ways, it is not that different from what people, including scientists, are saying. Now, a lot of the basis of erlichs theories and how he is trying to demonstrate the validity of his theory is what is known as ipat. That is the shortterm. The ipat equation. I stands for the impact which erlich sees as almost excessively negative term. As a result of three key factors population, rising population, affluence, rising affluence, and increased technology. He argues that these three things together are having the terrible effect on the earth. And putting us really, you know, into the danger zone. The theory is, the more people you have, the harder it is to get resources. The more affluence you have, the more consumption you have. People are gobbling up the resources even further. And the more technology have, the more negative side effects you have to that technology, whether it is pollution or something else. So this is sort of where he is coming from. Really, this is a bestselling book. It was really gripping. A lot of people were scared and enthralled and interested in what he was saying. So all of this really helps prime the audience for a movie like soylent green in 1973. So lets turn to the film and the making of the film and how to analyze it in the 1970s setting. So a little bit about the making, it is based on a novel, 1966 Science Fiction novel called make room make room by harry harrison. So this is the publication date, 1966, reflects the rising interest in population theory and helps further that same interest in the issue of population. And the book, it is a little different from the movie, it is set in 1999, but the plot is different. But the setting is very much the same. This very dire setting of this terrible new york city that has reached a point of no return. So these dire consequences. It was one of the key figures putting this figure together was a producer, a former agent turned producer, walter selzer. And he put this film together, brought it to mgm in terms of the film rights, and also thought of it as a vehicle for charlton heston. They had collaborated together on several other films and were friends. But more than that, heston was also really interested in these issues of overpopulation and what that could mean. Some of you may know that heston had become politically active by this point in his career with president ial candidates as well has some social movements, some social causes. And one of those causes was Environmental Conservation efforts. At one point, heston bought a solar powered car. He got a lot of publicity about that. He did Public Service announcements for Environmental Conservation. He and his wife also were financial supporters of planned parenthood. And made this really personal decision where they felt like they wanted to expand their family. They thought about bearing more children, and they decided not to. They decided to adopt instead. They thought that would be the responsible thing. They adopted a girl named holly. These were really personal issues to heston. I think that helps show a little bit about him, that a lot of people think of him as this conservative because he was president of the National Rifle association. He was a big supporter of reagan in the 1980s, but before that, heston had a lot of other interests as well, and, actually, he was mostly aligned with the Democratic Party at this point. In 1972, he voted for nixon, but he was aligned with a group called democrats for nixon. Still kind of associated with the democrats. So i just think that that is an interesting thing to think about, the bipartisan appeal of environmental issues, but also heston having a more complex Political Engagement than some people might realize. Heston was also really involved in the Film Production itself. Due to his friendship with selzer, but also he had a lot of clout in the Film Industry. This was also a new thing to in the industry, he could make demands. He had cast approval. He had the screenplay approval. He helped with financing. He helped deal with some of the issues of making the film. And that is one of the reasons in this film theres actually more of a racially diverse cast than there are in a lot of 1970s films. Heston was involved in the civil rights movement. He sort of felt like when making a film, he would do it he could to try to advance civil rights issues. He knew it was not a lot, but it was what he could do. And one way of doing that was through casting. You may have noticed in this film, as opposed to a lot of 1970s films where there are specific black roles and white roles, in this movie there is just roles, and anyone can play them. They do not necessarily have to be black or white. That is another part of hestons influence. That is kind of an interesting thing to consider. So, turning to the film itself, again, although the film is extreme, and it certainly shows society on the throes of ruin, it really does reflect a lot of the assumptions and predictions posed by erlichs population bomb, and you can see that with the opening montage, the first couple of minutes. I think the montage is really effective. It is really gripping. It sucks you into the movie. I am going to show a brief clip. To make sure we are all on the same page. Professor raymond ok, so the beginning part you have slow music, the pastoral scene, the people enjoying the outdoors, and just a few people here and there. The landscape dominates. There are a few people in that landscape. That is what some of these first pictures here help illustrate from the montage, and then the pace picks up. The music gets faster, and it gets a little more aggressive. You see signs, pictures, scenes of urbanization, scenes of industrialization and more and more people throughout. They also show a lot of cars. I think the point here is cars are guzzling gas and putting us in this difficult situation. First, we see the old model t cars and interstate highways and driving, and then the music slows down again. It slows down to show we have hit our peak, and now we are in decline. Things are getting worse. Heres a lot of the consequences of this lifestyle, so you see people who are sick. You see piles of trash. You see people Wearing Masks over over their faces, pollution, and then new york city covered in haze, and then this starts the film, starts soylent green. So a lot of that ipat equation is just very easily reflective of the opening montage. The consequences of overcrowding reflects the challenges that our textbook mentions of the 1970s, particularly the three es. The three es, the most vexing policy initiatives of the 1970s. So in terms of analyzing this film within those, those three es, there is a lot of examples of how the environment is suffering in 2022 as a result of overcrowding. One thing that they mention pretty frequently is global warming, the greenhouse effect. And i think the filmmakers did a pretty good job it is hard to show people how hot it feels, but they do a pretty good job of it. Heston is sweating during the entire movie. He is kind of glistening here. It gets worse. He is always wearing that bandanna. He is wiping his brow. The heat really does seem oppressive. There are patches of sweat on everybody. When heston goes into in , itconditioning environment is like, ahh, he relaxes. The oppression is off. There is this constant heat wave happening. Also they tried to show the pollution. So there is always this haze over the city. That is partly the heat but also just the dirty air that is enveloping the city. And they use filters, especially these sort of yellowish, greenish filters for all of the outdoor scenes that help illustrate that pollution. Another environmental issue in soylent green is drought, not having enough water. Everything looks dusty. You can sort of see here there is no grass growing anywhere. And there is one building, chelsea towers west, where one of the characters lives, and there a moat around the building, but it is empty. There is no water in it. Just a terrible drought associated with the heat. I think most of all, most sort of touching to the audience is this dying Natural World, that there is no fresh food of any kind, no fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, meat, dairy. Everything is the dried soylent stuff. There is no vegetation growing in the city. The only park, this is the only park in the city, gramercy park. It is like this little greenhouse, i guess. You go in, there are three straggly trees in there. It is a pretty sad state of affairs. So this dying Natural World, Charlton Hestons character does not understand it necessarily. He is too young. We learn about it mostly through his partner, through the police force, a lot of his research for him. They are also roommates. Saul is the one talking about how the world used to be, how it used to be beautiful, there used to be food. Thorn doesnt really know any of this. I think one touching scene, always one of my favorite scenes is when saul and thorn have a meal together, and it is thorns first real meal. He has to learn how to eat regular food, food that we take for granted that is not even all that fancy, to be honest. So let me pull this clip up. [video clip] what have you dug up on simons . I have a handful who worked 20 years out of there. Draw out a name. You expect miracles. Simonson, sol, reports. [laughter] [laughter] professor raymond so there is this real nostalgia for the way things used to be. I have just always liked how mimics sol. Polishing his apple, and he eats the whole thing. He just leaves the stem. That is another good reference to this dying Natural World. And then finally, finally toward the end of the film where sol tells thorn that he is going home, that he is going to be euthanized. This is the norm in new york city. It is so overpopulated that the government is encouraging people to have assisted suicide. They try to make it as pleasant as possible to entice people. It is airconditioned. Especially for the older generation, they can see scenes from their childhood, and they end up showing this montage of scenes from the Natural World. Sunsets, fish swimming in the ocean, horses, deer, wild flowers, tulips, all things that are the norm for us, but people in the film are nostalgic for. And then heston arrives and sees this happening. He gets really emotional because he has never seen it before, now he understands what sol has been so curmudgeonly about. This dying Natural World has this really nice theme throughout the movie that can make you feel really emotional about what is happening with the environment. Another e is the economy, and there is all sorts of economic problems in soylent green due to the overpopulation. Inflation is a big one. Everything costs a lot of money. Simple things that we could easily go to the store and buy for a couple of dollars are wildly expensive. Here is the character martha eating a jar of strawberries. Anyone remember how much those cost . Yeah, 150, which is ridiculous. At one point cheryl goes grocery shopping, and she just buys a few, a sorry piece of celery and a few other things. It is hundreds of dollars to buy just a small amount. Inflation is a real problem, as well as shortages. There is never enough to go around. People are going to the marketplace to try to buy the soylent. Halfway through the film they run out of soylent. People are angry, they had been standing in line. They get to the front of the line, and it is out after they had been in line for hours. So shortages with a lot of things, but especially food is a big one in the film. Unemployment is another big problem. The population of new york city is 40 million. How many of them are employed . 20 million, so we have got a 50 Unemployment Rate in this world. Then there is also these really ginormous income disparities between the wealthy in the city and the rest of the teeming masses, the really desperate masses. There is a few who are employed by the government and help control the masses, people like thorn who is a police officer, guards. People who work at the euthanasia center. But other than that, everybody else is kind of a desperate mass, so they have long welfare lines. Most of the people are on relief. They are going in and picking up their welfare checks so they can get their rations. There is just this terrible income disparity that has a very large welfare state. And then energy, the other e as identified by shulman, not enough energy to generate the kind of normal power that one would have in a household. Whether it is for hot water or for a refrigerator or for a lightbulb, you would have to generate it yourself. You cannot just get it from the grid. You cannot buy it from the city unless you are really wealthy. Everybody else has to generate it themselves. Sol and thorn have a bicycle at their apartment that they ride that they can get the tv to come on or get the lightbulb to stop flickering. That is probably the clearest example. There is also a lot of broken down cars in the movie. They are everywhere. They are in the streets. People are using them as homes. They are just piled up everywhere. I think that is showing us there is no gasoline to fire these things up. And beyond that, the industry overall has kind of broken down. If something breaks, it is difficult to repair it. There is no new technology or innovation that is helping deal with these problems. For example, thorns boss, his watch breaks and is like, well, if you cant fix it yourself, it will never be fixed. Security cameras that are broken in one of the buildings, they you dont know if they will ever be fixed either. Everything is falling apart in a lot of ways. So like i said, this movie helps give us a window into what is happening in the 1970s. It was easy for audiences to relate to what was happening with thorn and the rest of the city because they had seen similar images or had dealt with similar problems in their daily life, albeit in tamer fashion. For example, shortages, here is a scene from the movie where people are waiting in line to get water canisters filled. You have to wait in line and hope they still have some by the time you get there. The same thing was happening with gas stations all across the country where there were shortages. Gas was divvied out in small rations, or you might be able to go to the gas station if you had an even license plate on one day, but if you had an odd license plate, you would go on another day. There were fistfights at gas stations. People would wait for hours, they would get there, and it would be out. Those sorts of signs were very familiar in the 1970s. These are some of the most Iconic Images of the 1970s, the problems at gas stations. The same with blackouts in cities, where there was not enough power to light the city. There would be dark nights where everyone had to turn their power off, or it would be at half blast, flickering. As extreme as the movie seems, it was not that far away from reality. And the same with the economy. We have talked about how inflation started to creep in in the 1970s. By 1973, when the film was released, inflation, which refers to prices outweighing wages, think of climbing prices, but wages are staying relatively flat, had risen to about 5 by 1973. That was considerably different from what americans were used to. Between the 1950s until about 1968, the normal rate of inflation was anywhere between 1 and 2 . You might have an occasional spike, but it would always go back down. So that changes in 1968. Inflation starts to creep up. It does not seem to be going back down. It is creeping up and creeping up. This chart shows the misery index. Just the fact that this was even created tells you something. An economist created this as a measure to try to understand how inflation and unemployment were affecting people, what kind of a squeeze it was having on them. Basically you have got unemployment here, and then inflation here. The misery index is the combination of the two. When they are both high, the conclusion is that you are becoming more miserable, that life is becoming harder for you. So we see in 1973, it is , moderately high level spike goes down, then it will spike demonstrably high during the carter administration. So you see a lot of connection between the film and real life on the three es, and of course we already talked about the environment. There is also a connection between some of the related results that have come from some of these problems. You get these other societal trends that are kind of the result of overpopulation. For example, social fears over conflict. You know, that the classes are sort of fighting with one another. In the movie, there are armed guards everywhere policing peoples apartments, making sure no marauders get in. This is a famous image from the 1970s where you had people, probably teenagers, siphoning gas out of peoples cars. People were getting sick of it, so they started arming themselves and protecting their cars so their gas would not be stolen. So this kind of fear over conflict between americans. Also fears of a police state. One of the things about soylent green, they are so desperate that you have this kind of corporate dictatorship that has taken over. You have a very powerful police state. I think that is most obviously control. With the riot you know, at the marketplace, they run out of soylent green, and the masses start getting angry and protesting and rioting. Here are the police in their football helmet sort of getup. And then big trash trucks roll in, picking people up and throwing them in the back. I think we can assume they are going to die probably going to the off to one of the death centers at some point. That is probably the most obvious example of the police state. Also with thorn, hestons character, he has a lot of power as a police officer. He never has search warrants. He can use force at any time. He gets into fistfights with people. He can go into peoples apartments and take things from them, take their food, take their things. So that, sort of, is reflecting another fear of american society, especially when you think about the Antiwar Movement and conflicts between protesters and the police. This is an image from kent was as, there series of demonstrations at kent state protesting the war. And the crowds were getting bigger. At one point they set a building on fire, and the National Guard was called in to try to restore order. During that process, the National Guard ended up shooting and killing four protesters. So there is all of these really sad and disturbing images coming from kent state that i think also shows the fear of a police state in both cases. There is also, i think, a really interesting thing happening with the role of women in soylent green. Basically, what they show is that the role of women in society has declined due to overpopulation because they have this exchange. This is the place where sol does his research and gets his information. At the exchange, there are judges there. Well educated judges. There are about five that i can tell, and three of them were women. You get the sense that women were valued as intellectuals, as contributors to society in this preapocalyptic world. But the younger generation, and thorns Love Interest cheryl, really doesnt have any kind of status at all. She is actually referred to as furniture because she sort of comes with the apartment. Whoever lives in the apartment, he can keep her like you would keep a couch or a chair. There is this decline of womens place in society. Any guesses as to why this is . What do you think they were trying to say . [indiscernible] younger women would be kind of like a nuisance almost. Professor raymond ok. Yeah. It seems to be a comment on fertility, that women are the breeders and not as valued when we dont need any more children. We dont need anymore fertility. Any other reasons . [indiscernible] about a decade later you have the handmaids tale, and in both cases, there is the assumption that in a totalitarian state, womens rights are impeded or hurt. And there is some background to that, whether it is nazi germany and women legitimately given medals based on the number of kids that they produce to various dictatorships that have brothels and stuff like that. So it is, with a destroyed environment and idea of mother earth is dying, it makes sense that in the same universe, women themselves would also be i am trying to think of the right phrasing. Their rights would also be checked upon and would be as destroyed as earth. Professor raymond that is a great connection. Mother earth versus these mothers who are seeing decline. Anything else . What else does it tell us about this apocalyptic Dystopian Society . I mean, what do you have to do to survive in a society like this . Just sort of has to come down to , thingsitive, you know are becoming more primitive in a way. You are going back to caveman days. You are going back to the survivalist society where things are determined on brute strength, and for women, they have to rely on their appearance. Prostitution is the oldest profession, they say. It is sort of this backward trend for women. I think they are trying to show the movie, i think there are some disturbing images about women in the film because there is this concept of furniture. Because they are getting beat up by the police like everybody else. I dont think it is because the filmmakers were antiwoman. I think they are making a larger point about the decline of society. It is interesting given what is happening in real life where women are seen to be improving their status. They are on the rise. This is a flyer from the womens suffrage movement, and anti womens suffrage, which is of course agitating for the right to vote. A lot of people were a part of that movement. But a lot of people were against womens suffrage. You see flyers like this. Which do you prefer, the home or streetcorner for women . Vote no on womens suffrage. And the suffragette is made to look like she is delirious, a weirdo. By 1968, you have ads like the virginia slims cigarettes, and the tagline is, you have come a long way, baby. It is showing how women have gained in status, gained in independence and are more career oriented. You can see that by her dress, even if it is a smoking ad. That was a common phrase in the 1970s. Isgot old out of this ad very generally. This is also at the time when they are trying to push the equal rights amendment. The same people that are antiepa are oftentimes the same people that were against immigration. It would make sense that sort of approach is in the same sort of platform because the same people are in the epa are often the same people that were against the ira and immigration. That was the continuity of government in this universe, which you would expect. Emilie raymond in the book, it is more commented, but there is a lot to talk about Birth Control and whether or not it is appropriate. Should we be using Birth Control, should we be making people use Birth Control and so forth . That breakdown society, and over time we have proven that a welldeveloped society in the 21st century is involvement of women, where they have not really been before. I think it is kind of in it is not so obvious what the context of the movie not being explicitly about that, but when you think in terms of this is just a world that is completely broken down and so primitive, it is not based on any progress that we are making today or that they were making. It makes sense women had to revert back to lust, lost a lot of their roles they had at the time. Emilie raymond yeah. You are right. The idea of progress is like out the window. [laughter] Emilie Raymond so i think that fear is an interesting theme that comes out, and then the fear of a corporate dictatorship, the fear of a corrupt government working with big business and some sort of nefarious way. And of course that is brought out in terms of the Soylent Corporation decision to basically be cannibals in terms of making soylent green. It all comes out in the final scene, which is one of the more famous scenes of the film, so i thought we could watch that. It is so dramatic, but it is great. If any of you if any of your saturday night live fans, they did a great parody of this. I will have to send it to you. I followed the parity before i saw the film. It was the funniest thing i had ever seen. Ok. [video clip] i have got to tell people. Tell them what . Oceans die. People. Soylent green is meat out of people. Made out of people. In they are making our food out of people, breeding us like cattle for food. You have got to tell them. I will tell the exchange. Tell everybody. Listen to me, hatcher. You have got to tell them. Soylent green is people. We have got to stop them somehow. Emilie raymond all right. Now of course a lot of the problems that we have been talking about has not gone away by the time of jimmy carters presidency, which is what our chapter is really focusing on. So i just wanted to briefly talk about his presidency and how that fits in with all that is happening here. Carter was elected in large part a because he seemed honest. He did government experience, governor of georgia. A lot of americans felt like will will will having been Vice President , he needed a change. He represented the new south you that we talked about last time and the rising evangelical you will and fervor associated with evangelical religion. In a a lot of factors were in contributing to his victory, but americans were disappointed and i in carter. Not in the same way as with president johnson and nixon. There was corruption they brought to the office. It is reflected in the soylent green is people again, very extreme. With carter it was different. It was more ineptitude, inability to govern. The sense that he was unable to sort of control policies that he wanted to bring about. So it is a frustration with government, with carter. It is different what we have seen earlier in the decade. Those three es that were sort of on the scene in the movie also came to define carters presidency. These were the domestic agenda that he initiated as his policy priorities, but he ended up not doing so well on any of these. For example, the environment. Carter ran as the environmental president , and he especially targeted dams, locks, and canals, his water projects are among the most important things he could target and regulate. He targeted 22 of these projects, because a lot of environment the necessary to control water was damaging the natural habitat. Dams may generate electricity on one hand. They also bring about pollution. They can contribute to the extinction of species. They also seem wasteful. It was Big Government spending and so forth. Carter targeted these 22 project but was not able to stop any of them. And he got himself in political hot water with the environmental groups that supported him because he promised to stop these dams and just simply could not do it. He had this series of false starts, with the environment. Also regarding energy, having some sort of National Energy policy and energy solution, carter argued was so important that it was the moral equivalency of war that we had to become more efficient, we had to become less dependent on middle eastern oil in particular, especially after the two oil crises in action 73 and 1976 in 1973 and 1976 where there was a shutdown or embargo of oil for u. S. Consumers. As but carter wrote this enormous bill, like 113 separate proposals, and did it sort of quietly on his own with his own team. He did not get the buyin of congress. He brought it to capitol hill and said, lets vote. Basically the bill was declared , dead on arrival by both media and members of congress because they resented the way it had been put together. So it was broken down into separate proposals. So it was buried by lobbyists. A lot what he was trying to do with the energy bill did not come to pass. In the meantime, by june 1979, carter is getting ready for reelection, 60 of the nations gas stations were closed due to shortages. That is an astounding statistic, 60 of the gas stations were closed. So energy really was in crisis. Finally, carters record on the economy. Carter sort of zigzagged through his presidency. Spending andcut sometimes increased spending. That was the problem for him to get control over the biggest problem which was inflation. There was spiraling inflation, people thought it was bad in the early 1970s when it was 5 , but getting to 10 and almost 15 during carters presidency. Eventually, by the fall of 1979, he is able to enact the right policies. He appoints a new Federal Reserve chair, paul volcker, who enacts tight money, meeting higher Interest Rates and constricting the amount of money coming out of the Federal Reserve to the banks. That should cool down the economy so there is not as much spending and inflation. It takes time, and by that point it was too late to save carters term. And, in fact his approval , ratings fell to 33 , which was lower than nixons during watergate. Sad state of affairs. So we see that the three es, despite to this gap between the , are and the presidency still challenging. I love this movie for a lot of reasons. But i also glad that he is very wrong in its predictions. Lets talk about why. Why is it so wrong . Especially given that the worlds population has expanded. It did not expand as much as ehrlich predicted, but we dont have the global Food Shortages, the widespread famine they were predicting. Market prices have declined, and we are using the same amount of farmland now that we were in the 30 or 40 years ago. So of course there is still , hunger in the world. There is a famine situation that is the result of political instability or the result of war not the sweeping famine that , ehrlich was predicting. Two reasons why we havent had Food Shortages and the population growth. Population growth in the western world, easy access to Birth Control and in the United States roe v. Wade, which was a general bursting of the dam when it came to access like the pill, Family Planning, and stuff like that. You had the western developed world, a decrease of population growth where even in western european nations and japan, you were starting to have negative population growth. In the underdeveloped world, you have high population growth because you have no Family Planning and low life expectancies due to improved health care. As they improved, they fell in the world and the population was decreased. Or at least remain stable like the United States that have like 2. 2 , which is what you need to maintain levels. When it comes to Food Shortages, thanks to improvements in Agricultural Technology and genetics of food and the like, you are able to get more pounds of crops per acre of farmland, which is in many ways thanks to agricultural policies the United States has had dating back to the 19th century and landgrant colleges and the department of agriculture and stuff like that to really be at the forefront of Agricultural Research and development which has read that , knowledge in a variety of ways across the world. As we export the improvement and our ability to farm each arable acre of land, we have been able to get more bang for our buck. Now we have people suffering obesity and overweight instead of famine and malnutrition, where we have less of a problem growing food and the true problem is getting the food we have to the people that need it. With time and effort, hopefully those things will continue to improve. Emilie raymond two of the most important trends are declining fertility rates. Even though the population continued to grow, it is predicted it is going to level out. And then advancements in technology regarding farming, but nevertheless there is disagreement. It depends on who you ask. Paul ehrlich said he was not wrong. In an interview in 2011, he argued that the next 2 billion people on the planet will have a much more negative impact than the previous 2 billion people. Predict the to earth is sort of teetering to its collapse. In other words, he says we have not reached a crisis point as quickly as i thought we would, but we are still going to reach a crisis point. That is one view. Others have questioned the basic assumption behind that ipat equation, impact, affluence, technology equation. Scientists have pointed to hunger and notnd necessarily overpopulation is the underlying cause. Others have shown how affluent societies have cleaner air, cleaner water. In part because they cant afford it, and they can shift their priorities from economic survival to more qualityoflife issues. But also they have invested the money into technology. Whereas technology can create problems, it can also create solutions. That ipat equation is more nuanced than one would see if you look at ehrlichs explanation of it. So, in other words earth day and , the events that precipitated it alerted americans to pretty clear environmental problems, but expanding populations are generally not attributed as the underlying cause of the problems. This thing about overpopulation has sort of changed. Nevertheless, soylent gives us an insight into the fears and societal issues of the 1970s and the way Science Fiction interpreted it. I hope you have enjoyed soylent green experience, and i will see you next time. You are watching American History tv, all weekend, every weekend on cspan three p to join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspan history. Q a, the founder and ceo of open the books and how taxpayer dollars are spent any need for government transparency. Government affairs have audited the checkbook. Last summer we found that during a. Where up to 1006 veterans died while waiting to see a doctor, the v. A. Spent 20 million on a high and art per for leo portfolio. Trees costchristmas 21,000. There were sculptures price like fivebedroom homes. There were two sculptures for 700,000 were cared for aba center that serves blind of veterans. It was all in with landscaping for 1. 2 million. This is the type of a waste that is in our government. Tonight at 8 00 eastern on cspans you and day. Q a. Cspan, the New York Historical society hosted a events. It is a little over a half an hour. Tonights program will focus on new york citys role in world war one, before, during, and after the war. Our city played an Important Role and continues to host memorials throughout the city. Our guide on this city will be kevin fitzpatrick, who has written the Governors Island explorers guide and the algonquin round table. His latest book is world war i new york, a guide to our citys enduring ties to the great war. The book is for sale in museum store and kevin will be in the great hall outside after the program to sign books and answer your questions. Besides being an