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Soylent Green is an interesting film about what life may be like in the not-too-distant future. It is also pretty depressing. Massive overpopulation and food shortages are the order of the day. This isn’t some third-world country, though; it’s New York City, in the year 2022. Soylent Green sure isn’t The Jetsons. The movie offers a bleak view of the future, but what makes the tone even bleaker is the fact that, with just a little stretch of the imagination, the bleak future the film presents could actually happen.

For example, take the way Soylent Green presents the institution of marriage. The movie presents marriage in 2022 as nothing more than a contract. Love is a very trivial factor in the concept of marriage. There is little if any talk of family. In fact, there are several instances in Soylent Green where the women are referred to as "furniture." That is how they are envisioned in the world 2022. When a man leases an apartment, a woman is merely included in the lease, for the man to use in whatever way he chooses. Today, of course, something like that would be unthinkable. However, forty years ago, a lot of what are now commonplace practices of marriage would have seemed unthinkable. In the 1940s and 1950s (and part of the 1960s), marriage was viewed as sacrosanct. It truly was not to be entered into lightly. People got married with the intent to have children and stay married until death. Divorce was a taboo subject.

Things began to change in the late 1960s, and the change only grew greater throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Women became more independent. Not all women felt the need to get married. For many of the women who did choose to marry, they expressed the desire to be "equal partners" with their husbands in their marriages. Though it should be celebrated that women became independent, the terminology is interesting. No longer were men and women merely husbands and wives; they were "partners." The transition of marriage from a sacred institution to a rather business-like contract had begun. There were also other changes in store for marriage as the 1980s and 1990s wore on. While marriages of convenience had probably been around for centuries, they really began to take prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. There were several instances of marriages taking place for the sole benefit of climbing the corporate ladder. Again, marriage was becoming more and more of a contract. Finally, the divorce rate began to increase sharply during the 1970s and 1980s, and by today, over half of all marriages end in divorce. Divorce was no longer taboo; it was commonplace. It showed that, for many people, marriage was beginning to be taken more lightly than before. If things keep continuing as they are, marriage may regress into a form similar to its form in Soylent Green. Considering women’s current independence, I really doubt there will be a time in the future that finds women as furniture. However, with the current overpopulation problem in the world, many couples are seeking to cut back on the number of children that they have. If the population explosion continues, by 2022 there may be a majority of couples in the world opting not to have children. If the rate of marriages for convenience also continues to rise, then marriage may very well be just a contract by 2022.

It would be interesting to see the reaction a Mythopoeic person might have to the future presented in Soylent Green. While much of society would probably view the world of Soylent Green as overly bleak, Mythopoeics would probably view it as good. The Mythopoeics’ ground for goodness is the survival of the group. In Soylent Green, there is a food shortage, and the Soylent Corporation deals with it by processing people into small wafers of food. With the wafers, the Soylent Corporation can feed its masses of people. It may very well be the only way that the people at Soylent figure that they can feed the people. In Soylent Green’s 2022, basic foodstuffs that we take for granted now (such as strawberries and water) are very rare commodities, and the processed wafers may be the only economically viable way to feed people. If this is the case, the Mythopoeics would very likely be in favor of the Soylent Corporation’s methods. Also, the vehicle for goodness for the Mythopoeics is to follow nature. At first glance, the idea of reprocessing dead bodies as edible wafers for people may seem unnatural, but if, in fact, eating the wafers is the only way people can survive, then the whole process is very natural indeed. If our future is like the one in Soylent Green, the Mythopoeics may not mind.