Pale Green Girl, Pale Green Boy

It was a minute before nine when I heard the call. "Are you coming to watch your movie?" I pried myself from my book and my computer screen, poured myself another glass of pale green cloudy fluid and sat down with Sonja and the Hammer in front of our television. Turner Classic Movies was showing "Soylent Green."

It had been a while.

Earlier Sonja had suggested I would pass out before the film was done. That was all the encouragement I needed to see it to its end. The film is a metaphor for a world, our world, eating its dead to prevent itself falling to the ground, each man and woman, wittingly and unwittingly, preventing themselves from becoming part of the pale green food chain.

The film's appeal for me, the reason I saw it in a theatre in 1973, is to watch Edward G. Robinson's last work. It is not his best but it is, for me, his most memorable role. Robinson was my favourite old time actor, preceded only by Groucho Marx.

Mass consumption of our own kind has not yet come to pass. I wonder if there are, on a smaller, if more demonic scale, I suggest in a hopeful metaphoric tone, secret societies, who do partake of the porky meat that hangs from our own delicious bones. Modern medieval Satanic Majesties gathered in shameful rooms flinging the cooked remains of corpses about.

I call for a re-make of Soylent Green, motherfuckers.