Ecocide, the widespread annihilation of nature, constitutes the principal theme of Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) and Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973). Seeking recourse to one of the major film genres, namely, science fiction, these films emphatically disclose an inconvenient truth—the imminent extinction of the ecosystem. Set in a dystopian world, the films outline two futuristic probabilities: the sustenance of the last trace of bio-network only on spaceships in Silent Running and the overpopulated city haunted by the scarcity of natural resources in Soylent Green. In other words, while Silent Running strategically uncovers an already depleted biosphere, Soylent Green systematically examines the road to ecological perdition. Significantly, the cinematic space resorts to diverse techniques, including stills, close-up, voice-over, and music, to convey the petrifying reality that awaits humanity in the near future. Drawing the title from Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary on global warming, this paper, in analyzing the environmental apocalypse in Silent Running and Soylent Green, seeks to reveal how the cinematography weaves an ecocentric discourse to promote the inevitable truth that ecosphere is intrinsic to human survival.

Visual spaces often expose the widespread obliteration of the ecosystem across the globe as an alarming and inconvenient truth. Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006), for instance, is a celebrated documentary in which Al Gore, an American environmentalist, elucidates the undesirable consequences of global warming. Likewise, the cinematic representations of ecocide in Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) and Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973) particularly emphasize the inopportune catastrophe that awaits the Earth in the near future. In analyzing these science fiction films set in a dystopian universe, this paper seeks to address the ubiquitous inconvenient truth that looms large on the face of the Earth, namely, the malefic consequences of ecocide in a technologically flourishing universe.

To create a sense of startling revelation, science fiction films often deploy an unfamiliar topography. At the beginning of Trumbull’s Silent Running, the cinematic lens navigates through the seemingly familiar but unfamiliar trajectory which Johnson (1972, 55) seeks to explain in his review of the film: “With his extended metaphors, Trumbull is drawing on what may be the greatest source of strength in SF [Science Fiction]: a kind of poetry. To put it in scientific terms, the poetry in SF radiates from the bombardment of the familiar by the unfamiliar.” This technique is quite popular among literary writers like DeLillo (1985, 127), who, in White Noise, defamiliarizes toxic exposure using a mythological analogy: “The enormous dark mass moved like a ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings.” In her critical analysis of White Noise, Heise (2008, 177) emphasizes how DeLillo familiarizes the unfamiliar by focusing on one of the greatest dangers that beset the contemporary world—the airborne toxic event that leads to transnational, technological risk scenarios termed “riskscapes.” In a different way, Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968), for example, shows an ironic reversal when the film familiarizes the unfamiliar. In this film, the unfamiliar scene of monkeys ruling the planet is made familiar by showing the Statue of Liberty in ruins, thereby revealing that the place of action is the Earth itself, but lamentably, the point in time is the ‘post-human’ age. Likewise, Silent Running begins with a close-up shot screening the bio-network that looks strikingly familiar as a terrestrial space, but gradually the camera angle shifts to expose the same place as an unfamiliar realm, the domes on the American Airlines space freighter named “Valley Forge.” Like a conservatory, the domes contain the familiar bucolic milieu as part of the unfamiliar spaceship situated on the outer rings of the Saturn. Here, the unfamiliar location in Silent Running perfectly blends with the familiar landscape to express an inconvenient truth, namely, the spaceship is the only probable place to reconstruct the last specimen of the extinct flora and fauna of the Earth.

American Literature Journal, Amor in Pound, Classical European Literature, Homosexuality, Diastasis, Olga-Circe-Artemis, Heterosexual Love, Homosexual Love.