Tag Archives: Clarendon

The Thanatorium: A beneficiary’s experience

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The thanatorium is a speculative service for assisted suicide in Soylent Green. Suicide and death are not easy topics and I will do my best to address them seriously. Let me first take a moment to direct anyone who is considering or dealing with suicide to please stop reading this and talk to someone about it. I am unqualified to address—and this blog is not the place to work through—such issues.

There are four experiences to look at in the interface and service design of the Thanatorium: The patient, their beneficiaries, the usher, and the attendants to the patient. This post is about the least complicated of the bunch, the beneficiaries.

Thorn’s experience

We have to do a little extrapolation here because the way we see it in the movie is not the way we imagine it would work normally. What we see is Thorn entering the building and telling staff there to take him to Sol. He is escorted to an observation room labeled “beneficiaries only” by an usher. (Details about the powerful worldbuilding present in this label can be found in the prior post.) Sol has already drunk the “hemlock” drink by the time Thorn enters this room, so Sol is already dying and the robed room attendants have already left.

Aaand I just noticed that the walls are the same color as the Soylent. Ewww.

This room has a window view of the “theater” proper, with an interface mounted just below the window. At the top of this interface is a mounted microphone. Directly below is an intercom speaker beside a large status alert labeled SPEAKING PERMITTED. When we first see the panel this indicator is off. At the bottom is a plug for headphones to the left, a slot for a square authorization key, and in the middle, a row of square, backlit toggle buttons labeled PORTAL, EFFECTS, CHAMBER 2, AUDIO, VISUAL, and CHAMBER 1. When the Sol is mid-show, EFFECTS and VISUAL are the only buttons that are lit.

When the usher closes the viewing window, explaining that it’s against policy for beneficiaries to view the ceremony, Thorn…uh…chokes him in order to persuade him to let him override the policy.

Persuasion.

“Persuaded,” the usher puts his authorization key back in the slot. The window opens again. Thorn observes the ceremony in awe, having never seen the beautiful Earth of Sol’s youth. He mutters “I didn’t know” and “How could I?” as he watches. Sol tries weakly to tell Thorn something, but the speaker starts glitching, with the SPEAKING PERMITTED INDICATOR flashing on and off. Thorn, helpfully, pounds his fist on the panel and demands that the usher do something to fix it. The user gives Thorn wired earbuds and Thorn continues his conversation. (Extradiegetically, is this so they didn’t have to bother with the usher’s overhearing the conversation? I don’t understand this beat.) The SPEAKING PERMITTED light glows a solid red and they finish their conversation.

Yes, that cable jumps back and forth like that in the movie during the glitch. It was a simpler time.

Sol dies, and the lights come up in the chamber. Two assistants come to push the gurney along a track through a hidden door. Some mechanism in the floor catches the gurney, and the cadaver is whisked away from Thorn’s sight.

Regular experience?

So that’s Thorns corrupt, thuggish cop experience of the thanatorium. Let’s now make some educated guesses about what this might imply for the regular, non-thug experience for beneficiaries.

  1. The patient and beneficiaries enter the building and greeted by staff.
  2. They wait in queue in the lobby for their turn.
  3. The patient is taken by attendants to the “theater” and the beneficiaries taken by the usher to the observation room.
  4. Beneficiaries witness the drinking of the hemlock.
  5. The patient has a moment to talk with the beneficiaries and say their final farewells.
  6. The viewing window is closed as the patient watches the “cinerama” display and dies. The beneficiaries wait quietly in the observation room with the usher.
  7. The viewing window is opened as they watch the attendants wheel the body into the portal.
  8. They return to the lobby to sign some documents for benefits and depart.

So, some UX questions/backworlding

We have to backworld some of the design rationales involved to ground critique and design improvements. After all, design is the optimization of a system for a set of effects, and we want to be certain about what effects we’re targeting. So…

Why would beneficiaries be separated from the patient?

I imagine that the patient might take comfort from holding the hands or being near their loved ones (even if that set didn’t perfectly overlap with their beneficiaries). So why is there a separate viewing room? There are a handful of reasons I can imagine, only one of which is really satisfying.

Maybe it’s to prevent the spread of disease? Certainly given our current multiple pandemics, we understand the need for physical separation in a medical setting. But the movie doesn’t make any fuss about disease being a problem (though with 132,000 people crammed into every square mile of the New York City metropolitan area you’d figure it would be), and in Sol’s case, there’s zero evidence in the film that he’s sick. Why does the usher resist the request from Thorn if this was the case? And why wouldn’t the attendants be in some sort of personal protective gear?

Maybe it’s to hide the ugly facts of dying? Real death is more disconcerting to see than most people are familiar with (take the death rattle as one example) and witnessing it might discourage other citizens from opting-in for the same themselves. But, we see that Sol just passes peacefully from the hemlock drink, so this isn’t really at play here.

Maybe it’s to keep the cinerama experience hidden? It’s showing pictures of an old, bountiful earth that—in the diegesis—no longer exists. Thorn says in the movie that he’s too young to know what “old earth” was like, so maybe this society wants to prevent false hope? Or maybe to prevent rioting, should the truth of How Far We’ve Fallen get out? Or maybe it’s considered a reward for patients opting-in to suicide, thereby creating a false scarcity to further incentivize people to opt-in themselves? None of this is super compelling, and we have to ask, why does the usher give in and open the viewport if any of this was the case?

That blue-green in the upper left of this still is the observation booth.

So, maybe it’s to prevent beneficiaries from trying to interfere with the suicide. This society would want impediments against last-minute shouts of, “Wait! Don’t do it!” There’s some slight evidence against this, as when Sol is drinking the Hemlock, the viewing port is wide open, so beneficiaries might have pounded on the window if this was standard operating procedure. But its being open might have been an artifact of Sol’s having walked in without any beneficiaries. Maybe the viewport is ordinarily closed until after the hemlock, opened for final farewells, closed for the cinerama, and opened again to watch as the body is sped away?

Ecstasy Meat

This rationale supports another, more horrible argument. What if the reason is that Soylent (the company) wants the patient to have an uninterrupted dopamine and seratonin hit at the point of dying, so those neurotransmitters are maximally available in the “meat” before processing? (Like how antibiotics get passed along to meat-eaters in industrialized food today.) It would explain why they ask Sol for his favorite color in the lobby. Yes it is for his pleasure, but not for humane reasons. It’s so he can be at his happiest at the point of death. Dopamine and seratonin would make the resulting product, Soylent green, more pleasurable and addictive to consumers. That gives an additional rationale as to why beneficiaries would be prevented from speaking—it would distract from patients’ intense, pleasurable experience of the cinerama.

A quickly-comped up speculative banner ad reading “You want to feel GOOD GOOD. Load up on Soylent Green today!”
Now, with more Clarendon.

For my money, the “ecstasy meat” rationale reinforces and makes worse the movie’s Dark Secret, so I’m going to go with that. Without this rationale, I’d say rewrite the scene so beneficiaries are in the room with the patient. But with this rationale, let’s keep the rooms separate.

Beneficiary interfaces

Which leads us to rethinking this interface.

Beneficiary interfaces

A first usability note is that the SPEAKING PERMITTED indicator is very confusing. The white text on a black background looks like speaking is, currently, permitted. But then the light behind it illuminates and I guess, then speaking is permitted? But wait, the light is red, so does that mean it’s not permitted, or is? And then adding to the confusion, it blinks. Is that the glitching, or some third state? Can we send this to its own interface thanatorium? So to make this indicator more usable, we could do a couple of things.

  • Put a ring of lights around the microphone and grill. When illuminated, speaking is permitted. This presumes that the audience can infer what these lights mean, and isn’t accessible to unsighted users, but I don’t think the audio glitch is a major plot point that needs that much reinforcing; see above. If the execs just have to have it crystal clear, then you could…
  • Have two indicators, one reading SPEAKING PERMITTED and another reading SILENCE PLEASE, with one or the other always lit. If you had to do it on the cheap, they don’t need to be backlit panels, but just two labeled indicator lamps would do.

And no effing blinking.

Thorn voice: NO EFFING BLINKING!

I think part of the affective purpose of the interface is to show how cold and mechanistic the thanatorium’s treatment of people are. To keep that, you could add another indicator light on the panel labeled somewhat cryptically, PATIENT. Have it illuminated until Sol passes, and then have a close up shot when it fades, indicating his death.

Ah, yes, good to have a reminder that’s why he’s a critic and not a working FUI designer.

A note on art direction. It would be in Soylent’s and our-real-world interest to make this interface feel as humane as possible. Maybe less steel and backlit toggles? Then again, this world is operating on fumes, so they would make do with what’s available. So this should also feel a little more strung together, maybe with some wires sticking out held together with electrical tape and tape holding the audio jack in place.

Last note on the accommodations. What are the beneficiaries supposed to do while the patient is watching the cinerama display? Stand there and look awkward? Let’s get some seats in here and pipe the patient’s selection of music in. That way they can listen and think of the patient in the next room.

If you really want it to feel extradiegetically heartless, put a clock on the wall by the viewing window that beneficiaries can check.

Once we simplify this panel and make the room make design sense, we have to figure out what to do with the usher’s interface elements that we’ve just removed, and that’s the next post.

Thanatorium: “Beneficiaries” only

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In the subsequent post of the Soylent Green reviews, I’m going to talk about the design of the viewing room and the interface there. But first I need to talk about the design of something outside the viewing room. When Thorn enters the building and tells the staff there to take him to Sol, who is there to commit suicide, they pass a label on the wall reading “beneficiaries only.” This post is about the heavy worldbuilding provided by the choice of that one word, “beneficiaries.”

Here let me repeat my mantra that suicide is not an easy topic. Anyone who is considering or dealing with suicide to please stop reading this and talk to someone about it. I am unqualified to address—and this blog is not the place to work through—such issues.

It’s totally weird to call the people witnessing the suicide “beneficiaries,” right? Like their defining characteristic is that they get something out of the death? That’s crass. Shouldn’t they be called “loved ones” or something more sensitive?

To answer that question, we need to talk about Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, seen here in a still from the movie.

Just to be clear, this is not an actual still. This is a Midjourney image.

In 1798, this clergyman anonymously published a book called An Essay on the Principle of Population, Chapter 11 of which describes what has come to be known as a Malthusian Crisis. This happens when a given population, which tends to grow exponentially, surpasses its ability to feed itself, which tends to grow linearly. The result is a period of strife, starvation, and warfare where the population numbers “correct themselves” back down to what can be sustained.

It would be irresponsible of me to invoke Malthus without pointing out that many people have taken this argument to dark and unethical conclusions—specifically almost always some sort of top-down population control with anti-poor, racist, or genocidal undertones. Sometimes overtones. Compare freely the English Poor Laws as they were curtailed by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the British government’s approach to famine in Ireland and India, social Darwinism, eugenics, the Holocaust, India’s forced sterilizations, China’s former one-child policy, and a lot of knee-jerk conservatism today. “iF We hElP ThE PoOr, It oNlY EnCoUrAgEs tHeM To hAvE MoRe cHiLdReN AnD ThErEbY ExAcErBaTe pOvErTy!” You may recognize echoes of this oversimplification from some recent indie sci-fi.

Though this gives me the opportunity to link to the Half-Earth Project. Hat tip mashable.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t make mention of the number of times Malthus has been been debunked. Scientific American did it. Forbes did it. These guys did it. Lots of people have done it. In short, we are not herds of helpless animals subject to brutal laws of nature. We think. We can invent industries and institutions and technologies that help us reduce waste, feed more, and more fairly distribute resources. We can raise people out of poverty with democracy, access to birth control, education, supply-chain citizenship, the empowerment of women, and even increasing vegetarian choices in diet. Had Malthus been able to predict Norman Borlaug and The Green Revolution, he would have quietly tossed his manuscript into the fire.

Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is because Soylent Green seems to be conceived as a Malthusian Crisis writ large. Given its timing I wouldn’t be surprised if writer Stanley R Greenberg had read himself some Paul Ehrlich, felt a panicked inspiration, and then grabbed his typewriter. The movie cites other factors, like climate change, that lead to its crisis; and illustrates contributing factors, like inequality, that exacerbate it. But with the titular green being food and the set decoration being mostly sweating extras lying about, the movie is a neon sign built to point at questions of feeding an overpopulated planet.

Which takes us back to that label outside the viewing room.

We’re all beneficiaries of that costume and set design. /s

One of the Malthusian levers to address the problem is systemically reducing the population. Speedy, public suicide services would be one of the tools by which a society could do that. And though this society does not go as far as Children of Men did (which placed ads for the suicide kits called Quietus throughout British cityscapes), characters in Soylent Green do speak about the “death benefit” several times in the movie. This points to survivors getting some payout when citizens suicide. Want to kill yourself? The government will pay your loved ones!

So though it might be seen as a poor, crass choice to refer to loved ones who are witnessing a suicide as “beneficiaries,” this framing within the diegesis helps encourage the act, by subtly implying though its choice of language that the loved ones are not there to witness an act of selfish escape as much as an act of kindness, both for their loved ones and the world.

Even the font of this wall sign—which looks like the least sci-fi typeface of all time: Clarendon—does not speak of sci-fi-ness, but of friendliness, early advertising, and 19th century broadsides. It nefariously adds a veneer of friendliness to what amounts to a murderous propaganda.

Naming is a narrative design choice, and the right name can do a lot of worldbuilding in a very small space, even if it’s misguided and driven by the popular panic of its times.