No Good Very Bad Movies 22: The one where everybody's an idiot

 

Title: Idiocracy

What Year?: 2006

Classification: Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Who Cares? (2/3)

 

As I write this, I’m really getting pretty close to where I already planned to end this feature, or at least change out the format. In the process, I have been making some final decisions on what to include, and what’s been a bit counterintuitive is that most of them are ones I meant to cover all along. What really came as a surprise is that many of these are quite unremarkable at face value, neither notorious nor obscure in general pop culture, yet these are the kinds of movies that stay with me as either unsettling or irritating. In many ways, the most representative and egregious example was the present film, a quite recent one by my standards that’s actually fairly popular but has never sat well with me. I present Idiocracy, a film about a world where dumb people have taken over the world, and it’s a lot more awkward than it sounds.

Our story begins with a grim pronouncement that the human race of the late 20th- early 21st century has just now started rewarding the less intelligent to have more offspring, illustrated by an upper class couple’s faltering plans to have children and several generations of a redneck clan. Meanwhile, a slacker soldier and a sketchy lady of the night are frozen in a military experiment that is covered up and forgotten. Fast forward, and the soldier emerges to find himself in a world where seemingly the entire population has degenerated into debilitating idiocy, which actually doesn’t seem to leave them that badly off except that they can no longer dispose of trash or grow crops. The slacker makes his way from low-end housing and giant Costcos through hospitals, courts and a jail break before being accepted into the very macho president’s cabinet. There, he struggles to convince the government and the populace that their plants will grow better if irrigated with water instead of a sports drink. When his well-meaning interventions cause an economic meltdown, he is sentenced to effective execution in a gladiatorial monster truck rally. It's up to the lady of the 2000s to save him, but will she be too late?

Idiocracy was a 2006 film directed and cowritten by Mike Judge, following work including the film Office Space and the animated series King of the Hill. The movie was widely regarded as an unofficial adaptation of the 1951 story “The Marching Morons” by C.M. Kornbluth. The film starred Luke Wilson as Corporal Joe Bauers, with Maya Rudolph as Rita and Terry Crews as President Camacho. The production received a total budget of up to $4 million, but was only given a limited release by its distributor 20^th Century Fox. Contemporary and later accounts noted poor test screenings and concerns that it would be considered anti-Republican. Crews later recounted that companies which had approved the use of their names had tried to withdraw because of the film’s satirical portrayal of advertising. The film became popular on home video, During and after the 2016 election, it was widely referenced by critics of Donald Trump. Judge has consistently denied political messaging in his works.

For my experiences, my central frame of reference is that I’m a virtually lifelong fan of Kornbluth, not so much of what is by far his most well-known story. The one thing that has kept me baffled and vaguely annoyed is how often I run across critics and sometimes fans who seem to take the tale as Kornbluth’s own take on heredity and class division. In reality, the author was first and foremost a satirist who often took on the cliches and conceits of the science fiction genre itself. If his work reads like a fan’s quasi-elitist wish-fulfillment fantasy, an issue that certainly isn’t unique to “Morons”, the very safe rule of thumb is that he recognized that the fantasy was there all along. With that context in mind, Idiocracy feels very much like a treatment that not only misses the point of the story but gets it exactly the wrong way round.

Moving forward, one further comment in order is that the “morons” of the original story don’t really act mentally handicapped so much as prejudiced, resentful, and mean. By comparison, the film offers a surprisingly nuanced vision of an egalitarian society where the simpletons seem to have solved many of our problems in their own way. Male and female sexuality and other biological functions are discussed openly without judgment. A non-white character leads the government (2 years before Obama’s election!) without anyone commenting on it. Citizens criticize the president and other leaders freely and publicly. Even ladies of ill repute face no legal or social consequences, unless they fail to hold up their end a bargain. The real problem is that it gets hard to judge how much of this is intentional irony or just liberal-leaning Hollywood types not thinking things through. As a further consequence, the film offers very little that’s truly political, which is just fine by me, but it pulls short of both its reputation and its full potential.

Meanwhile, the more obvious problems to argue with really distract from the story and characters, and in many ways, this is just as well. On the pro side, we have a likeable main character with a genuinely satisfying self-improvement/ redemption arc. On the con side, and it is definitely a con, he simply isn’t that smart. To start with, he’s shown to be strictly average by present-day standards. By implication, he’s not simply an intellectual type without “real world” experience. What gets problematic is that his social skills, emotional intelligence and overall judgment are still poor even compared to the simpletons.  Then it becomes entirely odd that he ends up becoming an unquestioned authority on farming, something he admits he has never done, and more importantly, something actual illiterate peasants have done well enough for thousands and thousands of years. The strangest part is that the story freely shows him to be gullible enough for the simpletons to take advantage of him, conspicuously in the whole subplot of a supposed “time machine”. This is the point where it would be one thing if he was “book-smart” but socially awkward, but what the story sets up is an artificial problem that exists solely for an artificial savior to solve.

That leaves me with the “one scene”, and there’s one scene that truly amazes me. After Joe is determined to be the smartest man in the world, the president delivers a speech to an assembled crowd. To me, the character is fascinating. He’s belligerently masculine yet also an exaggeratedly flashy dresser of the kind that was being dubbed “metrosexual” at the time the film was made. All of this is played up as he gives his speech. In the midst of it, the audience begins to heckle him, something they clearly believe they can do without repercussion, specifically pointing out that he and others have made the same promises before. He continues without apparently taking undue offence, until the hecklers actually threaten to drown him out. That’s when the mindboggling part starts: He breaks out a semi-futuristic firearm that he has by all appearances had at ready all along, and rather than directly threatening the crowd, he simply fires into the air until they shut up. The impression I get, whether or not it is intended, is a return to the near-tribal conditions of feudal society, complete with the flamboyant male dress that was really the “norm” before the combined forces of puritanism and gay stereotypes were applied. It’s intriguing and un-stereotyped, but it’s also the surest proof that this movie could have done so much more.

In closing, I come as usual to the rating, and if anything, it might seem like a surprise I haven’t given it a lower rating than I have. As with Looker, I was indeed very prepared to give the lowest rating, in no small part because it presents an inexplicably late revival of genre trends that were already scraping the bottom with 1970s trash like ZPG. Ultimately, however, it was this context that convinced me to spare this one. It doesn’t remove the odious racism and class bias that drove the overpopulation panic and eugenics before it, but it’s clever enough to offer terms for honest discussion. The final verdict is that the poor and uneducated have always had more children than the wealthy and learned, and the only real solution is to pay to educate them, and for that matter keep as many of their children as possible alive. The real moral of the present film is that being congenitally dumb still isn’t as bad as being ignorant, and that’s good enough to get a pardon from me.

Image credit IMP Awards.