Published by Whatculture, maintained here for posterity.
You can be forgiven if you have never heard of
2006′s Idiocracy. From the box office numbers, few bothered to actually pay to
see Beavis & Butthead creator Mike Judge’s 2nd live action film, his follow
up to the generally low key but well-received cult favourite Office Space.
Idiocracy is of the same mold: average people
doing average things, trying to adapt to a world that makes no logical sense to
the idea of humanity in the first place. While Office Space was set in the days
before Y2k, Idiocracy happens to be set 500 years in the future and it’s a
spot-on satire of where we, as humans, could be heading.
When it was released America wasn’t ready for
Idiocracy, especially after multiple test screenings by American film goers
that ironically ranked the film somewhere between completely incompetent to
Troma-level stupid. 20th Century Fox decided to stall its theatrical release
for nearly a year before finally releasing it nationwide in just seven cities
and 130 theaters in total with little to no press or marketing.
Its box office take was a shade under $450,000
USD, but its enduring popularity comes primarily from word of mouth, which is
always a good sign of a great film and here I aim to do the same.
The plot is simple; take an average man of today (Luke Wilson) and put him 500 years in the future. In Judge’s future world natural selection is indifferent towards intelligence. The world is inhabited by stupid people, mainly because they reproduce more than intelligent people. It’s a number’s game where stupidity reigns as is quickly explained in the first minutes of the film. The scale tips towards those of low intelligence and it’s in this world that Luke Wilson and his fellow time traveler (Maya Rudolph as the prostitute with a heart of gold) find that they are the most intelligent people in the country.
Waking up from a government experiment
gone wrong in a mountain of garbage, Luke Wilson tries to find his way back to
the past with the limited help of his court-appointed lawyer (Dax “I like
money” Sheppard). He barely navigates his way through the many
institutions (medical, judicial, democratic) that have de-evolved through
centuries of ‘dumbing’ down.
He may not be smart but in Idiocracy he is the
smartest man in the world, which leads him to become a
special adviser to the President of the United States; Dwayne
Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
 |
| Here he is on the campaign trail |
 |
| Here he is getting the attention of Congress |
Idiocracy is the rarest of gems; a science fiction comedy. It takes a bleak, sarcastic look at a possible future timeline that at times the viewer will think could well be disgustingly possible. After all, all the signs are there. A government run by a corporation? Check. An environment destroyed by same corporation? Check. A top-rated tv show that deals with a guy getting kicked in the nuts? Check. A former wrestler turned President of the United States? Check. Buying a lap dance at Starbuck’s, Chec- wait, what?
Science Fiction implies a certain gravitas in
its subject matter. It is either about a Utopian world where technology
and humanity’s quest for knowledge leads us, as a species, to conquer worlds,
space travel, mis-communication and maintain a type of universal ultra-super
ego. Star Trek is perhaps the most masturbatory exhibit of this type of
thinking: Gene Roddenbury envisioned all that we could be and we love him for
it.
In the Dystopian Science Fiction world, humans
again are generally either near superhuman (ie. Equilibrium, Aeon Flux) or are
cogs in a greater machine that has wiped out most of basic humanity
through assimilation either technological or viral (1984, Brazil,
Resident Evil) leaving mankind to either fight each other, killer robots or an
emotionless system that is centered around the stripping of our basic human
wants and needs.
 |
| Here they are approaching Costco |
Mike Judge tackles this vision, of a society that is stripping away the core meaning of what it is of being human and replacing it with something that again, is quite plausible yet devoid of emotion and humanity. We won’t evolve into a society with a thirst for knowledge of what’s beyond the stars but of a society for a thirst of a drink that is full of electrolytes, and a society where people go to watch a movie called ‘Ass,’ which is just a movie of someone’s ass (which went on to win Best Picture) and in a scene that didn’t make the final cut was a commentary on modern sports, in which baseball has devolved into ‘Extreme Baseball,’ which was essentially just a bat fight.
So much of Idiocracy may come to pass and that
is another reason why it rings truer than films such as Terminator or Gattaca.
In his films, Mike Judge relies on the ‘every
man’ type of actor; ones that viewers may not strive to be but can personally
relate to (so no Denzel Washington or Brad Pitt in a Mike Judge film). While
Luke Wilson can barely carry a film, that is the point of this movie: we don’t
want a Christian Bale or Ryan Gosling in this type of movie representing what present
day humanity is. We want an average guy with no ambition other than to just
wait out his days in a type of purgatory, which is what Luke Wilson is. He is
the Ron Livingston character in Office Space, just wanting to be left alone and
not care about anything.
There is a fine ensemble cast of B-actors in
Idiocracy, which makes it work so well, including Dax Sheppard, Maya Rudolph,
Michael Bolton from Office Space. They don’t play Stupid for Stupid’s sake,
which would pander down to the film’s ultimate goal of trying to show a world
where these type of people very possibly could be leaders of our civilization.
The only one (in my opinion) who doesn’t quite
work in the overall feel of the movie is Justin Long, playing a doctor who
informs Luke Wilson that “Well, don’t want to sound like a d*ck or nothin’, but,
ah… it says on your chart that you’re f*cked up. Ah, you talk like a f*g, and
your sh*t’s all retarded.” He says this in a semi-literate back-country accent but personally I think it could have worked out just as well as him being Justin Long.
Such is medical advancement in the 26th century…
 |
| And signage spacing |
Idiocracy cuts deep into American culture, which is probably why it was not widely accepted or marketed. The very thing it addresses is also its most negative point; America is not the glowing green light at the end of the dock, to pull a ‘of-the-moment’ Great Gatsby reference. It’s a country that has become reliant on corporations and of the meekness of its citizens to not care about where things are going, provided they have the right distractions and as Dax Sheppard repeatedly states “likes money”.
Yet, I don’t feel Idiocracy comes off as
heavy-handed like a Michael Moore documentary nor does it come off as
light-hearted and slapstick like a Mel Brooks comedy. It’s a veiled warning of
a possible scenario that sometimes we see directly in our internet feeds and on
news channels. It’s what could happen if education is placed behind television
ratings, if corporations take over social services. If our quest for material
goods becomes so disposable, we can pull our clothes out of a tissue box and
everyone just gives up and wears Crocs all the time.
Will big box mega stores ever sell law degrees?
Maybe. Will they have a greeter at the front door, staring zombie-like into
nothing saying ‘Welcome to (fill in store name), we love you’? They just about
do now. Will we eventually watch live executions involving monster trucks and
fireballs?
Sure, why not?
Idiocracy does what few films manage: it’s able
to create discussion. Not the type of discussion debating the plot holes of
comic book movies and career arcs of famous directors but of what the
film-maker is actually trying to say. It holds a mirror up to society in an
entertaining yet eye-opening way. When I was recommended this film, I was
warned that ‘it’s not exactly funny, but it’s a great premise’ and so I shall
warn you as well.
It doesn’t shove facts down your throat like a
tear-choked documentary nor does it try to reinvent history in a hail of
gunfire or alternate past timelines
and interpretative facts-checking. All it does is tell you a story of
an average guy and girl put into an extraordinary situation trying to come to
grips with what they encounter. When you think that it will start just becoming
a send up of itself, the story moves on to its next subtle and/or not so subtle
critique. No more different than Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes or Woody
Allen’s Sleeper.
Idiocracy is a movie that should start creeping
its way into more and more all-time cult film lists as the mandatory ’10 years
later’ rule takes effect. And that’s what a good film should do. While we may
not know the Oscar best picture of 2006, we should at least remember that this
was the year Mike Judge made made the best comedy sci-fi of the millennium.
No comments:
Post a Comment