Movie Review : Idiocracy (2006)
No one watched Idiocracy when it came out in 2006. It grossed under half a million worldwide and most of that money was made in U.S and Canada. Although it became semi-famous over its DVD run, the phrase "well, Idiocracy was really a documentary" is much more popular than the movie ever was. Especially since the Donald Trump presidency. I don't know about you, but I'd never seen Idiocracy before and I don't believe most people who say this fashionable dinner party line ever did either.
So, I watched Idiocracy to determine whether or not it is an unwitting documentary.
Idiocracy tells the story of Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), a ruthlessly average army soldier and a sex worker named Rita (Maya Rudolph) who get frozen as part of an army experiment and promptly forgotten for 500 years. In the world they wake up in, the collective IQ has lowered so much due to lack of natural selection that they’ve become the two most intelligent people on the planet. You think it would be easy to lead morons into a better existence, but the problem with morons is that they don’t know they’re morons.
Stimulation and Spectacle as Social Standards
No, Idiocracy is not a documentary. It's a science fiction comedy that imagines what would be the continuation of our worst possible instincts. By worst, I mean the absolute fucking dumbest. But what Idiocracy does that feels so uncomfortable is that it challenges our cultural understanding of what it is to be dumb. Mike Judge's morons aren't bumbling, self-destructive nitwits. They seek a stimulating outcome to any form of social of cultural interaction, which is something we’re also all guilty of to a degree.
In the movie, Joe is almost immediately elected secretary of interior by President Camacho (Terry Crews) and put in charge a life or death issue : saving the crops. Being an average guy in every possible way, Joe dispenses sensible advice and since his solution doesn’t work right away (using water instead of a sports drink), he’s immediately condemned to a penis monster truck death match. Punishing him was not as important as turning a boring ordeal into an entertaining one. Worth is intrinsically linked to stimulation.
Now, that’s just one of many example of how dumbness is defined in this movie. But it's meant to make you question your own relationship to entertainment. It's something we consume in excessive quantity right here and now and that we don’t question at all. Instead of asking ourselves whether we should entertain ourselves or tend to more important issues, we take pride in watching "smart entertainment" over "dumb entertainment" without asking ourselves the question whether we should seek it at all.
Of course, this is an idealistic point of view. There's a lot of downtime in someone's life and a huge offer for entertainment. But I'm as guilty of thinking like this as anyone else.
Is Superior Intelligence Even Desirable?
One great aspect of Idiocracy is that it doesn’t present intelligence as a be all and all solution supposed to save the world. The world in 2505 is beyond saving and it will take several centuries and a lot of intelligent people fucking a whole lot in order to reverse five hundred years of dumbing down. No, Idiocracy presents intelligence as a mere means of survival and legacy for the self. It gives Joe security and purpose as he's constantly able to outsmart everyone around him. He never solves the dumbing down.
That said, the world being filled with dumb people is never presented to be a tragedy or anything that will lead to an imminent doomsday. It’s just a byproduct of inherent natural selection. Without a predator, the intelligent are not the one that survive, but rather the people who fuck the most. I thought it was somewhat of a fatalistic, but humble point of view on the question of intelligence. The dumbing down of humanity is eventually going to end us, but it’s inevitable since we’re on top of the food chain.
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Next time you head someone say "well, uh, Idiocracy was really a documentary", tell them to shut the fuck up and actually watch Idiocracy. It's about people like them too who feel good about themselves for recycling shit without even thinking about it. It taps into many, many worrisome slippery slopes humanity is on right now, but it's not quite the revolutionary indictment of our times. Not for lack of trying really, but there's just nothing left to indict if we just abandon social and political responsibility for entertainment.
