Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/22/idiocracy-is-coming-back-to-th.html
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I like him better when I don’t watch his interviews. Safer with guns? Come on Mike.
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Man, I could really go for some Brawndo right now.
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It’s too real
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You can jump to about the 25 minute mark for the Idiocracy relevant bits.
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It’s what plants crave!
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Obligatory:
The world isn’t getting stupider. It may be getting angrier, or maybe we finally have enough of a media panopticon to illuminate the injustice, intolerance and inequality to the point of action. Or perhaps the social change has slipped far enough from the social systems to require a realignment.
And the statists who just long for “the good old days” are getting mobilized to make a stand for their dying ideals.
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The problem (well, one of them) with Idiocracy is that it was an example of the thing it was decrying - the movie itself was dumb and the very notion of stupidity it presented was also dumbed down, presumably so that even very stupid people wouldn’t recognize themselves in it. (Although, granted, I didn’t watch the whole thing because the insult to my intelligence was too painful. Also that stupid, wrong pro-eugenics argument at the beginning didn’t leave me predisposed to liking it, either.) It’s coming in time for the election, but even tRump supporters won’t see themselves in it.
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Beat me to it.
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I feel that bringing this back now, could potentially polarize people more. We saw what Clinton’s comment did. Now this…? But, free speech, so whatever
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BoingBoing posting anything even vaguely related to INFOWARS is a mistake. Alex Jones is a bible-quoting, Obama-hating gun nut who spouts idiotic conspiracy theories in his sleep.
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Alex_Jones
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At first blush, Idiocracy is about the dangers that an uninformed, undereducated, apathetic populace can cause. However, it veers into neckbeard territory occasionally (ha ha, people who like lowbrow entertainment are dumb). It doesn’t make its arguments all that well because the neckbeard points overwhelm the valid ones.
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The movie was entertaining, but the premise was disturbingly close to “Make America Great Again!”
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I haven’t seen it, but I’ve read that it plays off eugenicist tropes. (e.g. that differences in intelligence are primarily genetic rather than environmental, that less intelligent groups are reproducing faster, and that eventually the intelligent groups will be overrun.) If this is accurate, I should avoid supporting it.
(And certain political groups have always combined those assumptions with their race-theories…)
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Historically, even educated upper classes didn’t have access to effective birth control or vaccines, so having just one kid wasn’t really the option it is today. Now we have those things, and they’re more likely to be used by the intelligent/educated.
But the answer isn’t to prevent poor uneducated people from breeding, it’s to organize things so that nobody is poor or uneducated.
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Idiocracy was a blown opportunity, for reasons @Shuck has already mentioned. Maybe its caricatures and hyperbole are part of its charm for fans but I felt they were too extreme to resemble any extrapolation from contemporary society and therefore elicit any sort of dread.
I got the sense that Judge was trying to further articulate the concept of a dumbed down generation that he’d illustrated—brilliantly, I think—with Beavis and Butthead. But B&B was funny because of its understated satire and unpredictable flashes of social insight. Idiocracy’s overreach makes it a satire without teeth and thus easy to write off as a fantasy farce rather than a gut-churning dark comedy.
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I concur.
Stating that you don’t want to express political points of view IS a political point of view, in and of itself. It’s like Howard Zinn said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.
Meanwhile, Judge made a film about “idiots” overtaking the “smart” people in the political process. In real life, however, he shows a noticeable amount of intellectual temerity, or, perhaps, cowardice, when it comes to actually addressing the political issues of the here and now.
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The key to enjoying this satire (and Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons,” to which the movie owes a lot) is accepting that the eugenics covered at the beginning is not actual science but a dramatic conceit. I like this film and use its memes regularly, but I recommend “Office Space” and “King of the Hill” as better examples of Judge’s work.
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