I assume you are being satirical, but I think any of those four would be a clear improvement over the current president (though I’ll admit to not actually knowing much about any of them).
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Don’t you guys know about the future? Taco Bell is the only one that survived the Franchise Wars. Demolition Man spelled it out pretty clearly.
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Also, classist.
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Not mine.
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Exactly. It’s not even like Mike Judge doesn’t have better movies. Extract is really good, and Office Space is, well, Office Space. Idiocracy is the kind of movie I thought was funny in college but turns out to be problematic in hindsight.
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I guess, too, that not everyone agrees with these assessments, but that’s the feel I got off the film. Give me Office Space or King of the Hill any day.
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Meanwhile, on another BB thread:
That’s the trump magic, his supporters are too damn stupid
Ignorance must be very comforting.
shit-gargling morons
Perhaps these are valid descriptions of America’s current idiocracy. Or perhaps this site can be a bit elitist as well a times.
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precise meaning has been lost?
what a cop out. When you publish a dictionary, people will trust you. Use that trust to your advantage.
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Racism is not the key feature of Idiocracy, though.
Although there’s certainly room to critique the race and gender politics of the movie, the world of Idiocracy underplays the racism and sexism of reality.
OTOH, it provides a sharp, albeit probably unintentional, portrayal of classism.
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Count me with the folks who think some other folks are making an error by talking the movie more seriously than it takes itself.
If it had gone into the actual reasons for social decline, it’d be a Mike Moore film.
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That’s fine, you’ll get no argument from me there.
Not really, the dumbing down is the setup, but its clearly satire. Carol and Trevor are at least as stupid as any other character in the movie if not more self-involved, and Trevor is able to maintain full reproduction capability thanks to science!
I read this to mean that people are becoming dumber in this world not because of their condition, but that by being unable to understand the forces that shape their lives they believe themselves in control of their destiny, and technology and market forces only serves to enable putting off making the hard choices (Making money then in vitro for the “smart” couple,; Nothing to aspire to but have sex and the miracle of modern medicine for the “dumb guys”)
Like I said, taking anything here at face value is mistaking satire for self important cleverness.
There’s a lot to parse out here, so I’ll jujst atake a stab at what I consider to be a couple of key flaws in these articles, but the main one, and one that we absolutely have to deal with.
People have clearly misunderstood this movie, that doesn’t make the movie bad, and you (As in the people who wrote the article) can’t argue that it is wrong if you’ve misunderstood what it is trying to say.
Before I go on, I fully realize that the movie has to stand on it’s own, that if it has something to say, it is responsible for saying it and getting its point across, and that this is not a perfect movie by any means. That leaves us with a problem: Since it isn’t solid storytelling, since it doesn’t have such great performances, since the directing is weak and since the tone can get confusing at times, then we’ve got to acknowledge that this will create some gaps that make interpreting the work, a bit more subjective than strictly necessary.
This is the only thing I see that makes it possible for anybody to suggest as the Vice article does, that this movie promotes eugenics.
Something else that informs my view of this movie is that I believe that when confronted with something too difficult to comprehend, we will attempt to understand it in a way that allows us to deal with it and if we can’t then we will try to misrepresent it. I believe this is key because I do not think the articles you posted are just clickbaiting, I believe they are in fact reacting to having been damned so hard by the material that they react to protect themselves from being the object of scorn.
The vice article:
“If one believes the accuracy of film’s central premise—that the dumb are reproducing at a higher rate than the smart, which will lower the world’s intelligence until idiocy reigns supreme—it’s only natural to want to stop that from happening. From there, it’s not at all that great a leap to begin believing that maybe there should be some kind of policy only allowing intelligent people to reproduce—in other words, sterilize the dumb.”
The slippery slope fallacy. Even if it were natural and not a great leap to want to turn to eugenics. It get’s the premise wrong. How does it get it wrong? Simple, the writer must assume that the movie believes he and the rest of the audience is part of the high IQ group. It does not.
The movie is not kind to the high IQ people either, in the future, they’re dead. This movie has got nothing nice to say about anybody. I talked about it a little bit here:
The alternet article waists no time:
"First of all, there’s the issue of the film’s pro-eugenic premise: "
The movie hinges nothing on how people got dumb, only that they did. Two minutes later, the movie begins.
" Well, the overt argument of the film is that good breeding prevents social problems. The so-called satire proceeds from there, presenting the ridiculous consequences of what will happen if we don’t rethink how society breeds. "
The movie does not say that good breeding prevents social problems. No reason for saying this is given. As in my previous comment I’ll point out that the high IQ people in the movie are actually as dumb if not more so than the so called “dumb hicks”. The reasons they give for not having a child until it’s too late are dumb, these people are too involved with their own place in the world, with stock markets and with being right that they breed themselves out of existence.
This is not a world where smart people can actually implement a successful eugenics program, “smart” people of this world cannot make simple choices for themselves, there is no way they can make reproductive choices for the whole of society that would not be disastrous.
If we are to take the film at face value then we must acknowledge that “dumb” people survived, whereas “smart” people died out. The world we see in the future is one where so called dumb people are now suffering because they live in a world they do not understand.
The irony is that if we count ourselves amongst the people who would not desire such a world to come to pass, it doesn’t matter, we’re dead anyway.
Exhibit A:
“Satire isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card for all vulgar and illiberal ideas; it has to be pointed and targeting the powerful, not targeting vague notions of idiocy illustrated by Appalachia accents and trailer parks without consideration for what caused the idiocy in the first place.”
Sorry Adam Johnson via Alternet, you dead. You don’t get to say these people are dumb, They adapted and lived. Like Oscar Wilde’s nightingale, you sacrifice your life for the concept you call justice to somebody who does not care for what you personally believe to be love.
The mistake is to focus on the how it happened. This movie does not deal in how it happened. This movie spends all of two minutes telling us how it happened to spend the remainder of it’s running time showing us how people interacting with a world they do not understand are morons in our enlightened eyes.
Judgement only exists because we are there to witness it. But in reality, we died long ago, these people only able to survive a bit more is an indictment on civilization and technological progress. We were fine until we built a world regular people can’t understand.
The gizmodo article lays it out bare, its misunderstanding, its idiocy and it’s instinctual recoil from the condemning satire of the movie, especially of media:
"If only we could get rid of the uneducated Americans (read: redneck poors) and we’ll have the opportunity to live in a utopian world filled with smart and civilized people. "
No, if we follow the movies premise as misrepresented here, and stop the breeding of so called idiots, then we get a reduction in population where now we have a world built to sustain millions that will not know enough about farming to takes at least 500 years more into the future.
Sure “brainy” people built factories and sewage treatment plants and nuclear reactors, but we need warm bodies to keep them from killing us.
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MTV style propaganda?
Okay. If you say so.
These types of clothing been going on for like forever. ALL of these places sell their own stuff online in their stores and on Amazon
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Comacho was the president right? I thought he was just “a wrestler” with the mannerisms of a WWFE heel? (Most of whom are white.)
Was there anything about his character that you can point out that was specific to him being black?
Wow, at the tone of this conversation.
Unlike so many folks who ranted/raved about Idiocracy, I saw the film 10 years too late; when the ridiculous happenings were already too similar to real life to be funny, even in a satirical sense.
That said, I didn’t find the movie ‘prophetic’ or elitist, or as a vehicle promoting eugenics.
To me, it was a snarky take on how our society often acts against its own self interest; allowing the Dumbening to take hold for power and profit, the disdain for higher learning and advanced intellect that has long been a huge part of our culture, and corporate intrusion into nearly every aspect of our private lives.
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