Mike Judge has always had a soft spot for dimwits. Beavis and Butt-head might leave chaos and destruction in their muttering, giggling wake, but they rarely suffer lasting harm themselves. In another writer’s hands, the soft-handed seat-fillers of his slacker masterpiece “Office Space” would be contemptible. Judge makes their complete and utter failure to pull off a microscopic scam feel heroic. For “King of the Hill,” he built an entire town out of workaholic marks and conspiratorial morons, and never once sneered at them across 13 seasons. So, you have to wonder, what happened in 2006? What happened with “Idiocracy?”
Judge’s sci-fi comedy, which turns 20 this month, centers around an Army librarian named Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) who unwittingly time travels into a dumbed-down future. The rabble living in this grim, garbage-strewn dystopia are kept docile by a steady stream of imbecilic television and sugary drinks. Any citizen who steps out of line risks the ire of an even dumber police force, riding around in cruisers that lift their design language from Ed Hardy clothing. After being arrested and sent to debtor’s prison, Bauers’ intellect attracts the attention of the pro wrestler president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews), who reveals that the country is suffering through a crop failure. It falls to Wilson’s exceedingly average Joe to save a world too stupid to save itself.
The message? You, the viewer, are holding down the last redoubt of high-mindedness in a cheap and crass era that will only get worse. The barbarians are at the gate, and worse, they’re breeding.
The movie projects contempt for the dense from its first frame, sharing a montage of recent pop culture as a stentorian narrator worries that modern conveniences have perverted the concept of survival of the fittest. A eugenicist montage appears, played for laughs, in which an upper-class couple — high IQs helpfully shared on screen — fails to have children. At the same time, a trailer-dwelling man named Clevon becomes the patriarch of multiple interconnected, large families. The message? You, the viewer, are holding down the last redoubt of high-mindedness in a cheap and crass era that will only get worse. The barbarians are at the gate, and worse, they’re breeding.
Up to this point, Judge’s filmography was exceedingly kind, willing to dig deeper and find humanity in an entire universe of schmucks and mediocrities. “Idiocracy,” on the other hand, was as cheap as the mid-aughts culture it was setting out to satirize.
Poisoned by the overwhelmingly toxic culture of time, the film’s downward-punching humor is as radioactive as its future’s fallow fields. There are a few fun visual gags about the degraded far-future — a hospital named St. God’s, the city’s digital clock tower being stuck on a blinking 12:00 — but its punchlines tend toward nasty. One of the few running bits in “Idiocracy” concerns Joe’s articulate speech, which citizens of the future invariably characterize as “f**gy” and “r**arded.” Courtroom sketches of Joe show him holding out a limp wrist.
The film wasn’t screened for critics or promoted heavily by 20th Century Fox, and it flopped hard at the box office. Still, it built up a cult following on home video, as viewers who considered themselves above the era’s current of anti-intellectualism, typified by George W. Bush administration, boosted it as a frightening and funny vision of an all-too-possible future. Two decades later, the idea that “‘Idiocracy’ was a documentary” has gained cachet in the more self-satisfied corners of the internet. Claiming the movie’s satirical predictions have “come true” has been regular fodder for clickbait articles, egged on by its creator and stars.
Then, as now, college-educated liberals were worried about the state of their country and ashamed of the man who led it. There’s no real harm in relieving that stress by laughing at the antics of President Camacho. But pulling that idea out of the multiplex, admitting that you think so little of your fellow Americans that you would champion a movie like “Idiocracy,” should inspire some shame.
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For one, the premise is faulty. Camacho is a preening strongman idiot, played with undeniable charisma by an American flag-covered Crews. But beyond his character being the president and a former professional wrestler, Crews’ performance doesn’t map onto its target in any meaningful way. Bush may have been a poor public speaker with a thick Texas twang, but he was no fool. The former governor of Texas helped carry out a plan to remake the country in the image neoconservatives saw when they closed their eyes at night. His Republican Party swung the judiciary in its favor and expanded America’s war-making abilities in a way that made all the right people wealthy. Along the way, they peeled back pesky regulations and neutered the government’s ability to restrict the flow of money between the ultra-rich.
Although Trump is undoubtedly the most incurious president in U.S. history, he’s also no dummy. Plenty of business scions have inherited a fortune and used it to make a slightly bigger hoard. But only he has been able to make himself first a television star and then president, while also remaining ridiculously wealthy. The media portrayed candidate Trump as a buffoon right up to election night. For gamely playing the fool, he got all he ever wanted: a money printer tied directly into his family’s interests and a never-ending parade of lickspittles he can dispose of at any point.
Perhaps more seriously, “Idiocracy” allows the viewer to feel accomplished for doing nothing beyond sneering at their fellow Americans. While the film frets that the stupids are building an army to overthrow the world, it can’t even bother to come up with a counterrevolution. The dumb conscripts are given instant gratification and money. When Joe Bauer is pressed to share his vision of a better world, all Wilson can muster is a mumbled plea to maybe read more books.
In the end, for all the movie’s pride in great thinkers, it does precious little thinking itself. To borrow from “The Big Lebowski,” another cult classic passed around by DVD-owning adepts, say what you will about moron-maxxing, at least it’s an ethos.
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by Alex Galbraith
