Things That Are Great This Week Part One: Idiocracy

[Currently Listening To: The Oohlas - Best Stop Pop]




It's nice when your opinions are echoed by people you respect. Right after I'd written about the dumbing down of America, and how natural selection had failed us, I discovered that Mike "Office Space / Beavis & Butt-Head" Judge had made a movie about the very same subject. It's called Idiocracy, it's hilarious and clever, and if you've never heard of it before, you're not alone.

In Idiocracy, Luke Wilson plays a desk clerk in the US Army, and is chosen for a top secret military hibernation experiment particularly because he is stunningly average in every way. The experiment is meant to hibernate him for one year, but it goes horribly wrong and he ends up frozen for five hundred years, awakening to a future America which has fallen into ruin because the intelligence of its people has been thinning for centuries.

In Judge's future America, the masses are braindead, easily-amused mongoloids who exist only to satisfy their most basic urges. They live amongst giant piles of garbage and speak an English language which been reduced to little more than a series of grunts. They watch mindless television and are easily manipulated by marketing - they even wear disposable clothing which dispenses like tissues and is covered with advertisements. The President, pictured above, is an Xtreme former wrestler/porn star voted into office because people thought he was cool. Wilson's protagonist, a man of notably average intelligence in the year 2006, finds that in the future, he is the smartest man in the world. It's absurdity that isn't nearly as absurd as it should be.

Idiocracy is hardly a brilliant film. Like Office Space, its plot is silly and ultimately irrelevant, but the clever social observations and comedic details are what shine through and make it really enjoyable. It's been criticized for stooping to exactly the sort of sophomoric potty humor that the people it's lampooning would enjoy - but personally, I think the satire sort of demands it. You'll particularly enjoy it if, like me, you're one of the many very average people who feel like you are becoming the unlikely new intellectual elite amongst a majority that celebrates vapid celebrities, giant trucks, wrestling, reality TV, and disposable pop music.

The problem is that the film's distributor, the mighty FOX, apparently doesn't share my excitement about the movie. Finished two years ago, the film has been in distribution Hell because the studio simply wants nothing to do with it. Ironically, they gave up on the project because early test audiences of average moviegoers didn't get the joke. If anything, that should have assured them the movie had succeeded. But these are greedy, out-of-touch movie studio execs we're talking about here; so - presumably merely out of contractual obligation - they released it only in seven cities, with no promotion whatsoever. No trailers, no advertising, no nothing. Mike Judge won't even do any interviews about the movie, in protest of FOX's poor treatment. And that, tragically, is why you haven't heard of it, and why pretty much no one will ever see it (read this Time article for more about the film's demise).

A quick search reveals that even the wasteland of YouTube doesn't have one single clip from the film; although it does have a great deal of retarded home-made videos featuring horrendous misuses of the word "idiocracy" - which admittedly isn't really a word, but it's especially not a word when you're meaning to say "idiocy."

Mike Judge, please, leak the entire movie onto the internet. Let it spread virally and show FOX they made a mistake. If not, we can only hope it gets released on DVD and becomes a cult hit the way Office Space did. When movies like Step Up are topping the box office, it's sad to see clever satire get kicked to the curb because it was misunderstood by the same dolts who are lining up right now to see that football movie starring The Rock.

After seeing Idiocracy we came out of the theatre on a friday night and decided to take a walk up the street to see what was going on. As we strolled up Cahuenga Blvd past the usual assortment of overhyped bars and clubs, Hollywood felt more like a wasteland than ever before. The streets were dirty and grotesque, Hummers were cruising by blaring thumping hip-hop music, while the crew of wiggers inside leaned out the windows and shouted boorishly at women on the streets. Advertisements covered every surface, most of them for cell phone ring tones, upcoming pop albums, and new sitcoms. We passed a bar called "Big Wang's," which boasted a sign with a cartoon rooster flexing its muscles, and was overflowing with grunting, shouting idiots showing off the unpaid $10,000 rims on their giant cars, while homeless people slept on the sidewalk across the street. Inside the bar, football was playing on every TV screen and that song "I'm 'n Luv Wit a Stripper" [SIC] was blasting to much fanfare. The similarities to what we had just seen in Idiocracy were uncanny. It felt completely surreal, as if we had somehow stepped out of the theatre and been transported into Mike Judge's dismal future world. Perhaps his only miscalculation in making the movie was thinking it would take 500 years for things to get so bad.

Anyway, for now, since you can't go see Idiocracy, you should definitely see Little Miss Sunshine if you haven't already. It's a very funny and poignant black comedy that is all but guaranteed to put a smile on your face. It's kind of like a dark, indie version of National Lampoon's Vacation. Although when I say "dark" I just mean there's a lot of off-center humor - the movie actually has a lot of heart.


P.S. - See, I managed to get through this whole entry without going off on a tangent about overpopulation and bad parenting and underpaid teachers and how you should have to have a permit to have children. I didn't think I could do it. But I will say this: If you're the type of person who says things like "I don't think I'm going to ever have children, I just couldn't bring a child into a world like this one"... If you are aware enough to say something like that, then you are EXACTLY the type of person who should be having children! The world needs your contribution to the gene pool! Take a lesson from Mike Judge, and breed. Breed, breed, breed, for the sake of our future!