An Allegory For Our Time
Pilgrim’s Progress Rewritten In Future Imperfect Tense
The Warning
If clinical studies indicate that a medication carries a significant risk of serious adverse effects (e.g., death), the Food and Drug Administration has the authority to mandate that the manufacturer include a black box warning, i.e., a summary of those adverse effects, prominently displayed within thick black borders, on that drug’s labeling or in its literature to alert potential users to the danger.
If risky movie recommendations1 came with black box warnings, this post would be required to reveal the following:
Potential viewers of the movie, Idiocracy, are strongly advised to read and take into account the following issues before proceeding:
1. My 18 year old son and his friends, who have been enthralled by every horror and monster screen spectacular, teen-ploitation film, critically lambasted motion picture, and cinematic showcase of humor derived from heroic gastrointestinal functions, gratuitous violence, or sexual misadventures produced in the past decade, voted Idiocracy “The Dumbest Movie Ever Made.”
2. The director, writer, and producer is Mike Judge, the guy responsible for TV’s “Beavis and Butt-head” and “King of the Hill,” the animated feature film, “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America,” and the cult movie, “Office Space.”
3. It’s been reported (but not confirmed) that the final cut was taken out of Judge’s hands and “dumbed down,” which, as will become evident, is itself a funnier concept than the those found in the plots of most comedies on TV or the big screen.
4. The likely reason you may never have heard of Idiocracy, let alone have seen it, is that the movie’s promotional campaign arranged by its distributor, 20th Century Fox, consisted, in toto, of sending posters to theaters. There were no movie trailers, television ads, or press kits for media outlets. Nor was the film screened for critics. The movie’s release was delayed and rumors abounded that it would be put on hold indefinitely. When it did open, Fox placed it in – count them – seven cities where it quickly closed. It went to DVD shortly thereafter (in January 2007).
Idiocracy’s Not-So-Idiotic Premise
The movie’s plot is based on the all too accurate principle that evolution is directionless.2 Consequently, the human species is as likely to move toward dystopia as utopia.
The Idiocracy vehicle has its GPS set, as it turns out, for Dystopiopolis, and is, as long as we’re stuck on the movie-as-automobile metaphor, fueled by the geometric progression of lusty, stupid individuals invariably and enthusiastically reproducing at far greater rates than bright but overly cautious people, resulting in a society that becomes, generation by generation, more dim-witted.
The Story: Sleeper Meets Rip Van Winkle Meets Mad Max Meets Candide
With Cameos By The Three Stooges and The WWF
Luke Wilson plays Joe Bowers, a soldier chosen for an Army hibernation experiment because he is absolutely average. Like most of us average Joes, Private Bowers has spent his adult life avoiding responsibility. When chosen for this assignment, he protests, mounting the defense that Every time [the officer] tells me to “lead, follow, or get out of the way,” I get out of the way.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Click to hear line from movie
Nonetheless, he and his female counterpart, Rita, a distinctly non-military prostitute3 whose pimp has consigned her to the project in return for certain legal considerations, are placed in suspended animation. The army project, however, goes awry because of a scandal revolving around the Project’s military liaison’s fascination with the contrast between the world of squares and that of pimps and hookers.4
Consequently, Joe and Rita snooze through 500 years, during which civilization deteriorates catastrophically because of the afore mentioned diminution in intelligence.
Compounding he problem, the few knowledgeable individuals that remain in the population have been put to work not on solving the crises that face humankind but commercial projects with the logical result that last of these capable people ended their days creating potions and mechanical devices for growing hair and, of course, eliminating erectile dysfunction specifically and penile flaccidity in general. The evidence of their success is a cigar-smoking lab monkey who makes a brief appearance on the screen adorned by a particularly well developed Jheri curl (think Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction) and a similarly well endowed erection (think, if you dare, John Holmes hirsute little brother).
Not surprisingly, the current generation cannot maintain, let alone improve, the machines, infrastructure, and services developed by their predecessors. The immediate impending disaster is a looming famine because of crop failures caused by the use of a sports drink rather than water5 for farmland irrigation.
OK, cue the avalanche.6
The Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505 felicitously awakens Joe (and, a bit later, Rita) to a world best summarized as being – well, an Idiocracy that is characterized by the dominance of the crassest of crass consumerism, the lowest common denominator of a mutant populism, and anti-intellectualism so profound that Wilson’s Everyman is now the most intelligent living person - by two or three standard deviations.
Joe undergoes a series of Candide-like torments at the hands of a society that regards the utterance of a complete sentence as “talking like a fag.” While trying to get help at a hospital that is a macabre mutation of a McDonald’s-HMO hybrid, Joe is discovered to be “unscannable” because he lacks the requisite bar code tattooed on his forearm.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Click to hear line from movie
He is arrested, tattooed with the name “Not Sure” as a result of an all too believable computer glitch,
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Click to hear line from movie
and escapes from prison by claiming to be so stupid that he mistakenly got into the “Enter Prison” line rather than the “Leave Prison” line.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Shortly after his elopement from jail, Joe is again arrested - and then appointed Secretary of The Interior by President Camacho,7 who discovered that he was the smartest man living from a prison intelligence test. In an address to his constituents, the President (pictured below in official dress) declares,
That promised solution is – ta da – Joe.
Despite his correct diagnosis of the Brawndo-for-water irrigation problem, the failure of Joe’s plan to provide immediate results combined with the loss of joonlbs at Brawndo results in his impeachment, in large part because Brawndo, a sports drink promoted by the slogan “It has electrolytes, is one of the handful of remaining corporations, along with Carl’s Jr, Costco, Bell, and a few others who have purchased portions of or melded with the government. When Brawndo faced problems with the FDA, for example, its solution was to buy and privatize that agency.
As shown on Fox News, Joe is summarily convicted8 and sentenced to “one night of rehabilitation.” In 2505, “rehabilitation,” which has replaced Monday Night Football, has transformed into a gladiators Vs the condemned sort of spectacle held in a stadium with the Corrections Officers driving huge tank-like vehicles with gigantic phallic extensions to crush or drill the convicts. Joe, still chained to his rock, is given a barely operable sub-compact with a Nerf-dildo duct-taped to the hood.
Joe survives long enough for Rita (who Joe has brought along to the White House) to flash photos of plants beginning to grow.
Joe becomes President and marries Rita. They have three children, who are, of course, the three smartest children living.
The Funny Stuff
Although Idiocracy is satire on an epic scale with no gross-out opportunity, be it sight gag, primal slapstick, or scatological dialog, missed, DrHGuy’s position9 is that the movie’s humor lies in the details. Moreover, the humor is independent of the pertinent scene’s position on the Disgust Index.
But in addition to the details providing the humor, the onslaught of these throwaway lines, vignettes, minutia, observations, and other exemplars of a world gone bad forces the audience to confront the problem. Mike Judge provides the audience with no escape; if one views the movie, one views a continuous stream of society’s malfunctions.
A few of my favorite bits follow as examples:
- The Secretary of State plugs Carl’s Jr. in every conversation because he is paid for the placement. He introduces himself to Joe thusly, “I’m Secretary of State, brought to you by Carl’s Jr.”
-
Costco is approximately the size of Deleware and includes not only merchandise and amusement rides but also a law school. Best of all, it has burly greeters who repeat, like automatons, “Welcome to Costco. I love you.”
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Click to hear line from movie
- Starbucks still sells lattes but has branched out to offer sexual services with a special on hand jobs.
- The most popular television show, “Ow! My Balls!” features the hero undergoing an unceasing sequence of testicular traumas. The popular actor who plays the lead is similarly battered by his fans when they meet in real life.
- The Oscar winning film is Ass, which consists of 90 minutes of the same set of barely moving, flatulent buttocks filling the silver screen.10
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Click to hear line from movie
-
Many of the names of individuals are commercial derivatives; we are introduced, for example, to Frito, Velveeta, Formica, and Beef Supreme.
- Rita’s pimp, on the other hand, is named, Upgrayedd, spelled with two D’s for a “double dose of pimping power.”
- Rita points to a TV showing Joe on Monday Night Rehab. Desperate to rescue him, she then asks Frito, “Can you take me there?” Frito, eager to help, picks Rita up in his arms and carries her – to the TV a few feet away.
-
The Fox News reporter provides the summary of Joe’s Trial:
It started off boring and slow with Not Sure trying to bullshit everyone with a bunch of smart talk: ‘Blah blah blah. You gotta believe me!’ That part of the trial sucked! But then the Chief J. just went off. He said, ‘Man, whatever! The guy’s guilty as shit We all know that.’ And he sentenced his ass to one night of rehabilitation. - The reflecting pool of the Washington Monument is now a jet-ski paradise,
- A billboard with a tough looking smoker offers the slogan, If you don’t smoke Tarrylton’s… fuck you. Similarly, a fast food vending machine announces, Carl’s Jr. “Fuck you, I’m eating.“
The Message
With so much energy devoted to jokes, with so much emphasis on the grotesque aspects of life in 2505, and with an almost incomprehensibly disjointed dramatic construction, this flick does not announce itself as a Message Movie.
My contention, in fact, is that the film’s message is delivered so heavy handedly that its significance can be missed because of the distraction caused by all that maneuvering of weighty palms and digits.11
Such is the fate of satire in general, and by pushing satire to the point of burlesque, Idiocracy risks being mistaken for the very thing it is ridiculing – a concern which has much to do with my motivation for producing this dissertation and, especially, this rather pedantic section.
The movement in Idiocracy is Joe’s transformation from someone who “always get(s) out of the way” into chooses to take action, even though that puts him at risk of being beaten for acting “faggy,” imprisoned, and impaled on a rotating steel phallus being propelled by a tricked out tank-SUV.
While it’s nice, one supposes, that Joe saves the world from famine and pestilence, there are few inhabitants of that world capable of establishing even the minimal rapport that will occasion much celebration of their survival among the movie’s audience. The salvation in Idiocracy is Joe’s. He rescues himself from his narcissistic passivity to have an impact on others and to find himself an identity as part of a family with Rita and the kids.
And that’s the message:
Not only is it possible to screw up the future but that is the likely outcome unless we be become active participants in life beyond ourselves and our immediate circle of acquaintances.
To the extent that Idiocracy is indeed a Message Movie, it presents that message in an honest, forthright, challenging manner rather than pandering to the audience. The film confronts not only Joe’s narcissism, but our own. This is not a propaganda piece pitting us (AKA the good guys) against them (AKA the bad guys) in the mode of a Michael Moore production such as Fahrenheit 9/11 or even a documentary such as An Inconvenient Truth. Those folks in Idiocracy’s version of 2505 are the easily recognizable progeny of today’s materialistic, commercial, dumbed-down world.12
Taking a brave and creative artistic stance, Idiocracy is talking to us about us.
So, What Can We Do?
Well, don’t assume that some misconceived notion of Darwinian manifest destiny will rescue us if we just “get out of the way.”
Read a book. See a movie. Don’t be stupid or crass. Be involved.
And a special shout-out to the farmers in the Heck Of A Guy viewing audience - for goodness sake, don’t irrigate your crops with sports drinks.
And word to you smart people – start having lots-o-sex and at least a few kids.
Media
Video players with clips from Idiocracy are available at
~Media: Idiocracy~
Be warned, if you haven’t figured it out already, that scatological language abounds, but there is probably less in these scenes than one would find in, say, an episode of Deadwood. Despite all the talk of sexual deviance, there are no sex scenes, little nudity (and any nudity that does occur is not, I promise, the sort that will be listed among your “Favorite Turn-ons,”) and only cartoon-like violence.
Nonetheless, I have prepared a three-part sensitivity test for readers concerned about viewing gross-out comedy. If you answer “yes” at any point, you will probably be happiest not going further, and that’s fine – if you don’t mind being a wuss.
The DrHGuy Idiocracy Audience Sensitivity Test
- Are you actually concerned about viewing something called “gross-out comedy?” Really?
- Are you mightily offended by this scene from the movie?
Setting: A woman has just been told by the Carl’s Jr. computerized vending kiosk that she should leave because she has no more money in her account for buying food. The machine then announces:Your kids are starving. Carl’s Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl’s Jr.
- The first video at ~Media: Idiocracy~ is an extended version of the Carl’s Jr. vending kiosk scene. Watch it. Does it upset you?
Just another public service from Heck Of A Guy Blog.
Footnotes
- The primary risk from this movie recommendation, of course, is to my reputation and credibility.↩
- The survival of the fittest nonsense didn’t originate with Darwin; one Herbert Spencer, a social scientist, is responsible for that concept. His original quotation was “It cannot but happen… that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces …This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.” Survival of the fittest works only if “fittest” is defined not as the one which can run the fastest or furthest but as the one that best fitted to survive. ↩
- An ongoing joke is that Joe never figures out she is a prostitute, believing instead her off the cuff invention that she is an artist.↩
- The nifty set-up for the scandal includes an a businesslike, quasi-academic PowerPoint presentation containing outrageous scenes of the liaison gaining the trust of the inhabitants of this society by participating in their lives a la Margaret Mead↩
- Water is used only in toilets, a point invariably mentioned in response when Joe suggests using it for other purposes, such as drinking.↩
- Landfill technology is one of the long-long skills. Garbage is simply piled into rising mountains until the tipping point is reached with one can setting off a garbage-slide of refuge flowing through the streets of the city.↩
- Full name: Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho↩
- Joe’s jailers prevent a reprise of his previous escape by chaining his ankle to a boulder the size of a small car.↩
- Mr. Science and Lawanda, intrepid of heart, have not only courageously confessed that they were co-viewers of Idiocracy but have also bravely admitted holding opinions that are more or less congruent with DrHGuy’s.↩
- In Joe’s first address to the nation as President, he alludes to a Golden Age: “There was a time when reading wasn’t just for fags. And neither was writing. People wrote books and movies. Movies with stories, that made you care about who’s ass it was and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!”↩
- Disappointingly left unanswered is the Zen question, “What is the sound of one heavy hand clapping?”↩
- It’s especially easy to note the similarity between today’s vernacular and the Hillbilly-Valleyspeak-Ebonics patois spoken by Idiocracites.↩
