The Deconstructionist: The End of Intelligence

Filed Under Mike Judge, The Future, The Deconstructionist

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Now With Electrolytes! What Nerds Crave!
 
Mike Judge’s film ‘Idiocracy’ is one of those movies where what actually happens isn’t that important. It’s the world the film creates that matters. Any action and adventure we see in such a tale is secondary to the rubbernecking as we try to take this strange, impossible place in.
 
If you aren’t hip to the details, the film imagines an America where the apparent prevailing stupidity of our population grows and grows, until the average dumbass from our century would be hailed as the smartest person on the planet.
 
This outlook fills gap in most speculative fiction, which usually imagine how the world would be if the best (Star Trek) of human impulses triumphed, or the worst (1984, anything featuring a ‘radioactive wasteland.’). Idiocracy takes the middle road and allows the most mediocre aspects of human nature to dominate. We are shown vast cityscapes of crumbling infrastructure, wrecked not by war or ground beneath the heel of some fantastic totalitarian regime, but simply because taking care of shit is gay.
 
Think about that for a moment- take some time and consider all the meaning of turning aside from a responsibility because the pursuit of same is labeled with a bit of slang that is derogatory to certain lifestyles, and then take this premise to international levels. There’s enough schederfrude in that one observation to fuel ten movies and thousands of term papers.
 
The movie itself is small, brief and rarely more than mediocre. Hell, even the cast is mediocre- Luke Wilson? Mya Rudolph? And in true Mike Judge style, the jokes are little origami envelopes that you don’t know what to make of at first, and only after a little finagling can you get to the most valuable part of them.
 
And the jokes are worth the effort. For example- Luke Wilson’s character cannot even make himself understood at first because his somewhat shoddy English is taken to be snobbish and effeminate. Throughout the film, Wilson is ridiculed as a fag and sometimes threatened for offering ideas that go against what is widely believed. Everyone in the year 2508 is terrified of going against the mainstream, and there’s no Big Brother keeping them in line, simply a fear of being truly unique. Centuries of being told that the only way to stand out is to choose the most extreme (and popular) sodas and snacks have whipped our culture in ways that fascism never could.
 
This is an old, deep observation. C. S. Lewis went on and on in the Screwtape Letters about how the best way to dismiss an idea that challenges your own ‘complete’ understanding of the universe is to make fun of it. In Idiocracy, this backwards sentiment has become policy.
 
The studio hated this film. IMDB tells us: ‘Unsure of how to market the film after disastrous test screenings, Fox sat on the near-completed film for over a year, before finally giving it an unusually small release in only 6 markets (skipping over major markets such as New York City). The release was done with little to no marketing- there weren’t even posters made for the release.’
 
And I’ve heard it was even worse than that- Fox didn’t want to pay for the films’ completion. Mike Judge had to call on his friend Robert Rodriguez to complete the special effects shots.
 
Whatever Judge had to go through to make this film, it was worth it. He has created a singular nightmare, more terrifying than Brazil or 12 Monkeys because even those dystopias proclaim some measure of human ingenuity, even if it is turned against humanity itself. Come 2508, Idiocracy tells us, all such ingenuity will have been pounded out of us by relentless amusement.
 
The opening of the film offers a theory as to how things got so bad. The idea is that the stupid reproduce much more quickly than the educated. The idea is somewhat classist, yet the film’s real horror is that the inverse is true as well: “The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.”
 
Terror for the future is the idea that given a choice the betterment of the self and masturbating, more and more humans will chose the later, until the practice is so widespread and acceptable it will become ‘batin’ and we shout it out at visitors who come round during the appointed ‘batin hour.’ (as in, ‘Come back later! Batin!’)
 
The film entertainingly makes clear what I went on and on about last week- that as a species, humans may not be able to turn aside from the traps of gluttony and sloth. In the end we may be no smarter than goldfish with control over the goldfish food- we’ll keep eating and eating until we die.

 

The Deconstructionist with Gordon Weir was too busy ‘batin to post this on time, and appears every Wednesday on www.BBTmagazine.com .

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Comments

2 Responses to “The Deconstructionist: The End of Intelligence”

  1. Urbpan on April 1st, 2008 2:37 pm

    I see you’re continuing to read Chris o’Brien’s pamphlets. I’ll be rushing to see this one, just so I can get the right accent on “‘Batin’” when I need to say it.

    Soylent Screen is tangled up in wordpress–I think Chris found out that I trashed The Prestige and hacked the site. Hopefully I’ll get it to load and be able to post it momentarily.

  2. Natalie L. Sin on April 2nd, 2008 8:36 am

    Do celebrity news magazines run the country in this scenario?

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