Thursday, February 01, 2007

Idiocracy

Mike Judge, USA, 2006
3.5 out of 4 stars

The same studio that was responsible for dumping this film into all of 130 theaters last year, 20th Century Fox, just this last weekend opened Epic Movie, a film that has 0% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes and is unanimously described as a film that contains no actual jokes, merely a random sequence of reenactments of various blockbusters alongside depictions of bodily functions. Of course, this was last weekend’s #1 film. Unsurprisingly, some people on the Internet feel that Fox is engaged in some kind of conspiracy, preferring that we not see this comic (but also very angry) depiction of dystopic society in which, 500 years later, everyone has become terminally stupid due to natural selection no longer taking its course (“only stupid people are breeding,” as the song goes).

Rumors also circulate that this film has been butchered by the studio, and I couldn’t help but engage in guessing games while watching the film. For instance, did they really need that narration? Although it was often funny, it also felt, often enough, like it was really just explaining the obvious, although you could take that as some kind of perverse metacommentary. The film is also only 84 minutes, which made me wonder if the narration wasn’t covering up the gaps left by all the footage that had been hacked away (unless Mike Judge got his budget slashed and had to use narration to convey what he wasn’t able to film).

Indeed, there are ways in which the film seems cheap or hastily done, but there is still a spark of malicious genius to the whole thing, a sort of tremendous hate-letter to our modern society and its valorization of the idiotic; the cynic will claim that most of the things in the film are only slightly exaggerated. I don’t think I agree with Judge that people are getting dumber, and will only get dumber in the future. I think that the popular culture certainly is getting dumber, but I think that this is, for the most part, due to the media’s increasing willingness to pander to our more vapid and venal impulses, rather than attempt to pacify us as they did in the Father Knows Best days (what was so “smart” about that stuff, after all? I think, then, that our overall intelligence isn’t decreasing, it’s more that the visibility of the unintelligent is at an all time high, and whatever thrall the intelligent once had over those who are less so is at an all time low. I will say that the part that rang the truest for me was when the “average” hero is time and time again shot down for his apparent effeminacy, because that is how the future people read anything other than idiocy. I may not agree with Judge’s diagnosis (much less his reading of class and sex, which is questionable at best), but I agree that something is rotten, and I found his vision, powered by righteous anger, to be appropriately disturbing.

Source: Fox DVD
31 January, 10:32 PM

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