TV Note: "Idiocracy" (4/27)
David Shasha
"Idiocracy" will be screened on Cinemax Monday, April 27th at 8:00 PM
Movie Review: "Idiocracy" (Mike Judge, 2005)
One would think with the success of Judge's seminal MTV cartoon series "Beavis and Butthead" - a joke I now assume that people did not really get - and the recent commercial triumph of "Talladega Nights" which both skewer the stupidity of American culture at this moment in our history, that "Idiocracy," a veritable "Citizen Kane" of American schlock and kitsch, would have been a shoo-in for mass appeal.
But it was not to be.
20th Century Fox, which itself gets raked over the coals in this profanely hilarious satire of American culture, decided to dump the film and not release it in theaters. The film has recently appeared on DVD and in the graveyard of modern movies, Cinemax, the outlet that is currently showing it in fairly heavy rotation.
And after seeing the movie, it is little wonder that Hollywood would not want people to have access to "Idiocracy": it is an unsparing frontal assault on Hollywood's frivolity and the culture that has been spun off by MTV, "Entertainment Tonight" and the National Enquirer.
The story of the film is very simple: a slacker army desk-jockey gets picked to participate in an experiment which would freeze him for a year after which he would wake up and be examined for the success or failure of the procedure. In addition to this army slacker, played with deadpan ease by Luke Wilson, a female specimen is "procured." Played by SNL cast member Maya Rudolph with a vixen-like spell, the young woman is a prostitute whose pimp is named Upgrayyyyed.
The two scapegoats fall into some bad luck as the army base in which their cryogenically-frozen bodies have been stored gets closed down and the two caskets are waylaid. The characters wake up 500 years later where Wilson finds a society that has become completely stupid; a place that is undergoing an epic garbage crisis - the garbage is piled up to the sky - and where the laziness and the excesses of American society have been blown up out of all rational proportion. TV shows are filled with vulgarity and stupidity in ways that are not to be believed. A form of Gatorade is being used to water crops and fill water fountains. The president of the US is a Porn star/Martial Arts expert. The state is controlled by an interlocked set of video screens that monitor each and every person through their "marking"; a coded tattoo that identifies them and permits the ubiquitous police to monitor them.
The level of detail that Judge creates to flesh out this world is overwhelming and I could not even begin to recount all of it. It is a surreal mash-up of John Carpenter, George Orwell, ESPN, MTV, "A Clockwork Orange," Dick Cheney, the Patriot Act, and Halliburton.
And in fact, like "Talladega Nights" it is an extremely cruel and crude - but often spot-on - parody of Bushworld. People in the year 2505 do not read books; act out their humanity in sexualized terms; are ultra-violent and hateful; and do not seem to know much of anything beyond their bodily needs. Wilson is quickly identified as the smartest man in America - this asks us to recall how stupid he was when he was sitting at his army desk - who is charged by the president to solve all the problems of society.
"Idiocracy" is a film that is politically super-charged as an angry and pissed-off rant at George W. Bush and Karl Rove - Bush's Brain. It tells a story that on its surface is laughable, but it does not take much to figure out that the candy is filled with a sharp razor blade. The movie is beautifully mounted as it expertly sketches out a nightmare world of characters that make Beavis and Butthead look sophisticated. It takes the worst and most egregious faults of our culture and exaggerates them to allow us to more easily see their grossness.
It was clear enough to the Fox executives that "Idiocracy" is a completely subversive and dangerous movie. It is not on the fence in any way, shape or form. It is a full frontal assault on the NASCAR world that finds its sorry expression on the Jerry Springer Show and the execrable Girls Gone Wild videos. It portrays a world of no hope because of the things that we are experiencing at present, but that do not seem to be of that big a concern to people: the forced ignorance, the over-sexualizing of everything, the laziness, the deceit, the proclivities for violence, the absence of creativity, and complete lack of dedication to principle.
"Idiocracy" is a nightmarish fantasy that shows us what we are to become if we do not make the necessary adjustments. It lays out a world whose contours are recognizably our own; it simply extends out things that we already see today in an massively exponential fashion. The film is a warning to us that is articulated in the form of a socio-cultural satire that abstracts our most decrepit character traits to show us what we look like in the looking-glass of the carnival house. It is a world where nothing is taken seriously; where language has been eviscerated and where decency is long gone. It is a society that can function no more.
I am not sure what "Idiocracy" can be compared to. It is a very funny movie filled with an anger that is often waiting to explode. Like "Talladega Nights" is takes on the Red State Conservatism that has brought us face to face with our Constitution and the beating that it has taken from the current administration in Washington. It argues that we have ceased to think, to work in productive ways, to care about the things we should be caring about - that we have stopped acting in human ways.
Wilson's character is amazed when he sees how far this has all gone. The very rudiments of cultural knowledge and professional expertise have been thrown to the wind. It is as if the world of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears has taken over the center of our civilization and determined the ways in which we live.
Similar in this sense to what "South Park" has been doing for the past few years, "Idiocracy" is part of a small, but feisty group of comedic parodies that is unafraid to skewer anything and everything in its sights. While many would not respect the steely intelligence of people like Judd Apatow, Will Ferrell, Matt Stone, Trey Parker and Mike Judge, it is in fact in these artistic productions - low culture in the eyes of the elites - that we see the ways in which the marginal is brought to the mainstream. Such a cultural move is deeply subversive and often feared by the powers-that-be which quickly moves to market these comedies as more pablum, more fodder for stupidity, so that the movies and TV shows feed the very beast that they are attacking.
In the case of "Idiocracy" such a strategy was blocked by the studio system and the movie is out there in a no-man's-land of commercial vacuity. The film was not reviewed in the regular outlets because it never opened commercially in theaters. Thus "Idiocracy" has truly become an underground film that is maverick in spirit. It is one of the most lethal and Swiftian of the modern attacks on Western civilization and all the better for it. It takes the attitude of a Mel Brooks and ties it to a politics that is truly radical.
It is a film that must be seen to be believed.
David Shasha
From SHU 283, October 17, 2007