“Why are you trying to read that word? Are you a FAG?”

Last night I watched Mike Judge’s “lost” movie Idiocracy. It isn’t a masterpiece by any means, but I’d recommend everyone rents it and checks it out as it is very funny, has some great lines and raises some interesting questions.

Idiocracy is a rather pointed take on a branded-up, dumbed-down future. Set in a future country called “Uhh-Merica”, presided over by a Smackdown champion, where the favorite TV show is called “OW! My Balls!” and intelligence is derided as being faggy, it is as much a comment on the here-and-now as it is on the year 2505. Perhaps that’s why it failed to get anything other than a tiny theatrical release — 6 markets NOT including New York and NO marketing budget whatsoever. All of this was despite Luke Wilson, who was hotter than a hot thing on National Hot Day when the movie was made in 2005, being the lead.

If that story sounds similar, Judge’s other anti-corporate movie, Office Space, lost out when it failed to garner sufficient studio support (from the same studio, bizarrely enough — begins with “F” ends with “X” rhymes with “lox”) only to become a huge success following its video / DVD release. One could infer that Idiocracy has touched a similar raw nerve and suffered a similar distribution fate. Thankfully, the good part of the Office Space story has also been repeated here as it has already dwarfed the $400,000 it made at the box office.

Wilson plays a GI of average intelligence who is frozen for a year as part of a military experiment. A series of misunderstandings mean that the experiment is forgotten and our hero emerges 500 years later to discover an Uhh-Merica covered in trash, populated by the obese and governed by brands — some real, some fictionalized though thinly veiled. He also is the most intelligent person on the planet because, as the movie’s narrator tells us:

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.

What I like about Idiocracy is that it falls into line with an age-old technique of social commentary. 19th century authors were fond of showing us visions of the future to either warn their contemporaries of their shortcomings (H.G. Wells in both The Time Machine and The Sleeper Awakes) or the promise of how good things could be in a future utopia (Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward). Even Woody Allen’s The Sleeper updates Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and you get the sense that Judge sees himself as part of this tradition.

Looking at Idiocracy you can see Judge deliberately moving away from the subtlety of his masterpiece commentary, King of the Hill, (favorite line from Hank to his son: “That’s great, Bobby. If you weren’t my son, I’d hug you”). Now, Judge’s critique of modern society is as heavy handed as the crass society he critiques. But, any film which features the line, “I can’t believe you like money too! We should hang out!”, where a certain coffee chain now offers sexual favors as well as complicated coffee orders (the Full Body Latte) and where the Carl’s Jnr. line has evolved to “Fuck you — I’m eating”) is alright by me.

Check it out.
This review from The Guardian tells more of the story:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/patterson/story/0,,1866782,00.html