In a future where basic science is ignored, corporations control the government, and…wait.
When I tell you that I have been avoiding this movie like the plague in recent years, I mean it. Mike Judge has this weird ability to have his finger directly on the pulse of what is going on and, just because Idiocracy came out nearly twenty years ago, that doesn’t mean that it’s an exception to that.
If you have absolutely no clue what I am talking about, let me give you a brief synopsis. In the year 2005, an army librarian named Joe is chosen for the army’s suspended animation program. Joe and another person, Rita (from the private sector), are placed into pods where they are to be awoken in one years time. This doesn’t go to plan and they wake up 500 years into the future. The future they’ve woken up in is filled with garbage, everyone lacks intelligence, and corporations are in true control of everything. This makes Joe one of the smartest men alive.
There are so many aspects of this film that were, unfortunately, predicted correctly (and we’re only 20 years removed from this film. Not 500.).
The most apparent aspect of the film that has translated to our every day lives is the television. In Idiocracy, when a television screen is shown, the program playing is in a small box in the middle of the screen. Then, surrounding it are ads. Ads are everywhere. I was instantly reminded of those ads on television that play in a box on one side of the screen, and then they are surrounded by a banner that is an advertisement for the same company, and then within that banner is a QR code that you can scan with your phone while watching that ad in order to, almost certainly, be directed to another ad (I’m looking at you Progressive Auto Insurance…). It is absolutely maddening. I was also reminded of those videos where the screen is split and one half is an “important” video and the other half is some video game play, in an effort to hold the viewers attention. Our attention spans have gotten just as bad as those in this fictional movie.
The United States in Idiocracy becomes a corporation driven hellscape. Well, do I have news for you. We didn’t have to wait 500 years for that to occur. It’s happened in our own lifetime. (Thanks a lot, Citizens United.) In Idiocracy the corporation Brawndo makes sports drinks akin to Gatorade. At a certain point the Brawndo corporation reaches stagnant year over year growth (a necessity for capitalism). They now view water as a threat to their profit margin. So, they bought the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), enabling them to do and sell anything they wanted. This is what leads to the crop shortage, as Brawndo has replaced water completely (except for in the toilets). Society has become so far removed from basic science that they nearly kill Joe as a result of removing Brawndo from the crops. The cause of the anger being that half the population worked for the company. Because it had become so large and intertwined with every day life. So, once half of their product’s use went away, then so did half the staff. And that was a lot of pissed off citizens. They wanted Joe’s head. Like, literally. They have him fight in a gladiator-esque Monday Night Rehabilitation program. We are currently living in this corporation driven hell. Corporations have purchased our government officials under the guise of campaign donations and the like. Those that say this is incorrect, that those donations do not influence the legislation the recipients pass, they’re lying to themselves. And unless somebody does something to stop this, we are hurdling toward certain irreversible disaster.
Intertwined with this corporate hell in Idiocracy is a police surveillance state that results in the criminalization of the poor. As Joe ventures out into this world he’s woken up in, he sees a woman at a Carl’s Jr. fast food machine. She’s trying to order food for herself and her kids, but is having trouble with the machine. The machine charges her account, and notifies her that she does not have the funds for the purchase. Desperate, she starts to hit the machine, trying to get the fries the machine says it distributed to her. The machine sprays her with a gas and states “This should help you calm down. Please come back when you can afford to make a purchase. 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. Carl’s Jr. Fuck you.” The whole interaction is about punishing the poor. Also, the removal of a human being to logically evaluate the situation makes me think of the current AI overtaking we are in and that’s not great, either.
Joe meets a man named Frito who tells him about a time machine that Joe thinks he can use to get back to 2005. In trying to get to that time machine, Frito’s car is shut down entirely at a stop light when a camera scans inside the car, scanning Joe’s new barcode wrist tattoo (a tattoo everybody has in the future for identification purposes). It’s the police who are after Joe for not paying his hospital bill and breaking out of jail (or, rather, breaking out of the “House of Particular Individuals”). They shut down Frito’s car battery at the light for harboring a fugitive. And, brother, if that doesn’t draw some parallels with the surveillance that is currently being created and tested by various companies for the purpose of police and military use, then I don’t know what does. Again, took twenty years.
The largest aspect Idiocracy seemed to absolutely nail is anti-intellectualism. We are currently living in a time where the average American has a 6th grade reading comprehension level. We are currently living in a time where the CDC, the FDA, the NIH are being completely torn apart; scientists and educators are losing their jobs left, right, and center and at an alarming rate. The media has taken a tone of shame when covering these stories. “Shame on those that are smarter than me” the author always seems to say. But, that’s not the way it should be. We should be listening to those that have dedicated their lives to being experts in specific subjects. We should be listening to those that are knowledgeable. Instead, we mock them. What are we doing?
Overall, the film wasn’t as bad to watch now as I was anticipating. It’s still dated by its use of “fag” and “retarded”, as most early 2000s comedy’s are. And, even then, those words have come back into the general lexicon, unfortunately, so another mark for Mike Judge. Goddammit.