Idiocracy: An Insufficient Satire

I was disappointed

My brain has felt heavier for the last few months over all the chaotic, evil, disturbing, and downright stupid things happening as a result of the current U.S. presidential administration. I’ve turned to art for escape, and I’ve also turned to it to help me better understand the world I live in. This weekend, I was particularly yearning for a great satire, something that would be able to both give me a good laugh and also help lift my spirits a bit.

Laughter, I believe, is not enough, but it is a powerful weapon against the forces and systems that seek to cause destruction. Laughing at them proves that they have less power over us than they would wish to have.

My hunger led me to watch Idiocracy, released in 2006, directed by Mike Judge, story by Judge, screenplay by Judge & Etan Cohen. I had heard about this film first in high school, I believe, when the class was learning about dystopian fiction. In the years since, its title kept reappearing in things I’d read or in discussions I’d had. I thought it would be the right film for this moment. Indeed, it had been made during the presidency of America’s other great recent idiot, George W. Bush. And, as I got ready to write this discussion, I found the picture included above, which was taken at a Women’s March against Trump in 2017, according to Wikimedia Commons.

The title is perfect: a rule by idiots. However, the film itself fell quite short for me.

The essential plot of the film is that two average people, Joe (Luke Wilson) and Rita (Maya Rudolph) are pushed to be part of a military experiment that hopes to hibernate people for as long as necessary. The justification for this is that some skillful generals might be wasted if they serve during peacetime and aren’t saved for future crises. Joe and Rita are only meant to be asleep for one year. However, the head of the experiment is thrown in jail, and Joe and Rita are forgotten. By sheer dumb luck, they wake up again five hundred years in the future, in 2505. The United States has become an idiotic hell. Corporations own everything, and the leaders don’t know how to do anything. Brand names are plastered everywhere. Computers are in charge of running businesses and hospitals. Though they were average people in their time, Joe and Rita are the two smartest people in the world now.

There is some pleasure to be found in this film. The visuals are pretty funny in an absurd and goofy way. So many buildings wear garish neon and metallic colors. At the hospital, the computers seem to have bright colorful buttons that should be reserved for children’s toys. There’s trash everywhere. The corporations have changed their names to become crass. For example, Fuddruckers is now Buttfuckers. The most popular entertainment include a show about a man being constantly injured in his testicles and a film that is a ninety-minute close up of a farting bare ass. Court proceedings have more in common with wrestling matches, and gladiator sports have been resurrected, although this time they involve gigantic monster trucks with dildo-shaped weapons.

I have a soft spot for juvenile humor, especially when it’s this over-the-top. And, to the film’s credit, the gags and the setting feel cohesive. The world is well-realized in the sense that its aspects seem to fit together.

I also thought the performances were solid. Wilson and Rudolph are both rightfully confused by their new situation, and they develop from being on edge to making the most of their circumstances. And the supporting cast of characters from 2505 are committed to their parts. Dax Shepard is a dumb-as-a-sack-of-bricks lawyer who studied for his law degree at a Costco the size of a city. Terry Crews is the U.S. President, and he’s pretty lovable as a dumb jock who inhabits his office with the bravado of a professional wrestler.

However, what annoyed me about the film was its message. Satire, more than other genres, tends to have a direct message. That’s where part of its power comes from; it can point directly at a crisis in society. The message here didn’t sit well with me because it didn’t point at the correct culprits.

The essential thrust of the film is that intelligence should be valorized instead of dismissed, and culture is largely to blame for this. I’m always suspicious of anything that criticizes culture; culture is formed by material conditions, so any critique should be aimed squarely at said conditions. The film, however, seems to imply that individual choices primarily shape culture; the opening montage, which is meant to be funny, contrasts a high-IQ couple being reluctant to have children against a low-IQ family that has tons of kids. The film overtly says that people who are intelligent should have more children and people who aren’t shouldn’t. At worst, this seems like eugenics. If I’m being charitable, maybe the film is going for a tough-love approach that people should get their shit together. Even if that is what the film’s intentions are, I still don’t like that message because it ignores why people’s lives take certain trajectories. We are the products of our environments, which themselves are molded by systems. What good is it to tell someone to study harder if, for instance, they live somewhere where their schools are underfunded? What’s the point of telling someone to stay in school if they have to work to feed their family?

Indeed, it’s misguided and cruel to poke fun at people who are struggling and not at the sources of their crises: rampant, unrestricted capital and the politicians it bankrolls to do its bidding. If the film is concerned with the fact that people are becoming dumber, it should understand that the reason for this is because money that can be used to fund education is being spent elsewhere, while people are being bombarded with distractions and propaganda through their sources of entertainment. This isn’t an accident; an uninformed populace is much easier to take advantage of.

I thought the film would offer a more damning critique of megacorporations, through all of its visual and world-building gags. However, it seems to merely imply that the ascension of corporations was a by-product of the ascension of stupidity. A major plot point is that the crops in the U.S. are dying because Brawndo, a sports drink company, bought the FDA and HHS a few centuries earlier and replaced water everywhere with its sports drink. This didn’t come off as a critique of how corporations have too much influence on government because the film explains that stupidity was on the rise already when Brawndo took over.

I think good satire should critique the powerful. And this film doesn’t do that at all; it merely pokes fun at the people who are at the mercy of various systems. I understand that this film is a product of the Bush era, and I think Idiocracy is an apt name for that administration as well. Yet, if the film is concerned with how people came to elect Bush, it should not ignore the special interest groups backed by rich people that have felt emboldened since Reagan to dismantle social safety nets and to undermine equality in this country. It should not ignore the propaganda systems that these interest groups have funded. It should not ignore the billionaire donors that sway members of both parties to enact policies that benefit the rich at the expense of public goods.

If this film was aiming to be just a goofy comedy, then it need not be as concerned with all these facts. However, it seems to want to say something important through its goofiness and absurdity. In that, it misses the mark. Which bums me out, because if there was even some gesture toward the actual culprits that give rise to a real “idiocracy,” I would have appreciated it much more.