“Ladies and gentlemen, the president of uh-merica!”
We’ve talked about Mike Judge before—and here’s another piece of his that, while not making the biggest splash on release, has since become something of a cult classic over the years. You might have seen many a piece claiming that the dire social enshittification predicted here has come true…and perhaps more recently, it feels like it might just have been on to something. It’s time to pound your ballot in with a rubber hammer with Idiocracy.
The plot is a riff on your Sleeper Awakens/Brave New World style take as we follow an unassuming US Army librarian Joe (Luke Wilson), who takes part in a cryogenics experiment meant to freeze him for just a year…however, the early seeds of the oncoming tide of stupidity are sown when a foulup has the project literally buried. And so Joe wakes up 500 years later after an avalanche of garbage knocks his cryopod into the apartment of surly schlub Frito (Dax Shepard), unleashing him into a future where even talking clearly is scorned, and where concepts like responsibility and complexity are thoroughly dead.
Alongside another 21st century human popsicle Rita (Maya Rudolph), both navigate a justice system both completely uncaring and completely ineffectual, before ending up in the highest levels of government on account of being the smartest people alive. What makes Idiocracy work as a movie is both the small touches alongside the big ones—we can see that this future society has coasted along relying mostly on drones and AI for any slightly complicated tasks, but even that automation is now deteriorating. There’s even ads plastered on every side of every screen as our glimpse of entertainment is completely unchallenging nonsense. Naturally, all of this is utterly inconceivable.
Wilson and Rudolph of course all do their job just fine as every people trying to fumble through an absurd world—but of course the show-stealer is Terry Crews as the President Camacho, who solves a rowdy congress by firing machine-guns in the air. Now Camacho might be brash, but he is seemingly still quite intelligent by the standards of his society, and actually knows when to defer to those that are in turn smarter than him. This here is, sadly, ringing less and less true.
There’s other things that you pick up on rewatches—like cops that end up shooting down airliners just to arrest a car, or TV shows that are literally just a guy getting slammed in the crotch—you may chuckle, but then you shudder and realize what that just might imply. Hell, the unrealistic part might be that said show appears to have runtimes longer than thirty seconds.
So that’s Idiocracy—it still gets a chuckle, and while it may have felt on the nose back in 2006…it turns out in the long run that’s exactly what was needed. When society starts threatening to overtake satire, that’s the ultimate vindication you can give satire…and let’s just hope we’re still not quite fully there just yet.
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