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Life Arts    H4'ed 6/9/11

Idiocracy (2006), Re-Visited

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I suppose that's just life imitating art imitating life when the satire actually proves the point.  But ouch.  The film should have been seen by a lot more people who really need to understand and absorb the main messages of the narrative.

So what is Mike Judge saying?

Evolution has shifted such that stupid people breed like rabbits, and the smarter ones tend not to.  Long term trending in this direction produces a stupid society which will eventually collapse under its own weight: pretty straightforward line of reasoning.  With corporate domination and a culture of convenience, regular people find it easier to just go along and get along, subsisting on junk food and entertainment.  This is scary close to current reality for an ever-increasing chunk of the populace.

Private Joe Bauer ends up being the guy who traverses both worlds, our world today -- in which he is complicit, just getting by -- and the world of the future where everything has gone to its logical destructive conclusion.

The future American people are reduced to drooling cretins consumed with base instincts, convenience, entertainment, mockery and fear of anything new.  Rigid blinders have become the norm as the inhabitants stumble around seeking to satisfy their needs and urges without having to think.  Thought has become an anachronism.  Mindlessness has ascended and is now the status quo.

The consumer / customer service culture has worked out the necessities of life into options as on a plastic menu.  You get a few button choices to push in each area of your life, and that's it.  Why would you want more?

Just as individuals seek only convenience and refuse to think so does the society at large, at all levels.

Enter Joe Bauer, and his companion, the prostitute / time-traveling guinea pig Rita.  Joe is discovered to be the most intelligent man alive in America in the 26th century.

The government -- helmed hilariously by President Camacho -- assigns Joe one week to solve all the problems that exist.  Since he's the smartest man in the world, it's a no-brainer, no?

The confused rabble look to the new leader to save them.  They seek the quick fix, the solution that requires no sacrifice on their part.

Joe wants only to get to a time machine, which can transport him back to our time.  He then actually does solve their crop problem, but in so doing he disrupts the status quo.  His act of saving the crops throws the entire society into chaos and free fall.  The mobs riot and call for Joe's head.

Interestingly, Joe's only crime was solving the famine issue by removing a malevolent corporation from of the equation, and substituting actual water for their defective crop irrigation product.

When Joe fails to get the crops growing fast enough their entire world turns on him in an instant.  If he will not save them with the quick painless fix then they'll just kill him for sport in a gladiatorial setting.  It's all very fall of the Roman Empire in a blaze of mindless carnage -- monster truck murder as Rome burns.

Judge makes many observations about the failures of government, of democracy, of corporate influence on society, and ultimately of us and our own place in the scheme of an unsustainable system.

Judge does not let the public off the hook.  The Idiocracy after all gives them everything they want and more.  This is in evidence today: the junk food, the mindless TV, the meaningless sex and violence and the waste.  The genius of Idiocracy is giving it all to us and then showing us where it may lead, and doing it all in an extremely funny fashion.

Why are sports players and pop singers worshiped, while scientists are simply treated as employees, their discoveries and inventions taken and owned by their corporate masters?

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Joe Giambrone is an American author, freelance writer and filmmaker. Non-fiction works appear at International Policy Digest, WhoWhatWhy, Foreign Policy Journal, Counterpunch, Globalresearch, , OpedNews, High Times and other online outlets. His science fiction thriller Transfixion and his Hollywood satire (more...)
 
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