Devolution
Being out of the country I missed the eye of the Celebrity Big Brother racism/bullying storm, but arrived home in time to feel the weakening force of its tail end. (And when I say “missed” I use the verb in the sense of “fail to be present at or for” rather than “regret the absence or loss of”. Just to be clear.)
It was therefore apposite that I first saw 2006’s Best (And Certainly Funniest) Film You Didn’t Hear About in the week after the British media (if not, perhaps, the British public) appeared finally to rumble that many of our Warhol-esque “celebrities” are simply pig ignorant, talentless halfwits and that many of the reality TV programmes that made them famous use conflict and human pain as the blunt instruments through which “entertainment” is extracted when none would otherwise exist.
In this movie, the top rated television show is the Violence Channel’s Ow! My Balls!, hospital waiting room reading matter includes magazines entitled Hot Naked Chicks and World Report, the Fox News Channel’s anchors are sensationalistic, bare-chested bodybuilders and strippers and the year’s highest-grossing film, entitled Ass, is just that: 90 minutes of a bloke’s silent, motionless, naked arse cheeks onscreen – and it won the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Screenplay.
The American President is a retired WWE wrestler; a burger chain pays his Cabinet members every time they utter “brought to you by Carl’s, Jr.” Water has been replaced everywhere but in toilet bowls by a Gatorade-style, luminous green sports drink after its parent corporation purchased the Department of Commerce. Costco stores the size of cities – complete with a door greeter who drones, “Welcome to Costco, I love you,” at all who enter – have aisles that stretch for “hours” and a “Starbucks latte” means something very different from what you might think.
The English language has regressed to a series of grunts, “a hybrid of hillbilly, Valley Girl and inner-city slang”. Shantytowns of sub-Bill and Ted dopes are anaesthetised by their plasma screens, slumped on Lay-Zee-Boys with integrated toilets, constantly feeding themselves processed junk via tubes.
This is the 26th century according to the movie Idiocracy (the second film directed and co-written by Mike Judge, creator of TV’s ridiculous Beavis And Butthead and sublime King Of The Hill) – “a dipshit dystopia where corporate mendacity and consumer apathy have merged in apocalyptic symbiosis.”
Interestingly, Judge is part of an Austin, Texas-based troika of directors – along with Richard Linklater (the DVD of whose wonderful A Scanner Darkly also plopped through my letterbox this week) and Robert Rodriguez (whose imminent Sin City follow-up may be the first of the sequel genre I have genuinely anticipated) – producing bold and intelligent, creative and spirited movies that at least equal anything else coming out of the States.
Like Judge’s directorial debut – the transcendent Office Space – Idiocracy had an unhappy cinematic release. Its studio (20th Century Fox) sat on the film for over a year – perhaps out of corporate spite for its ridicule of Fox News? – before releasing it last autumn in a handful of cinemas in a handful of mid-Western America cities without previews, advertising or promotional activity. It naturally took peanuts at the box office and disappeared without trace in a matter of days. It has now been released on DVD (albeit in a shoddy package produced with such a lack of care that would make even Russell Brand blanch) where, like Office Space before, it is much more likely to find an audience.
The premise is simple, and hardly original. A soldier (Luke Wilson) and a prostitute (Maya Rudolph) are strong armed into participating in a military hibernation experiment intended to last a year. Events mean they are forgotten, to emerge, blinking, from their pods 500 years later into a world where rubbish is piled into fifty-storey tall towers, corporations have wholly subsumed society, people are named after brands and nobody eats anything but junk. So far, so Woody Allen’s Sleeper – among others.
Evolution of the human species, however, ended centuries ago: the current day trend of ill-educated, trailer trash morons reproducing with abandon while the “professional” classes delay breeding for so long that it never happens results in a population of sex-obsessed, illiterate, imbeciles without the wherewithal to make crops grow. Thanks to cryogenics, Wilson and Rudolph, the very epitome of 2005 human mediocrity, find themselves the world’s smartest people in 2505. By turns mocked by the masses for speaking so “faggy” and begged to solve the world’s problems, Wilson and Rudolph just want to go home.
While there are plenty of great sight gags and some genuine laugh-out-loud moments, this is nevertheless one angry movie. Where Judge once churned out puerility for Beavis and Butthead, he now turns the tables on the audience – ‘laugh at this shit now and repent at leisure; you can only dumb-down so far until there is nothing left but dumb and nothing left to do but celebrate dumbness’.
On one level (sadly possibly the only one the average Hollywood studio can comprehend) insulting one’s audience understandably rarely makes cash registers ring. Judge *is* calling America stoopid. But Judge knows that much of America is *so* stoopid that it won’t understand it is being insulted – the rednecks being ridiculed won’t watch this movie so much as look at the pretty colours and flashing lights and laugh at the fart and dick jokes.
This is at times razor-sharp social satire, dissecting the themes that imbue all of Judge’s post-B&B output: class (a form of discrimination that remains alive and well in 2007 Britain but is, if anything, more overt, more invidious and more poisonous in the United States), masculinity and human intelligence. Wilson’s character, in many ways, is Hank Hill made flesh, demonstrating that traditional values are traditional values for the same valid reason that clichés are clichés – because they are truisms.
This theatrical cut of Idiocracy weighs in at just 84 minutes, almost certainly a result of cuts demanded by nervous studio lawyers and angry executives: one feels a rather more substantial offering was in Judge’s mind than this ‘abridged version’ – and still perhaps lies on some digital editing suite floor. The DVD’s “extras” amount to no more than a couple of deleted scenes.
Ironically, this movie – like Office Space before – is a better DVD than it ever could be a big screen movie: like the best of the Abraham/Zucker comedies, Idiocracy has more laughs in its background (road signs, advertising boards, overheard snippets of conversation) than the average Hollywood comedy has in its script and therefore withstands repeated viewings even in this bastardised form.
If Idiocracy garners just a quarter of Office Space’s word of mouth, Fox may even eventually succumb to the lure of the dollar and release this movie to DVD with the respect it, its director and his audience deserve.