Pledging Allegiance to Carl's Jr.

Luke Wilson cryogenically frozen for 500 years, awaking to an America where he is the smartest inhabitant. The movie the Man doesn't want you to see (and I haven't yet, needless to say Office Space is a high bar to hurdle), making a limited city run as of this week. From LA Times via Arthur (where theaters showing are posted):

What does Mike Judge have to do to get a movie released and marketed? He could stop making satires as merciless and spot-on as this one, for one thing. His second film in seven years, "Idiocracy," was completed nearly two years ago and dumped on Friday, reviewless and unmarketed, in six markets not including New York and San Francisco. (Because who could possibly be interested in the long-awaited movie by the director of "Office Space" there?) It's this sort of vote of no-confidence that gets people wondering — just how bad could it be? Which raises the issue of what "bad" means to the studio that unleashed "Date Movie" and "Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties" on an unsuspecting populace.

Judge has a gift for delivering brutal satire in the trappings of low comedy and for making heroes out of ordinary people whose humanity makes them suspect in a world where every inch of space, including mental, is mediated. The movie would be worth seeing for its skewering of the health system alone — in the future, hospitals will resemble a cross between a chain auto-diagnostic center and a Carl's Jr., powered by Help Me technology — even if its opening thesis on the moment in history (roughly now) that evolution tipped into devolution weren't so clear-eyed.

"Idiocracy" is Judge's pitch-black, bleakly hilarious vision of an American future so bespoiled by rapacious corporations and so dumbed-down by junk culture that the president of the United States is a three-time "Smackdown!" champion and former super porn-star. The movie begins with a comparison of two family trees. A high-IQ couple waits for the perfect time to have a child, a decision they don't take lightly, while elsewhere, in the trailer park, the dim bulbs breed like rabbits. The high-IQ couple waits too long, the husband dies of stress during fertility treatments, and their line stops there. Meanwhile, the moron population explodes.

Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson), however, is not actually a moron. He's an average, unambitious, essentially lazy guy biding his time in the Army until he can collect his pension. It's his perfect averageness (that and his dead parents and no siblings or wife) that make him the perfect candidate for an Army experiment in cryogenics. The idea is to freeze the best soldiers for thawing at a later date, when they're really needed. Joe is chosen as the guinea pig, and because the Army can't find a servicewoman to meet the same criteria, they freeze a hooker named Rita (Maya Rudolph) alongside him.

The experiment is meant to last a year, but in that time the base shuts down, is replaced by a Fuddruckers, and Joe and Rita are forgotten for more than 500 years. Meanwhile, humanity devolves to the point where it can't take care of its basic needs, like dealing with garbage or growing crops, and when Joe and Rita find themselves unearthed during the great garbage avalanche of 2505, they discover to their great surprise that they are the smartest people on Earth.

An IQ and aptitude test he takes in prison (non-payment of his hospital bill) gets Joe taken to the White House, where President Camacho (Terry Alan Crews) makes him secretary of the Interior and entrusts him to fix all the problems. But Joe is focused on getting home and enlists his incompetent lawyer and stupid friend, Frito Lexus (Dax Shepard), with leading him, and Rita, to a time machine.

The plot, naturally, is silly and not exactly bound by logic. But it's Judge's gimlet-eyed knack for nightmarish extrapolation that makes "Idiocracy" a cathartic delight.

In the future, Fuddruckers will become Buckrudders — and then finally just come and say what it's been longing to say for years. (It will remain, however, a popular destination for children's birthday parties.) Carl's Jr. will adopt as its motto, "Fuck You, I'm Eating." The phone company will have merged with several media companies, the U.S. government and, of course, Carl's Jr. Costco will house one of the nation's top law schools. (It will also have warehouses roughly the size of Connecticut.) The streets will resemble Universal CityWalk in bad decline.

And the No. 1 movie in America is called "Ass".

Comments

[J.R.]

Judge must have pissed in somebody's Wheaties at FOX, because they really hate his movies. This guy needs a supportive studio. A friend of mine in LA says they released the film with the title "Untitled Mike Judge Film". Catchy.

[Richard]

Sounds like "The Marching Morons" by Cyril Kornbluth....

Richard

[norelpref]

Well we don't want to see any movie trump "Snakes on a Plane" (that's "Mother******* Snakes on a Mother******* Plane). Or You Me and Dupree. Or the latest SNL alumnus generated piece of shit. We don't need to go 500 years into the future for "idiocracy"; we there now, dawg.

[bartelby]

Hi,
There was a book published back in 1978 titled I.Q. 83. Written by the author who also wrote The Swarm and some other bio-disaster fare.
It's about a germ warfare experiment that escapes into the environment. Basically a disease that makes people stupid is unleashed in the U.S. It's not a particularly good book but I used to read it in the bookstore stockroom when I was supposed to be working. I found the premise really creepy. Doctors work feverishly on a cure as they become measurably stupider by the day. In the end the U.S. is quarantined.

I work with tourists at my weekend job, and while I've kind of gotten over my frustration with people hailing from parts of the country where stupidity is considered a sign of honesty, I still from time to time get within a hairsbreadth of telling them "Next time, please go to Branson."

[Midget Master]

Hahaha this says a lot about our country. (For the record, there are some good parts of Branson!)

If you are looking for other funny pictures, you might want to check out www.allaboutmidgets.typepad.com The site is all about midgets.

Yee haw!

[Listener T.]

David Herman (Office Space's Michael Bolton), who plays the Secretary of State in "Idiocracy", is a friend of mine and he told me that had he not been having dinner with Mike Judge about a week prior to the film's opening he would have been entirely aware of its release. He said that a trailer was never approved and that the studio was apparently doing everything it could to squelch the film. I can also confirm that the only way to get show times on Moviephone was to know that the film was listed as "Untitled Mike Judge Comedy".
I saw the movie this weekend and, while uneven, there are some tremendously funny parts and some very trenchant satire. Go see it if you happen to be in one of the six (SIX!?!?!) cities in which the movie is playing.
(Brought to you by Carls Jr.: Fuck You- I'm Eating!)

[bartelby]

I will probably not be seeing this film until it is available on DVD. I think though that the way people play fast and loose with evolution is disturbing. A better example might be "The Darwin Awards" which combine schadenfreude with a wistful longing for eugenics. These are 2 things perhaps best kept on non-adjacent shelves. The recent drop in SAT scores is unlikely genetic in origin and probably reflects the kind of priority education, and for that matter empirical truth, is given these days (A Million Little Pieces anyone?).
I'm taller than both my parents, both of whom are taller than both their parents. That is not evolution, it is a combination of diet and advances in health care. You will not see the results of human evolution in your lifetime. 500 years ago mass literacy and numeracy were unheard of. That you can read and compute numbers is not a result of evolution in the intervening years. There are probably some changes in human beings over 500 years that can be chalked up to evolution. Exactly what those are I am unsure. An enthusiasm for professional wrestling is likely not among them.
Stupidity is a choice.

[K.]

What an intriguing backstory!

At first, when I read about the film here, I felt _compelled_ to see it in the theatres ( given that I see a movie in the theatre about once every 3 years that's something ). I thought, "What a remarkable word of mouth ad campaign."

Then, the more I read about the content of the film, the more I began to wonder if Fox wasn't in fact actually afraid of this film. Given that their entire business model is predicated on selling junk to idiots, it's not hard to imagine them wanting to distance themselves from a film like "Idiocracy". Rushing to bite the hand that feeds, and all...

It's worth consider the fact that from a business perspective, what Fox is doing makes some sense. After all, it's fair to say that only a small percentage of the population is going to find this movie good. So why promote it, it's just money down the drain. I'm sure they're contractually obligated to Judge to do a theatrical release, and so they did.

Finally, it's remarkable to me that it is still possible to produce art which is genuinely shocking and disturbing to people. And I think this is. The movie seems so crass and direct in it's criticism, that even your average American is going recognize that they are being skewered. What a remarkable achievement.

BTW, is there a better candidate for bootlegging and backdoor distribution over BitTorrent? If Fox wants to treat the movie as a pariah, shouldn't we return the favor?

[King Hubbert]

In movie #1 TV sho cawld Ow My Balls.
I laff becuz it trew! Fo Shizzle.

[Lanier]

bartleby, your points about certain trends being misattributed to evolution are well-made, but I have a few quarrels.

first, i haven't seen the movie, and i'm not entirely sure from the description - is judge actually saying that it's evolution that causes the regression over 500 years? The reviewer used the world 'devolve,' but i'm unclear if that's meant to be take literally. maybe judge is talking about exactly the sort of culture factors your describing - if people who choose to be 'stupid' breed more children, they're likely to indoctrinate their children similarly and perpetuate a growing cycle.

second, SAT scores aren't declining. in fact, while the average verbal score from 1981 to 2002 remained the same (the math score increased), all ethnic groups actually improved their averages during that time period. here an article explaining how that's possible and giving the relevant numbers: http://www.america-tomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA/EDDRA30.htm

here's the most recent data directly from the college board: http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/news_info/cbsenior/yr2006/national-report.pdf

it looks like they may have slightly altered their formula for relating the older scoring system to the current system causing bracey's 1981 numbers to be slightly off - but the general principle holds.

[The Imperious Dork]

Well, actually, there are some typos I've noticed. It's "Buttfuckers." And Frito's last name's "Pendejo." And "Lexus" is the doctor.

But hey, Idiocracy's fun. Actually.

In the words of the Costco greeter, "Welcome to Costco. I LOVE YOU." And the prosecutor, "Peace."