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Most of the Mike Judge oeuvre is what :thinky-felix: called “Irridescent media” in that the vantage point of the viewer drastically changes the content. A reactionary would obviously see idiocracy as “Eugenics good.” A lib would see it as an ode to the “adults in the room,” but a leftist could certainly see it as a call for radical change in things like environmental, health, education and agriculture policy.
Idiocracy always had a weird eugenics undertone to me. That undesirable people will out procreate desirable ones. I feel people misunderstand the message of the film. They come away thinking the idea we need to fix people, not systems that which people find themselves. I know it's all for laughs, but I think a lot of people who watched that and just thought the problem was individual acting “poorly” rather that the MEGACORPs/Systems that control everything. These systems limit individuals' agility to act (let alone act “well”). Worse yet, these systems can even reward “dumb” behavior or whatever. I felt its critique was of “dumb people” not of the systems that create and refuse to take care of those “dumb people” and also create cultures around them. It made fun of consumers rather than consumerism. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it seemed ill-spirited, or at least misguided. The lack of structural critique makes it feel a bit icky.
It's not even really an undertone, since the opening is literally saying "smart people don't have enough kids and dumb hillbilly yokels have too many kids"
The eugenics angle pushed at the start of the movie is incredibly unfortunate because truly the problem is not breeding but culture. Anti-intellectualism permeates American culture and politics, and is pushed just as vociferously by Harvard and Yale legacy students as it is by hillbillies in trailer parks. It will be hard enough to keep the populous mentally stimulated in a push button automated world under removedSC, but it will be nigh impossible under a financialized, service-based capitalism were people got to be made dumb enough to continue falling for scams like credit default swaps, health insurance, and NFTs.
What the movie fails to account for is how fucking stupid rich and “successful” people can often be
Isn't that exactly who guys like President Camacho and his staff parody? The rich and successful people are all just cultural icons rather than geniuses or exceptionally hard workers.
Bill Gates would "step aside" then set up a non-profit foundation to continue growing his wealth while slowly enacting his eugenicist agenda across the African continent
Idiocracy always had a weird eugenics undertone to me. That undesirable people will out procreate desirable ones.
That's the face-value pitch. American troglodytes keep breeding while the "good" people self-select into oblivion.
But I'd argue a funnier reading is that liberal intelligentsia produces sexless weirdos and losers more concerned with personal vanity and careerism than building a future they might actually want to live in. The run into a hereditary dead end as the American consumer culturalism they seek to master basically kills their libidos.
The David Duchovny movie "Evolution" handles this issue a bit more gracefully, as the things rapidly breeding and spreading are alien lifeforms rather than American chuds. The climax of the movie has the protagonists fighting a fifty foot tall alien amoeba. Duchovny's character bemoans how evolution doesn't favor any particular trait beyond habitat suitability and muses how sometimes the simplest organisms are the best positioned to thrive.
King of the Hill can be a similar experience at times, Idiocracy is just more overt. I get the feeling Judge was trying to "both sides" a lot of the issues his characters face and make fun of everything and everyone involved.
I think it's a matter of degree. Some stories are harder to mistake. People will still do it, but a larger chunk of chuds might just recognize what something is, and simply hate it
Like, the movie is very clearly hyper-critical of a host of early 2000s-era American cultural touchstones, from conservative hyper-nationalists hero worshiping the police state to liberal technocrats unquestioningly deferring everything to "experts". Its told from an outsider perspective by way of "time travel", and the eugenics bit is just to get you to the premise of the show.
The story is basically just a revamped Gulliver's Travels. But in setting up the outsider perspective of a basic bitch white American loser, its real failure is in being myopically Western-centric. There's never a consideration that life outside America could possibly be better off than the dystopian nightmare the protagonist finds himself in.
I'd say that's the real sin. For all Judge's critique of American culture as trashy, violent, navel-gazing self-destruction, he can't see outside the fucking DC Beltway.
Most of the Mike Judge oeuvre is what :thinky-felix: called “Irridescent media” in that the vantage point of the viewer drastically changes the content. A reactionary would obviously see idiocracy as “Eugenics good.” A lib would see it as an ode to the “adults in the room,” but a leftist could certainly see it as a call for radical change in things like environmental, health, education and agriculture policy.
Idiocracy always had a weird eugenics undertone to me. That undesirable people will out procreate desirable ones. I feel people misunderstand the message of the film. They come away thinking the idea we need to fix people, not systems that which people find themselves. I know it's all for laughs, but I think a lot of people who watched that and just thought the problem was individual acting “poorly” rather that the MEGACORPs/Systems that control everything. These systems limit individuals' agility to act (let alone act “well”). Worse yet, these systems can even reward “dumb” behavior or whatever. I felt its critique was of “dumb people” not of the systems that create and refuse to take care of those “dumb people” and also create cultures around them. It made fun of consumers rather than consumerism. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it seemed ill-spirited, or at least misguided. The lack of structural critique makes it feel a bit icky.
It's not even really an undertone, since the opening is literally saying "smart people don't have enough kids and dumb hillbilly yokels have too many kids"
An overtone, one could say.
It's at least a tone
Superliminal
The eugenics angle pushed at the start of the movie is incredibly unfortunate because truly the problem is not breeding but culture. Anti-intellectualism permeates American culture and politics, and is pushed just as vociferously by Harvard and Yale legacy students as it is by hillbillies in trailer parks. It will be hard enough to keep the populous mentally stimulated in a push button automated world under removedSC, but it will be nigh impossible under a financialized, service-based capitalism were people got to be made dumb enough to continue falling for scams like credit default swaps, health insurance, and NFTs.
plus America keeps cutting education budgets
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Isn't that exactly who guys like President Camacho and his staff parody? The rich and successful people are all just cultural icons rather than geniuses or exceptionally hard workers.
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Karl Albrecht, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates less so. Not all these rich fucks are Musk.
Those people have egos just as big if not bigger than musk. It's just that their not trying to be zoomer shit posters as an adult
Bill Gates would "step aside" then set up a non-profit foundation to continue growing his wealth while slowly enacting his eugenicist agenda across the African continent
That's the face-value pitch. American troglodytes keep breeding while the "good" people self-select into oblivion.
But I'd argue a funnier reading is that liberal intelligentsia produces sexless weirdos and losers more concerned with personal vanity and careerism than building a future they might actually want to live in. The run into a hereditary dead end as the American consumer culturalism they seek to master basically kills their libidos.
The David Duchovny movie "Evolution" handles this issue a bit more gracefully, as the things rapidly breeding and spreading are alien lifeforms rather than American chuds. The climax of the movie has the protagonists fighting a fifty foot tall alien amoeba. Duchovny's character bemoans how evolution doesn't favor any particular trait beyond habitat suitability and muses how sometimes the simplest organisms are the best positioned to thrive.
King of the Hill can be a similar experience at times, Idiocracy is just more overt. I get the feeling Judge was trying to "both sides" a lot of the issues his characters face and make fun of everything and everyone involved.
This is so dumb it's melting my brain. That's literally all stories.
Basically anything that's not a polemic anyway
I think it's a matter of degree. Some stories are harder to mistake. People will still do it, but a larger chunk of chuds might just recognize what something is, and simply hate it
Like, the movie is very clearly hyper-critical of a host of early 2000s-era American cultural touchstones, from conservative hyper-nationalists hero worshiping the police state to liberal technocrats unquestioningly deferring everything to "experts". Its told from an outsider perspective by way of "time travel", and the eugenics bit is just to get you to the premise of the show.
The story is basically just a revamped Gulliver's Travels. But in setting up the outsider perspective of a basic bitch white American loser, its real failure is in being myopically Western-centric. There's never a consideration that life outside America could possibly be better off than the dystopian nightmare the protagonist finds himself in.
I'd say that's the real sin. For all Judge's critique of American culture as trashy, violent, navel-gazing self-destruction, he can't see outside the fucking DC Beltway.
"don't look up" was basically the "idiocracy" of last year
That's a good term, I'm gonna use that.
i keep forgetting what that word means. someone give me a mnemonic i can remember it by
“Body of work” or “body oeuvre work”