Back in 2006, Mike Judge, the man who gave us the immortal Beavis
and Butthead as well as “King of the Hill” and a more recent and
less distinguished TV show whose name I have momentarily
forgotten, directed a total flopperoo of a movie called
Idiocracy that made less than half a million dollars at
the box office after a limited release on 130 screens. The idea
behind this futuristic fantasy was that contemporary American
culture had already set us on course to be, in about 500 years’
time, a race of morons. Mr. Judge’s narrator in that film told us
that,
as the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning
point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest,
the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than
the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits
of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science
fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized
and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be
heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this
happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.
With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply
reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent
to become an endangered species.
It was an often if not uniformly amusing film in which an average
couple from our own time (Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph) were
cryogenically frozen and woke up in a world where the ruling
classes were, like everyone else, so stupid that the
time-travelers were considered geniuses by comparison.
Admirers of Mr. Judge’s cult classic, Office
Space, will recognize the scenario of the attractive
couple who inhabit an otherwise deserted island of sense in a
vast sea of nonsense, stupidity and vicious self-seeking. Though
not so much fun as Office Space, Idiocracy
deserved to do better than it did, and Manohla Dargis
theorized about the reason for its failure in reviewing Mr.
Judge’s new film, Extract, for the New York
Times. She thought that the earlier one had flopped because
20th Century Fox, which released it, was miffed about alleged
satirical swipes at its corporate stable-mate, the Fox television
network, and some of its advertisers. Not that she liked that
movie much better than she liked this one.
I would suggest another possibility. Two of the features of the
cognitive élite who dominate our culture now are an uncritical
belief in “progress” (which is why they call themselves
“progressives”) and a lack of imagination. Indeed, the one
follows from the other. To today’s braniacs, a future world in
which they are not in charge, having put right all our world’s
wrongs, is almost inconceivable. That’s why, even though
Idiocracy all but invited them to identify themselves
with Mr. Wilson and Miss Rudolph and the alleged morons of the
future with those of the present who were supposed to have
elected George W. Bush, they shunned it. Call it a failure of
self-knowledge on the part of the progressives who, apart from
teenagers, are almost the only movie-goers left in America today.
One of the most amusing features of Mr. Judge’s last utopian
fancy was the idea that the most popular program on television in
2505 would be “Ow! My Balls!” — a “reality” show consisting of
nothing but slacker dudes howling in pain as they suffer from the
sorts of accidents, presumably staged for the cameras, that the
title suggests. But the new film, which on its opening weekend
made 12 times as much money as Idiocracy did during the
whole of its brief run (though on 12 times as many screens), may
owe at least some of its success by a similar resort to bad
taste. For not only is it once again about a normally intelligent
couple who are surrounded by fools and knaves, it also revolves
around an incident of testicular trauma. If you can’t beat ‘em,
join ‘em, I guess.
When the half-witted “Step” (Clifton Collins Jr.), an employee of
a plant that manufactures flavor extract, “suffers mid-body
injury” (in the words of the local newspaper) as a result of the
incompetence of his co-workers — although this is scarcely
greater than his own — he decides to sue his employer with the
help of a shyster lawyer, played by Gene Simmons of Kiss, and
sexy Cindy (Mila Kunis), a hustler and thief who gets a job at
the plant. “Hot girls need jobs too,” the boss, Joel (Jason
Bateman), explains.
“Do they?” says his assistant doubtfully.
Cindy pretends to be Step’s girlfriend while simultaneously
trying to seduce the boss. One or the other seems likely to be
her victim — whichever is stupider. One difference between this
movie and Office Space is that the boss is now the hero,
the employees the idiots, instead of the other way around. It’s
not a formula calculated to appeal to Miss Dargis or other
progressives, I fancy, but it makes for a refreshing change.
What this movie and Office Space have in common,
however, is that Mr. Judge has once again allowed himself to be
sidetracked by a plot that has little or nothing to do with the
comic scenario he has constructed out of the extract plant and
its more or less idiotic employees. In the earlier case it was a
heist caper; in this it is Joel’s improbable (to say the least)
hiring of a moronic gigolo (Dustin Milligan) to seduce his wife
(Kristen Wiig), who has been “not in the mood” for some months
past, so that he can nail Cindy without guilt. The stupidity and
bad taste of this plot, cooked up under the influence of drugs
with the help of another mental defective, a bartender played by
Ben Affleck, almost makes us long for an episode of “Ow! My
balls!”
What, in any case, Joel’s marital difficulties have to do with
anything else in the movie — including yet another idiot (David
Koechner), a neighbor who is a bore and incapable of taking a
hint — let alone with Step and Cindy’s plot which, with the
connivance of the law and the culture of stupidity, threatens to
cost him his livelihood, it is far from clear. It’s nice to know
that Mr. Judge is unafraid to expose stupidity wherever he finds
it, even when it is not among capitalists, managers, politicians,
his own descendants or the ruling classes, but his attention span
appears to be hardly more capacious than Step’s. As in all his
movies, however, and most of his TV shows, there are a number of
good jokes.
