Entertainment
How A Raunchy, R-Rated Sci-Fi Comedy Warned Us About Everything We’re Currently Living Through
By Jennifer Asencio
| Updated
Mike Judge brought us the animated sitcoms Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, which were full of sharp social commentary interwoven with cutting humor. He also wrote and directed feature films like the meme-laden Office Space and the sci-fi comedy Idiocracy. The latter predicted a future that seems like it’s already here.
Luke Wilson plays Joe, a fiercely average enlistee in the US Army who was hoping that he could pass his tenure in a lonely library, away from other people. However, the Army has other plans: they enlist him as a test subject for a top-secret project meant to freeze soldiers in time, to be awakened when needed. Also enlisted is Rita, a prostitute played by Maya Rudolph who has drawn the eye of the project director. The project is forgotten while they are asleep.
The project works extremely well, and Joe wakes up in 2505. The world has drastically changed and is facing a series of catastrophic challenges like famine and drought. Everything is automated and everyone seems to be pretty dumb. Joe finds out that he’s the smartest man in the world when run-ins with the law force him through an intelligence test.
He gets recruited by the President, Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Comacho (played to extremes by Terry Crews), to solve the famine or else he will wind up in jail in this terrible place forever. With the aid of Rita and contemporary local Frito Pendejo (a dumbed-down Dax Shepard), Joe strives to save the world so he can stay out of jail long enough to return himself and Rita to the 21st century.
Brought To You By The Creators Of Ass, And Ow, My Balls!
In Idiocracy, intelligence is seen as a disability, much like learning disabilities are viewed today. The number one TV show is called Ow, My Balls, and its single gag is that its lead repeatedly receives blows to the groin. The number one movie is called Ass, and it is a feature film that is entirely a farting butt. Justice, both the courtroom and the “House of Representin’,” is televised and sensationalized. Everyone’s clothes, no matter how simple, are covered in logos.
The world is controlled by the corporation Brawndo, whose main product is an electrolyte beverage that has replaced water. Everything is so automated that there is no way to reach a human, and nobody is smart enough to do anything about it.
If all of this sounds oddly prescient, well, it is. Anyone who has had to deal with automated customer service these days knows about the frustrating string of endless automated replies that never address the problem and are full of vague platitudes. This has largely occurred as our corporations increasingly turn to AI to cut costs, creating an amazing amount of enshittification, or the decay of a product over time as it draws more customers.
Over time, customers come to actually expect less quality, which is why some of us can remember when McDonald’s tasted good and a party there was the coolest thing in the world, while now it’s not even food anymore. And if you’ve ever had to troubleshoot or submit a ticket on X, you know a human has likely never seen it.
A Future We’re Already Living
Entertainment is growing more and more mindless these days as companies attempt to check inclusivity boxes rather than tell stories. Although the FCC is not owned by a corporation like Brawndo, the fact is that entertainment has narrowed to reflect only a certain point of view, and this emphasis has reduced the quality of the stories we are being told in all our media, from books to video games to TV and movies.
Lots of people are allowing themselves to be satisfied with Ass on their streaming services, TV screens, and especially our phones. With the equivalent Ass and Ow, My Balls readily available no matter where we are (as long as there’s a WiFi or cell signal), the ethernet has been inundated with meaningless content that just plays on automatic all the time. It becomes not only what we get used to consuming, but also background noise that never ends with autoplay.
He Warned Us, But We Didn’t Listen
To top it off, many popular franchises are being turned into almost two hours of nothing but a farting butt, for all what has been produced of them has been worth. This is just more enshittification, but applied to entertainment, which is just another product.
In Idiocracy, judgment and justice are meted out mostly through the court of public opinion rather than facts and legal proceedings. This starts out in the local courthouse, presided over by famous Mike Judge collaborator Stephen Root, and escalates all the way to President Machado’s speeches, filled with wrestling shouts, automatic gunfire, and cheering fans.
The world Mike Judge posits in Idiocracy is full of very stupid people who were selected by nature as they bred faster than smart people. Frito and his peers are so dumb that they’re easily distracted, drawn to sensationalism like moths to flame, and unable to solve even basic problems. Intellect is something pitied in this world, something that seems true today as colleges become degree mills and merit has been replaced by having the “correct” opinions. This has served to have the same effect as Judge’s centuries of natural selection, as people have been mesmerized by commentary from people more interested in remaining relevant than telling the truth.
Idiocracy is absurdist, almost a cartoon, running its premise to its most ridiculous conclusions, but that’s the point. It’s not meant to be an image of today but a warning of what might come. It was made in 2006, before a lot of the conventions it lampoons became culture and everyday life, so Mike Judge did not yet have to deal with endless phone menus and the degree to which almost every product in our daily lives has decayed. But it’s clear he knew it was coming, as this piercing comedy film shows through biting satire and fantastic attention to the world it created.
Idiocracy is streaming on Hulu. Watch it instead of yet more Ass.