Midweek Mention...Idiocracy

This is going to take some imagination because it is a very subtle movie but IDIOCRACY (2006) asks us to visualise a world  in which America is in danger of becoming a dry, polluted wasteland ruled by a crude reality tv star who cannot pronounce the word ‘nuclear’ properly, where corporations manipulate and corrupt a vulgar, angry and willfully ignorant population using a combination of fake news and pseudo-science.

Mike Judge's angry and very stupid comedy polemic has an inherently cruel and unlikeable premise which it lays out in the first two minutes, explicitly laying the blame for the dumbening down of society at the feet of the poverty stricken and working class whilst simultaneously softly advocating for eugenics as a method to make a better world. It's also bizarrely silent or even underhanded on race, with the US depicted here a post-racial society having elected a black President which seems like a progressive idea at first but contrast that with Maya Rudolph's character where the joke is "what if a black prostitute became the smartest woman in America?".
 
Safe to say this is a pretty flawed movie then, but its furiously primitive and ridiculous vision plays out less absurd and more eerily prescient given the numerous predictions about society and culture it makes which have already come to fruition, and the movie's anarchic disregard for corporatism, expressed beautifully through production design makes this worth checking out. 

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