> I used part of the LBO list's downtime productively by watching
> Mike Judge's
> "Idiocracy," a film that was long held prisoner by 20th Century Fox
> and has
> now escaped to DVD. This is the greatest dystopian movie since Terry
> Gilliam's "Brazil." It makes "Mad Max" look like "Brigadoon."
[WS:] One thing that I really like about this list is the recommendations for further reading or viewing. I took a lot of such cues - even from people with whom I otherwise disagree. One benefit of such recommendations is that they keep me reading, while the content itself would make me stop by page 20, and discover something valuable buried in the middle. For example, not long ago I bought a book _Inside the Mouse_ that someone on this list recommended, and after struggling with pages and pages of pomo hot air, which would normally be a sufficient reason to toss the book into a recycle bin, I discovered a decent chapter on labor relations in the Disney empire, buried on page 100 or so.
The same can be said about "Idiocracy." It is unlikely that I would pick that DVD without Carl's recommendation. The superficial impression created by its trailer is that of a cinematic fart joke - not exactly my cup of tea. However, I did see the film and I quite liked it. It is a "Dumb-and-Dumber" style of comedy - to be sure - but with a clear cut political twist, which makes quite an interesting mix. Turning the idiocy of pop-culture against itself is quite clever indeed, a sort of poetic justice if you will.
However, the film is a bit disappointing in that it does not go beyond using idiocy to critique idiocy and ridiculing political or cultural tropes of today that are already ridiculous. For example, the scene of a ridiculous diorama in a theme park showing "historical" events is less ridiculous than the actual reality of such dioramas and theme parks - brilliantly and much more scathingly exposed in Umberto Eco's _Travels in Hyper-Reality." Nor does the film offer any clear way out of the impending idiocracy, which perhaps is a shortcoming of the genre itself. It is cheap laughs at cheap laughs, and adding anything to the mix would probably spoil it. The "happy ending" itself is a pastiche of Hollywood - a mixture of cheap didacticism and simplistic story lines ("read more books," "tell whose ass it is and why it is farting," - btw, the "Ass" movie itself had a certain minimalist Andy Warhol style in it - or the boy getting the girl and living happily thereafter.)
The end result is the impression that there is no escape from idiocracy - even if you are not a literal part of it, you still use it (or need it?) to expose and ridicule it. But at least one can have a few good cheap laughs, and that is perhaps all that one can do in this political reality.
Wojtek