Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Derb Media Report (2) — Movies   [John Derbyshire]

Saw Idiocracy at the weekend.  This is Mike Judge's dysgenics movie, inspired (I should think) by C.M. Kornbluth's classic sci-fi story "The Marching Morons."  We're 500 years in the future and the dims have out-bred the brights, so that world mean IQ is down in the tank.  A 100-IQ visitor from our own time is the smartest guy on the planet.

I wasn't much impressed.  The movie might have worked as an animation, but with live actors it doesn't really come off.  Plot credibility is down around South Park levels, with a couple of gross lapses of continuity.  (How did Frito get a new car so fast?)  In Kornbluth's story a dwindling elite of brights just manages to keep everything going, but in Idiocracy everyone's a moron.  The jokes are kind of obvious & not many are very good.

Kornbluth's story is much bolder than Judge's in its solution to the problem.  (Kornbluth used some ideas from the Nazis' management of the death camps—this, in 1951!)  In part this is because Kornbluth was working in print storytelling.  Nobody would have made a movie of "The Marching Morons" in 1951.  I do believe, though, that it is also in part a narrowing in the scope of topics that can be respectably discussed in any medium.  In the sissy-totalitarianism that dominates our own intellectual culture, a storyteller is less able, or less inclined, to take an idea wherever it might lead him.

So why did Fox deep-six the released movie?  (The reason that I and others are talking about Idiocracy now is that it was released on DVD a few days ago.  The actual theater release was quashed by Fox—you had to be some kind of sleuth to even find out where it was playing.)  No great mystery to me.  The dimwits who inhabit the world of 2505 include black and Hispanic dimwits.  Not actually many blacks, though U.S. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho is worth a couple dozen all by himself, but Hispanics are way in evidence.  It's almost a Hispanic-dimwit movie.  Possibly this is just a California sensibility, but I bet it was this that set off the PC alarm bells in Fox HQ.  Just as movie criminals have to be white and Anglo, so do movie morons.

Idiocracy has, by the way, the longest list of credits I ever saw.  It seems to be almost as long as the movie.  When they started to roll I did what we all do—fast forwarded through to see if there were any post-credits outtakes or jokes.  I fast-forwarded for a usual sort of spell: credits still rolling.  Fast-forwarded again: still rolling...  Who ARE all these people?

01/23 09:03 AMShare