A Look at Idiocracy

[TulipQulqu]

The movie never said it was 3 to 4 sds away from average.

Do you wait until a movie has a character say the N-Word followed by people congratulating the character saying it on demonstrating moral character in doing so to wonder if there is a racial subtext to a movie?

Because it seems like you will only find a movie bothersome if it wears its reactionary politics so on its sleeve that it could not be understood another way.

I am not saying Mike Judge intended to make eugenics propaganda. I have no idea what is in his head or heart. I just know he repeated a lot of the concepts eugenicists push in a movie. See the Patricia Taxxon video I linked a while back on the matter for someone going into depth on it because she got paid to while I am just some forum poster.

I don't find his piece liable for those events.

And Gone with the Wind is not liable for the KKK, but we still recognize that it had a deeply screwed up view of reconstruction. You do not talk about that movie without bringing that up in the modern day unless you do not know the history.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

The movie never said it was 3 to 4 sds away from average.

Do you wait until a movie has a character say the N-Word followed by people congratulating the character saying it on demonstrating moral character in doing so to wonder if there is a racial subtext to a movie?

Because it seems like you will only find a movie bothersome if it wears its reactionary politics so on its sleeve that it could not be understood another way.

I am not saying Mike Judge intended to make eugenics propaganda. I have no idea what is in his head or heart. I just know he repeated a lot of the concepts eugenicists push in a movie. See the Patricia Taxxon video I linked a while back on the matter for someone going into depth on it because she got paid to while I am just some forum poster.

I don't find his piece liable for those events.

And Gone with the Wind is not liable for the KKK, but we still recognize that it had a deeply screwed up view of reconstruction. You do not talk about that movie without bringing that up in the modern day unless you do not know the history.

Okay, so you're going the headcanon approach. Got it.

[Scififan]

I think what the movie is trying to say, if it's trying to say anything, is that we live in a world in which we don't have to and don't think as hard now as we used to. I mean I myself don't have to remember phone numbers because my cell phone does it for me. I don't have to grow my own food because I can go to drive through. The society we live in as we see in the explanation as to how things got shows a society that allows for people to do stupid things and basically get away with it because we protect our idiots more.

Also we do have a culture that celebrates the Homer Simpsons of the world and as the Dr. Asimov once said:
Isaac Asimov Quotes About Ignorance. There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.".

[TulipQulqu]

Okay, so you're going the headcanon approach. Got it.

You have gotten me to start citing exact shots from the movie, here is where I got my clip of the opening of the movie, if there is a scene before it please feel free to tell me.

We start by saying that in the 21st century, evolution has stopped making humans "noble" and begun favoring other traits. Included in the "noble" humans is literally Charles Darwin. There is an excruciating social darwinist subtext to this combination of spoken words from the seemingly omniscient narrator and the images shown on screen.

About 40 seconds in the narrator begins to describe how there is nothing to "thin the herd". This lack of a "thinning" mechanism is then attributed to making the "intelligent" an "endangered species". This is the narrator saying that an absence of things killing the stupid people is going to make smart people stop existing. There is no other meaning of "thin the herd". No one thins a herd by educating the dumbest animals; the shepard just kills the surplus animals.

This segways into showing the contrast between the "smart" and "stupid" reproductive habits of people. In this sequence, the character of Clevon suffers a life threatening injury from doing something that is probably supposed to be indicative of his stupidity. This injury is pointed out to have been one that previously would have sterilized Clevon, but instead he will "regain full reproductive function". Then the sound effect used to show Clevon's family tree growing plays and more members of his family are implied to be created. The movie has made it clear it does not approve of Clevon having children, and that this application of medical science to not at least let Clevon be sterilized by accident is a mistake. Reply to this post with what you think the doctor's facial expression at 2 minutes 16 seconds is meant to say about this, because he is an actor thus there is a textual meaning to his deliberately included emoting.

In under 150 seconds the movie evokes social darwinism, the murder of the less intelligent, and their sterilization if that cannot be achieved.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Okay, so you're going the headcanon approach. Got it.

You have gotten me to start citing exact shots from the movie, here is where I got my clip of the opening of the movie, if there is a scene before it please feel free to tell me.

Thank you.

These are all drawing upon really discrete observations of socioeconomic trends. First, and foremost, there is no indication that this has to do with genes at all in the film. Evolution doesn't have exclusively to do with genes. The science itself is a reflection of who survives in the environment, not a taxonomical examination of different species in which genes are the natural implication for evolutionary differentiation on the norm. Nowhere in the film does it indicate that these people are genetically dispositioned to lower intelligence.

Anybody can injure themselves. Mike Judge came from Texas, in which many of the towns worship high school football. The prospects are great for the all county champion who can go on to college and graduate on their football scholarship. If they do something like injure themselves though, then their prospects are immediately diminished. The injury denotes volatility to the prospect of worshipping football so much. They use these particular people most likely because they are emblematic of less-than-critical mindsets that otherwise strive economically. It's Judgmental and kind of demeaning, but it's largely unilateral in social speculation. There's no power dynamic between Judge and the white conservative culture that he depicts.

I heard on Adam Carolla him talk about growing up in Texas and getting a snazzy and respectably stilted STEM degree like chem engineering etc... He comes off a bit like Michael Crichton in at least his personal gripes about institutions, which is understandable in the outset of Office Space, Extract, and Silicon Valley (on HBO) where business directive is considerably satirized.

There's reasonably no implication that genetics has anything to do with it. It's a comical satire, in which Judge draws upon his experience in predominantly white towns (iirc), and these are observable sociological trends. It's not accurate, and it's not supposed to be; it's incredibly farcical and hyperbolic even in speculative consideration as he pushes it forward 500 years. That's not much different than Zemeckis saying he's not trying to be accurate in his depiction of 2015 in BttF2.

[TulipQulqu]

Okay, so you're going the headcanon approach. Got it.

You have gotten me to start citing exact shots from the movie, here is where I got my clip of the opening of the movie, if there is a scene before it please feel free to tell me.

Thank you.

These are all drawing upon really discrete observations of socioeconomic trends. First, and foremost, there is no indication that this has to do with genes at all in the film. Evolution doesn't have exclusively to do with genes. The science itself is a reflection of who survives in the environment, not a taxonomical examination of different species in which genes are the natural implication for evolutionary differentiation on the norm. Nowhere in the film does it indicate that these people are genetically dispositioned to lower intelligence.

Anybody can injure themselves. Mike Judge came from Texas, in which many of the towns worship high school football. The prospects are great for the all county champion who can go on to college and graduate on their football scholarship. If they do something like injure themselves though, then their prospects are immediately diminished. The injury denotes volatility to the prospect of worshipping football so much. They use these particular people most likely because they are emblematic of less-than-critical mindsets that otherwise strive economically. It's Judgmental and kind of demeaning, but it's largely unilateral in social speculation. There's no power dynamic between Judge and the white conservative culture that he depicts.

I heard on Adam Carolla him talk about growing up in Texas and getting a snazzy and respectably stilted STEM degree like chem engineering etc... He comes off a bit like Michael Crichton in at least his personal gripes about institutions, which is understandable in the outset of Office Space, Extract, and Silicon Valley (on HBO) where business directive is considerably satirized.

There's reasonably no implication that genetics has anything to do with it. It's a comical satire, in which Judge draws upon his experience in predominantly white towns (iirc), and these are observable sociological trends. It's not accurate, and it's not supposed to be; it's incredibly farcical and hyperbolic even in speculative consideration as he pushes it forward 500 years. That's not much different than Zemeckis saying he's not trying to be accurate in his depiction of 2015 in BttF2.

I do not care about who Mike Judge is as a person. I do not care what circumstances he grew up in. I am not trying to reach a judgement on if the man is a good or bad person. I do not care about his biography.

Not one thing you said there addressed what was in the movie, which talks about evolution, shows a picture of Darwin to make a clear connection biological evolution, and then shows that the ignoble types breeding is what causes the dystopian future.

[Thebestoftherest]

Yeah, I think the change that happened here is more social than biologicals, or at least it was trying to be.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Not one thing you said there addressed what was in the movie, which talks about evolution, shows a picture of Darwin to make a clear connection biological evolution, and then shows that the ignoble types breeding is what causes the dystopian future.

Darwin does not insinuate biological order. Darwin is emblematic of overall evolution despite his incorrect postulation on biological causes for evolution.

The very scene you showed me talks explicitly and upfront about natural selection, which puts to rest any real consideration for Darwinian evolution.

[FaxModem1]

Not one thing you said there addressed what was in the movie, which talks about evolution, shows a picture of Darwin to make a clear connection biological evolution, and then shows that the ignoble types breeding is what causes the dystopian future.

Darwin does not insinuate biological order. Darwin is emblematic of overall evolution despite his incorrect postulation on biological causes for evolution.

The very scene you showed me talks explicitly and upfront about natural selection, which puts to rest any real consideration for Darwinian evolution.

The film is advocating Social Darwinism. It shows as a warning the results of healthcare for all, idiots like Clevon will out breed rich people like Trevor and Carol.

It specifically uses the term 'thinning the herd' and how there weren't enough natural predators to thin out the stupid people.

Stupid people in this film are represented as being poor, having a limited vocabulary, and living in a trailer, while being smart means dressing well, living in a nice house, and being concerned about the world. Problem solving, rationality, creativity, etc, are not present in this case study, only their social class.

The film is saying that the rich smart people helping the poor dumb people by giving them access to life saving medical procedures will lead to the dumb poor people outbreeding the rich smart people. The outcome of that is the world of 2505, and is shown as a bad thing. The film seems to be arguing that giving life saving procedures to the poor in their trailer parks, who should just die out anyway, is NOT in the best interest of society, and it's better if they die off due to lack of medical care being available to them.

If you want to take Mike Judge into account, and not do Death of Author, his later film Extract is all about a rich smart person, giving jobs to poor dumb people, leads to trouble as one of his workers gets neutered in a machinery accident due to the employee's dumb coworkers being lazy and not focusing on their work. A factory accident isn't due to the rich factory owner not making sure his factory is safe, it's due to his dumb, lazy, poor employees slacking off.


youtu.be/OIyluGsy-zA

So yeah, that's there.

[Beastro]

I hate this movie because it assumes intelligence is genetic and not necessarily an attack on education by authorities that wish to deprive the public of truth, advantages, or teach them to question authority.

Except it very much is. There isn't much to improve it beyond doing what you can to impair it through the development of a child.

It also discounts the conflated bane of modern society: Wisdom and intelligence are not the same thing and nothing is more dangerous that a brilliant fool.

I hate this movie because it assumes intelligence is genetic and not necessarily an attack on education by authorities that wish to deprive the public of truth, advantages, or teach them to question authority.

It is satire should you take what happen at fact?

It literally endorses the logic of eugenics in its premise. A watcher of the movie is told straight up in the start of the movie "the dystopia of the future is because the dumb dumbs kept breeding like animals".

This is a real thing people into eugenics have said. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell?wprov=sfla1 was not so long ago that it is safe to assume that no one honestly thinks this way anymore.

If a satire had "them Jews!" secretly running society, and then showed a future where everything sucks, and the narrator said "them Jews ruined everything, no one could stop them", we would flip out because it's obviously Nazism. Why does advocating another, less famous, Nazi crime against humanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4?wprov=sfla1 get any pass?

That is the pitfall of comedy in general. It relies in its essence on exaggeration and simplicity.

The most extreme example I see in comedy of this is political cartoons. I simply don't see the humour in them given how extreme the hyperbole is, even if they resonate with me. I do not like discourse being reduced to mocking others as a strawmen.

In short: Do not look to comedies for nuance, much less on something weighty as the multiple factors which influence intelligence.