We come here to praise Mike Judge, not to bury him.
There are two primary garbage dump periods for movies: January and Labor Day weekend. January usually isn’t quite as grim, because that’s when Oscar bait films that squeaked in under the wire in New York and/or Los Angeles get their wider releases. Even as the studios unleash the first stinkers of the new year, there’s still a chance that there will be something entertaining or artistically interesting at the multiplex. Labor Day? Ooo, baby. It’s a wasteland. Allegedly, people would rather spend the last weekend of the summer outdoors instead of in a movie theater (as opposed to the rest of the summer?) so the studios don’t release anything they consider “important,” i.e. expensive, franchise-worthy, and/or artistically strong. Would people come if there were something “important” opening? Who knows, and on some level, it doesn’t even matter. We’ve been so trained to look away from theaters on this particular holiday weekend that distributors have turned Labor Day box office into a self-fulfilling curse. You have a shiny misfire featuring name talent that you’re probably contractually obligated to release in theaters? Make Labor Day your Wicker Man weekend. But please, at least pretend to support it by advertising it in print and on TV, and giving it a wide release. There have to be a few die-hard Nicolas Cage and Neil LaBute fans out there who will show up.
The Wicker Man, though, isn’t the only movie with a noteworthy pedigree that debuted on this doomed weekend. If you’re lucky enough to live in one of six chosen cities and you’ve been reading the fine print in the “opening this weekend” section of your local newspaper, or following these things on line, you may have noticed that something called Idiocracy, Beavis and Butthead auteur Mike Judge’s first film after the much-adored Office Space, opened this weekend as well. And it stars Luke Wilson—not quite as big a Name as his brother Owen (or Cage, for that matter), but not exactly an unknown pup. Hey, 20th Century Fox marketing department, that gives you two things to work with here…so why aren’t you?
That question would be of no consequence if Idiocracy completely and thoroughly stank. But it doesn’t. While by no means a perfect movie, it certainly has its virtues. For one thing, Judge displays a quality that was sorely missing from most of this summer’s Hollywood fare: brevity. He gets in and out in less than 90 minutes, and yes, that is a good thing for what is essentially a one-joke movie. It’s a sharp, humorous joke with multiple guffaw-inducing set-ups, but a single joke all the same. If he’d lingered over it any longer, it would lose its flair (as one friend observed, it was shorter than many Saturday Night Live skits these days). For another, Wilson and the rest of the cast attack the material with the kind of straight-faced conviction satire needs. Wilson never loses his air of earnestness, even when his average Joe-turned-accidental genius-turned new president of Uhmerica announces that under his leadership, movies will have characters that make you care about the asses that are farting on screen. Finally, as this suggests, Judge knows his satirical target and hits it with everything he has. It isn’t just that current pop culture is rife with stupidity: it’s that all of our cultural and political and social institutions are infected with the same kind of intentionally puerile, macho, greedy brainlessness. For those of you who embraced Beavis and Butthead as a desirable lifestyle choice, Judge would like you to know that you’re a destructive jackass.
Granted, the ferocity and thoroughness with which Judge hammers away at cretin culture teeters on that very fine line between being a critique and just being another dumbass movie filled with, well, fart jokes, testicular abuse, and brain dead women with big breasts. Already one critic at Entertainment Weekly seems to have missed the point (he probably also thought Jonathan Swift was one sick customer for suggesting that Britain solve its hunger problem by feeding the poor their young). Yet, since that comedic formula has proven so lucrative in the past (and probably will be this fall when Jackass: Number Two opens in a wide, well-advertised release), I have to ask Fox: what gives? Then again, maybe the better question would be: why did Fox even make this movie? Occasionally I wonder if someone inside Fox with the power to greenlight movies has a master plan to take down Fox’s arch-conservative owner Rupert Murdoch, in that Fox has produced not only Idiocracy, but also Warren Beatty’s equally pointed and liberal cri de coeur Bulworth. They both blast corporate ownership of everything and the attendant moronization and corruption of everything corporations touch. Fox News, Fox Television, the New York Post: Murdoch’s News Corp. has a sterling track record in creating media spectacles that divert attention away from anything the least bit serious or thought-provoking. Yes, I know Fox TV has certainly raised its artistic bar since the early days of non-stop Cops and Married…With Children, but they haven’t exactly become PBS. When Judge portrays a Fox News anchor desk staffed by a shirtless muscle head and a breathy, well-endowed babe in a satin bustier, he’s not that far from the truth of Fox’s successful exploitation approach to its “news” network.
Perhaps that’s the real fear driving the effort to not just dump, but also effectively suffocate Idiocracy. Bulworth could be dismissed as the ramblings (very funny ramblings) of an over-the-hill Hollywood lefty whose star power is quite diminished among the under-40 set, but Idiocracy has the personnel and the broad, crude comedy that could actually attract the young male audience if Fox had even bothered to create one, one advertisement or trailer. When Joe stumbles upon his eventual lawyer and ally Frito Lexus watching a ginormous TV tuned to the “Violence Channel” for his favorite show Ow, My Balls! while sitting on a Barcalounger equipped with a built-in toilet, it is indeed hilarious on all levels. Equally hysterical is the opening explanation of why the population started plummeting down the back slope of the I.Q. bell curve (the highly fertile and contraceptive-averse Kevin Federlines of the world, and their equally dumb stables of Britneys: you’re going to have a lot to answer for). By the time Wilson’s Joe meets the president and finds out that he’s an ex-wrestler and ex-porn star prone to grabbing his crotch or shooting large guns in the air in the House of Representin’ in lieu of actually making policy, Judge’s gift for giving the lowest denominator what they want and scolding them for it, even as we all laugh our heads off, is amply apparent.
Judge, though, is equally clear about the price of embracing consumerist, fathead machismo and rejecting the trappings of intelligence (reading, correct grammar, clear sentences, movies with narratives) as “faggy”: the human race will kill itself. What if that young male audience, or hell, any mainstream audience, actually got that message and took it to heart? What if boys started to think, and girls realized they could be more than just whores, strippers, and rap star arm candy? What if voters decided intelligence and nuanced thinking were more important qualities in a presidential candidate than with whom they’d most like to have a beer? What if the Uhmerican public decided they wanted decent, affordable health care, and started doing things like reading books and cultivating gardens instead of turning on the TV, gorging on fast food, or going shopping for clothes covered with corporate logos? My goodness, it would be the end of civilization as we know it! But don’t worry, Fox has made sure we’ll all keep living in our Idiocracy by burying the “faggy” Idiocracy.
Guy Movies is a biweekly analysis of machismo cinema from the perspective of a woman.
