Looking over his body of work, it’s hard to argue that Mike Judge isn’t, on the whole, underrated as an American artist. His career has largely been similar to peers Trey Parker and Matt Stone: massively successful and briefly controversial cartoon, followed by a mix of animated and live action feature films as their television series go on and on. Parker and Stone have South Park; Judge has Beavis and Butt Head and King of the Hill. At the movies, they’re almost even—except that Judge has never had a hit. 1999’s Office Space is one of those curious cases of a classic that bombed initially only to be “rediscovered” on home video. This happened to Freddy Got Fingered, Clerks, Election, Fight Club, and Heathers. With this “rediscovery” comes the classification of the “cult film,” a context outside of the massive or even modest hit.
When Mike Judge shot Idiocracy in 2004, Twentieth Century-Fox quickly realized that they had a genuine film maudit on their hands, a movie that not only mocked corporations and brands like Costco, Starbucks, and Fox News but implicitly compared them to agents of the apocalypse. Unfrozen in 2505, Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph are thoroughly average by our standards but SUPER SMART in the future. Everything’s a disgusting mess, garbage piled sky-high and killing even more in avalanches. Dax Sheppard is introduced in a recliner with a working toilet built in, watching a massive flatscreen television that doesn’t look that far off today. Neither does the content: besides the main program Ow! My Balls!, Shepard’s screen is covered in loud and lurid advertisements, trailers, and widgets. Is this Roku City?
Wilson tries to find a doctor; he waits in line for hours at a dirty, overcrowded hospital, echoing coronavirus vaccine lines just a few years ago; the attendant is so brain-dead, she’s reduced to pressing buttons in lieu of diagnosis. Wilson eventually sees a doctor played by Justin Long, who says, “You talk like a fag and your shit’s all retarded,” while assuaging his apparent distress by reassuring him that, “Don’t worry—one of my wives was ‘tarded.” Wilson puts it together that he’s accidentally time-travelled to the future, and Long starts freaking out like a caged animal when he realizes that Wilson’s missing his wrist barcode tattoo, one of the few “problematic” jokes in the movie that remains largely unremarked upon.
Idiocracy has endured as a title and as a concept, but nothing from the movie itself stuck. No wonder test audiences hated it: from minute one, Idiocracy builds on the idea that intelligence is hereditary; everything “degenerate” is ethnic, from “the inner-city.” It’s a remarkably specific picture of a brief moment in political pop culture, when George W. Bush’s second term was met by the kind of liberal reactionary narrative that set up anti-Islamist atheists like Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, and Christopher Hitchens. Paris Hilton and rap slang are used as shorthand signs of the decline of American civilization, but the brunt of the blame goes to the poor, who really ruined the world by having too many children, while “intelligent couples” hemmed and hawed and ultimately missed their shot. This attitude is carried right through the end, when Wilson gets three kids and Shepard, 35.
Anyone but Bush: Idiocracy is an evergreen idea chained to its embarrassing and messy topicality, a comedy that’s not funny as often as it is depressing, even horrifying. It has a lot in common with antebellum South and KKK movies like Mandingo and The Klansman, with a punishing, one-note, but unfortunately largely accurate indictment of humanity at its worst. But it’s hard to think of another American film from the 2000s that’s aged worse, especially considering how often it’s referenced. People aren’t watching Idiocracy, you don’t even have to read a synopsis, the title says it all. Office Space was conceived in the 1980s and by its 1999 release, Judge thought he might’ve missed the moment; if not for its stellar script, with dozens of iconic lines that would be enough to sustain most movies on their own, Office Space might just be remember for its poster, or Stephen Root’s red stapler. Idiocracy doesn’t even have a poster, or even an image.
I love seeing this movie in theaters, because everyone’s heard of it but few have seen it or seen it recently. And from the very beginning, the movie says that poor, non-white people ruined the world by having too many kids, watching too much television, and eating too much junk food—these are the people who elected a cage fighter to the Presidency!
After giving the movie the smallest theatrical release that was legally possible, Twentieth Century-Fox put out the DVD and waited for that “cult classic” status to bring in the real money. In the end, $10 million against $2.4 is hardly a hemorrhage, but I wonder how much that DVD would’ve made if Donald Trump had become President earlier. Idiocracy’s status as a “cult classic” was cemented before Trump won in 2016; a movie whose title, like Rain Man or Zelig, would enter the contemporary lexicon and become widely recognized shorthand. Ironically, the movie’s eugenicist position—outlined at length at the very beginning and emphasized throughout—hews closer to the right than the left or even liberals of today. The brief rise of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the “new atheism” after Bush won a second term, has long since fallen out of favor, with most of those figures now either on the right or dead. Idiocracy is closer to Bill Maher’s Religulous and Jon Stewart’s hugely successful America: The Book than Office Space or any other mid/late-2000s comedy; both have long since become passé, and Idiocracy would’ve disappeared with them—if not for its title.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits