It’s basically a comedy with the subtlety of a guy repeatedly screaming “I am beating you with a sledgehammer” as he hits you with a sledgehammer.
The joke is that everyone is dumb and the future and its painfully spoon-fed to the audience ad nusuesm. And now 15 years later everyone constantly brings up that movie when ever something happens and its the most over commented thing I’ve ever seen. It makes me hate the movie more. Its the peak movie for pseudo intellectuals.
That’s the thing: there’s nothing to interpret. The movie depicted a intellectual stunted world…and the world has moved toward the movie. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. There’s nothing deep about it.
The problem with comparisons between the movie and real life is that there are still plenty of people of intelligence behind the scenes making our lives miserable.
The world of idiocracy is basically the result of accidental eugenics. “Smart people” don’t have babies, so only dumb trailer trash has babies, so the world gets dumber. That’s not how the real world works, people who were born to families living in trailer parks or low-income housing have just as much of a chance to be smart as those born to the rich… as long as they have the same opportunities. For the most part, they don’t, but there’s a minority that still gets grants and scholarships and just luck to become the “smart elite” that don’t exist in the world of Idiocracy.
This is a bit of a controversial topic that’s surely bigger than this thread, but I’m going to leave it here anyway for other people reading this.
You talk about trailer parks/low income families vs rich families, but I think that Idiocracy is not about income, it’s about being dumb. Part of which is just cultural (ignorance), but part of it seems to be intelligence. And as far as I know, there’s no evidence that any kid can become as intelligent as anyone else with proper raising and education. Research seems to pretty clearly show that IQ is heritable to a significant degree, and while it can be needlessly lowered in many ways (like malnutrition or high stress in critical development phases), in the absence of these issues no enrichment is able to raise it.
Despite how controversial it is in some circles, the Wikipedia article on the topic seems to be pretty good.
However, since the movie really is not deep, it’s possible that its whole point was just that the idiocy is cultural, and in that case the above obviously doesn’t apply. I’m just saying what it seemed like to me.
IQ isn’t even a good metric of intelligence, just of the ability to do well at IQ tests.
The point of the movie is to show how stupid people are everywhere, and it’s their fault that the world is going to shit. Which is an elitist, shitty argument. It completely ignores the direct involvement of those with a vested interest in keeping people ignorant of the world around them.
Sure, you can make an argument that a certain level of intelligence is inheritable… but not to such a degree that is implied by the movie, or by how people interpret it. Sure, you may not have quite the same ability to quickly consume and interpret information… but most everyone has the ability to do it eventually. It’s just a matter of how much you want to. Many people, especially those in the American culture presented in the movie, have been trained to not do that, and that’s what people see when they look around and find idiots all around them. The unfortunate truth, though, is that those who judge others based on that vapid criteria suffer from the same lack of intelligent thought. They don’t put any effort into interpreting the world around them, and thus just assume those around them are a bunch of idiots who cause all the problems in their life.
IQ isn’t even a good metric of intelligence, just of the ability to do well at IQ tests.
I’ve seen this repeated ad nauseam on reddit in any slightly relevant threads, but it seems completely unfounded. Psychometrics is one of the subfields of psychology that doesn’t suffer from an apocalyptic replication crysis, like for example social psychology, and there’s decades of research on IQ. Please note that I’m not saying that IQ is the most important measure of a person or anything like that, but it’s a pretty good metric that demonstrably correlates to/predicts a lot of things with reasonable confidence.
The point of the movie is to show how stupid people are everywhere, and it’s their fault that the world is going to shit. Which is an elitist, shitty argument. It completely ignores the direct involvement of those with a vested interest in keeping people ignorant of the world around them.
In my experience, in real life it’s more common that people just don’t care about wellbeing of others who are worse off/more ignorant, than it being malice, but otherwise I agree.
Sure, you can make an argument that a certain level of intelligence is inheritable… but not to such a degree that is implied by the movie, or by how people interpret it.
I agree with this as well, and with other critics you write below. I don’t think it’s a very good movie.
Sure, you may not have quite the same ability to quickly consume and interpret information… but most everyone has the ability to do it eventually. It’s just a matter of how much you want to.
But I don’t think this is the case. Firstly I don’t like the “it’s a matter of how much you want to”, because that’s very close to blaming a person for not being born smart enough. Secondly, even if what you say is true - it’s a matter of time and effort - the reality is that at some point the time and effort needed would be so huge that it’s the same as “not able to do it at all”, because an information that was acquired/way to solve a problem that was found was only relevant ten years ago and is completely useless now. Most people simply don’t have it in them to seriously work on a unified theory of physics, but most people (though a considerably smaller “most”) also don’t have it in them to be a good strategic leader of a company, who does nothing as complicated as theoretical physicists, but needs to solve problems in a smart way fast to be good for anything.
I’ve seen this repeated ad nauseam on reddit in any slightly relevant threads, but it seems completely unfounded. Psychometrics is one of the subfields of psychology that doesn’t suffer from an apocalyptic replication crysis, like for example social psychology, and there’s decades of research on IQ. Please note that I’m not saying that IQ is the most important measure of a person or anything like that, but it’s a pretty good metric that demonstrably correlates to/predicts a lot of things with reasonable confidence.
The problem is that this correlates to/predicts outcomes in systems predicated on … IQ.
“IQ correlates to success in careers,” for example. Your career path and ensuing choices in your life is heavily influenced by your SAT scores if you’re in the USA. And SAT scores are …
… drum roll …
… basically just IQ tests. So strangely enough, in a system that explicitly filters based on IQ, a high IQ correlates with success within the system. And most other nations that have modern educational infrastructure have some form of test which is IQ-adjascent: China’s is even worse than the SAT, for example, while, say, Canada’s system kind of smears out and obfuscates the IQ component … but it’s still very much a part of things.
I don’t think this is an argument against the usefulness of IQ. Firstly not all countries use standardized tests with such an influence (I’m from Czechia and we don’t, there’s a standardized high school leaving examination, but it’s only necessary to pass, the score is generally unimportant for university admission). Secondly all you’re saying is that the tests correlate with IQ. That does not make them or IQ invalid, it may just as well simply mean that they test how well a student does in school, and having a higher IQ tends to make studying easier.
But mostly, again, psychometrics is the one field of psychology that has relatively rigorous and reliable methodology. The idea that you disprove decades of research, from large scale statistic studies made with cooperation of state institutions to expensive and rare research like various twin studies, simply by saying “actually IQ doesn’t matter” is naive at best. There really isn’t a lot of reasons to say that apart from ideological ones.
IQ tests can be studied for. Someone taking an IQ test cold will get a lower score than that same person taking just a second test after knowing how the IQ test works. Further, you can actually train for higher IQ scores. This kind of indicates that there is a measurable learned skill component in this “metric”. Teasing that learned component out from something intrinsic (and it’s utterly ludicrous, incidentally, to conceive of “intelligence” as a single thing that can be boiled down into a single number!) is a problem that has thus far proved intractable.
IQ tests have major cultural components. IQ tests made for Chinese people (culturally Chinese, not ethnically) are different from those made for American people which are again different from those made for German people. Culture is not intrinsic to the brain, so again it seems IQ is not measuring something intrinsic. It is measuring something related to its cultural milieu.
IQ test results vary by the quality of education available. People who were privileged enough to have good schools, private supplemental tutoring, etc. get higher IQ scores than people whose background was shit neighbourhoods with terrible schooling and no money for extra tutoring. Again, this strongly indicates that IQ is not intrinsic but at least partially cultural and educated (and a rather large part).
IQ numbers have been rising over time to the point that someone who got an IQ score of 140 in the 1970s would score as a borderline idiot today. Judging by the behaviour of people and their proclivity to believe stupid things, there has been no real change in actual ability to think and process information over that time (if anything it might be a negative trend, given American politics in particular!). Yet if there wasn’t a built-in corrective factor applied that changes each year IQ scores would be rocketing skyward. Again this hints at something learned, and not intrinsic.
So IQ measures something … but nobody can say what it is. The only thing we can know for certain is that IQ tests measure with 100% accuracy your ability to write IQ tests.
So that’s four non-ideological reasons to be suspicious of IQ tests. Please feel free to dismiss this as “naive” or “ignorant” or “ideological” if you wish; it will strongly show your own ideology.
IQ has its uses, but sadly those uses aren’t the ones commonly associated with it. (The original use that proto-IQ tests were intended for were to highlight students who were struggling and needed extra assistance, a role in which they were nearly perfect.) But then the US Army latched onto it as a measurement of “intelligence” and things went to Hell almost immediately thereafter.
IQ isn’t even a good metric of intelligence, just of the ability to do well at IQ tests.
It is the best way we have to measure g factor. IQ is highly correlated with life outcomes, so the argument that it only measure one’s ability to do IQ tests well is clearly specious. It’s measuring g factor, and g factor enables one to work more productively and delay gratification, meaning less crime. The average IQ in prisons in America is something like 85. That’s near the cutoff for the army, because not even they can teach such a person to peel potatoes. The ramifications of this are obvious: we’ve built economies which require intelligence. Someone with an 85 IQ (more than 10% of the population) can’t even be trained to run cash registers at McDonald’s. What does one do if they can’t work? Crime, poverty, self harm, and chronic welfare. We need to figure out what to do with these people, and the first step is acknowledging that not everyone is equally capable of contributing to society. Then we can have an honest discussion about welfare and UBI for these vulnerable people. Pretending they’re not severally disadvantaged is harming them immensely.
I have never once heard someone call this movie subtle though. The opening credits literally have Mike Judge saying “this is what I see happening right now and this movie is a warning of what things could be like if they continue.”
This is an unpopular opinion because it is a wrong opinion. True about the subtlety part tho
It’s on the same level as Office Space (another Mike Judge movie), it just has a lot of moments in it that people see in their own lives and can point to the movie as art imitating life imitating art. No one has really ever called either movie cerebral or claimed they were deep, they’re just really relatable to alot of people. Given that he also worked on King of the Hill as well, that’s been kind of common thread through alot of his work, comedy for the “everyman”.
Except in this case, instead of art imitating life imitating art, it might be life imitating art imitating life? :-P
No one has really ever called either movie cerebral or claimed they were deep
Ii definetely disagree on that point, there were plenty of folks on reddit who treated this movie like it was a documentary and that it was required watching for understanding the faults in our actual society
That being said, I agree with everything else you said, some people just aren’t good at separating “I like this” from “this is important”
The point is that the movie is extremely stupid and yet still we can find parallels between our world and this dumb movie. Our reality is fucking dumb. Nothing pseudo intellectual about it.
Absolutely it’s as subtle as a safe dropped onto your head. The point made isn’t made any less valid by being exaggerated - satire does that sometimes.
And Idiocracy being deep is not something I hear a lot, where in the world has that been a common take?
If you think fans of this movie are pseudo intellectuals, I think that says a lot more about you than them
Who the fuck calls it deep?
“ad nusuesm”
Op is an idiocracy
Fuck you, I’m eating
And now 15 years later everyone constantly brings up that movie when ever something happens
No, that’s not why people bring this movie up, but your odd description is sort of proving their point.
I’ve always thought of it like this: the concept of the movie is great, and pretty prophetic. All of the worldbuilding and exposition falls under that. But, as for the plot, it’s pretty forgettable and doesn’t stand out too much. Frankly I don’t even remember what Luke Wilson’s character does in the film – I just remember the film’s concept.
it’s hard to rail against that film without sounding like the guy on his toilet chair watching his television and eating his cheese, telling everyone to shut up
It wasn’t trying to be subtle and wasn’t trying to be deep. The people who like it now are those that can relate to seeing the world lean further into the jokes about society getting stupider.
Nobody is trying to be intellectual when they bring up this movie.
And before I forget: Welcome to Costco, I love you.
You’re not wrong. I don’t think anything Mike Judge has ever done should be necessarily labeled as deep. I think there is still some funny commentary in it.
Mike Judge is legendary at character development. I’d have him as my first choice in designing a town of misfits or a group of people for a sitcom or a film.
For the plot and overall structure, I’d look elsewhere.
