When it debuted in 2006, Beavis and Butt-Head creator Mike Judge’s sci-fi comedy Idiocracy wasn’t exactly a box office hit, but it went over well with critics and audiences with its humorous, satirical take on a dystopian, anti-intellectual society where everyone has become dumbed down and America is just a corporate-sponsored landfill. It’s a clever movie, full of well-placed jokes and a lot of surprisingly thoughtful commentary that has made it much more timely nearly 20 years later — and scarily accurate, too.
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With Idiocracy having arrived on Netflix in September, fans are rediscovering the film while others are watching it for the first time and, in the process are starting to realize just how much about our current society Idiocracy actually got right. In a recent Reddit thread, viewers have been sounding off how Idiocracy has turned out to be eerily accurate and while some of the observations are humorous, others are a little unsettling.
“A Comedy Slowly Turning Into a Documentary”
In Idiocracy, Army librarian Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson, along with sex worker Rita (Rudolph) participate in a government experiment into suspended animation with Joe being chosen for how average he is. The experiment ended up suspended indefinitely and the pair end up not being awakened for 500 years. However, the world they return to is far different than the one they left with America having gotten dumber and Joe now being the smartest person — and the only hope. The film has themes of misinformation, commercialism, consumerism, and overpopulation, but it’s also hilarious — a major plot point is that people have swapped out for an energy drink called Brawndo and are going so far as to water crops with it. This results in crop failure, but when Joe explains that plants need water, the clueless public merely repeats the brand’s logan, “Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes” despite having no clue what that even means.
While the film is very clearly intended to be funny, fans on Reddit have started to see Idiocracy as a bit less humorous and sadly more along the lines of a documentary of how things are actually going. “The craziest thing is it wasn’t meant to be a documentary,” one Redditor noted while another chimed in, “I’m scared to watch this movie because I’m afraid real life is worse than the movie as this point.”
Of course, we’re not at the point of watering crops with energy drinks (yet) but some Redditors also noted that they’ve also noticed how fewer and fewer people seem to be just drinking regular water, opting instead for performance drinks at home and in situations they aren’t actually meant for, with one commentor even recounting how a woman they shared a hospital room with apparently didn’t handle things well when medical staff wouldn’t give her anything except water to drink because she was used to drinking anything but.
“Welcome to Costco. I Love You.”
While people largely discuss how the film has gone from satire to unintentional pseudo-documentary, there are also people who are sort of darkly appreciating the corporate sponsorship references in the movie as well. A key element of Idiocracy is that, in the film’s dystopian future, corporations pretty much control or sponsor everything. The government in the film operates in the best interest of, not the people, but the big corporations and officials openly accept bribes. Corporations are also shown as being mega-conglomerations that control pretty much everything. A major example of that in the film is Costco, which has everything including a law school and there’s only one communications company in Idiocracy: AOL-TimeWarner-Taco Bell-U.S. Government Long Distance. Advertising has also become aggressive and pervasive in Idiocracy’s future, going so far as to replace the stripes on the flag and corporate slogans are everywhere — including “Welcome to Costco. I love you.”
The depiction of corporations and product placement in Idiocracy are dialed up for humor and fans definitely enjoy some of the catchphrases even now, but others noted that even that feels a little too close for comfort.
“I watched this film years (and years) ago. At that time, I regarded it as difficult viewing,” one Redditor wrote. “Yes, I laughed at parts, but in general things in it actively scared me. Recently it was suggested for a movie night and I realized… I just couldn’t bring myself to even watch the film. The commentary and parody are just TOO spot on.”
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