Though a seemingly ridiculous farce about the future, Idiocracy does provide some insight to a future in which the world is populated with consumers with no citizenship. Toby Miller’s chapter on “What is Cultural Citizenship?” is a difficult, and somewhat schizophrenic, read that covers a whole span of issues in a small amount of space. The chapter discusses the spread and prevalence of neoliberalism around the globe but disguised as citizenship—a victory for capitalism is a victory for democracy.
Miller discusses the difficulty of cultural citizenship and provides great examples in which the co-existence of cultures in the same space results in a collision. He presents a “double bind” we are placed in. We protect cultures from external oppression while trying to protect members from internal oppression when their human rights are threatened.
It seems that despite any cultural citizenship, the world is doomed to one of survival of the fittest, which would be survival in a neoliberal environment. But at some point, there would be a toppling of those in power. As the uprisings in the Middle East show, the oppressed are now taking control. As Americans, we celebrate the “victory for democracy.” But we have to look at the future when the oppressed decide that America’s consumption practices are a form of oppression against the rest of the world. The future as depicted in Idiocracy doesn’t address it, but the world will be, if it isn’t already, a mad scramble for what’s left of the world’s resources.
What struck me about Idiocracy was its harrowing insight on how insincere the world has become. The premise (one of a world going against natural selection and resulting in a more "stupid" planet) is obviously clever and unique, but I was surprised at how many levels of critique it was able to draw upon from our own lives in the present twenty-first century.
ReplyDeleteIn this sense, I do not think the film was implying that we are actually going to end up this stupid and incompetent one day if we continue on this path, but rather it is presenting an aggrandized depiction of life as it already is to emphasize some of the bullshit that we let commercialism indulge us in. For instance, at the giant CostCo the entrance host monotonously tells the guest "Welcome to CostCo, I love you" repeatedly, void of any affection at all. This is very telling of the routines in which commercialism takes to trick us into being attracted to something, no matter how insincere the gesture may be. Or the idea of this energy drink helping plants grow; the business could care less whether or not nature is affected by their marketing lies, just whether or not their shareholders are appeased. I also appreciated the ideas on the impersonality of advanced technology, with everything being inefficiently handled by desensitized computers.
I was very surprised with how much I enjoyed Idiocracy. Sure, the ending was flat and predictable, but the first two acts had enough acerbic satire to keep me thinking for awhile about my own negative contributions to society.