Caring about Consuming: Practices of Productive Citizenship in Idiocracy and Wall-E

The presumed binary between consumer and citizen, as discussed by Canclini and van Zoonen, is an interesting perspective to apply to our screening of Idiocracy.  Much of the film takes place in a dystopic wasteland of the future, marked by overconsumption and underproduction – a capitalist system run amok.  It is only through the temporary stoppage of consumption and the return to the most basic mode of production – farming – that the world has any hope of survival.

Canclini’s article acknowledges a social and economic power of modern consumption that is deeply entrenched in class difference.  Commodities have also historically served as status symbols, purchased by individuals as part of a framework of class-based social identity.  Consumption, it seems, has the potential to inform sociopolitical identity and action on the most basic levels:

“Cultural leveling and depoliticization do not follow from the structure of the medium… nevertheless, this transformation in the relations between public and private in everyday cultural consumption marks a fundamental change in the conditions for the practice of a new type of civic responsibility.”  (45)

The solution proffered by Canclini here envisions an idealized democracy of consumption that would “elevate consumers to citizens,” and is very similar to van Zoonen’s hope for a mobilized political public through television entertainment:

        “Since fan communities and political constituencies bear crucial similarities, it is clear where the relevance of television politics lies: in the emotional constitution of electorates which involves the development and maintenance of affective bonds between voters, candidates, and parties.” (49)

Through the consumption of popular television programming like Big Brother, van Zoonen hopes, essentially, to make people care – an act that proved difficult for our Idiocracy hero when faced with the deeply apathetic population of the future.  This struggle is similar to that of the eponymous protagonist of another futuristic dystopian film, Pixar’s Wall-E, released two years later.  In that film, an obsolete robot from Earth comes in contact with the human race, which has evacuated the planet and now floats around the universe in a fully automated spaceship.  The humans here are similar to those in Idiocracy in that their bodies and minds have atrophied due to centuries of inactivity – technologies of service and automation are perfected, thus eliminating the need for production (intellectual or otherwise).  People are now in a constant state of consumption and no longer lead valuable social or political lives. 

In both of these films, the plight of the human race is attributed to overzealous privatization of government by conglomerates – Buy & Large in Wall-E, and various corporations, including Gatorade-like “Brawndo” in Idiocracy.  The discovery of a seedling in a boot in Wall-E proves the viability of Earth’s soil, and thus the possibility of a return to productive citizenship, in similar fashion to Maya Rudolph’s excitement over the plants growing in the dusty soil of Idiocracy.  In both of these cases, corporate leaders and mechanisms rise up in an attempt to prevent the democratization of industry, and both times power is restored to the people (through proper channels of Americanized government, of course). The end goal in both is an investment by the people in productive consumerism – they must form social cohesion in order to perpetuate the basic economic systems of Western life, and work together to contribute to that which they consume.