Idiocracy and Branding

Idiocracy was by far the most frustrating film for me to watch in 517 this semester. Throughout the film, I not only developed a mixture of visceral disgust, due to the piles of trash, bins of lard and unhygienic living conditions of its characters, but also a severe awareness of the films use of branding; particularly the naming of its characters using brand names, the emphasis of parody over brand names (similar to that of Dumb Starbucks), and especially the overuse of branding in clothing, architectural surroundings and economic transactions. The Persuaders reinforces how brands are themselves becoming commodities, each competing against one another to differentiate themselves. This aspect of brand as commodity is continuously demonstrated in Idiocracy through the depiction on brand names on clothing items for example, as brands are literally bought and sold to be worn and consumed.

What I found particularly interesting about Idiocracy was its examination of both the politicization of citizenship as well as fan culture. In Miller’s “What is Cultural Citizenship,” he identifies the ideal citizen as elevated and separated from the consumer. “The consumer, by contrast, is naïve, a relatively precocious creature. Derided as a wastrel of natural resources in the fourteenth century, and stereotyped by Immanuel Kant (“I need not think, so long as I can pay” [1991, 54]), the consumer was understood by Karl Marx as “man separated from Man” (1994, 139) (30). In the film, natural resources no longer exist, and citizenship in the political and obligatory voting context is undermined, stripped and replaced by consumption in unruly court trials, a lack of control in the medical field and an unstructured government that is falling apart entirely. Likewise, fandom is explored in Idiocracy much as van Zoonen expresses in “Imagining the Fan Democracy,” where fans are merely “mindless followers of their heroes and citizens (45)” Fandom throughout the film is expressed through the passive watching of repetitions of television shows which every citizen seems to recognize such as Ow, My Balls! and the overuse of arena spaces in conjunction with politics and filled with raging fans, for example in the depiction of the supreme court as a wrestling rink and Joe’s “rehabilitation” as a monster truck fight to the death.

In “Consumption is Good for Thinking” Canclini identifies consumerism as a marker for difference: “If the members of society did not share the meanings of commodities, if these were meaningful only for the elites or the minorities that use them, they would not serve the purposes of differentiation” (39). It is interesting to note that in Idiocracy the characters seem to melt together into a single population where consumption has become so engrained in their social coherence that it has become naturalized, unquestioned, and no longer generated as a mechanism to create difference; the population here is not in control of the choices they make in relation to their consumption or their ability to consume; rather, consumption rules them and blankets over the entire population, creating divisions not so much in class as in communication between human beings, exploited in the film to the point where drawing a map to express ones thoughts isn’t even viable. What I found the film also explored in relation to communication which I do believe we are experiencing today is the relation between human beings and technology and the use of technology in replicating and even replacing social interaction, as indicated through the film's hospital scene where the receptionist at the hospital pushes buttons in front of her in order to provide Joe with an answer and give herself a sense of direction. Brands, particularly computer and cell phone brands, are infiltrating our world technologically, and in many ways have blanketed our generation to the point where we have lost an awareness of it or how much they have debilitated human intercommunication. What I would like to explore more, especially in relation to Cultural Studies would be the presence of branding within interactive technological devices and how that has shaped our present interpersonal communications ie) texting, online dating, etc.