Idiocracy and the Reassertion of White Male Superiority

            The film Idiocracy naturally focuses upon matters of consumerism and the limits of governmental development, but what I found fascinating was how its dystopian future both criticized patriarchy and re-instilled it, as well as how it addressed race in a surprisingly retrograde manner. In this vein, the film provides rich material for discussion of gender and racial politics beyond its clear critique of consumption and the devaluing of intelligence.

            Firstly, in terms of gender politics, the film often wants to have its cake (or Carls. Jr, as the case may be) and consume it too. On the one hand, the rampant patriarchy and objectification of women present in this dystopian future is critically presented as a consequence of a society in decline, where substance has fallen pray to surface. Moreover, this society privileges bodily needs and indeed, much of the humor in the film emerges from these sources. The men retreating to their base sexual needs are exemplary of this de-volution and return to primal, essentially animalistic interactions between the sexes. We can also observe this in the arena scene, where crude battle between the erect, dominating monster trucks stand tall against the flaccid appendage attached to Joe’s rusty small car. The phallic nature of this exchange seems to reassert the importance of masculinity in the future in the most exaggerated manner. Though this all enables a relatively potent critique, it is still at the price of abhorrent objectification of the female protagonist. Instead of correcting the fellow idiot’s assumptions that he has copulated with her, Joe agrees with them and essentially does nothing to change these paradigms. Significantly, Joe’s most naïve/unintelligent moment stems from the repeated incidents where he believes the prostitute is actually a painter; here the only time where Joe can be said to be on par with the obliviousness of the rest of society is when he misreads the girl’s promiscuity. Her final decision to stay in the dystopia, where as a woman she is subject to rampant objectification, seems to suggest that her old life was even worse, and leaves her with essentially minimal choices.

            In terms of race, Idiocracy pushes the agenda for white superiority even further. It is far from a coincidence that the future president is African American, of course, but what’s shocking is how elements of black culture are appropriated and repositioned to signify stupidity in this bleak future. The president speaks in taglines and slang, wears glamorous outfits more suited to rap artists than government officials, and essentially engages congress in a gathering that resembles a chaotic party (not the political kind). At a very base level, the film sets itself up so that an average white male rescues the government and replaces its inferior leader with himself in a coup that is done for the betterment of mankind. Joe’s standard intelligence in the future allows him to be the most intelligent man on earth, but the ‘white man saves the day’ parable here is so overt that it oversteps the border of acceptability into offensiveness. Naturally, the entire film plays on stereotypes and exaggerates them for impact but its implication that the ‘correct’ or ‘adequate’ citizen is the white male reminds us, --as Kaplan and Grewal do in particular – about how neoliberal discourses are accessible to particular subjects and thus are inherently gendered, classed, and racialized.