“There's Pro-Wear on the Top, Assorted
in the Middle”
Reactionary Anxieties in Idiocracy
“All the agents in a
given social formation share a set of basic perceptual schemes, which receive
the beginnings of objectification in the pairs of antagonistic adjectives
commonly used to classify and qualify persons or objects in the most varied
areas of practice. The network of oppositions between high (sublime, elevated,
pure) and low (vulgar, low, modest), […] fine (refined, elegant) and coarse
(heavy, fat, crude, brutal), light (subtle, lively, sharp, adroit) and heavy
(slow, thick, blunt, laborious, clumsy), […] unique (rare, different,
distinguished, exclusive, exceptional, singular, novel) and common (ordinary,
banal, commonplace, trivial, routine), brilliant (Intelligent) and dull
(obscure, grey, mediocre), is the matrix of all the commonplaces which find
such ready acceptance because behind them lies the whole social order. The
network has its ultimate source in the opposition between the ‘elite’ of the
dominant and the ‘mass’ of the dominated, a contingent, disorganized multiplicity,
interchangeable and innumerable, existing only statistically. These mythic
roots only have to be allowed to take their course in order to generate, at
will, one or another of the tirelessly repeated themes of the eternal
sociodicy, such as apocalyptic denunciations of all forms of ‘levelling’,
‘trivialization’ or ‘massification’, which identify the decline of societies
with the decadence of bourgeois houses, i.e., a fall into the homogeneous, the
undifferentiated, and betray an obsessive fear of number, of undifferentiated
hordes indifferent to difference and constantly threatening to submerge the
private spaces of bourgeois exclusiveness.” - Pierre
Bourdieu, “Classes and Classifications”
“But the English
language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city
slang and various grunts.” – Narrator, Idiocracy
The
longstanding conservative fear of being overwhelmed by the abject masses plays
a central role in Idiocracy’s dystopic
future, in which society’s mentally/spiritually superior elite is displaced through
the sheer fecundity of their alleged inferiors. Within early iterations of this
apocalyptic social narrative, the ‘massification’ of culture occurs as a
consequence of the upheaval of the social order through endless multiplication,
where the influence of the elite ceases to fall on the ears of the
ever-burgeoning populace, and, without the discipline that it imposes, order is
quickly replaced by unrestrained hedonism. The advent of consumer society added
a new dimension to this; the Malthusian scenario
of near-extinction became increasingly unthinkable in an age of seemingly
endless abundance, and so the scenario had to change; it was not, as Menenius
Agrippa tells the rioting plebeians in Coriolanus,
the social body starving after its obscene components gorge on food meant for
its more industrious organs, but instead endless regression into increasingly
degraded genetic/cultural stock. This terror reaches its peak when the grand
distinction between the obscene toes, genitals, etc. and the pure, functional
stomach, mind, and soul become indistinct.
These fears have proliferated wildly among the
petit-bourgeois and even those it nominally targets; as Steinbeck observed, the
American working class isn’t composed of the poor, but instead temporarily embarrassed
millionaires. What is the popular refrain among white, suburban audiences that
they enjoy rap, so long as it isn’t about “bitches, blunts, and bling” if not an
attempt to draw distinction between the implied “low” point of those
enunciating these desires[i]
from that of the newly comfortable establishmentarians who once uttered the older
(and perhaps even now-quaint) mantra of “sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll”, and
present the former as a perverse attempt at polluting the purity of the latter?
This declaration also sheds light on the enduring role that fears of
miscegenation plays within this narrative; the: “fall into the homogeneous, the
undifferentiated[…]” (Link)
refers not only into the collapse of class distinction, but also the breakdown
of its parallel racial hierarchy. The horror within the conservative narrative
is not only that the President of the United States is: “five-time Ultimate
Smackdown Champion, porn superstar, and
president[…]” (emphasis mine), but that he is also Dwayne Elizondo Camacho, an
amalgam of “low” identities. This anxiety is not limited to genetic “dissolution”,
but is also understood in terms of cultural pollution; the replacement of “normal”
English by a pidgin hybrid of the slang used respectively by the poor, ungovernable
women, and racial minorities serves as the starting point for the viewer’s
introduction to Idiocracy’s future.
The transmission of “low culture”
memes through television is viewed not only with contempt (the star of “Ow, My
Balls!” is endlessly victimized by his fans) or with distrust (a cabinet member
endlessly follows his sentences with: “Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.” with the
apparent belief that the company sponsors him, adopting their values as his
own), but as something that will actively render the audience unable to think;
the slogan that Brawndo has electrolytes becomes a basic fact in the worldview
of the future, complete with an associated symbolic organization of similar
objects (“Water? Like from the toilet?”). While the film enthusiastically
embraces the use of mass media as a means of communicating from the elite to
the masses (textually through the broadcast of the growing plants,
metatextually as a film), the fear that it will fall into their hands is
central to Idiocracy’s dystopia.
While these only begin to cover the
extraordinarily reactionary politics of Idiocracy,
it reveals a dangerous undercurrent to contemporary American discourses on
class, especially among the young libertarian right; disturbing connotations of
racial hierarchy, the placement of responsibility for capitalist abuse (of the
environment, the working class, etc.) on the poor, and, most troublingly, the
implication of eugenics as a solution to the crises it depicts are all central
to the film’s politics.
[i] The
final component being the greatest obscenity; what is “bling” if not a kitschy
appropriation of one of the great traditional status markers?
No comments:
Post a Comment