'Idiocracy' Now!

Mike Judge's dystopian satire bombed at the box office in 2006, but it has never felt more prophetic.

Twenty years ago this fall, Idiocracy arrived in theaters under a cloud of bad buzz. The pitch-black comedy from Mike Judge starred Luke Wilson as Joe Bauers, a deeply unremarkable Army librarian who is recruited to participate in a cryogenics experiment — and promptly forgotten. Five centuries later, Joe emerges and discovers that the human race has devolved so badly that he’s now by far the smartest person alive.

The United States has become an anti-intellectual dystopia and corporate hellscape in which the president is a former professional wrestler, every citizen receives a mandatory barcode tattoo, Cabinet members get paid each time they mention Carl’s Jr., and a sports-drink conglomerate owns the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

20th Century Fox, reportedly concerned about alienating the very real corporations lampooned in the movie, repeatedly delayed the release of Idiocracy. Test screenings went badly, and the studio declined to screen it for critics — rarely a good omen. After sitting on the shelves for nearly two years, the film was dumped on barely a hundred screens in a handful of cities (not including New York or San Francisco). Judge, Wilson, and co-star Maya Rudolph did virtually no press.

The film, Judge’s much-anticipated follow-up to the cult favorite Office Space, was marketed so badly that some wondered if the studio was intentionally trying to drum up curiosity and film-nerd outrage ahead of a wider release. Alas, this conspiracy theory proved inaccurate: Idiocracy quickly disappeared from theaters and ultimately made just $444,000 at the box office.

But in the years since its brief, ignominious theatrical run, Idiocracy has become an unexpected cultural touchstone. It is no longer viewed as an embarrassing misfire from the guy behind irreverent favorites like Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, and Silicon Valley, and is instead seen as alarmingly prescient satire that accurately predicted the era of garish stupidity and self-destructive consumerism in which we now live.

If Judge’s vision of the future once seemed too cynical for mainstream filmgoers, in many ways it actually overly optimistic. Idiocracy is set 500 years in the future, after centuries of evolutionary decline. The president has stopped even pretending to address real problems and is able to distract the public with violent spectacle backed by major corporations. In reality, the United States got to this point in less than 20 years. (Likewise, the White House in Idiocracy is in disrepair and has been outfitted with a tacky above-ground pool, but that’s less intrusive than a 92-foot-tall “claw” — and the fictional East Wing is still standing.)

On Sunday, Trump celebrated his 80th birthday by hosting a massive U.F.C. fight on the south lawn of the White House — an occasion that Variety dubbed “peak Idiocracy.” Featuring analysis from leading public intellectual Joe Rogan and costing a reported $60 million to produce, the event was full of ludicrous details that Judge and his co-writer Etan Cohen probably would have dismissed as too far-fetched or crass to be believed.

It was sponsored by Bud Light and Ram Trucks, and streamed on Paramount+, a second-tier streaming service that’s desperate for eyeballs and is also controlled by the Trump-aligned Ellison family. Fighters were paid in crypto from a Trump company. Ring girls wore star-spangled gowns that may have violated the U.S. flag code. One of the event’s headliners, Alex Pereira, has been accused by two women of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. After winning his fight, heavyweight Josh Hokit for some reason chose to lob a juvenile, transphobic insult at Michelle Obama, a woman who hasn’t lived in the White House for nearly 10 years, and gave his chain to Trump.

Idiocracy’s strange afterlife began nearly as soon as it flopped at the box office, and fans have been noting its prescience for most of the last 20 years. There’s a dedicated Reddit forum — which was created in 2009 and now has close to 200,000 members — where people share real-world occurrences that feel lifted from the movie.

But the Idiocracy comparisons truly kicked into gear with Trump’s rise to power a decade ago. In 2016, Cohen tweeted that he “never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary.” Rumors even swirled that Terry Crews would reprise his role as President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho in a series of anti-Trump ads, but were then shot down. During Trump’s second term in office — as the emboldened president does whatever he wants, from repainting the reflecting pool in “American flag blue” to building a billion-dollar ballroom with tech bro money — the Idiocracy allusions have become almost impossible to resist.

The irony is that Judge never really intended to make a grand political statement with Idiocracy. Early drafts of the script didn’t include President Camacho, the character most often likened to Trump. Judge told the Los Angeles Times he was inspired to write the movie during a trip to Disneyland with his daughters in 2001. They were standing in line for the teacup ride when a fight broke out between two women. The vulgar display gave him an idea:

I started thinking about the movie 2001, and wouldn’t it have been funny if, instead of this monolith and intelligent people and this kind of pristine sci-fi world, it was just gigantic Costcos and The Jerry Springer Show and all this, people yelling at each other, yelling obscenities at Disneyland? Taking the progression from when the movie 2001 came out to the year 2001 and just projecting that forward many years — just where would that go?

It’s worth noting: Idiocracy is not a great movie. Despite a running time of just 84 minutes, it somehow feels long — like a one-note Saturday Night Live sketch stretched to feature length. Wilson is almost too well-cast as a boring regular schmo, and the satire is about as subtle as a blow torch to the face.

Then there’s the quasi-eugenic premise of the whole film. In the opening scene, a narrator explains that in the early 21st century, “human evolution was at a turning point.” People with low IQs were procreating at a higher rate than their more intelligent counterparts, leading to a fundamental change in the process of natural selection that “once favored the noblest traits of man.” By way of example, we meet Clevon, who has an IQ of 84 and a litter of children with multiple women, and a childless professional couple named Carol and Trevor (141 and 138, respectively).

Idiocracy’s implicit warning — that smart people need to start having more babies or humans will eventually be too stupid to tie their own shoelaces — feels like something JD Vance might endorse. (This sequence also appears to have resonated with Joe Rogan, who interviewed Mike Judge about the legacy of Idiocracy on his podcast in 2022. Yes, the irony is too much to bear.) The IQ obsession is also reminiscent of Trump, a man who loves to boast about his cognitive abilities and regularly insults his critics, especially when they’re Black, by calling them “low-IQ.”

At the end of the film — spoiler alert — Wilson’s character decides to stay in the year 2505. He eventually becomes president and gives a speech in which he declares, “There was a time in this country when smart people were considered cool. Well, maybe not cool, but smart people did things like build ships and pyramids, and they even went to the moon,” he says. “I believe that time will come again.”

We can only hope that Idiocracy was right about this, too.

Meredith Blake is the Contrarian’s culture columnist.

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