Marcie and I were in Boston recently (more on that later) and one night in our cable-equipped hotel room we caught the movie Idiocracy. This was Mike Judge’s low-profile effort in between Office Space and Extract. Idiocracy starts from the Darwinist premise that dumb people are reproducing much faster than smart people, meaning that smart will eventually die out and dumb will take over the world. Technology and societal mechanisms become idiot-proof enough to keep humanity alive before all good sense disappears. As you might expect, Mike Judge’s picture of a future Stupidtopia is hilarious. Ironically, the film stumbles due to the dumbing down of its presentation. Too much is delivered via omniscent voice-over, and the story eventually devolves into a pedestrian and implausible race against the clock.
I had a dream that night in which we watched the same movie, but it was better- a smart, magical realism kind of scenario. There was a group of animals who were beginning to use the tools and technology left idle, evolving to fill the niche for intelligence left vacant by the idiot humans. Then, in their hubris, the humans exterminated the evolving animals, thus sealing the doom of intelligence on Earth. That would have been a good movie, and probably just as profitable.
Taking It Too Seriously 