An Idiot's Reh-jeem

An Idiot’s Regime

            I had never heard of Idiocracy before this class, so I had no idea what it was going to be about. When I started the movie, I was pretty sure it would be really stupid, but by the end, I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t horrible. To me, it resembled the tv series Futurama in that it was about a person that got cast into the future. Both this movie and that tv show are about “normal” people who are forced to live in a completely different world. Besides that, the notion of intelligence is addressed in both of the movie and in Futurama. I also initially thought that both Idiocracy and Futurama are based around social commentary, but I found that Idiocracy seemed to be more about making fun of a social commentary. This movie plays with the idea of intelligence and stupidity, and plays with these ideas through the use of fallacies. I wasn’t looking for fallacies when I started watching this film, but as soon as I identified one fallacy, I noticed that the entire movie utilized different fallacies to demonstrate the stupidity of the future people or to push the plot forward.

The entire plot of the movie is even based on fallacy; the narrator of the film states that because “stupid” people reproduce much more than “smart” people, the entire world would of course be filled with stupid people in 500 years. This statement isn’t even one fallacy; it rolls a slippery slope and a genetic fallacy into one concept. Considering the type of movie this was though, I actually thought the use of fallacies to be intentional, which made the comedy even more appealing to me. As the movie moves forward, the viewer is brought to a place where they understand the future people to be stupid not only because of their speech and their actions, but because of how they reason. When Joe is brought before the court, his trial is based purely on how he speaks and is called a “fag” which leads the court to erupt in laughter and then leads to his incarceration, the people base their reasoning for Joe to be guilty because of his character, not the fact that he doesn’t know how to operate in the future. This ad hominem fallacy is used very often throughout the movie, especially with whatever trouble Joe gets himself into. Every time he does something wrong, he is accused on the basis of him talking like a fag or, as written on one sign at his rehabilitation, he’s guilty because “he’s a dick”. Even though putting millions of people out of their jobs probably wasn’t the best decision Joe made, the only way the future people were able to put his wrongdoing into words was through this fallacy.

The fallacy that I initially noticed in this film was when Joe had his first meeting concerning the crops after seeing that they were watered with that electrolyte Gatorade-like drink; brawndo. When Joe was trying to argue in favor of water, the argument kept circling back to water being gross because it comes from the toilet, a genetic fallacy, and brawndo having “what every plant craves, its got electrolytes.” When Joe asked what was so important about electrolytes, his cabinet just kept talking in circles, saying that electrolytes are used to make brawndo because brawndo has electrolytes.

These different fallacies, as well as some others are used to help the viewer identify with the stupidity of the future people, and to help sympathize with Joe’s frustration in dealing with them. The use of these fallacies really added to the comedy of the film, as well. Overall, this movie was actually very funny and it helped me to identify and see the different uses a fallacy can have.