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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to Bulwark Movie Club. The Bulwark Movie Club. Is that what we're going. Chris? CHRIS Herbert, I'm going to pull the curtain back here slightly. Chris Herbert was saying we don't, maybe we don't want to brand it like that, but I don't know, people seem to like it. Bulwark Movie Club, let us know in the comments. Leave a click like share with people, subscribe. But if, if you like that title, we'll, we'll have to stick with it because the people get to decide. I like it. I think it's a good one.
- [00:23]
B
I love Sarah.
- [00:24]
A
Sarah. Sarah Longwell, thank you for joining us today. Jonathan Last thank you for enjoying joining us. Joining us today, Sonny I'm Sonny Bonsheim, culture editor at the Bulwark and I'm very excited to be talking about one of the best movies of the 2000s, considered to be one of the most prescient films of the 2000s, one of the great harbingers of where we are, where we were going, where we wound up. Idiocracy. Mike Judge's Idiocracy we should thank our.
- [00:52]
B
Viewers, people who liked the Death of Stalin episode. We weren't sure how many if we would keep giving doing it, but not only did we really like doing it, I think it was really fun. We got a lot of suggestions and everyone's like, you got to do Idiocracy next. I've never seen Idiocracy.
- [01:08]
A
You had never seen Idiocy.
- [01:09]
B
I've never seen Idiocracy. You know, and I gotta tell you, I'll say this at the jump, as soon as I started watching it, I knew exactly why I never had, which is that I always felt like this was not a movie for me. This felt like a movie for boys. I maintain that actually a little bit. But I, I don't know what I thought it was because it's old now. I mean that is a young Luke Wilson came out in 2006.
- [01:38]
A
It was released in 2000 years. I think it was shot in 20 2005.
- [01:42]
B
So yeah, 20 years old and so certainly like 20 if 2006 at 26 year old me did not think, boy, this is a, this is a movie for me. And but I enjoyed it a ton and I enjoyed it more because I could see it through a political lens and it was great fun. I will say I know a lot of people suggested this. I didn't think it was anywhere near as potent a political analysis for the moment as Death of Stalin, but it had lots of fun things for us to chew on.
- [02:17]
A
Well, this is, this is a thing we can discuss. And I'm, I, I'm, I'm excited to get into that because there was. There, there. This, this movie has had a very interesting life. It, it, you know, it gets buried by Fox. It gets buried by Fox when it's released. Like to the extent that there was a profile of Mike Judge in the New York Times, I don't know, five or six years ago. And one of this, one of the scenes in this profile is the, the author of the profile is having lunch with Mike Judge and Tom Rothman kind of walks up at the Fox cafeteria and he's like, my bad, my bad on that one. I buried it. You know, we should have, we should have believed in it. We should have had faith in it. We should have put it in theaters. But I think this is a movie that was kind of destined to always have that cult status, much like his, his first big feature live action film. The. Which of course is Office Space. You've seen off. You've seen Office Space right there like a hundred times.
- [03:09]
B
I know I'm a Mike Judge fan, and so it is weird that I haven't seen this, but I could also see why I didn't jump at it, despite the fact that I must have scrolled past it a thousand times in my life.
- [03:21]
A
Yeah, it's definitely, it's a little bit caustic. It's a little bit, you know, some of the language in this jbl. You. We were, we were doing, we were talking yesterday and you were like, I'm watching it now. I'd kind of forgotten some of the, some of the, some of the language in this one.
- [03:37]
C
Yeah, I, this is a movie that I used to really, really like. Now that it plays as a documentary, I, I do not care for it. Now that it is our actual life, I feel I do not like it.
- [03:57]
A
Do not.
- [03:58]
C
Do not like this movie. Do not want. Do not. I mean, I, It's. It hits really different. I would say that all the President Camacho stuff hits different. All of the cable news stuff hits different. And frankly, the eugenics stuff hits different too.
- [04:21]
A
So Idiocracy opens not with the character who is played by Luke Wilson in this movie. His name is Joe Byers. He gets called not sure. In the future he's an army. The most average member of the United States army who is put into suspended animation for an experiment for a year and winds up waking up 500 years in the future. Real Rip Van Winkle sort of thing. You get, you get this occasionally in storytelling, but before we get to that, before we get to the adventure of Joe Bowers, there's a, there's a five minute preview which, in which shows how the world gets to where it is. Right. Which involves essentially the, the stupid outbreeding, the intelligent, to put it as bluntly as possible, these stupid people who do not have impulse control, just breeding like rabbits. While our kind of stereotypical upper middle class to upper class white urban types keep putting off having children. They keep putting it off, keep putting it off and eventually one of them dies, ironically, while masturbating to produce sperm for artificial insemination. So the, the there, there is this explicitly like, this is not like an implied. Like, oh, you know, it's. It is explicitly about eugenics, which has again, a weird. Watching that now. Jbl, what did you. What, which, which side of the aisle did you think that that would.
- [05:58]
B
Sorry, before you answer, the guy who does the procreating, I don't think his name's Cletus, but it is like Clovis or something like that. Like we have something super close.
- [06:08]
A
I was gonna. Sarah, thank you. Thank you for reminding me, because I do want to ask you if we want to put a Cletus limit on this episode. If JBL has to like keep it to just two cletuses for this episode, maybe we can, maybe we can do.
- [06:23]
B
Three wheels off fun pod. And so JBL can do what he wants.
- [06:26]
A
It's not okay. As many cletuses as possible.
- [06:28]
B
I just. When the car. The guy who is breeding like rabbits with multiple women is like a bubba for the ages. And I, I can't remember what his name was, but I just remember thinking, man, JBL is going to have a field day with this. So, so you take it away, sir.
- [06:44]
C
Yeah, again, it all just hits very different for me. If I could put on my Barbra Streisand, Prince of Tide pants, as Tobias would say, and talk about demography.
- [06:58]
B
Now we're talking. Tell me more.
- [07:01]
C
One of the things that I did write a book about demographics once upon a time. And the idiocracy thing is wrong. This isn't actually how it works. So fertility rates do correlate with education and income, but they are led by the upper classes historically and have almost always and everywhere in that way. So the people who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic and educational ladders wind up patterning their fertility preferences over the long term, over the. On the elites. And so this is a Thing that we have seen throughout all societies over the last hundred years or so, everywhere. Whether you're talking about Iran, like theocratic, post revolutionary Iran, America, France, Japan, I mean this is. And so everybody's fertility rates are moving backwards. It is not the case that the, the, the cletuses of the world are breeding like rabbits. It's the opposite. And the, there this idea about the, the Untermensch outbreeding. Everybody is, has a very rich history from again across the world, whether it is Nazis worrying about Jews and Gypsies or it is Americans worrying about the Irish, right, and in the Italians, or then later worrying about Hispanic immigrants. And the answer is again, all of these fertility rates regressed to the mean very, very fast. When I wrote my, my book on demographics, one of the things I got when talking to conservative audiences was like, oh, but you know, America's being overrun by Hispanics and they are breeding like crazy. It's, it's exactly the idiocracy thing. And I was like, I am sorry, but it turns out that Hispanic fertility has regressed to the mean over like the course of a single generation in America. And this is in fact, if you have followed anything about demographics over the last 10 years and you see like every year there's a story about like, oh, the American total fertility rate is a new all time low. The reason it has hit a new all time low every single year is because of declines in Hispanic fertility. Not like, you know, whites and blacks have basically held, held even. It is that as you've had all of these recent, you know, arrivals in America and they plant their roots in, in America and within one generation their kids have the same fertility patterns as native borns anyway.
- [09:54]
B
Isn't part of that people being like, you know what's expensive these days? These kids like, it is too expensive to have.
- [10:02]
C
That is, that is our seats. But again, this is, this is true everywhere. It's true in Tehran, it's true in Moscow, it's true in Helsinki, it's true in Mexico City. It's true. It is something bigger. And I don't want to turn this into demographics talk. I would just say that now that we live in a world where the eugenic stuff is running active policy. I wrote today about a speech being given by a senator, a US Senator from Missouri, in which he talks about great replacement theory. I found it very, very hard to laugh at the eugenics in idiocracy the way I did the first time when this stuff didn't like really exist in our world, respectively that's all. I don't mean to be a buzzkill, like, ah, it's a funny movie, it's a great movie. But again, just like context matters and viewing it through this level, like I did literally had the experience of watching Senator Eric Schmidt's piece about like, you will not replace us on this, you know, within an hour of watching Idiocracy. And that whole first section like, feels mean spirited and dangerous in a way that the first time I saw it and the second and third and fourth and fifth time I saw this movie I just thought was hysterical.
- [11:30]
A
Well, this is a mean spirited movie. This is another thing we were discussing before the show that this is, this movie is, is mean spirited in a way that Office Space and, and a lot of his, a lot of Judge's other stuff is not. You know, we could, we could talk about King of the Hill versus, You know, Silicon Valley versus whatever. But I do I. There, there is a real, there's a real mean streak to this movie about the, the, the actual, the idiocracy itself, like the, the people who are, you know, left and running the world in 2505, 500 years in the future, which is, look, I'll be honest, is like cathartic and appealing in a very real way. As I'm sitting here, you talk about what you were watching last night. What I'm watching today is RFK Jr talking about vaccines and that sort of thing. And I'm watching the people trying to cheer him on and be like, oh yeah, those shots, you know, it's like slavery drives me absolutely bonkers. It drives me absolutely bonkers. And I'm okay with a little bit of mean spiritedness toward, toward that type of person.
- [12:47]
C
Kids need electrolytes, not vaccines.
- [12:50]
B
Can I. So since we're, since we're already going to zag on this, I wanted to let us, I don't know, settle in first. But I would say one of my big critiques of this, when you say this movie was prescient, I guess I expected it to be more prescient than actually it was when I saw it. So many people say Idiotic Idiocracy was a documentary. I'm not sure what I thought it was going to be about. But if I had to take away some of the, with the exception of this very specific political scenes with President Camancho, which that hits hard relative to Trump, like the idea that he was a, a rock star, porn star, whatever that led him to be the elected president. It's like, okay, that's on the nose. But the, the thesis was actually more corporatized that these big corporate giants were going to rule things to such an extent in the future that you know, we're watering our plants with a Gatorade substitute like a downgrade Mountain Dew. And that's why you know, in this world which by looks very much to me like Wall E. Like the, the, the movie.
- [14:04]
C
Yeah. Or Ready Player one.
- [14:05]
B
Because I had never seen this movie before and had seen Wally many times both as an adult and with my kids. I, I, I don't. It was funny how much Wall E sort of mimics it. The mountains of trash and they don't know what to do with anything. But the so much of it didn't to get what the future would be like correctly.
- [14:29]
D
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- [15:00]
E
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- [15:18]
A
No, no.
- [15:19]
D
You need to listen to music in the most difficult way possible.
- [15:22]
E
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- [15:32]
B
Well, yeah, go ahead.
- [15:33]
A
Yeah, yeah. So this is, this is a thing I always think about when I'm watching a sci fi futuristic type show, right? Which is that anytime you make something about the future, it is almost always the present. But more so it is always so. Like in 2005 there was lots of talk about landfills. What are we going to do with all this trash? What are we going to do with all this trash that we have? And turns out there's a lot of space for trash. It's not really a thing that, that we have to worry about that much. It's why, like, if you go back and watch Blade Runner, right? Blade Runner has this kind of undercurrent of, of like yellow peril, right? There was like this fear of Japan and China coming to America and like taking everything over. And that, that is very present in 1982's Blade Runner. That is like a. That is a thing that defines that future and is obviously not really a thing that we are super worried about anymore. It just doesn't. That's not a thing we have to think about. And so when I'm watching Idiocracy, I'm thinking of the things that it does get right. Like for instance, the celebratization of politics. The President Command Camacho, like the President Camacho thing is so perfect. And in the degradation of the House of Representatives to the House of Representatives, the cabinet secretaries, the attorney. What do they call her? Attorney General Fund bags. Like the, the. All of this stuff like that.
- [16:58]
B
Well, I can't wait to talk about how they deal with women in this movie.
- [17:01]
A
What are your thoughts on Rita? Because I love this character. She is. Maya Rudolph is so funny in this movie.
- [17:09]
C
Is this pre SNL for her?
- [17:11]
A
I think it's right. It's like her first season maybe.
- [17:16]
B
All right, I'll tell you what I think because this was actually one of my biggest disappointments about the movie. Because Maya Rudolph is a queen. She should be given only the awesomest of roles. And I thought that now to get to the way they talk about women and we haven't really talked about this yet and I want to lead up to it properly. So much of the premise on this is that mankind has been reduced to its most base forms. Like people cannot talk incomplete sentences anymore. They are so stupid and so degraded over time that we are 500 years in the future. It's like people sit there much like in Wall E when they're on the ships. Like they've. They now have to live in space on these ships with these enormous big gulps and they all fly around in these recliners. Like Dax Shepard. A very young, dumb looking Dax Shepard is sitting on a lazy boy that once he gets up, you realize is also a toilet. He's just eating like a bucket of slop where he's like drinking the Mountain Dew through a straw and he's like. Food consumption is just. It's like a popcorn bucket of sugar. Like paste. Yeah, right.
- [18:29]
A
Sugar, lard.
- [18:31]
B
And so, so one thing that happens if you degrade men down to Three, he's watching a show that's just like, you know, they kind of have almost owl my balls.
- [18:40]
A
But.
- [18:40]
B
But it's first, it's like this selection. You can see the selection screen and it's like grotesque violence porn. And then like the show he's watching is all my balls, which is just a guy, like getting kicked in the balls, falling onto things and hurting his balls and like, whatever, and he's laughing maniacally at it. And you could see how at a time when, like, Jackass was one of the dominant things that people were watching, like, why this joke really landed. But of course, what happens when men are reduced to this is also that women become nothing but sexual items. And so there she is a prostitute. But she's a prostitute also in our timeline, right, the 2006 Maya Rudolph character is a prostitute. Who's this is. And this bit is like kind of funny where the military has found her because they went. They went to her pimp Upgrade, which is. This is one of the best bits in the whole thing, which is. Upgrade is spelled U, P G R A Y E D d. The second Ds for. What was it? I can't remember what the. What the joke is, but Upgrade. And so she's. She's a prostitute and she is treated then as such in the future as well. Like, women are like the one woman who is on the. There's not that many women characters to begin with, but the one that there is is Maya Rudolph. And the best thing you can say, I think about her character is that she allows the male character to define himself as a nicer person relative to everybody else. You see, like, there is a scene where he has to tell, in order to get some time alone with her to talk to her about something, he has to tell the guys around him that they are going to go. And I think they don't say words, they just make the little circle and then put the finger, index finger through it. For those listening, I have just showed you what that looks like. And some of the men say they come down during the talk and they're like, can this. Can this be done family style? Like, they just. There's just a casual, like, can we have a gang rape here? Um, and. And I, I basically hate that stuff. Like, it just doesn't. It's not going to land for me. And I also think it's just like a criminal underuse of Maya Rudolph where her entire character is there to be like, this guy is like a. A guy from the past who's still a nice guy and has certain morals around women, even though, like, the best they could do for a woman in this was fun bags. Cabinet member and prostitute. Those are the two female characters in this show. In this movie, I will say.
- [21:18]
A
I will say so she had been on SNL for like five years when they shot this movie. She'd been on the show for a while. I will say I. She has my absolute favorite line read in this movie, where it's towards the end of the film where Dax Shepard, like, picks her up to move her closer to the TV screen or something, and she's just like, don't you fucking like that. Like, it's like the perfect encapsulation of how frustrating all of this must be to a person of completely average intelligence. And that is. That is. And, and so that is what the movie is really about for me, which.
- [21:53]
C
Is, yes, this is how I feel listening to Sarah's podcast, Sonny.
- [21:58]
A
This is, this is how I feel. This is. But like, this is, this is the. The idea of being a, a like, normal person and watching the world shift around you to the worst and not understanding precisely why it has happened is what the movie is about. So I want to. I want to. I just want to read an excerpt from this New York Times profile of Mike Judge by Willie Staley. Then he told me he being Mike Judge, told me the best story of the night. He was location scouting for Idiocracy at a reform school, though he didn't know it was a reform school at the time. He looked around and thought the students there looked, in his words, kind of stupid and figured they might be of use to him in the Idiocracy universe. The most popular movie in America and the winner of eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, consists entirely of a man's buttocks passing gas intermittently for 90 minutes. Judge had made a 35 millimeter print of this movie within a movie, just a few minutes of it, for a scene that takes place in a theater. And he wound up recruiting 250 of the juvenile delinquents to fill the seats. Judge figured he'd have to do a bit of directing to get the proper response from these extras. That context free flatulence wouldn't actually be that funny. But the kids surprised him. They just start laughing, he told me, and they just keep laughing. And that is like, I feel like the entire world is now a collection of reform school students who are just kind of laughing at what is happening in, in the world or just kind of going along with it or Actively supporting it. And I like it breaks my brain. It breaks my brain and I don't know how to handle it. And this movie kind of makes me feel seen in a way.
- [23:38]
D
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- [24:08]
E
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- [24:39]
B
Jbl, does it make you feel seen?
- [24:40]
C
I mean, no, I, I was joking when I said that this is how I feel listening to the focus group sometimes, but I kind of wasn't joking. Like sometimes I will listen to the people in your focus groups say things that are just utterly divorced from reality. Like, you know, well, he's just a businessman. He made so much money with his casinos that I trust that he knows. Like things which are just like, no, he didn't. He bankrupt his casinos. Right. Like, this is just things that are utterly stupid. They might as well be the prosecutor saying, you know, look at the evidence. They might as well be Dax Shepard's character. That's like a prevailing ethos in America now. Like, it, it just really is. People just like say stuff and I don't know, I don't know how it's all supposed to work. I don't know. Like, I, like again, the, the Bobby Kennedy hearings today. You know, the Joseph Ladopo or whatever the idiot surgeon general of Florida is. You know, they just say, just say things that are nonsense and people just, you know, I, I don't know Man, I'm sorry. This. I didn't even finish a heavy episode.
- [26:01]
A
You got, you got depressed watching.
- [26:02]
C
I did. I really did. Yeah.
- [26:06]
A
Okay. Not even. You weren't. You didn't even find the, the PowerPoint presentation about the pimps. A pimp's love versus a square's love funny. That didn't work for you at all.
- [26:19]
B
I laughed out loud at that part.
- [26:22]
C
I laughed at parts of it.
- [26:23]
B
It's got 20 slides he's going through.
- [26:27]
A
Jesus, Collins.
- [26:28]
B
It's one of the best bits in the movie.
- [26:31]
C
I don't know. It was a tough watch. Do you guys not feel any of that? Am I the only. The only one?
- [26:41]
B
No, in part, I, I, I didn't. Largely because, again, I sort of felt like. And maybe this is a stupid way for me to analyze something like this, but having not watched it back then and only watching it now, I was like, well, they really misread, like, the cultural dominance of our, like, like, they bit Fuddruckers and Carl's Jr. And the soft drinks and all of that stuff. Like, the brands are like, basically the thing that rules the world. The one political catastrophe that happens is when Luke Wilson's character says, well, the reason the plants aren't growing is because you're. You're not using water. You're using this, like, downgrade Mountain Dew. And they're all like, the stuff in the toilet. Like, that's what we should put on flour, like, on the plants. And that causes a bunch of people, like, they switch and, like, the plants start growing. But it also causes all the Mountain Dew, the fake Mountain Dew people to lose their jobs and stock to crash. Yeah. Is that what it's called?
- [27:51]
A
Brondo, it's got what plants craze.
- [27:54]
B
It's got electrolytes. What are electrolytes? It's what's in Brando. You know, I guess I was like, you know, the, he was making a critique on the undue influence of corporate culture where I actually think that the way that people get this isn't judge's fault. Like, there's lots about this that's interesting. It's just, to me, like, the, the way that people are getting dumber is much more a function of. Not of sort of mindless consumerism, exactly, but more the information streams becoming so diffuse and AI and not reading like their, you know, like. And, And I gotta say, some of the critiques lacked a little fleshing out. Like, the idea that this guy was a lawyer and that there was still a legal system, there was still a stock market. But everybody was too stupid to like, do anything. But these things still existed also 500 years in the future. I don't know. It was we for them to. Because he comes back, right? And everybody keeps accusing Luke Wilson's character of talking faggy. Of. Of it being faggy talk because he speaks in complete sentences even, and so everybody thinks he sounds like a, Like a, Like a fag. That's fag talk. And I was like. I was like, first of all, conservatives, just so you know, people don't get woker. More woke as the future goes on. They get. Apparently it's still cool to call things baggy, but I, I just. I don't know, it felt. I spent the whole time being like, well, this wouldn't be what it's like, or like, this isn't what. What is.
- [29:40]
A
I don't know.
- [29:40]
B
How Does Faggy survive 500 years? You know?
- [29:45]
A
But you don't think there's. You don't think there's like an element of like, oh, that's that. What is this highfalutin talk? It's not phrased exactly like that anymore. But you don't think that there's some, Some pushback on. On that sort of stuff?
- [30:00]
B
No, I do. It's just that you don't meet one. He is like an alien. He's an alien to them. Not. Not.
- [30:09]
C
Have you watched TikTok ever?
- [30:11]
B
Yeah, but. But not. But not a group of people. Not a group of people they dislike. Like an un. He's an unrecognizable form to them.
- [30:21]
C
Gore Vidal and Bill Buckley would be unrecognizable forms to the people on TikTok these days. I think many of the Utes.
- [30:32]
B
The Utes, yeah.
- [30:33]
A
One thing that is interesting about the, the, the like TV setup he has there is that he is not watching. He's not watching the Sopranos or, you know, he's not watching. He is watching functionally. What is. What are TikTok shorts? He is watching. He's watching Instagram reels. That's what. Ow, my balls is. It's not a TV show. It's just a series of things stitched together and one imagines that that's what the entire information ecosystem is. Right? So I actually had that as a thing that the movie kind of gets right, like the, the viewing habits of. Of modernity. I granted, they could have had like, you know, who could have seen a Joe Rogan style, like, nonsense person. Instead they have the, the kind of Fox News style hosts in the, the American Gladiator outfits which like, like again, that's like it's 2005, but more so that, that, that's the, that's the idea there. And I, I can see. I don't know, I just like is.
- [31:29]
B
It.
- [31:32]
A
Is that, is that not wrong? That's not wrong. I feel like it's. Maybe we got. I guess we have another 70, 470 years. But yeah, it's. Maybe it's. Maybe it's had. I don't know. I just think I like set aside the big picture stuff. I do find this movie very funny on a moment to moment basis. Like the bit where Luke Wilson's character is trying to explain like you can't put electrolytes on the plants because it's killing them, they need water. And he's explaining it and he's trying to look up what electrolytes are. There are no books. And so as we hear in the voiceover narration, eventually Joe just told them he could talk to plants and then they believe him. And like that, that it's, it's just like there are so many little bits like that throughout the movie that I couldn't, I couldn't stop. I still find this movie very funny and entertaining. It cracks me up every time. And there are so many great little visual jokes throughout. Like on the scoreboard. On the scoreboard at like the Murder Dome that he gets sentenced to. Right. The advertisements around the Tyranno Vision screen are for tjo handjobs. Vera laid. Smart Speak. We speak for you. Only $12 per unit. That's just chatgpt. That's just like Smart Speak. We speak for you. That's just AI. That's LLM.
- [32:58]
C
That's a lot of gambling stuff in there.
- [33:00]
A
One for Mike Judge on that one.
- [33:02]
C
All the ads. Can we talk about Mike Judge himself? Does that have any interest to you guys?
- [33:11]
A
Sure. I like Mike Judge because.
- [33:16]
C
I view Office Space as a perfect movie of which there really aren't many. Right. I mean there are many, many great five star movies that aren't perfect. Perfect meaning that there's literally nothing that you could change in it. Like there's not a frame in it that's wrong. Like everything in it is exactly right. I think Office Space.
- [33:36]
B
More Jennifer Aniston.
- [33:40]
C
Sure. More Jennifer Aniston would have been great. But. But it's like, I don't know. I just think it is exactly right in every way. And, and there's a huge lag between that and idiocracy, which I assume it's like seven years, I think, between Office Space and Idiocracy. I assume part of this is that he was in movie jail for a little bit because Office Space didn't do well.
- [34:06]
A
He's making King of the Hill.
- [34:09]
C
Is he already? Yeah, he's starting King of the Hill that early and. But he, like, the tone takes a turn because Office Space is a very loving movie. Like, he has great affection for everybody in that movie except for Bill Lomberg. He even likes the Bobs. Right? Even the Bobs. He kind of likes the Bobs.
- [34:35]
B
Have the best line in the whole thing, which is, what would you say you do here?
- [34:43]
C
Also great.
- [34:44]
B
I mean, I quote that every day to, you know, people out. Richard Rule.
- [34:49]
C
Oh, Richard Rule is so good.
- [34:51]
B
But he.
- [34:52]
C
So we go from this very good natured movie, Office Space, to Idiocracy, to then Extract, which is also a really dark and mean movie, and then to Silicon Valley, which I think is kind of optimistic. It's a little dyspeptic because it doesn't like the tech bros in Silicon Valley, but it likes the rest of us. Like Silicon Valley proposes that the problem are all of these assholes out in San Francisco and that, like, the rest of us are actually all normal and. Okay. It just seems like it's a. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. It seems like Mike Judge has been on a journey. It's like how he relates to people in the world, I don't know.
- [35:37]
A
I don't know. I mean, I. I do think that. So for the record, King of the Hill was on from 97 to 2008. So like, was. It was. It was basically this whole time up, almost up to Silicon Valley. It comes out in 2010, I think, something like that. I will say Extract is another movie that is very. Is very dyspeptic. Is very. Is very kind of down on the people in that movie. Everybody's kind of bad. Like nobody. Nobody's. Nobody's really. Nobody's great. I was talking with you about this before. Jbl, Beavis and Butthead. I know. Sarah, were you a Beavis and Butthead watcher at all? Was that. Or is that totally uninteresting to you?
- [36:24]
B
So it's super uninteresting, except it was so culturally relevant when I was a teenager that, like, I caught enough of it to know.
- [36:32]
A
But you love Daria, right?
- [36:33]
B
I loved Daria.
- [36:35]
A
You loved the Beavis and Butt head spinoff, Daria. That was, you know, that's where she. That's where she. That's where she came from.
- [36:40]
B
I had sort of forgotten that.
- [36:42]
A
Yeah, yeah. But Beavis in my head is interesting too because there is a weird mix of. That is a show that is, that is absolutely making fun of the characters on the show, but it's also kind of making fun of the viewers. The viewers are the Beavis and Butt Head stand ins. Beavis and Butt Head spend all their time sitting on the couch watching the music videos that are playing before and after Beavis and Butthead play. Right. Like you are Beavis and Butthead to a certain extent. And Beavis and Butthead also had like lots of great jokes about like their redneck neighbors and they're like dorky guidance counselors and, and that sort of thing. And so they're. He, he has always kind of straddled this misanthropic line of like, I don't, I don't, I don't love a lot of what I see in the world, but I do think he, look, I think he. Even in Idiocracy, even in Idiocracy, even in a movie that is kind of mean spirited like it is. I do think he has, ultimately, he has some affection for the world. At least enough affection for the world to give it a kind of happy ending with Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph, you know, having their super genius babies of like total average intelligence in the future. Even. Even with the little, you know, note of the, the Dax Shepard Lawyer Idiot Having 17,000 kids too, you know. I don't know, Sarah.
- [38:15]
B
Yeah, I guess I don't. I guess I thought the movie ended like it began in that it was like, yeah, there's some people who should be reproducing and they're not reproducing nearly enough to offset how all these other morons are reprod saying because it's like Dax Shepard as like a harem. These are the other women in the movie or Dax Shepard's harem and all of their offspring. Whereas he and Maya Rudolph have three nice little, you know, biracial children. And I, I, you guys didn't even respond to my women thing. But sometimes it's not just how women are treated in a movie, but also the lack. Total absence of interesting characters among them. And so did you have any response to what I was saying? Do you think I'm right? Wrong.
- [39:04]
C
The women's stuff is blatant enough that even I, and I am not sensitive to this sort of thing. Even I was a little like, huh, like the, the extent to which women are shoved into the background and not given really Much just like much business like they. They. I mean it is I guess like patriarchy, right? Like the. The in an idiocracy future it would by necessity wind up being super patriarchal. But everybody being all women being reduced to. To prostitutes again and just like not given a bunch of business during the.
- [39:54]
A
Movie.
- [39:57]
C
It felt a little off to me.
- [39:58]
D
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- [40:28]
A
Progressive knows we all crave validation.
- [40:30]
D
Girl, you are not 37.
- [40:32]
A
I would have guessed 27.
- [40:33]
D
You guys are too sweet.
- [40:34]
B
Sure.
- [40:35]
C
Dewy skin.
- [40:36]
B
Terrific.
- [40:36]
D
Um, is something wrong, Ned?
- [40:38]
A
Why would you ask? Just because Today marks my 10th anniversary without a car accident or even a speeding ticket.
- [40:42]
C
But.
- [40:43]
A
But somehow tonight's all about your skin care. Wow. With snapshot from progressive, you can get a personalized rate based on how you drive. And that's all the validation you need. Progressive Casualty insurance company and affiliate snapshot not available in California from all agents search possible for unsafe driving. Sarah, do you have a matriarchal future?
- [41:02]
B
Well, I have a thought about the way. I have a thought about why women's role was what it was. But I'm interested, Sunny, in what you thought before I talked about.
- [41:11]
C
Yes, honey, tell us why. It wasn't a problem.
- [41:13]
A
It didn't bother me that much because Maya Rudolph is so funny in the like Maya Rudolph is very funny in the film. And like we could talk like, is it. Oh, by the way, did you guys stick around? Do you know there's a Stinger, right? There's like a post credit stinger.
- [41:27]
C
I did not know that to the movie.
- [41:29]
A
You didn't? You didn't?
- [41:30]
C
Oh, I've seen the movie like 10 times. I've never stuck around through the credits.
- [41:34]
A
Post credit Stinger. Post credit Stinger is. There's a third pod. There's a third pod that opens in the year 2505. And out of it steps upgrade which just. Which just puts a nice little button on the joke she has throughout the movie, that upgrade is going to be coming for her. And, and Joe was like, no, he can't. It's. We're in the. Anyway, it's funny. You should go back and watch and just skip all the way to the beginning. No, I, I, it did, it didn't bother me that much because Maya Rudolph is very, very funny in the movie. Like, she, she just delivers an incredibly amusing performance. Like, I love all of, I love all of the work that she is doing in this film. I love the ridiculous costumes they have her in with, like, the branding for the, for the various companies. Like, she's wearing, like, billboard clothing is the only way I can think to describe it. I don't know. I, it does, it does not bother me in the same way that it bothers you, Sarah.
- [42:29]
B
Okay, well, here's my big take that I saved for 40 minutes in about why Mike Judge couldn't make this movie with many women. And he had to pick because even as a prostitute, like, one of the, One of the funnier bits they do with her is that there's a guy who immediately sees her in 2505, identifies her as a prostitute and starts trying to pay her for sex. But because they're so dumb at this point that Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph's characters are so much smarter than them, she's able to kind of say, yeah, yeah, give me money now, and I'll, I'll, I'll do this later. And he keeps falling for it. And so he keeps just bringing her more and more money so she's able to buy things. Because this guy just, like, can't he, like, can't put it together that he's getting scammed. But the entire movie, every character, the president, the cabinet, every, every the, all the henchmen, just all of it is men. And it's not. I don't know if it's Michael Judge's sex. I don't know that I think it's sexism. I think that it's because you couldn't make this movie with a lot of women.
- [43:42]
A
Like, you couldn't portray them being that stupid all the time.
- [43:45]
B
Yes.
- [43:48]
A
Wait, wait, I want to clarify. He couldn't. You couldn't portray them as being stupid all the time because women aren't that stupid or because he would get in trouble for portraying them as that stupid.
- [43:57]
B
I mean the former, not the latter. Imagine him trying to do with women, like, to the extent that the women are there at all. It is only as a way to demonstrate how either Dumb, all of the men are in it. Or Luke Wilson's relative virtue to this. If you had women as like a real part of this, you would struggle. I think, like, for, for men, it was very easy to be like, the Starbucks is now where you go to get. Because I can't remember what the tiers were of pricing, but it was all, it was a sex shop. Starbucks is a sex shop. They were all sex shops. Like, the only thing the men did was like, eat shit and try to have sex. Right? It's like you boiled men down to their ids, which I think is actually just harder to do with women, whether it's because they still have to give life and. No, but I just like, I bet he couldn't see a way to do it in a way that made sense and would be funny.
- [45:06]
A
Men are simple creatures, is what you're saying.
- [45:09]
B
I think that his interpretation of like, who becomes an idiot? And I'll just say the one thing that I kept thinking as I was like, okay, well, let's, let's think about the parallels to modern politics is the extent to which Donald Trump wildly over performs with men now and the gap now between women and men in terms of education, in terms of voting behavior, and as the Republican party becomes more a reflection of Donald Trump's id and somebody who sleeps with porn stars and, you know, talks about, you know, is like a former sports owner or whatever, he's more attractive to men. And these male podcasters who have three hour shows where they're like, I'm stoned. And I'm trying to figure out if, like, this gorilla is gonna like, beat this shark in this fight, you know, like, in, like, dudes are into that in a way that I just don't think women are. And so I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say that I actually think Mike Judge didn't know how to make idiocracy and have it be about women.
- [46:08]
A
I think that's probably about right. No, I think that's actually, I think that's actually a really kind of profound insight because I, I, I, I don't know how you would. Because what, what is. Who is like the only real, like, female idiocracy character in the idiocracy itself. Right? It's the Attorney General character. Like that. That's it. Fun bags, Attorney General, fun bags. And she is basically just repeating what the other guys like. There's no, she just, she just says the same things as everybody else. How would you, I don't know, how would You. How would you, Sarah, portray the women in. In a future like this? What would they be into?
- [46:52]
B
Well, I don't think they'd have. If. If you take this movie to its logical conclusion, women probably are, like captives or slaves of some kind in. In a world like this. Like, I'm not sure they could exist freely in a. Because, like, it's an interesting. It was interesting to me that so much of the sex was commoditized. But, like, you know what I watched recently because. Is it. Is it Cloverfield? No, no. What is the one where it's the dystopian future that they shot on, like, a iPhone. They just had its third season of it. It's a horror film. It's got Cillian. What's his name?
- [47:43]
A
Oh, the 28. 28 days later.
- [47:45]
B
28 days later. That. Then they do 28 months later, 28 years later. Okay, so I've only seen the first one because I was. Maybe. I was like, maybe I'll catch the third one. But I was like, well, I got to start the beginning, and I watched the first one. And the. The scariest part of that movie is that when all of everything's been wiped out and they find the military people and the head of the military guy, this is, like, towards the end, is basically has found these women that are traveling with Cillian Michaels or whatever his last name is.
- [48:13]
A
Killian Murphy.
- [48:14]
B
Yeah, Killian Murphy. Sorry. They. They. They're basically like, well, we're gonna kill him, and we're gonna. Like, we need to breed with these women. He's like, I promised these soldiers women. And I just. I feel like in a dystopian world like this, where civilization is gone and men's IDS are the only thing anybody has, like, women either get out of there. Like, they use their wits to get out of there and rule over the men, or men use physical domination of some kind, and, like, moral barriers are gone. But I actually thought he just, like, really skipped over the male female dynamic in it and did it by simply not just deciding not to play. Because I think if you introduce that, it builds up way more complicated questions of if the men are all this dumb, the women are now, like, a superior ruling class. But then the world's, like, kind of okay. Or the men have created, like, a thing where women are only there for sex because these. These were like. The whole point is that the men can't think or do anything productive at all or be anything other than, like, the base animals that they are.
- [49:31]
A
Yeah, yeah, maybe they did all. I mean, we really don't see that many. Maybe they did all leave. Maybe they're up in Canada.
- [49:37]
C
Maybe we ought to end the show there because it's such a profound observation. Sarah, that's really. You came to play. That's top notch.
- [49:50]
A
Yeah, I'm not going to top that.
- [49:53]
B
Maybe you guys should consider the interior lives of women. Every once in a while, it might add another layer of dimension to how you look at you both. Being like, God, I couldn't possibly do that.
- [50:04]
A
Think about it.
- [50:06]
C
I live with more women than you do.
- [50:08]
B
That's true. It's true.
- [50:12]
A
All right, well, this was a surprisingly downer episode, frankly. We were having more fun with the murderous Stalinist purges than we were with Brondo. And Upgrade.
- [50:25]
C
We got to get people to pick a better movie for us next week.
- [50:29]
B
Can I just quickly say, as a Death of Stalin comparison, I think part of the reason the Death of Stalin was so much better is the touch is so deft in that one. I mean, it is just like a scalpel in a way, that this one's a hammer. And so, like, this is funny. I thought this movie was really funny. I was, like, pumped that I finally saw it. I think that there are ways in which I was like, well, this guy in 2005, he had some stuff to get off his chest about people. And, you know, that part was pretty fun, but I didn't think that it said as much at the end of the day as Death of Stalin did. That was as resident for as many times as I've seen people say Idiocracy is a documentary about this political moment and me always kind of knowing what that meant but not caring enough to go really dig it in. The movie was sort of different. It wasn't as trenchant for the moment in a. In a, like I said, in a scalpel kind of way, but it isn't like a hammer kind of way.
- [51:31]
A
We'll always have President Dwayne Elizondo, Mountain Dew, Herbert Camacho there. Is that. So. All right, well, make sure you hit like and subscribe and recommend. As JBL says, maybe. I don't know. I'm not sure what JBL wants now. Now I'm. Now I'm nervous and confused. I don't know.
- [51:52]
C
I just blame the audience picking a bad movie. Okay, so you're nervous. What do you want from us? Welcome to podcasting with Margin Call network. Prime of Ms. Jean Brody, which I hear is a great movie.
- [52:07]
B
It is a great movie.
- [52:08]
C
I've never seen it myself.
- [52:09]
A
Are there any women in Margin Call? I can't remember.
- [52:11]
B
There are Demi Moores in Margin Call.
- [52:13]
A
That's right. That's right, Demi Moore. Okay. No, I just always see. God, I haven't seen that movie since it came out. That would be a good one to revisit. I'll sign off here again. Yeah. Let us know what we should do next. Preferably something that won't send JBL into a depression spiral. That'd be great. And we'll be back next week with another episode, hopefully.