Welcome to Costco, I love you

From David Fear at Rolling Stone, an appreciation of the “Genius of Idiocracy”, the smartest stupid movie ever made.

This is Judge’s vision of the future — a landscape of staggering vulgarity and franchising run amuck, where Carl’s Jr. can take your kids if you can’t pay for their “big-ass fries,” consumers eat tubs of butter while watching the Masturbation Channel and the President is a porn star/five-time TV wrestling champion. As he mentions in the interview below (jump to the 27-and-a-half mark), Judge was in line at Disneyland with his family when two women, each with kids in strollers, started screaming obscenities at each other. “I [started] thinking, what if the movie 2001, instead of the monolith and everything being pristine and advanced…what if it was The Jerry Springer Show and giant WalMarts?” With basic human intelligence now bred out of existence, the profoundly stupid have inherited the earth and they’ve turned it into both a giant, poorly run superstore and an Orwellian dystopia sponsored by Olive Garden.

Counterpoint by Matt Novak at Paleofuture: Idiocracy Is a Cruel Movie And You Should Be Ashamed For Liking It.

What’s so wrong with this thinking? Unlike other films that satirize the media and the soul-crushing consequences of sensationalized entertainment (my personal favorite being 1951’s Ace in the Hole), Idiocracy lays the blame at the feet of an undeserved target (the poor) while implicitly advocating a terrible solution (eugenics). The movie’s underlying premise is a fundamentally dangerous and backwards way to understand the world.

If you haven’t seen it, decide for yourself and watch the film on Amazon. (via @khoi)

• David Fear
• Idiocracy
• Matt Novak
• Mike Judge
• movies

The real Turing test

I had a number of practicing writers in mind when I started using the word “paleoblogging,” including Matt Novak of Paleo-Future. Matt’s particularly good at pulling images and advertisements from old periodicals and ephemera — stuff that doesn’t even usually get digitally indexed — that taken together reveal a kind of historical unconscious of old ideas and fears about the future.

Here’s a good one (from the archives, naturally) of a 1930 ad warning of the death of the music industry at the hands of guitar-playing robots.

As usual, there’s an additional layer of allegory here — the robots are just a convenient stand-in for “canned,” piped-in music from gramophone records (or maybe even the radio, I don’t know) in theaters. Just remember: even if they play guitar, write really sensitive songs, and seem like they can express what you’ve always thought but just couldn’t find the words to say, don’t date robots!

• Matt Novak
• music
• Paleo-Future