I mean, the movie doesn’t actually know what it’s trying to be. It’s a dystopia where everyone is too stupid to function, but a megacorp has zero difficulty arranging the infrastructure and logistics needed to water crops with sports drinks, while also engaging in massive regulatory capture to make this happen. It’s a world where intelligence has disappeared but they somehow have super advanced scifi tech everywhere that hasn’t broken down even though logically no one should have a clue how to maintain it. Oh, and despite being apparently the worst possible future, as soon as someone comparitively smart shows up they immediately put him in charge of the country instead of, say, handing it over to said megacorp.
Idiocracy is an incoherent mess masquerading as satire, while it’s only cogent point is “I hate anyone who has ever shopped at Walmart.”
Each one of these things is it’s own commentary, that is all. Judge obviously wasn’t doing cohesive world building; he was just squeezing together all the commentary he has on why people are hypocritical idiots. All the way down the the eugenics bit.
Since that’s where the conversation started, let’s go to eugenics first. I would wager the writer has expienced the ‘cautious successful people with no kids’ trope a million times in real life and in his very successful career. He made it his own when he contrasted it with the Jerry Springer types; which was very culturally dominant at that time. Yes, we look at it today and only see the problematic eugenics message; but I imagine the writers regret when he sees the most intelligent, affectionate, people he knows never being able to do what the dummy’s on Springer find all to easy.
The writers world is one on the brink of collapse. All because technology was so advance it was self sustaining, at least for a time. The excess it provided made society’s need for education, social structure, and governance evaporate. The time leading up to when Not Sure showed up could have been a cultural revolution of art and space exploration but instead was plagued with reality TV, fart humor, and fast food. All things that were dominating the culture when the writer wrote the script. Taken to the most extreme, focus on making more Gatorade then could ever be consumed would be in line with societies priorities at the time.
Finally, Not Sure becoming president was a simple, funny, way to advance the story. It would be unkind for the author to make all this commentary without giving the audience a polite instruction that could help circumvent our tragic future. That comment being, just feed the plants water. Meaning stop with the idiocy. You don’t have to listen to the, “smartest man in the world” because Not Sure was just an ordinary 20th century guy and even he knew that plants need water.
I’ve always found it funny how I’ve seen folks from both ideological sides point to this film as a satire of what’s wrong with the other. It’s a simple satire, but that’s what makes it effective.
Judge is master at this type of commentary. Beavis and butthead was making fun of how stupid the MTV audience was. The same audience that adopted and Beavis and Butthead just as fast as it was incepted.
King of the hill is the ultimate “Steven Colbert is a sincere conservative show.” In king of the hill Hank is a nieve Texan that buys into every bullshit “American exceptionalism” type idealogy there is. He then humanizes him and shows how every single time Hank is returning to “American values” he’s just being nieve and if he were born anywhere else he would be just as liberal as he is a “conservative.”