Bulwark Takes - Idiocracy: Did This "Dumb" Comedy Predict Our Politics?

Episode Date: September 6, 2025

Sarah Longwell, JVL, and Sonny Bunch revisit Mike Judge’s Idiocracy — the 2006 comedy that was supposed to be satire but now feels uncomfortably close to reality. Plus: why Sarah never watched it until now, and why JVL ended the movie feeling depressed instead of entertained.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Welcome back to Bullwork Movie Club, the Bull Work Movie Club. Is that what we're going? Chris Herbert, I'm going to pull the curtain back here slightly. Chris Herbert was saying, maybe we don't want to brand it like that, but I don't know. People seem to like it. Bullwork Movie Club. Let us know in the comments. Leave a click, like, share with people,

subscribe. But if you like that title, we'll have to stick with it because the people get to decide. I like it. I think it's a good one. I love yours. Sarah. Sarah Longwell, thank you for joining us today. Jonathan Last, thank you for joining us, joining us today. day. I'm Sunny Bunch. I'm culture editor at the Bullwark. 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 one of the great harbingers of where we are, where we were going, where we wound up, idiocracy. Mike Judge's idiocry. We should thank our viewers, people who liked the

Death of Stalin episode. We weren't sure how many if we would keep doing it, but not only did we really liked doing it. I think it was really fun. We got a lot of suggestions. I never was like, you got to do idiocry next. I'd never seen idiocry. You had never seen idiocry. I'd never seen idiocry. I've never seen idiocry. You know, and I got to 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 but 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.

It was released in 2006. I think it was shot in 2005. Yeah, 20 years old. And so certainly like 20, 2006, 26 year old me did not think, boy, this is a movie for me. 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. Well, this is a thing we can discuss. And I'm excited to get into that because there was there, this movie has had a very interesting life. 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 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 first big feature live action film, which, of course, is Office Space. You've seen Office Space, right, Sarah? Like a hundred times.

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. Yeah, it's definitely, it's a little bit caustic. it's a little bit, you know, some of the language in this, JVL. You, 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 language in this one. Yeah, I, uh, this is a movie that I used to really, really like.

Now that it plays as a documentary, I do not care for it. Now that it is our actual life, I feel, I do not like it. Do not like this movie. Do not want. Do not want. Do not. I mean, it's, it hits really different. I would say all the President Camacho stuff hits different.

All of the cable news stuff hits different. And frankly, the eugenics stuff hits different too. 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 has put into suspended animation for an experiment for a year and winds up waking up 500 years in the future, a real Rip Van Winkle sort of thing. You get this occasionally in storytelling. But before we get to that, before we get to the adventure of Joe Bowers, 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 intelligence to put it as bluntly as possible the 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 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, JVL, what did you, what, which, which side of the aisle did you think that that would appeal more to? I'm 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. We have to, oh, wait, super close. I was going to, Sarah, I was, this, thank you, thank you for reminding me, because I do, I do want to ask you if we want to put a Cletus limit on this episode, if we, if JVL has to like keep it to just two.

clituses for this episode? Maybe we can do three. This is a wheels off fun pod. And so JVL can do what he wants. It's not as much as many clituses as possible. I just, when the guy who is breeding like rabbits with multiple women is like a bubble for the ages. And I can't remember what his name was, but I just remember thinking, man, JVL is going

to have a field day with this. So you take it away, sir. Yeah. Again, it all just hits very different for me. If I could put on my Barbara Streisand Prince of Tidepants, as Tobias would say, and talk about demography. Now we're talking. Tell me more. 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 been 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 on the elites. And so this is a thing that we have seen throughout all societies over the last 100 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 cletus of the world are breeding like rabbits. It's the opposite. And this idea about the untermensch outbreeding everybody, 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 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 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 even. It is that as you've got 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 ports.

Anyway. Isn't part of that people being like, you know what's expensive these days? These kids, like, it is too expensive to have. So that is part of it. But again, 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 here. 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, like I wrote today about a speech being given by a senator, a U.S. 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 great movie. But again, just like context matters and viewing it through this level, like, I did literally have 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 idiocry 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 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 uh and and and a lot of is a lot of judges other stuff is not you know we can we can talk about king of the hill versus uh 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 uh the the the um the action the idiocracy itself like the the people who are you know left and running the world in 2505 500 years in the future which um is look i 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 uh is r fk junior talking about vaccines and that sort of thing and i'm i'm watching the people trying to cheer him on and be like oh yeah fuck those shots you know it's like slavery uh drives me absolutely bonkers it drives me absolutely bonkers and i'm okay with a little bit of mean-spiritedness toward that type of person. Kids need electrolytes, not vaccines. Can I, so 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, idiotic, 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 the very specific political scenes with President Camancho, which that hits hard relative to Trump, like the idea that he was 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 thesis was actually more corporatized, that these big corporate giants. We're going to rule things to such an extent in the future that, you know, we are watering our plants with a Gatorade substitute, like a downgrade mountain dew. And that's why, you know, in this world, which, by the way, looks very much to me like Wally, like the movie Wally. Yeah, a ready player one. Because I had never seen this movie before and had seen Wally many times, both as an adult and with my kids. Um, I don't, it was funny how much Wally sort of mimics at the mountains of trash and they don't know what to do with anything. Um, but the, so much of it didn't seem to me to get what the future would be like correctly. Um, and, like, well, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. So this is, this is a thing I always think about when I'm watching, uh, 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. In 2005, there was a lot to 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? It turns out there's a lot of space for trash. It's not really a thing 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 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 celebrization of politics, the, the president Camacho, like the President Camacho thing is so perfect and the degradation of the House of Representatives to the House of Representatives. The Cabinet secretaries. The

Attorney, what do they call her Attorney General Fundbags? Like the, the all of the, this stuff like that. Well, I can't wait to talk about how they deal with women in this movie. What are your thoughts on Rita? Because I love this character. She is, Maya Rudolph is so funny

in this movie. Is this pre SNL for her? I think it's right. It's like her first season maybe. 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 in complete 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 Wally when they're on the ships, like 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 it's also a toilet. And he's just eating like a bucket of slop where he's like drinking the mountain dut through a straw. And he's like food consumption is just, it's like a popcorn bucket of sugar like paste. Lard. Yeah, right? Sugar lard. And so, so one thing that happens if you degrade men down to the,

he's watching a show that's just like, you know, they kind of have almost like a balls. But 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 Al My Balls, which is just a guy like getting kicked in the balls, falling on the 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 right 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, um, a prostitute, but she's a prostitute also in our timeline, right? The 2006 by a Rudolph character is a prostitute who's, this is, and this bit is like kind of funny where the military has found her because, uh, 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 D's for what was it? I can't remember what the joke is, but upgrade. And so 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 are 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 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? And I, uh, 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 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 Funbags, Cabinet Member, and Prostitute. Those are the two female characters in this show in this movie.

I will say, 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, 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. thing. And she's just like, don't you fucking moron. 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 so that is what the movie is really about for me, which is. Yes, this is how I feel listening to Sarah's podcast, Sunny.

This is, this is how I feel. This is, but like, this is, this is, 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, uh, I just want to read an excerpt from this New York Times profile, uh, 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 Ediocracy 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 flatchelins wouldn't actually be that

funny, but the kid's surprised it. 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 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.

J.V.L. Does it make you feel seen? I mean, no. It, it, 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 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, again, the Bobby Kennedy hearings today, you know,

the Joseph Lodopo or whatever the idiot surgeon general of Florida is. You know, they just say things that are nonsense. And people just go, think, they're, you know, I, I don't know, man. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for this to be like a head of, the episode. You got depressed watching

I did. I really I really did. Yeah. Not even, you weren't you, you didn't even find the,

the, uh, PowerPoint presentation about the, the pimps, a pimps love versus, uh, a squares love,

funny, that wasn't, that didn't work for you at all. I laughed out loud at that part. I laughed at parts of it. He's got 20 slides. He's going through.

Jesus, Collins. It's one of the best bits in the movie. I don't know, it's, uh, it was a tough watch. Do you guys not feel any of that? Am I the only, the only one? No, in part, I, I, I, I, I didn't, um, 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 miss, read like the cultural dominance of our like they that fud ruckers and carls junior and the soft drinks and all of that stuff like the brands are like basically the thing that rules the world um 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 stuff in the toilet, like, that's what we should put on flower, 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 for their stock to crash. And, yeah, is that what it's called Brondo? Brondo. It's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes. What are electrolytes? It's what's in Brondo. You know, I guess I was like, you know, 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 judges' fault.

Like, there's lots about this. It's interesting. It's just to me, like, the way that people are getting dumber is much more a function, not of sort of mindless consumerism, exactly, but more the information streams. coming so diffuse and AI and not reading like they're, you know, like, and I got to 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 weird. For them to, because he comes back, right, and everybody keeps accusing Luke Wilson's character of talking faggy, 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.

all things. Faggy. But I just, I don't know, it felt, I spent the whole time being like, well, this wouldn't be what it's like. Oh, like, this isn't that. What is, what is, how does Faggy survive 500 years? You don't, but you don't think there's, you don't think there's, like, an element of like, oh, that's, 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? 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. Have you watched TikTok ever? Yeah, but not a group of people, not a group of people they dislike. Like an unrecognizable form to them. Gore Vidal and Bill Buckley

would be unrecognizable forms to the people on TikTok these days. I think many of the Utes the Utes yeah one thing that is interesting about 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 All 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 viewing habits of modernity, granted, they could have had like, you know, who could have seen a Joe Rogan style, like, nonsense person. Instead, they have the kind of Fox News style hosts in the American Gladiator outfits, which like, again, that's like, it's 2005, but more so.

that that's the that's the idea there and I can see I don't know I just like is that is that not wrong that's not wrong I feel like it's maybe we got we I guess we have another 70 400 70 years but yeah it's maybe it's maybe it's 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 the bit where uh 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 like,

he's trying to look up what electrolytes are. There are no books. And so the, as we hear in the voiceover narration, eventually, Joe just told them he could talk to plants. And then they believe them. And like that,

that 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. Uh, and entertaining. It, 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 Tarano Vision screen are for T.J.O. Handjobs. Vera laid, smart speak. We speak for you. Only $12 per unit. That's just chat, cheap, E.D. that's just like smart speak we speak for you that's just AI that's LLM that's yeah a lot of

gambling stuff in there one one for my judge on that one all the ads can we talk about Mike judge himself that does that have any interest to you guys sure I like Mike that because I 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 more jennifer hanniston sure more jennifer hanniston would have been great but uh but it's like i don't know like i just think it is exactly right in every

way. And there's a huge lag between that and idiocry. Which I assume, it's like seven years, I think, between office space and idiocry. I assume part of this is that he was in movie jail for a little bit because office space didn't do well.

Oh, he's making King of the Hill. Is he already? Yeah. He's starting King of the Hill that early? And but he like the tone takes a term because Office Base is a very loving movie.

Like, he, he has great affection for everybody in that movie except for Bill Lumberg. He even likes the bobs, right? You know, like, even the bobs he kind of likes. And, uh, the bobs have the best line in the whole thing. Which is? What would you say you do here? Also great. I mean, I quote that, I quote that every day to, you know, people,

out my jeep. What would you say you do? But he, so we go from this very good natured movie office-based 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 pros in Silicon Valley, but it likes the rest of us. 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. I don't know. I mean, I do think that. So for the record, King of the Hill was on from 97 to 2008.

So like it was he was, it was basically this whole time up almost up. up to Silicon Valley. It comes out in 2010, I think, something like that. I will say, extract is another movie that 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 about you about this before, JBL, Beavis and Budhead. I know, Sarah, were you a Beavis and Butthead watcher at all? Was that, or is that totally uninteresting to you?

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. But you love Daria, right? I loved Daria. You love the Beavis and Butthead spin-off, Darya. That's where she, that's where she came from. I had sort of forgotten that. Yeah, yeah. But Beavis and My Head is interesting, too, because there is a weird mix of,

That is a show 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 Butthead stand in. Beavis and Butthead spent 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 that sort of thing.

And so he has always kind of straddled this misanthropic line of like, 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 with the little, you know, note of the, the Dax Shepherd lawyer idiot having 17,000 kids too, you know, I don't know. Sarah? 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 reproducing 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 Meyer 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?

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 extent to which women are shoved into the background and not given really much, just like much business. Like, they've, I mean, it is, I guess, like patriarchy, right?

Like, in an idiocracy future, it would by necessity, wind up being super patriarchal. But everybody being, you know, all women being reduced to prostitutes, again, and just like not given a bunch of business during the movie, it felt a little off to me. Sarah, do you have a matriarchal future? 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, Sonny, in what you thought before I talked. Yes, Sonny. Tell us why it wasn't a problem.

It didn't bother me that much because Maya Rudolph is so funny in the movie. Like, Maya Rudolph is very funny in the film. And like, we can 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. I did not know that. I did not. You didn't, you didn't, oh.

I've seen this movie like 10 times. I've never stuck around through the credits. Post-credit stinger. Post-credit stinger is there's a third pod. There's a third pod that opens. in the year 2,505, and out of it, steps upgrade, 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 Joe was like, no, he can't. Anyway, it's funny. You should go back and watch it and just skip all the way to the beginning. No, it didn't bother me that much because Maya Rudolph is very, very funny in the movie. Like, 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 the branding 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. It does not bother me in the same way that it bothers you, Sarah. 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 process, 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 uh and starts trying to pay her for sex uh but because they're so dumb at this point that luke wilson and my rudoff's characters are so much smarter them she's able to kind of say yeah yeah give me money now and 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, 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. Like, you couldn't portray them being that stupid all the time?

Yes. Is it because... Wait, wait, I want to clarify. 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? 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 men, it was very easy to be like, the Starbucks is now where you go to get, because I can't remember what the tears were of pricing, but it was all, it was a section. 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.

Men are simple creatures, is what you're saying. 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 think about the parallels to modern politics is the extent to which Donald Trump wildly overperforms 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, what 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 going to like beat this shark in this fight. You know, like, and like dudes are into that in a way that I just don't think women are. Um, and so I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to say that I actually think Mike judge didn't know how to make idiocracy and have it be about women. I think that's probably about right. No, I think that's actually, I think that's actually a really, uh, kind of profound insight because 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. But attorney general, fun bags. Um, 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 how would you sarah portray uh the women in in a future like this what would they be into 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 a world like this. Like, I'm not sure they could exist freely in a, because like, it's an entry, 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 um season of it it's a horror film um it's got sillion what's his name oh 28 28 days later 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 And 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 Sillian Michaels or whatever. His last name is. Killian Murphy. Killingen Murphy, sorry. They are basically like, well, we're going to kill him and we're going to, like, we need to breed with these women. And 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. 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.

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. Yeah, I, I, I, I, 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. It's, it's, it's, I'll think about it. I live with more women than you do.

That's true. It's true. All right. Well, I, this was, this was a surprisingly downer episode, frankly. I, we were not, we were having more fun with the, the, the, the, the murder. murderous Stalinist purges than we were with Brondo and upgrade. We got to get people to pick a better movie for us next week.

Well, 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 like, 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. 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.

We'll always have President Dwayne, Elizondo, Mountain Dew, Herbert Camacho. There is that, so. It's true. 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, now I'm, now I'm, now I'm, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I just blame the audience for picking a bad movie. Okay.

So, uh, you're nervous. What do you want from us next time? Welcome to podcasting with J.L. Margin call. Network. Oh, Margin call. Oh, Margin' call. No one's going to do that one. Which I hear is a great movie. It is a great movie. I've never seen it myself.

Are there any women in margin call? I can't remember. There are Demi Moore's and margin call. That's right. That's right, Demi Moore. Okay. No, I just always see I, 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 JVL into a depression spiral.

That'd be great. And we'll be back next week with another episode, hopefully.