It's Got Electrolytes

The flop that became a documentary

In September 2006, Twentieth Century Fox released Idiocracy in approximately one hundred thirty theaters, with no national press push, no trailer in major-market rotation, and the marketing-budget equivalent of a man on a street corner shouting that a film exists. It made approximately half a million dollars. The studio appeared to want it gone. Mike Judge, who had previously made Office Space (similarly buried at release; similarly redeemed in second life) and the long-running Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, took the burial as the studios-bury-things-they-fear-corporate-blowback-from event it appears in retrospect to have been: the film’s specific satire of corporate-branded-everything, of a Cabinet position sponsored by Brawndo, of a Costco entrance greeting set to “I love you,” presumably did not survive the marketing-department’s review of which actual corporations the studio had ongoing relationships with. Whatever the specific reason, the film vanished.

It came back. By approximately 2014 Idiocracy had become a stable cult-classic streaming-discovery title; by approximately 2016 it had become the standard American political shorthand for “the trajectory we are on.” A 2017 Mike Judge interview noted that he had been told, by approximately every person who has approached him in public since 2016, that he had not made a comedy but a documentary released ten years early. Judge has not, so far as the public record shows, fully agreed with this — comedy depends on exaggeration, after all, and Judge is too good a craftsman to confuse the two — but he has not entirely disagreed either.

The popular reading of the film as documentary is mostly wrong about the specifics and mostly right about the trajectory. This is a piece about which is which.

The premise that aged badly

The film opens with a sequence that the contemporary viewer should watch with some discomfort. A yuppie couple defers having children indefinitely, in service of careers and lifestyle; a working-class couple has dozens of children, in service of nothing in particular. The voice-over informs us that the genetic distribution of intelligence shifts as a result. Five hundred years later, everyone is dumb.

The premise is, to be direct, eugenicist. It rests on a model of intelligence that the contemporary scientific literature substantially refutes. It carries the broader political baggage of the early-twentieth-century American eugenics movement — forced sterilization, immigration quotas by national origin, the broader category of pseudoscience that the post-1945 consensus has correctly rejected. A serious engagement with the film has to set this aside as the film’s weakest element. It is the comedy mechanism, not the substance.

The substance is the institutional satire that arrives once the premise is past. Strip the dysgenic frame and the film stops being a story about stupid people and becomes a story about smart people who built an unbelievably stupid system, and then walked away from it, and then died, and left no one who remembered how any of it was supposed to work. Which is a different and more interesting story, and is, on the contemporary trajectory, a story we appear to be in the early chapters of writing.

Brawndo’s got what plants crave

The film’s central plot device, once Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson, playing an Army librarian frozen in cryogenic storage who wakes up in 2505) has been dragged into the Cabinet of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews, playing a former pro wrestler and porn star whose presidential agenda is genuinely sincere), is the irrigation crisis. The crops are dying. The country is starving. Nobody can figure out why.

Why is that the Brawndo Corporation, which manufactures a Gatorade-style sports drink, has — through what one assumes was a perfectly legal series of corporate-and-regulatory transactions across the prior centuries — acquired the contract to operate the country’s irrigation system. The corporation’s product is what gets pumped onto the fields. The fields, as the contemporary agricultural-science viewer immediately recognizes, do not actually want sports drink. They want water.

Joe identifies the problem. He suggests, with the discomfort of the only person in the room who can see what he is seeing, that they water the plants with water. The Cabinet responds with the film’s most quoted line, repeated by approximately every official Joe attempts to convince:

Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes.

What plants crave is electrolytes. We know this because Brawndo’s got electrolytes. What are electrolytes? They’re what plants crave. The argument is circular, the corporation has captured the language in which the problem could be discussed, and any attempt to introduce the alternative (“water” — the actual substance the plants need) is met with the corporation’s slogan as if the slogan were an answer to the question.

The Brawndo subplot is, on close re-reading, the most pointed political satire the American film industry produced in the 2000s. It is a precise dramatization of regulatory capture: a system that has, through cumulative corporate-coalition lobbying, become incapable of asking the question whose answer would contradict the corporate interest. The system is not stupid. The system has been organized around a corporate interest that prevents it from being capable of identifying the corporate interest as the source of the problem. The two are different, and the difference matters.

If you have read the rest of these essays, you have already met the Brawndo subplot in its contemporary American forms. It is the pharmaceutical-pricing apparatus that cannot ask why drug prices are what they are because the regulatory framework that would ask the question has been substantially captured by the manufacturer coalition. It is the carbon-pricing-and-nuclear policy that cannot be advanced because the existing energy-coalition stakeholders block it from one side and the existing environmental-coalition stakeholders block it from the other. It is the campaign-finance system that cannot be reformed because the donor class that benefits from the system funds the political coalitions that would have to vote to reform it. The pattern is the pattern. The film just has the comedic decency to make it funny, which is more than the actual American political landscape has been able to manage.

President Camacho is doing his best

The popular gloss of the film, the dorm-room version of the comparison, is “lol the future president is a moron.” This reading is wrong about the film and wrong about the contemporary American political situation, in roughly the same way and for roughly the same reason. President Camacho is not the villain of Idiocracy. President Camacho is, in the film’s structural argument, the most sympathetic character in the institutional landscape. He is doing his best.

When the irrigation crisis is presented to him, Camacho does not deny that there is a problem. He does not claim the problem will solve itself. He does not blame the prior administration. He brings together the Cabinet, opens the question, and — when Joe identifies the solution — appoints Joe to the Cabinet position responsible for fixing it. When Joe later attempts to actually fix it, against the resistance of the Brawndo Corporation and its captured regulatory apparatus, Camacho stands behind him. When the fix doesn’t immediately work and the political pressure becomes unbearable, Camacho does the thing that contemporary American presidents have substantially stopped doing: he tells the country that the fix needs more time, and that the population should trust the process. The fix works. The crops return. Camacho cedes the presidency to Joe — not because Joe defeated him, but because the institutional process has produced an outcome and Camacho recognizes the outcome.

Camacho is the only competent figure in the institutional structure of the future America. He is competent in the specific sense that, when faced with an actual problem, he convenes the people who might know how to solve it, listens to what they say, and acts on it. The character has, of course, the rhetorical style of a pro-wrestling broadcast, and the personal-history résumé of a man whose qualifications would not have met the standards of the prior America’s political-recruitment frameworks. The film’s argument — the argument that has been substantially missed in the popular reading — is that none of this matters. What matters is whether the figure can convene, listen, and act. Camacho can. The system around him has lost the capacity to support what he is trying to do; the figure himself is doing his best.

The contemporary American political mapping is, in this respect, more uncomfortable than the dorm-room version of the comparison admits. The figures the popular comparison points at — the entertainer-presidents, the celebrity-candidates, the broader category of post-substantive-political figures — are, on the structural reading, not the principal problem. The principal problem is the institutional decay around them, which has produced the political environment in which substantive figures cannot get nominated and entertainer figures rise to fill the vacuum. The film has the integrity to recognize this. The contemporary American political discourse has, in operational terms, substantially not.

Welcome to Costco. I love you.

The other half of the film’s institutional satire is the substitution of corporate language for institutional language. Costco’s entrance greeting is “Welcome to Costco. I love you.” Carl’s Jr.’s tagline is “Fuck you, I’m eating.” The hospital diagnostic system is operated by an automated Carl’s Jr. menu. The Time Masheen exhibit at the museum (the spelling is the film’s) explains that Charles Darwin invented evolution to explain how, after the dinosaurs, the United Nations un-nuked Europe. The Library of Congress has been substantially rebranded as a Fuddruckers franchise.

The joke is that the corporate language has not merely entered the public language; it has replaced it. The corporation does not sponsor the institution; the corporation has become the institution, with the language of the institution adapted to fit the corporation’s existing brand voice. Public services — irrigation, courts, hospitals, education, history — operate as fast-food franchises. The distinction between public and private has not been argued away by some adversary; it has been forgotten. There is no longer any institutional voice to do the forgetting against; there is only the corporate voice, which is the only voice the system has retained.

The contemporary American mapping is the slow but unmistakable migration of public discourse into corporate-platform-mediated forms. The Library of Congress has not become Fuddruckers. The presidential debates have not — at least not yet — been broadcast on Carl’s Jr.’s automated menu. But the post-2010 American political discourse has, in operational terms, been substantially reshaped by the corporate platforms whose engagement-optimization algorithms determine which political content is amplified and which is buried. The platforms do not, formally, intervene in the substance of the discourse; the platforms simply shape the framework within which the substance is conducted. The shape is the corporate shape. Fuddruckers does not have to formally absorb the Library of Congress. The library will, in due course, on the trajectory the platform-mediated discourse is on, absorb itself.

What Joe Bowers actually does

The film’s ending is the part of the film that the popular reading has misunderstood most consistently. Joe Bowers does not invent anything. Joe does not bring some piece of twenty-first-century technology forward to save the future. Joe does not even, in any conventional sense, demonstrate intelligence. What Joe does, in the film’s actual climactic scene, is suggest that they water the plants with water. The future Cabinet, after some discussion and considerable resistance from the Brawndo Corporation, eventually agrees to try. The plants begin to grow. The famine recedes. Joe is hailed as the smartest man alive. He is made President. He marries the woman who was frozen with him. The film ends.

What Joe is, structurally, is the reintroduction of basic institutional competence into a system that had forgotten what basic institutional competence looked like. He is not smart by the standards of the twenty-first century. He is, in fact, repeatedly described in the film as a man of merely average intelligence — that is, indeed, the entire reason he was selected for the Army’s cryogenic-preservation experiment in the first place. The point of his character is that average intelligence, applied to a system that has lost the capacity to ask basic questions, is sufficient to identify the answers that the system’s institutional decay has obscured.

This is the genuinely hopeful element of the film, which the popular dystopian reading has substantially erased. The future America is not unfixable. The institutional decay is not permanent. The reintroduction of basic competence — not genius, just competence — produces the recovery the film concludes with. What the future America has lost is not the ability to recognize good governance when it occurs; what it has lost is the capacity to produce good governance, and has therefore been operating without it long enough that the absence has become the baseline. When good governance is reintroduced, the system recognizes it. The recovery is structurally available.

The contemporary American mapping is the argument these essays have been making, in their long and footnoted way, all along. The political-economy lock-in that has produced the institutional decay is real. The lock-in is not permanent. The structural alternative is the reintroduction of the institutional capacity that the post-1980 period has eroded — the campaign-finance reform, the administrative-state restoration, the substantive-policy frameworks that the broader series has documented. The reintroduction does not require genius. It requires, in the operative formulation of the film’s most underrated political philosopher, watering the plants with water. The plants will grow. The famine will recede. The country, which has spent forty years arguing about whether the famine is real and which corporation should be allowed to continue selling the sports drink, will eventually move on.

What we need to avoid at all costs is not the President Camacho future. President Camacho is doing his best. What we need to avoid is the institutional structure around President Camacho — the captured regulatory apparatus, the corporate-language substitution, the lost public knowledge of how the institutions are supposed to work — that has made the President’s best efforts insufficient to the structural problem the system is facing. The institutional structure is the problem. The figure who occupies the office is, in the long run, the secondary question. The structure can be rebuilt. The film, despite its eugenic premise and its broad comic register, is in the end an argument that rebuilding it is worth doing, and that the rebuilding is structurally possible, and that the rebuilding does not require us all to suddenly become much smarter than we are.

We are, on the operational evidence, smart enough to do this. We have been told, repeatedly, by approximately every comparator democracy and by the cumulative empirical record of the last fifty years of American policy, that the structural alternatives work. The cumulative refusal to adopt them is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of institutional capacity, of political-coalition assembly, of the substantive-political imagination the contemporary moment has substantially declined to exercise.

It does not have to stay this way. We do not actually need a librarian from the year 2005 to wake up and explain it to us. We are perfectly capable of watering the plants with water. The principal obstacle is the corporate slogan that has, across forty years of repetition, substantially replaced our memory of what the question was.

It’s got electrolytes. It’s got what plants crave. It’s also, on the empirical record of every developed country for which we have the data, structurally insufficient as an irrigation strategy. The plants need water. We know this. We have known this for the entire period that we have, instead of acting on it, been arguing about whether the corporation that sells the sports drink would suffer too much if we changed the policy.

The corporation, in the film’s gentle but firm conclusion, is doing fine. The plants are growing. The country, on the long arc the film concludes with, is recovering. The recovery did not require anyone to suddenly become a genius. It required the reintroduction of a question the system had spent generations forgetting how to ask.

That is the question. The reform is the answer. The film, somewhat to its own surprise, turned out to be onto something.