What movie(s) would you show to a US founder?

[pood]

First one in to say Idiocracy.

That’s the correct answer, right?

Idiocracy was very funny, but I objected to the premise, which is that low-income hoi-polloii breeded indiscriminately while the educated prosperous elites failed to have enough children, thus leading to dumbing down the population. This is completely biologically inaccurate, as well as implicitly racist and classist.

I liked Office Space a lot more.

I actually had not seen Office Space until recently. It’s hilarious.

 

[Elixir]

First one in to say Idiocracy.

That’s the correct answer, right?

Nah. They’ll figure that one out after you explain the current situation.

Competition for survivable space is not fierce enough among commoners.
Right?
New submission:
Debbie Does Dallas

 

[SLD]

First one in to say Idiocracy.

That’s the correct answer, right?

Nah. They’ll figure that one out after you explain the current situation.

Competition for survivable space is not fierce enough among commoners.
Right?
New submission:
Debbie Does Dallas

They might enjoy that. Especially Washington

 

[Jarhyn]

First one in to say Idiocracy.

That’s the correct answer, right?

Idiocracy was very funny, but I objected to the premise, which is that low-income hoi-polloii breeded indiscriminately while the educated prosperous elites failed to have enough children, thus leading to dumbing down the population. This is completely biologically inaccurate, as well as implicitly racist and classist.

I liked Office Space a lot more.

I actually had not seen Office Space until recently. It’s hilarious.

Seriously? That's tragic! But better late than never.

I think Idiocracy would be a good pick, but you would have to contextualize it afterwards "it was the dumbest kids of the richest poor people who owned the most guns reproducing at a high rate which actually led to the Idiocracy; it was the actions of the religious conservatives eliminating schools to serve the rich few, making the Idiocracy an army for the wealthy, who maintained education among themselves for their own benefit."

Then, some of the founders would have gotten a hardon at the idea of that, for all others would vomit of hearing it.

 

[SLD]

First one in to say Idiocracy.

That’s the correct answer, right?

Idiocracy was very funny, but I objected to the premise, which is that low-income hoi-polloii breeded indiscriminately while the educated prosperous elites failed to have enough children, thus leading to dumbing down the population. This is completely biologically inaccurate, as well as implicitly racist and classist.

I liked Office Space a lot more.

I actually had not seen Office Space until recently. It’s hilarious.

Seriously? That's tragic! But better late than never.

I think Idiocracy would be a good pick, but you would have to contextualize it afterwards "it was the dumbest kids of the richest poor people who owned the most guns reproducing at a high rate which actually led to the Idiocracy; it was the actions of the religious conservatives eliminating schools to serve the rich few, making the Idiocracy an army for the wealthy, who maintained education among themselves for their own benefit."

Then, some of the founders would have gotten a hardon at the idea of that, for all others would vomit of hearing it.

I wouldn’t use idiocracy. It’s really not that good of a movie. Plus the premise, as others have pointed out, is fundamentally flawed. I think most of you are picking it in reaction to the Trump administration and his pick of shit for brains people like Tulsi Gabbard and hegseth and rfk. But while I don’t care for Trump or any of his picks, I’m not sure what the movie shows a founder about America, its history, the advancement of civilization in the last 250 years or so.

The problem with most history flicks is that they only show a small snapshot of our history. The longest day only shows D-day. You can use it to explain the rise to globalism that the U.S. experienced. There’s also midway, which shows Pearl Harbor and battle of midway. Or Lincoln or Gettysburg. But all explain only a small slice of our history.

That’s why I don’t think that they’re necessarily the best thing to show. I suspect that they probably would be more interested in a sci fi movie. It shows the technological advancement and where society imagines the future. I think they’d want to understand better the scientific and technological advances of the last few centuries. Star Wars is the pre eminent sci fi movie. It explains flight, galaxies and space science even if it is fanciful. Plus it’s just a damn good movie. I think they’d enjoy it. I don’t think they’d like idiocracy.

 

[bilby]

Most movies require a detailed understanding of the culture in which those movies originated; Audiences without that understanding simply won't get a large part of what they are seeing.

The whole first half of the original Terminator movie is meaningless in a world where everyone is carrying a smartphone, for example. Sarah Connor has to find payphones (and coins to use them) or plead with businesses to let her use their phone; It's a central part of the way the movie builds tension as the T-100 inexorably closes in.

Now try to imagine just how much of that movie would be inexplicable to a person who has never seen a telephone of any kind. Or a radio. Or a motor vehicle. Or a computer. Or an automatic weapon.

And that's just the stuff. The geopolitical background is needed too - without an understanding of the Cold War; of the existence of opposing world destroying nuclear arsenals, and of computers that could launch those arsenals; Of a war that could kill everyone and destroy everything in a few hours; Of why it is felt to be useful to have such an arsenal, and to place it on a hair-trigger; Of what the Soviet Union is, where it came from, and why it is The Enemy; Of the rapidly growing technology that made the 1980s a terrifying and out-of-control example of hyper-modernity in which people were left floundering at the mercy of events they had no ability to influence, much less to control...

You would need to spend a decade teaching the Founding Fathers a couple of centuries of history and technological advancements, before they could even grasp what they were looking at; And they would likely never really understand the movie, unless they had lived through the 1970s and '80s in real time. In the same way that someone born too recently to remember the Cold War likely will never really understand Terminator, no matter how much they might enjoy the action.

Don't even get started on movies which have deep plots that are not just a vehicle for whizz-bang* special effects, explosions, and car chases.

By the age of nine, a modern person has been exposed to millions of "tropes". That exposure is a prerequisite for understanding most movies. And it is practically irreplacable - like learning your native language. Teaching an adult to become completely, natively, fluent in a foreign language is very hard indeed. Teaching George Washington to grok modern movie tropes, to the point where he could comprehend even half of what he sees in any movie, would take years of hard work.

Showing him any twentieth century movie would be like showing him a movie in Mandarin without subtitles. He might grasp the broad themes, but much of the detail would just be confusing and incomprehensible.









* The very phrase "whizz-bang" didn't exist at all until the late 19th century, when it was coined to describe the sound made by the German 77mm FK 96 gun, introduced in 1896. It fired a very high velocity shell, so rather than hearing the 'bang' of the gun firing, followed by the 'whizz' as it flew past, its targets heard the shell first, then the gun. Use of the phrase to mean 'very advanced technology' became widespread in the Great War, where that gun was particularly devastating, and widely feared by the British front-line troops.