To Stupidity, and Beyond

T hose who were listening attentively back in the early 1990s understood that there was brilliance beneath the “Uh . . . huhhuhhuh” of Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head. We were vindicated repeatedly over the years, as Judge became a much-quoted oracle with his films Office Space and Idiocracy and his TV shows King of the Hill and Silicon Valley. Now Judge is back to where he got started with a bright new Paramount+ movie: Get ready for B&B in space.

What Judge, now a widely acclaimed authority on idiocy, has accomplished in Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe will go unnoticed by most critics, but here it is: The movie is a successor to 1979’s Being There for our moment.

Being There, directed by Hal Ashby from a Jerzy Kosinski screenplay, was a one-joke movie (as is Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe) that, by being set in Washington, D.C., made its satiric points with such face-slapping directness that even a critic could not fail to notice them. Critics proceeded to congratulate themselves for grasping the joke: Hey, this cretin rises to the highest levels of Washington politics by babbling inanely about gardening! And people take him for a wise man speaking in parables!

BABDTU makes much the same point, but its indictment is slightly more interesting. We watch in awe as we learn that no matter how stupid Beavis and Butt-Head are, the society we live in is even stupider. Hence they get along just fine. They even flourish. Early in the film, after Butt-Head’s habit of repeatedly kicking Beavis “in the nads” leads to a high-school science fair getting burned down in 1998, the pair find themselves celebrated as “at-risk youths.” Not only are they given a pass, but they also are honored by being tapped for a space-shuttle mission. The grown-ups around them reason that the smart and talented kids will do well anyway, so why encourage virtue?

This is all very funny, but it’s also spot-on satire, a sort of miniaturized, high-school-centered take of Idiocracy. Really, no social analysis that assumes people are hapless victims of circumstance can survive our collective memories of high school, by which point it was exceedingly obvious that the “unfortunate” are mainly the same folks as the “undeserving.”

As lazy, vulgar, and moronic as they are, Beavis and Butt-Head stumble into one success after another because our culture either doesn’t recognize, or even actively supports, pure jackassery. They effectively have no parents, no guidance except television. They’re just two modern youths wandering through life with no more purpose than an entirely futile aim “to score.” Alas, we learn that even in a multiverse in which every possible version of B&B coexists, no iteration of the pair has ever accomplished this feat.

A typically idiotic interlude in space (the lads blind themselves by aiming a high-powered telescope directly into the sun) leads to a not-unreasonable attempt to murder them by their commander, later the governor of Texas, Serena (Andrea Savage). Yet stupidity can never be killed. It merely mutates into different form. And so the boys get sucked through a black hole, pushed forward in time, and wind up in Galveston, Texas, in 2022. Because everything is just as stupid as they are, they wind up with an iPhone they can use to pay for anything, the password of said phone being “password.” With limitless access to funding, they proceed to expend their riches on . . . nachos.

Further updating matters for our stupid century, the boys attend a feminist college lecture, where they learn about “white privilege,” which they take to mean allows them to do anything they want. “I think the problem is you’re just uneducated,” they tell the police when they get arrested. More stupidity (nonsensical muttering about toilet paper by “Cornholio,” Beavis’s alter ego) gets them stupidly released from prison while stupid G-men give chase. Judge imagines a governor of today showing up at a prison to say, “I’m here to surprise-pardon two criminals as part of my new ‘soft on crime’ initiative.” Well, we as a society clearly failed Beavis and Butt-Head.

The romantic imagination of our dimwit pubescent heroes is such that Beavis imagines a date that culminates with watching his bikini-clad girlfriend decapitate random people with a sword. In reality, boys are so besotted with porn on the one hand and video games on the other that this scene cuts things a little close to the bone. Meanwhile, referring to a woman as a “slut” gets the boys cheered by a feminist professor for being “sex-positive.”

All of this is very broad but also very broadly correct. The new movie clarifies that Beavis and Butt-Head are no mere signifiers of the 1990s; their intelligence level makes them perfectly adapted to the 21st century. “It’s like now I have the skills for today’s workplace,” Butt-Head opines. And how.