On Depicting Stupidity

I have often had occasion to remark how crude and foolish--and simple-mindedly prejudiced--popular culture can be when it attempts to convey the intelligence of a supposedly intelligent character to the reader or viewer. When it bothers to go beyond merely beating us over the head with superlatives ("X is brilliant!" we are told ad nauseam) it relies on such lame devices as associating the character with prestigious institutions in an exercise in shameless name-dropping (MIT! Oxford! And always, Harvard), similarly associating them with intellectually prestigious activities (physics is probably the favorite there), or presenting outrageously caricatured displays of intellection (like Ted Mosby reciting Dante's Divine Comedy from memory in the original Tuscan--never mind when an "architect" who spends all his free time hanging out with the likes of Barney and the gang would have acquired, and kept up, such knowledge).

What we get is not a depiction of intelligence, but, in line with the fact that this stuff is generally created by simpletons for other simpletons (don't let the nonsense about how "brilliant" TV, fiction and the rest supposedly are today fool you for a second), a simpleton's image of intelligence, which tends to reflect not intelligence so much as a package of socially elitist prejudices. (To cite but some of the most obvious: the Cult of the Good School long since run utterly amok; the hierarchical esteem for those who work "with their brains" over those who work "with their hands"; those who work with numbers over those who work with words; those recognized as disproportionately contributing to large profits for the rich and powerful over those who make any other sort of contribution, in any degree; and a leisure-class valuation of hobbies, favoring activities in which practical accessibility to most for reasons of time and money, and practical utility, are both very low--like the unpurposeful mastery of disused languages or dialects.)

Yet, in spite of the extreme stupidity Park Avenue, Hollywood and the rest show when depicting (supposed) intelligence, popular culture is not much more adroit or convincing at conveying (supposed) stupidity. After all, what do they serve up on those occasions when this is required (as in, for example, the movie Idiocracy)? What we see is a lack of formal education and social crudity and sometimes simple nonconformity (as if the only reason why a person might not conform to the conventional expectation in everything they do is their simply lacking the brain power to know and respect what society esteems as against what it disesteems). And in that it appears that just as depictions of intelligence are about exalting elites more than anything else, depictions of stupidity are a mockery of those who did not "get the breaks."

I might add that, especially in comedy, it is striking how often, when it serves the writers' convenience, supposedly "stupid" characters prove remarkably witty. One example of this that has long stuck in mind is in The Simpsons episode "You Only Move Twice" (a rather better than average parody of the '60s-era Bond films which on the whole does credit to the "classic" phase of a show that has long struck me as a good deal "smarter" than most of what we see on TV).1 Here at his new school Bart's teacher sees that he is not quite up to the local standard, which is higher than the one at the school he had previously attended, and takes him aside to ask if he knows multiplication or long divison. Bart replies that he knows of them.

Anyone who can offer such a verbally subtle response so quickly to his interlocutor's question makes it very clear that they are by no means stupid--and this goes all the more for a mere ten year old in a difficult situation such as that one. And there we have yet another irony--that a genuinely clever piece of dialogue which should have been presented as testament to its speaker's cleverness is instead used to demonstrate an academic failure supposed to reconfirm our impression of his stupidity, and get its speaker packed off to a remedial class.