What was wrong with 'Bora'????
Not that ???Borat??? was completely without merit or that everyone who got zapped in it was blameless, but the film took a couple of fairly innocent American characteristics, uncomfortableness in social situations and hospitality to foreigners, and used them to entrap and humiliate its victims. Scenario: You find yourself in some unusual social situation and you are suddenly confronted with a passing foreigner with a bizarre accent spouting all sorts of strange and outrageous things, all delivered in a spirit of great bonhomie. A bit stunned, disoriented and not thinking too quickly, since you have never encountered such a creature, you smile back, nod and just sort of go with the flow, while in the back of your mind you ask, "What IS this? Are these just innocent malapropisms? Does he have any idea what he???s saying? Does he think this is the way WE talk? Is he ineptly trying to be funny? Or ??? what?" In any case, you assume that soon you will mercifully pass out of his orbit and you can resume your comparatively more sane life. But--SPRING! CLAMP!--you have stepped into a big jagged leg-hold trap and you forever will be revealed to millions of future filmgoers as the scum of the earth, as a leering drooling closet racist anti-Semite KKK nightrider. Of course the reason this movie appealed to so many in the liberal establishment, particularly in the media, is that it confirms their vainest fantasies about themselves, contrasting their enlightened selves to the nonentities who sadly dwell out in America???s hinterlands, the area of the country filled with lesser-evolved types who are brimming with barely disguised hate, fear and racism, people who do embarrassing things like wave flags from pickups. Keep in mind that many of these, um, left-of-center cultural arbiters are the very same ones who piously preach "tolerance" and "multiculturalism," and yet roll their eyes and snicker at a large segment of people in their own culture. Comically, many are also the same people who imagine themselves to be champions of the working class. Go figure. 'Borat' was just the right thing to stroke their self-important pseudo-sophistication. In sum, yes, 'Borat' was a very revealing film--but in quite the opposite way that many reviewers comfortingly reassured themselves and their like-minded friends.
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Border Enforcement + Immigration Moratorium + Job & Eco Sanity
Cohen’s ‘Borat’
Arts and culture in the Bush era.
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There has been no shortage of movies about pivotal moments of the Bush era, from the unnerving "United 93" to Spike Lee's Hurricane Katrina documentary, "When the Levees Broke." Those films held a clear, piercing mirror to the times, but will we look back and say one of them epitomized the era? I think not. Let me offer a more cracked, wildly distorted reflection. May I propose "Borat"—a movie that is, at once, utterly singular (no one but Sacha Baron Cohen could possibly duplicate its outrages, and no one has tried) and impossible to imagine emerging at any other moment? When a comedy provokes such ear-piercing laughter—and angry cries of protest—that's a sure sign that it hit not just America's funny bone, but a raw nerve, too.
Why "Borat"? On the most obvious level, this faux documentary—which follows a bigoted, sexist, absurdly uncouth Kazakh "journalist" named Borat Sagdiyev as he travels across our fair land—paints a portrait of the American unconscious that we all do our best to hide. Racism, misogyny and homophobia come pouring out of the mouths of Baron Cohen's unsuspecting dupes, and in a time of political correctness, when the slightest suggestion of bias on the lips of a public figure gets raked over the media coals, there was something fantastically liberating (and frightening) about seeing the national id so baldly exposed.
Just as many people turned to comics such Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for news that got closer to reality than the sanitized "objectivity" of the mainstream media, "Borat" threw every notion of fairness and good taste out the window in pursuit of a lower (and perhaps higher) truth. And so we meet a used-car dealer who doesn't blink when asked if he's got any cars equipped with a "p–––y magnet"; a gun dealer who recommends a Glock for shooting a Jew; a cordial Southern hostess who bravely maintains her manners when Borat appears at the dinner table with a bag of his own feces but throws him out of the house when he invites a black hooker inside.
The ugly truths comically exposed by "Borat" were not unique to the Bush era—prejudice and ignorance are timeless—but they could only have come to light in a culture obsessed with acting out our lives in public. In any prior era, Borat's victims would have run from the camera; in the age of Facebook, YouTube and "The Hills," it beckons one and all. The promise of fame is the cheese in Baron Cohen's rattrap of a movie, and everybody bites.
What other film captured our mania for dirty linen so succinctly or caught our culture at the very moment when it seemed most eager to discard its claim to privacy? Whether you love "Borat" as the funniest movie of the decade, or hate it as a symptom of the coarsening of our cultural consciousness, it will be a treasure trove for future archeologists looking back on the first decade of the American 21st century. It's not just what "Borat" says that makes it the Bush-era movie par excellence. It's what it is.
© 2008
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