I've lived in the Fort Smith area for most of my life, and I am gay. Word about Cohen's act had spread pretty fast the night of the incident - I was at a liquor store and the clerk there told me that people had come in talking about what had happened downtown. I finally got the chance to watch this movie the other night.
Cohen stated in the film's commentary that people told him to go to Arkansas if he wanted some tried and true homophobia. Homophobia runs on a sort of spectrum. Some people are mildly homophobic, and some people tie gays to fences and beat them to death. I believe Cohen wanted to show the most extreme example of homophobia he could get legally, and he did what he needed to do in order to achieve that goal. The reactions of some of these people (and from the commentary I'm pretty sure no scenes from Texarkana were edited in with the Fort Smith footage) are downright scary. Yes, a lot of them were heavily inebriated, but I really doubt they would have reacted with any less passion had they not been drinking. An idiotic, intolerant redneck is an idiotic, intolerant redneck, drunk or not.
However, I can say I have not personally ever encountered the passionately deranged reactions pictured in the movie. I used to go to the gay bar downtown, and that's the only place I've ever encountered homophobia in Fort Smith. I'd sit outside in the parking lot on some nights, and as the bar is situated at the end of Fort Smith's largest strip of bars, a few drunk, redneck morons would drive by and shout out delightfully original declarations.
That's as close as I've ever been to homophobia here. I don't speak for all gays. I know there are intolerant dolts around here, and I'm sure there are violently intolerant dolts, but they're certainly not the majority. Fort Smith wasn't exclusively named in the film, so it's not like the town is objectively singled out or misrepresented. They named the state, but even in the commentary "Fort Smith" was not said (although Texarkana was named). The idea's that this could be anywhere, particularly in the south.
At the end of the day, even though this movie tried to show just how ridiculous some people are with their discomfort and/or hatred of gays, it's just a comedy film. I'm not one to attempt to flaunt my orientation, I don't go to gay pride rallies, I don't really have gay friends, but I do know that I'm gay, and divisive as this movie was among gays, I can say that I laughed my ass off, which was why I wanted to watch it in the first place.
How Real Is 'Brüno'?
Is Sacha Baron Cohen's new movie as staged as his MTV Awards brawl with Eminem? An exclusive look at a small Southern town presented as a hotbed of homophobia in the film.
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Erin Fowler rang in his 21st birthday last September in the time-honored tradition of college students everywhere: with drinking and dancing, starting at a club and ending at a popular local bar in Ft. Smith, Ark. While he celebrated over drinks, the melancholy strains of a slow country song came over the sound system—the universal cue to couple up for a slow dance—so he reached for his boyfriend, 25-year-old Dennis Marriott. The two drew close together on the dance floor, swaying to Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man."
But what started out innocently enough—"We weren't grinding, just slow-dancing," says Fowler—quickly turned ugly. An angry voice came over the speakers telling the couple to "Get your butts off of the floor!" and the rest of the bar started booing, cursing, and hurling epithets at them. When they left later, they found the fender of their Nissan Altima smashed in. The mark is still there.
If Sacha Baron Cohen's latest film, Brüno, is to be trusted, this story is typical of Ft. Smith, a Wild-West-meets-Old-South city wedged between the Ozarks and the Oklahoma border. Cohen's titular character is a swishy fashion journalist from Austria who bares his midriff in front of the world's most intolerant scenery: an extremely conservative Hasidic community in Israel, for example, or the lair of a supposed Bethlehem-based suicide-bombing sect. You can probably guess the results from the film's trailer. But against this stiff competition, it is Ft. Smith that comes across as the real hotbed of homophobia. The film's penultimate, climactic scene is an arena cage fight held in the town, where sparring between Brüno and his assistant escalates into a passionate embrace, then a sloppy makeout session, and finally, a sensual striptease. The enraged onlookers go wild, turning their beer cups, food wrappers, and even a metal chair into munitions. The trash rains in slow motion to Céline Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," offering a desperately bleak montage of American narrow-mindedness.
Marriott and Fowler may have avoided physical assault at the bar, but their accounts of being openly gay in Ft. Smith are filled with similar stories. Rocks with "fag" scrawled on them have been hurled at the home they share; Fowler, who's studying to be a history teacher, was excommunicated from his Jehovah's Witness faith and kicked out of his childhood home by his parents. Marriott, a marketing student who formerly had a side job as a Wal-Mart cashier, says patrons frequently skipped his line and told others to do the same to avoid contact with "the fairy."
But others in the community are upset. What appears in the film, they say, was indicative not of regional intolerance but of heavy-handed stage management.
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