Borat:: Dumb, Duplicitous and Dangerous

"She Who Must Not Be Named" and I went to see “Borat” recently. The reviews had led me to expect something special. It wasn’t. For one thing, the print we saw seemed to have been an edited for content. The much discussed “Jew in a Well” scene seemed to be missing and some of the frontal nudity was masked. What else has been removed and why?

What we saw was intermittently funny, consistently offensive, and not at all worthy of the accolades heaped upon it.

For me the best moments were throwaway images and sounds – a chicken’s squawk of protest, a bear’s head, or an artificial hand – each of which was the payoff for a joke set up long before. The set pieces, however, did not work nearly as well. Several of them – a painful dinner party, the Jewish bed and breakfast, hangin’ in the hood, the frat boys on the road – just were not funny. Others – the rodeo, the gay guys, the Pentecostal meeting -- were merely strange and freakish. The tours of Borat’s village were just plain dumb. The only set piece that worked for me was the book signing and that was due to the (dare I say it?) acting talents of Pamela Anderson. Her reaction to the word “marriage” made the whole piece work.

The one bit that is worthy of notice is the prolonged wrestling scene that bursts the bounds of gross humor – upping the ante in much the same way as recent horror films have done. You keep saying, “That’s disgusting! I don’t believe they put that on film!” That sequence, incidentally, was the only part of the film that elicited strong reactions from the suburban, mostly teen-age audience at the matinee performance I attended. There was a lot of “eeeewing” going on and understandably so.

Comedies are revealing social documents, but only in a limited sense. Effective comedies play off the deepest apprehensions and perceived limitations of their target audiences and can tell us a lot about that sector of the general public, but little else. To the extent they transgress perceived limitations they are liberating and exhilarating, allowing the audience to vicariously give vent to forbidden impulses. To the extent they address apprehensions, comedies can be therapeutic, allowing the audience to identify and confront their deepest anxieties.

Borat apparently serves these purposes for a segment of the American public – one that seems to include most of the nation’s critical establishment. Overwhelmingly the critics found the film to be both exhilarating and profound. But in a diverse and pluralistic culture such as our own, different groups react in different ways to comedic tropes, as the producers and stars of “Borat” are beginning to discover. Canny distributors realized this and released the film only in areas where it could be assured of good reviews that would produce packed houses. Only after setting attendance records and stirring an immense amount of commentary, nearly all of it positive, was “Borat” sent into wider release. As a marketing strategy it was superb, and “Borat” will undoubtedly be a financial success, but relatively few people outside the major urban centers will find the film as engaging as did the early reviewers.

“Borat” is very much a movie made by and for affluent Jewish boomers. It addresses directly and repeatedly the fears and insecurities of that demographic/cultural group. Its great theme is the multifarious manifestations of anti-semitism in modern Western society. Though the “Borat” character derives in some ways from the legacy of comic ethnic sages like “Mr. Bones” and “Mr. Dooley”, or might be seen (in Niall Ferguson’s words) as an expression of “Oxbridge irony”, it is more accurately described as a “put on” – a form of comedy that rose to prominence in the Sixties. It is a cruel, deceptive, and vicious form of comedy in which comics misrepresent themselves to people in hope of eliciting responses that will embarrass their victims. “Putting on” people invariably results in “putting them down.” It has usually been justified by its practitioners as a means of revealing truth and of speaking truth to power, but in “Borat” it is nothing of the sort. It is an instrument of deception directed as much at the audience as at Borat’s victims.

One reviewer, I forget which, made a very perceptive observation. He noted that, though the methods employed by Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays Borat, remain fairly constant throughout the film, the object of ridicule shifts constantly. It certain segments – the encounter with aging feminists, or the episode in the Jewish home for instance – it is Borat himself who is the fool and we are invited to laugh at his idiocy. In other scenes – the rodeo, the Pentecostal meeting, the fraternity ride, etc. – we are invited to laugh at his victims. And ultimately, Borat shrinks from taking a real risk with his comedy. He makes fun of Americans right and left, but [unlike Woody Allen, who really is an intellectual and really does take risks with his comedy] Cohen never directly challenges the sensibilities of his core audience – urban Jewish intellectuals. Rather he supports and affirms them.

Borat is in essence a litany of bourgeois Jewish insecurities and resentments – worries about international anti-Semitism; the suspicion that anti-Semitism lurks just beneath the surface of ordinary Americans; a paralyzing fear of the “Schwartzers”; disdain for a white Protestant culture that Jews see as being dumb and discriminatory. But, as Christopher Hitchens has noted, the casual and deliberate viciousness and offensiveness displayed by Cohen’s Barat stands in sharp contrast to the determined niceness and tolerance of the Americans he ridicules. One is struck by how easily Borat, with all his obnoxiousness, is welcomed by ordinary Christian Americans, both black and white, and how far they are willing to go to tolerate his outrageousness. As a result Barat’s exercise in sadistic nastiness reflects far more poorly on him and his adoring fans than on his victims.

The spirit of the film is one of sadism masquerading as joyous anarchism. Two ostensibly delusional cultural forms are being deconstructed here – Jewish paranoia and obsessive goyish niceness, even in the face of escalating outrage. However both of these, I might note, are socially functional and in these trying times are arguably necessary. Shared paranoia is a powerful instrument for forging and maintaining ethnic solidarity – especially in a time when the Jewish community seems to be dissolving; and an uncompromising, even lunatic, devotion to meliorative social rituals and illusions is necessary to sustain an increasingly factious social pluralism. Borat is thus ridiculing and undermining two characteristics of modern American culture that may be essential to its survival. That is destructive, dangerous, and dumb.

But is there more to "Borat" than that?

In the end I am undecided about “Borat.” Either it is a stupid and vicious display of ethnic bias or it is an ingenious and elaborate double “put on” that victimizes its most ardent proponents and exposes their paranoia and bigotry. “Borat” is a duplicitous and dangerous film, and our understanding of it depends on just how much ingenuity and malice we are willing to grant the film-makers. At the most obvious level “Borat” is a semi-documentary “put on” that victimizes unaware ordinary Americans and as such it has been understood by most reviewers. But, on reflection, it seems obvious that many of the scenes were staged and possibly scripted. We must remember that even in what appear to be the most spontaneous and authentic scenes the participants were very much aware that there was a camera, and most probably a cameraman and production crew, lurking just beyond our [but not their] field of vision. Moreover, it now appears that the film is not the authentic documentary it purports to be, but rather it is more like “extemp” comedy in which the participants are given working assumptions to guide their performances.

Ever since the film hit theatres articles, excerpts, “making of” features, etc. have been made available though the press and the internet, showing just how carefully crafted and severely edited this film was, and just how much preparation and planning went into the staging of its components. And with each revelation the authenticity of the project is diminished. It now seems probable that the entire film was itself an elaborate “put on” designed to elicit from upscale Jewish audiences and leftish critics precisely the reaction it has gotten. Sacha Baron Cohen may well be having a last sadistic laugh as his adoring fans begin to ruefully realize that it is they, not the goys, who are the real objects of "Borat's" disdain.

If such is the case, Sacha Baron Cohen is much smarter and more gutsy than I gave him credit for.

Somehow I doubt that.

UPDATE:

It seems I did not underestimate Cohen. He broke character enough to explain that

The journalist from Kazakhstan who sings anti-Semitic songs and refers to women as prostitutes was created "as a tool" to expose people's prejudices....

He said he was particularly interested in exposing American anti-Semitism and "indifference to anti-Semitism" because such indifference characterized the German population during the rise of Hitler.

So I was right the first time. He's just a nasty little bigot trying to draw a moral equivalence between America and Nazi Germany and nothing more.

Read his comments here.

UPDATE:

David Brooks agrees with the general tenor of my critique. Cohen is nasty and bigoted and plays to the status anxieties of his target audience, and in the process reveals their bigotry. Read his column here.

Jeff Jarvis agrees here.

And Charles Krauthammer exposes the blatant lie upon which the bond between Cohen and his most ardent supporters is based -- the myth of American Christian anti-semitism.

[A]n alarming number of liberal Jews are seized with the notion that the real threat lurks deep in the hearts of American Protestants, most specifically Southern evangelicals. Some fear that their children are going to be converted; others, that below the surface lies a pogrom waiting to happen; still others, that the evangelicals will take power in Washington and enact their own sharia law.

This is all quite crazy. America is the most welcoming, religiously tolerant, philo-Semitic country in the world. No nation since Cyrus the Great’s Persia has done more for the Jews.

Read him here.