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Borat: Make Learnings of How to be a Total Jerk (Pt. I)
Posted by KTK

OK - I just saw the “Borat” film, and I have highly mixed feelings.

I should say first that, while I had been aware of Sacha Baron Cohen and his “Ali G.” and “Borat” characters, I had never seen an episode of any of his shows, and had the vague impression that “Borat”, in particular, was a childish stunt. I was surprised at movie reviews claiming that the Borat film was really a biting social commentary and that it showed how well he reveals the truth about the people he interviews - I hadn’t understood just quite what he was supposed to be getting at by acting like a fool with a funny accent. (And, as a friend of mine pointed out, with his “idiotic Kazakh” character that bears no relation to reality, he’s really just doing a trivial variation on “Pollack” jokes - which supposedly are passe’. So what’s to like?) So I decided to check it out, and came away feeling that there really is a profoundly revealing quality to his shtick, and also that I don’t necessarily like him any better for that.

SPOILER WARNING: Details Revealed Below

The movie can actually be entertaining even if you know what is coming, but if you want to go in totally unprepared, skip the rest of this.

As I’m sure everybody knows, “Borat” is the name of a fictional character played by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen (who is an observant Jew). “Borat” supposedly hails from Kazakhstan, and is an obliviously idiotic, overly-friendly character who constantly ingratiates himself with Westerners to learn about their countries or to talk about Kazakhstan; he falsely portrays Kazakhstan as both hopelessly impoverished and virtually uncivilized (in the movie, he engages in a long French kiss with a young woman he then introduces as his sister, “the 4th-best prostitute in Kazakhstan”; he also introduces “the town rapist” and admonishes him “humans only!”; his house has only 3 walls and a cow lives inside it; the fake Kazakh national anthem extols the country’s claims to fame - prostitutes and potassium; etc. . . .). The Kazakh government has officially protested (which may not have helped their cause).

In this movie, “Borat” supposedly visits America to make a documentary introducing American culture to Kazakhstan. Under this guise, he got unsuspecting Americans to grant him interviews on-camera; they were asked to sign releases before the filming took place, and were led to believe that they were participating in an educational program for Kazakh children. On these terms, a variety of people agreed to participate and did their best to be polite. In each case, “Borat” then began goading them with more and more outrageous behavior, all supposedly the result of his good-natured, uncomprehending foreign ways - but in each case, of course, a calculated insult intended to provoke them into embarrassing reactions. Some of the people come off quite well, maintaining their composure in the face of the most bizarre provocations. Some react with discomfort but don’t embarrass themselves. Some go along up to a point, but then reach their own personal limit and burst out with angry or bigoted reactions that reveal their prejudices. (Some just let it all hang out right from the beginning, without any provocation.)

The power of the movie is multi-fold. Obviously, it reveals the bigotry lurking right beneath the surface of many parts of society. (A man in a cowboy hat at a rodeo recoils from “Borat”’s supposed “cultural practice” of kissing on the cheeks, and begins flapping his hands in the air saying “Around here, it’s only the fairy types who do that!” Several complete dipshit fraternity boys spontaneously begin ranting about how women keep them down and a man can’t let a woman have power over him. A refined dinner party erupts hysterically when he brings a black guest to the table.) It reveals how thin is the veneer of sophistication practiced by many people.

It also reveals how bizarre and, as a friend of mine pointed out, how harmful is the pervasive ethos of non-confrontation and “niceness” that allows people to get away with offensive statements and behavior simply because it would be rude to confront them. (Almost nobody in the film suggests that Borat is putting them on, or objects to his behavior until they have put up with far more sheer offensiveness than they should have to. They also seem strangely willing to believe that a Kazakh tourist would carry a live chicken in his luggage, or mistake a hotel elevator for the actual hotel room. And they do all this on camera - which you’d think might have tipped them off that they were being set up.) And it reminds us how much ugliness there is in our society, confirming a lot of comfortable stereotypes about Southerners, conservatives, religious people, small-towners, and the like. (Amanda of Pandagon has a fascinating post on how the movie’s market demographics seem to neatly conform to a conservative/liberal split in which the movie’s popularity reflects the percentage of its audience that enjoys seeing conservatives made fun of.)

As many fans of the movie have suggested, this is all to the good. It’s good to be reminded of these things, and it’s useful to have unmistakeable evidence of what you find when you scratch a conservative. When Ken Mehlman blandly declares that racial issues are irrelevant because racism is a thing of the past, it’s obvious he hasn’t seen this movie. The point about “niceness” is provocative, as well, because it calls into question the default stance of tolerance of others’ opinions up to and beyond the point of offence: if we are entitled to react when these yahoos finally reveal their true colors, aren’t they entitled to complain when “Borat” is goading them past the point of endurance? (In fact, apparently several of them are now suing him.)

And it’s that conflict that finally sours me on this movie. I agree that many of the people shown in this film are nasty bigots, and I’m childishly glad to see my stereotypes of them confirmed. And Cohen hits all the right liberal-stereotype buttons: snotty upper-class Southern racists; jingoistic patriot rodeo fans in cowboy hats; sleazy salespeople; freaky-ass speaking-in-tongues evangelical Christians; drunken frat-boys, and the like. These people deserve as much ridicule as they can get, and he gives it to them by way of simply letting them reveal themselves with their self-control stripped off. But is it reasonable to judge people on the behavior they reveal when their self-control is stripped off - and through no fault of their own?

These people’s self-immolation is less satisfying because it comes about through Borat’s taking advantage of them in several ways - first by misrepresenting himself to gain their indulgence for his own buffoonery, then by catching them in situations where they are trapped into humoring his racist or sexist provocations either out of politeness or the idea that “the customer is always right” (several of the people he lampoons are service-job workers he has hired to do something with him, and whom he then subjects to a barrage of offensiveness), and finally by pushing them to the point where, in some sense, they really can’t be held responsible for themselves. Bizarrely, Borat is so offensive and so provocative that he makes even the worst people in his film at least somewhat sympathetic.

In some cases, the worst his victims do is simply try to be polite when he - Borat - behaves like a jerk. (And he makes them pay for their own abuse: he drags a Hummer salesperson around for an extended test drive, peppering him with questions about how fast he should go to kill Jews, or his wife, with the car - then announces that he can afford $600 to buy it; he stages a slapstick routine in a small antique shop, destroying over $400 worth of merchandise, then claims he can’t pay for it [I hope and presume he made it up to them when the camera was off]. These are people trying to make a living, but he thinks nothing of aggravating them and taking up their time to no end.) In other cases, they reveal a side of themselves that he encourages to come out, while smirkingly aware that we hipsters are in on the joke with him and only the yokels who trusted him don’t know he’s mocking them. Borat ingratiates himself with people precisely to get them to show the side of themselves that we all don’t show to strangers. Perhaps this tells us something about who they are deep down, but are we entitled to judge people for what they usually don’t do in public?

Strangely, it’s the very worst people he displays who are in some ways least at fault for the behavior he provokes. The most profoundly revealing, and most troubling, sequence in the movie is when he tricks a group of genteel Southerners into hosting a dinner party for him so he can compare American and “Kazakh” cultural customs. As the evening wears on, he begins behaving more and more oddly, which they put down to his being foreign. (When he garbles the language, continually interpreting one man’s statement that he is “retired” to mean that he is “retarded”, they laughingly correct him. Later he says he wants to “make a dump” and cups his hands as if holding a turd - they politely tell him it’s called a “restroom” and direct him upstairs.) Then he begins making pointed comments about the women’s bodies (”These two would be very attractive in my country! . . . Her - not so much.”) - and they still don’t object (though the host seems kind of pissed at this point). At each step, they go out of their way to interpret his behavior kindly, and at one point (when he is out of the room “making a dump”), they agree that he could be just a regular American with a little more experience. (Get it?! They think it’s a compliment that he could be American! What yokels!) He comes downstairs from the bathroom holding a plastic bag full of his own shit, and hands it to the host at her own dining table, in her own house, with food still on the table. Everyone looks perturbed, but nobody says anything. She takes him upstairs, and there’s a painfully hilarious scene in which, waving a strip of toilet paper in his face, she tries to teach him how to wipe himself while he keeps asking her to do it for him. And she still puts up with it!

Finally, he finds the key: he introduces an uninvited guest to the party, and she stomps in, a loud, skanky-looking, fat, black prostitute. The dinner partners completely explode. A couple leap up and run from the room, the host begins babbling “Uh, it’s kind of late . . . uh, we really ought to go . . . it’s really late . . . I think dinner is over . . .”, and the rest just gibber. When he’s told that dinner is over, Borat asks impishly “Can she stay for dessert?” and the female host finally loses it, screaming at him “NO! And neither can you!”, threatening to call the police (for what? being hungry while black?), and physically throwing both of them out of the house. It’s painful, shameful, and hilarious.

So - he got ‘em. He finally pushed the right button, and they revealed themselves. The genteel Southern aristocrats who are so well-bred they don’t turn a hair when somebody dumps a bag of shit in their lap explode into violent hysterics when an underclass black person simply walks into the room. They’re the worst kind of racists and hypocrites, but they could have gone on denying it forever until Borat hit them where they live; now we know. But . . . is it justifiable? Should anyone have to put up with the kinds of things he does during this dinner? And, having ground down their resistance with truly unbearable behavior - he called one guest a “retard”, called another one ugly, then brought a bag of shit to the table, handed it to the host, and asked her to wipe his ass for him - he finally pushed them over the edge in a way that reflected badly on them. But if they had not gone to such excruciating lengths to accomodate his own offensive behavior - if they had simply kicked him down the steps in the first 15 minutes, as he deserved - they would never have gotten to that point. It’s their basic decency that makes it possible for him to out them as racists.

Something similar takes place when, pretending to have hit bottom on his trip and run out of money, he sleeps in front of the door of a Pentacostal worship hall, then follows the congregation in when they show up for services in the morning. Man, these people are weird - and offensive. There are a couple of local politicians, identified by name and office, preaching about a “return to America’s Christian heritage”; there’s a high-ranking military officer in full uniform on the podium. They are emblematic, at least, of the worst parts of the religious right, and they speak in tongues at the drop of a hat, which is as close to synonyous with “bat-shit” as anyone needs to get. Borat does his shtick - ingratiating himself, easing into their company (he does a priceless double-take when the guy holding his hand in a worship circle suddenly starts ululating gibberish), encouraging their sympathy with his confused and bedraggled appearance, and then following an “altar call” to confess his sins and let Jesus help him. And then of course he takes it too far - grabbing the microphone from the preacher and ranting his own fervent outbursts about Jesus (”Weel Jesusah loveah mah neighbor?” “Yes - Jesus will love your neighbor!” “But nobahdee loveah mah neighbor! We hateah heem!”), and collapsing and pretending to speak in tongues - setting off a circle of rapturous loonies also speaking in tongues while lunging forward to “lay hands on” Borat while he fakes having “the spirit” in him.

OK - so they’re goofy. And I’m more than willing to mock far-right religious weirdos. But . . . again . . . is this justified? For all their nuttiness, they were just minding their own (weird, speaking-in-tongues) business. They weren’t hurting anybody. What do we learn from seeing a hip young comedian invite his (mostly hip, liberal) audience to laugh at religious nuts just for being religious nuts? And do they really have to put up with people mocking them in the midst of their own ceremonies so we can have a laugh at their expense?

Some of the yahoos come off OK. Borat lies to some rodeo organizers, claiming he wants to honor America by singing our national anthem. He comes out wearing a US flag shirt, and leads the crowd in increasingly-strange cheers about 9/11: when he asks them to honor the fallen, they cheer loudly; then he shouts for victory in the war, and gets more cheers; then he cheers for killing everyone in the region who opposes us, and the crowd is quieter; finally he screams something about “blood everywhere” and the crowd is almost silent. When he pretends there was a miscommunication and sings the “Kazakhstan anthem” to the tune of the US anthem (”Kazahstan is greatest country in the world . . . Kazakhstan’s prostitutes are cleanest in the region / Except of course for Turkmenistan’s”), the crowd begins booing openly. (Hilariously, at that moment a beautiful cream horse, standing in the middle of the ring, ridden by a girl in a flag costume and holding a flagpole, simply collapses spontaneously, falls to the ground, and tosses the girl and the flag. It looked like he killed the horse through lack of patriotism.)

These cowboys are not exactly progressive thinkers. It was this scene that included the good ole’ boy’s fairy dance, just before the singing started. But you get a sense that - to whatever extent is possible in a rodeo arena waiting for the show to start - they are making moral distinctions, between what they will and won’t endorse, and between fighting for what they believe in and gratuitous violence. They didn’t blindly cheer for mindless violence; they calibrated their support for his idiocy to the degree that it tracked with their values. That’s not the worst thing I expected to see from a group of people I probably don’t have much in common with. And, while I’m not very emotionally invested in flags or anthems, many people are, so what’s the percentage in publicly mocking the national anthem of a country you supposedly visited in order to appreciate? I think people who get worked up about the national anthem or the pledge of allegiance are reactionary and narrow-minded - but I don’t think that about the people who booed Borat for lying to them about what he intended to do and then insulting them to their faces. What justifies this, and what does it tell me about my fellow citizens that possibly would justifiy it?

In some cases, he just behaves weirdly for a laugh. There is a long sequence in which he stages his “bumbling foreigner” shtick on a New York subway train, chasing his chicken around, falling over people, and trying to kiss strangers hello. (Several of them threaten to kick his ass, thereby confirming a perfectly correct stereotype of New Yorkers - but as a New Yorker I don’t see anything wrong with it.) There is another gross and hilarious scene where he and his hugely fat “manager” somehow get into a naked wrestling match that involves the manager stuffing Borat’s face between his grotesque buttocks, and Borat chasing the manager naked through the lobby of a high-priced hotel, waving a fist-shaped dildo. More priceless scenes: Borat and the manager quietly behaving themselves in a hotel elevator full of strangers, in the middle of their naked brawl, while the strangers huddle terrified in the corner but nobody says a word; Borat meeting with super-conservative former Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, and Barr gamely eating a piece of cheese that Borat sticks in his face because it’s a “cultural custom” to eat cheese at Kazakhstani meetings - after he bites it, Borat casually remarks that “my wife made it . . . with milk from her tit” - Barr doesn’t say a word, but simply . . . slowly . . . stops . . . chewing; Borat meeting with egregious dipshit Alan Keyes, and describing how much fun he had with some friendly young men who took him home to wrestle naked with them - Keyes suggests that “it sounds like you might have met some of what we call the ‘gay community’” - “Gay?” - “Yes - homosexual.” - the payoff is the looks on both their faces as Borat pretends to “realize” what happened and then says “You mean the man who stuck a fist-shaped rubber thing in my anus was homosexual?”. But these - however funny some of the scenes are - are the weakest part of the film.

This is Borat only being a jerk. Barr and Keyes are conservative nutcases from way back - but their scenes last about a minute each, and neither of them says anything very interesting. Chasing people on the street? What’s the point? It felt as if Cohen either couldn’t find two hours’ worth of genuine jerks in America - hard to believe - or he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to make a slapstick fish-out-of-water comedy or a biting social satire. It’s about half of both - which means that every really biting piece, which arguably redeems Cohen’s real meanness with the social revelation it brings forth, is undermined by an equally-long piece of pure buffoonery in which Cohen simply makes a fool of himself. At one point he even stages a sight gag involving his manager dressed in a Charlie Chaplin costume and refers to him as “Hitler” - thus explicitly referencing Chaplin’s brilliant take-down of Hitler through comedy in “The Great Dictator”. But Chaplin sustained his satire throughout the whole movie - he didn’t wander off in every other scene to pick on an old Jewish lady running a bed-and-breakfast in the Midwest, or to make stupid ethnic jokes about cultural practices that are in fact entirely fake to begin with. Cohen doesn’t seem confident enough in himself to take his own shtick seriously for more than 5 minutes at a time.

In the end, I don’t think Cohen gives us enough to chew on to justify what he does to get it. In fact, the movie kind of undercuts its own implicit premise simply because it is so lame: the really bad people in this movie are only 80% bad, and there aren’t that many of them. Once you get past the uptight Southern racists and the misogynist frat boys, the “second tier” bigots in this film turn out to be very ambiguous characters - people who are just going along with Borat, who is the actual bigot in the scene, or people whose prejudices are nuanced in ways that still leave them some dignity. At least half the movie is people who really don’t do anything wrong, or who are in fact victims of  Borat’s offensiveness. Even if these people were as bad as the movie suggests, they don’t deserve much of what Borat does to them to reveal that, and the fact that he has to go to such lengths to get their bad impulses out of them suggests they may not be as bad as all that after all, and the fact that there are so few of them in this movie suggests they’re not as common as all that, after all, too. If this guy spent however many months it took him, crossing America and setting up anyone he could find for this movie, and still couldn’t come up with more than a handful of actual bigots, America may be a better place than I had realized - and certainly a better one than Cohen realizes.

UPDATE: Cohen has now given an interview in Rolling Stone (excerpted here), in which he explains some of his thinking about the “Borat” character. Apparently he almost never gives straight interviews, but instead appears in character and does more of his shtick. This time, he says:

“Borat essentially works as a tool. By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudices, whether it’s anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. ‘Throw the Jew Down the Well’ [a bit from his TV show, in which he gets patrons in a country bar to join him in an anti-Semitic song] was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism.”

“But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tuscon. And the question is: did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism,” he said.

Baron Cohen said the concept of “indifference towards anti-Semitism” had been informed by his study of the Holocaust while at Cambridge University, where he read history. “I remember, when I was in university, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.’

“I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic,” he said. 

He also talked of his astonishment at hearing that the Kazakh government was thinking of suing him over the offence caused by his comic alter ego, and stressed that the “joke is not on Kazakhstan”.

“I was surprised, because I always had faith in the audience that they would realise that this was a fictitious country and the mere purpose of it was to allow people to bring out their own prejudices. And the reason we chose Kazakhstan was because it was a country that no one had heard anything about, so we could essentially play on stereotypes they might have about this ex-Soviet backwater. The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist - who believe that there’s a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to nine years old…”

That sounds a little naive to me. (Kazakhstan is not a fictional country - it’s a real country, you dumbass! - and the fact that people know you’re joking does not mean it’s not offensive - Poles know that Polish jokes are jokes, but they still don’t like them.) But it does confirm the obvious interpretation of his gags - that they reveal the tolerance people have for bigotry, and that he thinks that’s a problem that needs attention. (His focus on “indifference” seems to me to incorporate elements of both the “closet bigot” and “niceness” hypotheses: that is, the explanation for the behavior he elicits can be either that his targets to some degree endorse his crudeness or that they just don’t care enough to object, and it’s not clear which or both of these is his real concern.)

At the same time, not all parts of the movie make sense from this perspective. The constant harping on “Kazakh” backwardness has nothing to do with revealing “indifference” to bigotry - they’re just dumb ethnic jokes. The dinner-party scene also has nothing to do with “indifference” - he was everything but bigoted in that scene, and did not elicit “indifference” from his targets, but rather provoked them into losing their composure with disgusting - but not grossly bigoted - behavior.

Either he’s not really sophisticated enough in his own understanding of what he’s doing to target his routines really precisely, or he’s just putting on a gross-out comedy show with a veneer of social ideology to give it class. I’ll give him credit for a certain amount of sincerity in what he’s doing, but I’m still not that impressed.

November 13th, 2006 General, Reviews, Culture, Media, News & Current Events | 16 comments