Borat: Make Learnings From Different Perspectives (Pt. II)
by KTKNovember 14th, 2006
I’ve already given my reactions to the “Borat” film (below). Another consequence of it, for me, was an interesting conversation I had about it at a party this past weekend. After I mentioned having seen the film, a number of people wound up discussing it at some length. Among us were an actor, a writer, a graduate student in history with a focus on political activism, and a graduate student in philosophy with a focus on ethics. It was startling to me how different were the various perspectives each person brought to the subject. It’s not surprising that people with such backgrounds would have different takes on any contentious question, but it was amusing to see everyone playing to type so obviously, and yet with really valuable insights from those different perspectives.
The concerns of the ethicist were the ones I wrote about in my previous post (guess why). The activist, however, saw the film as an attack on hypocrisy and the willingness to “go along to get along” (it was his suggestion that the “niceness” that accomodates bigotry was the real target of the film, not bigotry as such). The writer was concerned about how well the message was getting across, and the danger of misinterpretation (that people would think “Borat” was really endorsing bigotry). There was a lot of disagreement in this conversation, but the the three of us formed a kind of conceptualist clique - focused on the explicit, implicit, and unintentional messages of the film and the propriety of the interactions between “Borat” and his targets.
The actor’s take on things was from a completely different perspective: she went on at length about how much she admired Sacha Baron Cohen for creating such outrageous characters, and how “brave” he was for being willing to take his character into public places and stay “in-character” while doing such outrageous things. (Actors talk like this a lot. The “courage” and commitment required are major themes when actors talk about acting. Sometimes that seems overblown, but anyone who has ever been too shy to appear in a school play, or has experienced stage fright at giving a speech, should be able to sympathize. And when you think about just going ahead and doing a character in public, when no one knows it’s a put-on, there is no play taking place, and you have no context to justify what you’re doing, the notion of “courage” begins to make sense.) Every time I described another disgusting or offensive thing “Borat” had done, she would dissolve into hysterics - she was willing to admit that his behavior was bad, but what interested her about it was simply how hard it must be to do what he does, and how successful he is at it.
This was an interesting conversation. The crux of the disagreement seemed to be how justifiable it is to take advantage of people for some social purpose. The writer noted that the participants were misled and asked to sign liability releases before they knew what would happen to them, so they had no real control of their own public image. The ethicist suggested that, even in the face of bigotry, there is a sphere of private behavior that we normally choose to leave immune to criticism, either as a social courtesy or out of respect for privacy, and that Cohen systematically invades that sphere to make people guilty of things they would not be guilty of if he simply left them alone. The activist seemed to feel that this is partly justified because the movie is, at bottom, an equal-opportunity offense: it tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the people it makes fun of on screen. And the actor took, implicitly, the ars gratia artis stance that sees artists as simply condemned to create, by whatever means are in them. (If it’s justifiable for Gaugin to leave his family and devote himself selflessly to alternately sleeping with and painting dusky South Seas maidens, and if it’s justifiable for Hemingway to abandon a string of women while working on his books, then it’s justifiable for Cohen to lie to people and set them up for unsuspecting humiliation to make a movie.) At one point the activist suggested that Cohen is the equivalent of Stanley Milgram, conducting morally questionable but highly revealing experiments in the human willingness to participate in others’ discomfort; the ethicist suggested another parallel was Philip Zimbardo’s “prison experiment“, in which subjects began to brutalize one another with virtually no provocation and the experimenter allowed it to continue; interestingly, we could not decide what these parallels said about the justification of Cohen’s project.
In the end, your reaction to Cohen seems to hinge on what values you prioritize most highly: you have a choice between the creative impulse, self-reflective social criticism, fair dealing, respect for privacy, and the delicious thrill of mocking asshole conservatives. The last in that list ranks very, very high for me - but perhaps not as high as the two just preceding it. That leads me to suspect that the movie’s payoff is not worth the price in invasiveness, deceit, and humiliation that “Borat”’s foils are tricked into paying - even granting that these include some of the worst people in America. (When the activist suggested that the movie’s real message is that it is the refusal to confront bigotry that is the most important problem, the ethicist responded by asking if that meant all the insults, humiliation, and simply offensive behavior were just “some sort of international assertiveness-training program?” - a question that went unanswered.) If you value comedy as a craft, however, or are willing to suspend your criticism of the bigots, jerks, and loonies in the film (thereby alleviating their humiliation) and turn your critical eye on yourself as viewer, then the film is revelatory as an unique window into your chosen subject. In this way, “Borat” - a low-budget cringe-fest - takes on a Rashomon-like quality: who, exactly, is the joke on? Who is being put under the microscope, here? To what extent are we each “Borat” and refusing to cop to it? To what extent are we each his victims, falsely believing that “Borat” is letting us off the hook by (ostensibly) laughing (ostensibly) at them (ostensibly) along with us?
UPDATE: Added remarks about the psychology experiments.
Categories: Culture, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics, Privacy, Religion |
Great post. As a native Tennessean (one who’s never been outside the state for more than two weeks at a time, I’m sad to say), I saw it as more of a commentary on American ignorance and complacence. I wasn’t offended by the portrayal of Southerners at all, because I felt like it was very accurate. I suppose my takeaway was along the lines of “See how ignorant Americans are? We need to do something about that. It’s sad and embarrassing.”
“As a native Tennessean (one who’s never been outside the state for more than two weeks at a time”
You must have learned a lot in those two weeks in order to be able to generalize about a whole nation.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/05/02/geog.test/index.html
WASHINGTON (CNN) — After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released Tuesday showed.
The study found that less than six months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 33 percent could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map.
The National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs 2006 Geographic Literacy Study paints a dismal picture of the geographic knowledge of the most recent graduates of the U.S. education system.
“Taken together, these results suggest that young people in the United States … are unprepared for an increasingly global future,” said the study’s final report.
“Far too many lack even the most basic skills for navigating the international economy or understanding the relationships among people and places that provide critical context for world events.”
The study, which surveyed 510 young Americans from December 17 to January 20, showed that 88 percent of those questioned could not find Afghanistan on a map of Asia despite widespread coverage of the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and the political rebirth of the country.
In the Middle East, 63 percent could not find Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map, and 75 percent could not point out Iran or Israel. Forty-four percent couldn’t find any one of those four countries.
Inside the United States, “half or fewer of young men and women 18-24 can identify the states of New York or Ohio on a map [50 percent and 43 percent, respectively],” the study said.
On the positive side, the study noted, seven in 10 young Americans correctly located China on a map, even though they had a number of misconceptions about that country. Forty-five percent said China’s population is only twice that of the United States. It’s actually four times larger than the U.S. population.
When the poll was conducted in 2002, “Americans scored second to last on overall geographic knowledge, trailing Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and Sweden,” the report said.
The release of the 2006 study coincides with the launch of the National Geographic-led campaign called “My Wonderful World.” A statement on the program said it was designed to “inspire parents and educators to give their kids the power of global knowledge.”
Hi K. Interesting post. Over at the BritannicaBlog, EB editor Michael Levy also comments on the potential for some people to not get the joke, and compares Borat to a modern day Archie Bunker. It’s an interesting question: when does satire cross over into something offensive?
Yes - there’s certainly that Archie Bunker aspect: the offensive lout who is really a spoof on offensive louts. But there have been lots of comedy characters like that (Ralph Kramden, Dwayne the Super from “One Day at a Time”, Herb Tarlick from “WKRP”, Lenny and Squiggy from “Laverne & Shirley” [you can tell what my formative years were]). They occur in fictional shows staffed by professional actors playing roles. Cohen plays pranks on real people who have no idea, at least to begin with, that he’s using them for humor; he then floods them with real abuse, not staged dialogue and joke props, and gets them to truly embarrass themselves when they are not at their best, not simply play a comedic role that demonstrates their underlying talent.
So we have to ask whether Cohen is treating the people in his movie decently. We never have to ask if Jackie Gleason was behaving decently on his show - everybody knows he wasn’t really going to hit Audrey Meadows “right in the kisser!” (even if many protested the humorous treatment of domestic violence). Cohen’s abusive behavior is real abuse, of real people, with real consequences - a fact that he and many others seem to think isn’t true as long as they can say “but it’s comedy!”.
if that was at a party what was it a chess club party? filled with english major nerds and an actor?? hahahaha, cool read jk,
jr
Coming from the UK i find you guys take on this interesting. When Baron Cohen was in another guise of his, Ali G, he started by sending up public figures in the UK. One that sticks out particularly is with veteran MP Tony Benn. When Benn realised Ali G was deliberatley trying to antagonise a reaction from him he confronted him, and left the interview. Once he realised the whole thing was joke, he did in fact see the funny side.
With Borat, Cohen seems to have moved on from being quite so antagonistic, by making Borat a far more ‘naive’ character that people find hard to get angry with, except perhaps those who have such ingrained prejudices.