Borat - Orientalist Satire for Make Glorious Debate Western Intelligentsiya
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You managed simultaneously to offend Kazakhs, frighten Jewish anti-defamation groups, outrage the orientalism monitors, tee off hypocritically thin-skinned Americans, provoke laughter across the Beavis and Butthead, Southpark, and Archie Bunker generations, and last--but certainly not least--provide glorious opportunity for Western intellectuals for criticize and debate merit, meaning, and interpretation of celluloid masterpiece.
It turns out he is fine and doing well, having found gainful employment in great American city called Branson, Missouri ("Hours great.
but what a country!".
Laugh, have fun!
2) If you go to the movie, don't laugh!
3) Go the movie, laugh, but later feign outrage!
4) Don't go the movie--in part because you might laugh!
5) If you do go, there's something wrong with you.
Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan can't help but leave the impression that we may have become an over-scripted, over-programmed culture.
It does so by tapping some of the wide-ranging film criticism, op-eds, and Internet postings that the film has spawned.
I laughed.
(but because I was laughing, not because I went).
NOT!!!
Let us begin with a question that has consumed so many keystrokes in recent months.
e.
e.
Shortly after the American release of Borat! an interview with Sacha Baron Cohen appeared in the 14 November 2006 edition of Rolling Stone.
While there can be, are, and will be many interpretations of who gets hurt as a result of Borat! (more on this below), Baron Cohen's comments to the interviewer Neil Strauss really eliminate much of the speculation about what Baron Cohen intends the film to do.
Here is what Baron Cohen said that should--although probably won't--once and for all dampen speculation about his motivations in making Borat!.
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.
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.
It's about the people Borat interviews--in the film, Americans--not about Kazakhstan and Kazakhs.
Certainly, this was what Ryan Gilbey of London's leftist weekly, New Statesman, took away from the film.
Others indict themselves as much by what they don't say as what they do.
Trying to find the ideal car for mowing down gypsies, or seeking the best gun for killing Jews, he encounters only compliance among America's salespeople.
An April 2003 article by Lucy Kelaart in the British daily The Guardian, suggests that some Kazakhs--at least those with some exposure to the West--understood this about Borat even back then (based on his British television show visits to the US).
Does she think Borat is giving Kazakhstan a bad name.
"They are gullible.
' The show describes a US stereotype, not a Kazakh one.
"
Of course, as I stated earlier and we shall see, were Baron Cohen's intentions the be-all and end-all of the criticism this article would be far shorter than it is.
The "Full" Sacha Baron Cohen: Beyond Borat
Lest Americans who see Borat! think in ethnocentric terms that we are Baron Cohen's principal target in his work, it is instructive to look at the "Full" Sacha Baron Cohen, or at latest a broader array of the characters he has played on television and in film.
Baron Cohen's character, Jean Girard, is a French "Formula Un" driver who takes the NASCAR circuit by storm.
It is hard to see this as a role in which Baron Cohen is somehow exploiting the American audience, other than that by playing a stereotype intended to be maximally offensive he is in a sense condescending that audience and its intelligence.
The first was seeing one of Peter Sellers' Pink Panther movies at a friend's ninth birthday party--setting off a lifelong admiration of the British comic actor's work.
Certainly, Baron Cohen's most famous character--and the one whose success probably was responsible for Borat getting a chance over the long-run--is the faux "gangsta" rapper Ali G.
Indeed, it is instructive to note that in Ali G.
Indahouse, instead of an epic quest for Pamela Anderson, Ali G.
Much of the criticism of "Ali G.
Within the UK, Ali G.
Substitute "Kazakhs" for "black street culture" and one could get a characterization similar to what we see in the wake of Borat!: "But a lot of the humor is laughing at black street culture and it is being celebrated because it allows the liberal middle classes to laugh at that culture in a context where they can retain their sense of political correctness.
Nevertheless, Why Exactly Kazakhstan?
The forefather and prototype for Borat was the character of a Moldovan television reporter, named Alexi Krickler, who Cohen played in the mid-1990s on British television.
there was a guy there who was a doctor, and the moment I met him, I started laughing.
He was Jewish, actually.
It was as Alexi Krickler that Baron Cohen hit upon what Strauss terms "a tiny epiphany that would eventually fuel Baron Cohen's career":
For example, when interviewing someone about the rugby team British Lions, he'd go back and forth with the interviewee for ten minutes, seemingly unable to comprehend that they don't have actual lions playing rugby.
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Of course, there was a difference that may have petered out over the years.
Perhaps this is where he "crossed the line.
After Alexi Krickler came an Albanian television reporter named Kristo.
This is perhaps important for it suggests that although Sacha Baron Cohen and Kazakhstan have become inseparably intertwined, Borat's "Kazakhness" was almost incidental.
Still, Moldova, Albania, and Kazakhstan have a clear common theme--they are all part of the post-communist world of the former Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union.
" In other words, a generic post(card)-Commiestan of sorts.
In this way not much has changed from Bram Stoker's time: the need to find a setting that is simultaneously exotic and yet familiar, that acts as a prop but not distraction from the underlying goal of the artform.
Distance of course makes parody easier (witness the infamous Weird Al Yankovic song and video parody "Amish Paradise"--talk about a disenfranchised community who was unlikely to get upset!) But only up to a point: Go eastward young man!.
Oh My!
This still leaves a key question unanswered: why has Baron Cohen sought to have his mock reporter come from real places.
As John Tierney opined in a New York Times op-ed,"I wish Cohen had instead invented a country like Molvania," rather than have Borat come from Kazakhstan.
" (Despite the fictitious country's name, stipulated location, and characteristics, its three Australian authors maintain it was not modeled on Moldova or even Romania, but was inspired by travels in Portugal.
"
Unsafe nuclear power plants, environmental degradation, and genetic mutation are also the punchline in Ben Stiller's 2004 comedy Dodgeball, in which we are introduced to Fran Stalinofskivichdavidovitchsky of Romanovia: "In her home country of Romanovia, dodgeball is the national sport and her nuclear power plant's team won the championship five years running, which makes her the deadliest woman on earth with a dodgeball.
There is speculation on the Wikipedia that Kreplakistan is "likely based on the real Karakalpak Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, now the Republic of Karakalpakstan.
"
But is inventing a country the solution to the problems of negative stereotyping and prejudice? If the Internet is any indication: apparently not.
There are angry denunciations particularly of the photos the authors use in the book and on the Molvania website--for while they play the role of fictional, mockworthy Molvanians, they are indeed real people.
In comments similar to those of Kazakh officials about Borat, in 2004 former UK minister for Europe Keith Vaz criticized the book because "it does reflect some of the prejudices which are taking root [in Europe].
" Ironically, too, the choice of a fictional "everycountry" can in fact be interpreted as even more insulting because it treats the people of an entire region or group as an essentially undifferentiated "them"--"I can't tell 'em apart, they all look alike.
Particularly as stories began to come out about how Borat's mock "Kazakh" home village in the movie was filmed in a poor Roma (gypsy) village in Romania--where the villagers received as payment for their work the feast of "a pig" and while Sacha Baron Cohen reportedly spent the night in the swanky mountain retreat of Sinaia --the issue of class entered the discussion about Borat!.
" That is: poverty becomes broadly funny when it is portrayed by the comparatively unknown or culturally unprotected.
The Polish author of the blog "Beatroot" captured this well in a post on the Molvania guidebook entitled: "Why is it that the only people 'liberals' think it's OK to laugh at these days are the white working class and Central and Eastern Europeans?"
Europe's 'white trash'
.
If this sort of book had been written about, say, African people, then, quite rightly, there would have been uproar and outrage.
But it seems that Political Correctness extends to all groups these days except poor whites from urban, rural or semi-rural areas in America and Europe.
By being presented as the comparatively-unknown Kazakhs, however, it made it "easier" to laugh freely.
A few years back I remember seeing a television report in a major US metropolitan area where real estate agents were being investigated for using the shorthand "Archie Bunker" to describe clients with 'discriminating tastes,' thinking that by using such language they were somehow remaining within the bounds of equal opportunity regulations.
So it has been with Borat.
The London tabloid The Sun, well-known for its "misgivings" over immigration and some would argue pandering to racist and xenophobic attitudes, searched for its pitchfork to make hay out of Borat! in the context of the looming immigration debate connected with Romania and Bulgaria's entry into the European Union on 1 January 2007.
This is Transylvania, home of Dracula.
Then I would cut his b***s off.
Romanians are heading our way for a better life; slowly.
He might bump into some of us in London soon.
Now Coming to a Theater Near You:r
Getting America's Wrongs Right, its Rights Wrong, and its Right Wrong
Borat! is replete with what might be called "nesting occidentalisms" or "nesting anti-Americanisms": that is, it creates and plays on foreign and domestic hierarchies of Americans, good, bad, and ugly.
Borat starts his American trek in New York, land of the cold and the distant, where the only communication is by epithet.
He takes a turn for Texas--where outsize nuts in cowboy hats chew their cuds on every corner.
"--he ends up in Southern California, where surgically enhanced breasts heave in every swimsuit.
Baron Cohen certainly takes--or at least wishes to portray--himself seriously.
Borat essentially works as a tool.
And his quote was, "The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.
They just had to be apathetic.
Let's see his Borat make some Cultural Learnings of his own smug world.
He could go to any British soccer game and find a cacophony of anti-gay slurs.
Borat could spend time with French gothics from the Dordogne.
Don't they have hookers in Hamburg? Let's see if they're welcome at your better class of German party.
Had he attempted these antics in many other countries--bringing a hooker to dinner, desecrating the national anthem in front of a rodeo audience--he'd have conducted the publicity campaign in traction.
" Is what he sees with most of the Americans he captures on tape the same as what he claims of the "upper-class Englishmen.
The reserve, the failure to act, the consensual behavior of the Americans Baron Cohen meets, I would argue, is born of a desire not to offend the guest, no matter how odd he is, not to speak or ask questions lest one show one's ignorance.
Don't be judgmental, just play along, go along to get along.
Indeed, the very American counter to Borat! can be seen in the final episode of the long-running comedy series Seinfeld, where the four main characters are hauled into court for failing to fulfill a newly-passed "Good Samaritan" law and helping a man in distress, whom they instead made fun of because of his weight--an homage, intended or not, to American self-centeredness.
Is it safe?
"Is it safe?.
It is the thought that crosses people's minds before, while, or after they laugh in our post-modern world.
Americans should actually be thankful for such a movie: it holds a mirror up and tells us how some in the rest of the world view us.
S.
Like it or not, Baron Cohen has tapped in effectively to foreign perceptions of the United States and he found enough Americans to play the ugly stereotypes he expected of them brilliantly.
Andrew Mueller explains why:
The reason that Borat is such a liberating hoot is Baron-Cohen's understanding that nothing is funnier than what we're not supposed to laugh at--and, in the early 21st century, the pressure upon us not to laugh at the backwardness and stupidity of foreigners has been considerable.
Nor should we cry too much for Kazakhstan (Moscow certainly doesn't).
" Another pointed out, Borat is portrayed as "naïve, but he is not cruel or bad.
" Professor Sean Roberts notes that, according to GoogleTrends, Borat more than doubled Kazakhstan's usual google hits during the lead up and height of the Borat film's PR campaign.
A modest proposal: How about a "Dallas"-like plot twister with "Who shot Borat?" Was it the Americans, the Kazakhs, the villagers of Glod?.
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