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There is
a scene in Borat in which the main character, low on cash, tries
to pay for something with a sandwich bag full of pubic hair. Fine pubic
hair, it seems, is a valuable commodity in Kazakhstan, and Borat is
unable to understand why the same is not true in the United States.
While I doubt very much that such an item is worth money at all in
Kazakhstan, I laughed at this scene. Not because it was funny, but
because it was shocking in a way that elicited a gut response in me. I
figured that I should either laugh or walk out of the theatre in
disgust, and since I was surrounded by a couple hundred other laughing
people, and had paid almost ten dollars for my ticket, I kept my seat.
Borat
has been touted as not only the funniest movie to come along in years,
but a clever indictment of the United States. I am not at all convinced
that the second claim is true, although the first might, in its vulgar
way, almost be. I laughed hard and often while I was watching the
movie, but left feeling a little bit disturbed. Why, exactly, had I
laughed at the pubic hair scene, or the scene in which Borat put his
feces into a plastic bag because he didn’t know to flush it down the
toilet, or the scene in which he joyfully introduced many members of his
town, including a his sister, the number-four prostitute in all of
Kazakhstan, and a character with the surname “the rapist.” Thinking
back on those and a number of other scenes, I realized that I was,
without having ever been there, offended on behalf of the nation of
Kazakhstan.
True political
humor or commentary is scarce to absent in Borat—about the closest thing
we get is a scene in which Borat, preparing to sing the Kazak national
anthem at a rodeo, makes several outlandish statements in support of the
Iraq War, echoing exaggerated sentiments which he might believe true of
American desire, but which most thinking Americans do not share. In
fact, I doubt that any Americans, unless they are psychopaths, wish for
George W. Bush to drink of the blood of every man, woman, and child in
Iraq, or for us to nuke Iraq to the extent that not even a cockroach
will be able to survive.
Borat goes on a
tour of America (some of it, anyway: New York City, part of the East
Coast, a few stops in Texas, and Los Angeles) by tiny little ice-cream
van. This leads to a few funny scenes, including one in which his pet
bear (which he has bought for protection against Jews) growls at a group
of children who think the van contains ice cream. On the road trip,
however, he makes a number of stops at destinations which do not
represent a multi-faceted cross-section of the country—he has dinner
with some upper class Texans, sings at a rodeo, and picks up urban slang
from a group of young urban black men. Perhaps this is meant to
represent how members of other nations view our own, but it seemed more
a venue for jokes about feces and pubic hair, an excuse for Borat to get
kicked out of a hotel lobby for trying to register a room with his
waistband comically low. Borat also ends up in a bed and breakfast run
by an older Jewish couple, and refuses to sleep because he is convinced
they will try to kill him. This is funny if you know that Cohen is
himself a practical Jew, but not everyone will be in on the joke.
In one
troublesome scene, Borat stumbles into a Pentacostel church meeting.
The film at this point takes great fun, and wants the audience to laugh
heartily, at the expense of the churchgoers speaking in tongues. The
problem here is that this church group is the first group of people to
unconditionally welcome Borat, not judging him for his “Kazak”
backwardness as most previous characters have. There are plenty of
complaints to be made about the influence of evangelical Christianity on
public policy in our country, but Borat sidesteps this by mocking
a particularly flamboyant brand of worship, and a sect which is not at
all exceptional in welcoming new members to its congregation.
Ultimately, the
problem with Borat is in the characterization of the hero, who
allegedly represents the pinnacle of Kazak education and society.
Unlike most of the other inhabitants of his village, he speaks English,
wears a suit, and owns a clock radio. He has been hand-picked by the
government to travel to the United States as a representative of
Kazakhstan. In the film, this is the best Kazakhstan can send. In
reality, that is not the case. The fact that Cohen accurately predicted
that Americans would either not know this or not care is the best form
of indictment against the United States that the film (as a cultural
event, and not a piece of art in and of itself) can muster—an indictment
that, sadly, most of us will not interpret, because we are too busy
laughing for all the wrong reasons. {Reviewed by Stephanie Eve Boone} |
