Guerilla comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film, Borat, takes the Hiroshima approach to comedy: It’s an uncompromising, total assault on civilization. Nothing is sacred, and the aftermath leaves no one standing. You can be appalled at its vulgarity and debate its virtues, but there can be no doubt of its devastating effects.
http://www.boratmovie.com/
To call this movie crass would be like calling Cindy Sheehan “a little kooky.” The word doesn’t even begin to describe it. Cohen has a fundamental dedication to pushing every scene to its most gasp-inducing extreme. But unlike so many other purveyors of gross-out gags, this is not merely a string of stunts. The genius of Borat is how the character exploits our country’s obsession with conflict-avoidance and multicultural tolerance. It’s a shiv to the guts of appeasement, and it just might be the best — and certainly the funniest — deconstruction of American pretensions ever made.
The full title, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is as gleefully unwieldy and absurd as the film itself. The setup is fairly simple: Cohen plays Borat, a dismally backward, utterly inept third-world news reporter with a lustful streak and an open racism toward Jews and gypsies. He travels the U.S. talking with a variety of unsuspecting marks — everyone from former congressman Bob Barr and a southern etiquette coach to a Civil War antique-store owner and a local TV news anchor — and in the process, either puts them in shocking, uncomfortable situations or gets them to make highly embarrassing statements on camera. Some of the film is staged, but much of it consists of real interviews conducted under the wonderfully ridiculous pretense that Borat is an actual foreign journalist. It’s like Candid Camera on crack.
Drawing on the inspired juvenile insouciance of South Park and Jackass, Borat mixes buffoonish caught-on-tape antics with a blitzkrieg of anti-P.C. insensitivity, juicing up the outrage and offense meters until they’re ready to explode. When it comes to exploring uncharted lands of awkwardness and vulgarity, this is the lunar landing. Free-speech absolutists will set up elaborate shrines to this film. Teenagers will sneak past movie-theater ticket takers. Concerned mothers will wonder what the world is coming to. And audiences everywhere will convulse in fits of pained laughter.
The tone is loose and playful, but in fact, the movie is structured with surprising sophistication. Each scene ups the ante on outrageous, boundary-pushing shenanigans. Think it’s too much to make jokes about one’s “retard” brother or refer to Alan Keyes as “a genuine chocolate face?” Just wait: It gets worse, and then it gets worse again in all sorts of totally hysterical, totally unprintable ways. This movie goes over the top and then doubles back to flip the bird to anyone it missed the first time — it’s a monument of defiance to the bounds of decency.
Watching the movie is like taking an 89-minute cultural-desensitization course. You walk in with your mores, tastes, and air of civility comfortably intact, but when you emerge you no longer have any idea of what’s acceptable. In the film’s twisted universe, the rules of polite society are as broken as Borat’s English; quite unequivocally, anything goes. This results in an unexpected amount of tension. By the time the film is half way through, it’s clear that Cohen will do absolutely anything in service of a joke; trying to figure out just what he’s going to say or do in any given situation is more nerve-wracking than most thrillers.
The film’s road-movie architecture gives audiences plenty of opportunities for suspense. Borat’s cross-country travels introduce him to a smorgasbord of familiar characters: an RV full of puerile frat boys, a cowboy-hat wearing rodeo manager, a panel of stuffy feminists, a pack of inner-city Atlanta street thugs; a warehouse church crowded with evangelicals shouting in tongues. It’s a sweeping panorama of American stereotypes, and each plays their part to obnoxious perfection. The frat boys pound shots and bark misogynist epithets; the feminists lecture in condescending tones; the cowboy disparages gays and Muslims; the hoods instruct Borat on how to sag his pants speak urban slang; the evangelicals rail against evolution and offer salvation through Jesus. It’s an all-American comedy of non-manners, with cultural conflicts, not-so-hidden biases, and the insular pompousness of various subgroups all splayed out for the world to see. The country’s clashing sects each get tricked into shooting themselves in the foot simply by forcing them to explain themselves to a mystified outsider.
Cohen’s secret weapon is Borat’s jovial naiveté. When he walks into a gun store, he calmly asks the owner what gun would be best “to kill Jews with.” Listening to the feminists try to explain gender equality, he bursts into laughter and proclaims that women have smaller brains. His innocence, excused by his country of origin, is what draws out telling remarks from his subjects, getting the gun dealer to pleasantly recommend either a .45 or a 9mm for Jew-killing, and convincing a Hummer salesman to detail just how fast one would have to drive to kill a gypsy in a hit-and-run (about 35 miles per hour).
Perhaps the movie’s most telling moment takes place at a mannered southern dinner party. After several rounds of inexcusably obnoxious behavior, Borat leaves for the restroom, but the camera stays behind as one of the primly dressed women explains in lugubrious southern tones that though “the cultural differences are vast,” she sees much potential in the man. Borat promptly reappears carrying a fresh bag of his own excrement, but the woman, barely missing a beat to suppress her shock, responds with calm, teaching him that Americans use a wonderful invention called toilet paper. Only when he invites a low-rent hooker over as his dinner guest do the party guests finally throw him out. By playing on our collective pride in cultural tolerance at any cost, Cohen exposes the blithe stupidity and potential for exploitation in the multiculti ethos. The film initially seems predicated on seeing how far Borat will go, but the real question is how much his victims are willing to take.
One might complain that Cohen’s ridicule paints a caricature of Americans by playing to the most exaggerated foreign clichés about the U.S. But the point is not to confirm stereotypes. Instead, the movie gives us an opportunity to laugh, without any of the usual restrictions, at both ourselves and those around us. It’s a great equalizer, because it allows that, given the right circumstances, everyone makes an ass of themselves. The humor of Borat derives less from Cohen using his marks as springboards for his own stunts than it does from him making a space for his subjects to display their inner fools. The joke’s not on us — it is us.
– Peter Suderman is assistant editorial director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and associate editor of Doublethink. He blogs on film and culture at www.alarm-alarm.com.