The Christian Science Monitor printed a good op-ed piece about the movie Borat. There's been much discussion of this movie on a sociopolitical and I won't get into it too much. Personally, I love satirical humor and I'm a big fan of political cartoons in the newspapers.
But for my taste, regardless of the message, good satire has to be subtle, not crude. Brick in the face humor can be amusing but it tends to get boring and tiresome very quickly. That's the difference between Beavis & Butthead (lame), South Park (moderately amusing) and The Simpsons (arguably the best comedy TV show of all time). Borat is brick in the face humor. Somewhere in the South Park range. Moderately funny but it seeks easy laughs. Not very clever.
I'm a big Canadianophile. I follow its politics closely. I like its social and cultural values, its emphasis on improving the lives of its citizens rather than on rampant militarism. Canadians think it's a better idea to provide health insurance for all their citizens than create health crises in other countries. Basically if America were a bit more enlightened and civilized, it would look something like Canada (or at least Vermont).
Even though Sacha Baron Cohen (the actor who plays Borat) is British, Borat's humor is very Canadian. Over the years, I've watched a lot of television and listened to a lot of radio programs from the CBC. One of the things I've enjoyed is Canadian comedy shows. One of the staples is to interview Americans, ask them questions about Canada and air the stupidest responses.
For example, they might go to North Dakota and ask people there where Manitoba is (it's on N. Dakota's northern border). They might ask 100 people who get the answer right but it'll be the 5 who say that Manitoba is in Africa or northern Antarctica that will get broadcast. I've met more than a few Canadians who don't get the concept that New York is not just a city, but a state too. I hope they never visit Quebec.
But this is really cheap humor is easy and formulaic. It doesn't take an ounce of creativity to come up with. Yet these guys act like their comedic geniuses for making essentially the same joke over and over. Borat is like that. I mean does anyone, other than males under the age of 10, really think poopy humor is hilarious after the 100th joke about it?
The Monitor piece that points out that the real United States is far more nuanced than the cariacture presented in the cartoonish Borat. The two filmmakers who wrote the piece spoke of the crosscountry journey they took while making a documentary.
On our journey across the country, we were overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. We received countless invitations to stay in their homes. People were excited to share their stories with us, and they were eager to hear our tales of life cruising the nation's asphalt on a Segway scooter ... at 10 m.p.h.
They pointed out how America is more than a few racists, drunken frat boys.
The abundant kindheartedness we saw helped us to regain our love for America, which had been severely tainted by modern media. The entertainment they sell is conditioned to incite conflict, challenge, and sensational response. It celebrates perversity, ugliness, and fear. "Borat" fits this model perfectly. This trend can cause us to lose sight of what really is.
Listen, Europeans, Canadians and Australians are vastly superior to us pathetic, crude, unsophisticated, mean-spirited Americans who all genuflect to Deus Bush, who are all heartless money grubbers, who all reject evolution and who all think that Kofi Annan is a cappucino-flavored ice cream. We get it!
I hardly belong to the 'America is uniquely righteous and everyone else sucks!' crowd but it begs the question: is this really movie length material or populist overkill that panders to, rather than challenges, easy stereotypes?
Sorry everyone. I adore good satire. But bad satire really stinks.
Update: This column in The Guardian also takes issue with the glee over Borat. Like I said, humiliation as entertainment (especially humiliation of the decent and unwitting, some of which Borat's victims were) is a phenomenon I've long found troubling.
4 comments:
At last! someone dares say it.Very good post. I was worried when the whole movie theater was lauching and lauding the movie as i didn't find it so funny.
I agree with what you wrote and believe that it was a bad satire. I didn't find Borat that amusing and didn;t recognize the America he was describing.
Bri, I have to disagree.
As an American who spent many of my formative years in Canada, I have to assure you that "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" never had to ask 100 Americans anything to get 5 outrageously stupid answers. I would say that maybe they had to ask 10 Americans to get the desired 5. Conversely, I think if the show was an American one, they would have had to ask 20 or 30 Canadians to achieve the desired result. You would find that the average Canadian knows far more about the states than we geo-centric Americans do. Like many third world countries, Canadians know what forces move their economy and teach about U.S. imperialism in high school. I guess I'm just saying that the trivia stats would likely fall heavily in favor of the Canadians.
Sascha Baron Cohen is not Monty Python. Neither is he South Park or the Simpsons. We agree on this. However, very simply put, "Borat", as both a character and a movie, is simply a reasonably unadultered (though certainly manipulated) look at the "Ugly American". Cohen is reassuring us that many of most outrageous creatures we see in the Simpsons and South Park actually have very real human counterparts right here in our very own society. They are based on human beings who NOT ONLY EXIST but who are quite often THOSE IN CHARGE.
Thats the point of his "brick in the face", as you call it. If you watch the idiots in the audience at the western hoedown who happily joined in to help Borat sing his little ditty, "Kill the Jews", you saw something very important and revealing. Borat did not have to go to 100 bars to catch the audience that would join in with him celebrating the Holocaust and praying for a similar occurence. Certainly, and admittedly, he might have had to go to 2 or 3 bars .... The important thing is that he did get the footage! There really was a bar in the U.S. where the audience thought it fine to loudly calp and sing along to a song that advcoated extermination of other human beings! The ignorant and anti-semitic crowd jumped right in. There are Nazis among us and far more of them then we might ever imagine.
Thats the major accomplishment of Borat that I think you are missing. He is showing us this basic truth of our society on camera. This makes it extremely difficult to go on pretending (after viewing it) that, as a society, we are anything but indian-slaughtering, slave-holding, border fence building, racist, anti-semitic, imperialist thugs. While Borat does not show you or me or many others to be so, it shows us that there REALLY ARE those amongst us who are truly terrible human beings fully capable of saluting "Der Fuhrer" and really truly hating those that they've never met.
Thats a scary truth but its extremely important that we face it, don't you agree?
Interesting discussion. I thought a low point in the film was the dinner scene with the plantationers, in which they remained gracious and patient in spite of one man being called a retard and a woman’s looks insulted. So Cohen chose to escalate, then even when he delivered a bag of his feces to the dinner table there was not only no outburst, but the hostess politely took him to the bathroom for a lesson in how to use the facilities. This woman appeared something like a saint; surely if there was ever a time to admit defeat and move on, that was it. But of course Cohen didn’t. To me, civility is something important and the shortage of it in America something worth criticizing. So while he exposed this in the (very funny) earlier scene in the NYC subway, in the dinner scene he ended up looking like the creep.
But what impresses me about Borat – or Cohen, I should say – is that he has succeeded in making a movie sharply critical of America, and Americans are eating it up. It’s not just critics but huge numbers of people in general who like this movie. They get the joke – that Cohen is setting them up with this cartoon of a backward foreigner and his backward, prejudiced homeland, then having him show us what is backward and narrow-minded in our own culture. They get that he wants us to look at ourselves first before casting stones at others, including those from places we don’t understand. The film is full of very lowbrow gags and soft targets, to be sure, but a subtler or sterner approach would never have had the wide appeal and affect that Cohen has achieved here. He’s recognized that the wisest whisper will go unrecognized in America, but a scream (with pants dropped, for good measure) will resonate. Such is the level of our discourse. And in fact I would say he has, if inadvertently, reminded us of one of the really fine things about Americans – our ability to laugh at ourselves. I live in Japan, a place where people are individually polite and self-deprecating almost beyond comprehension to Americans - top marks for civility - but where virtually any negative comment from a foreigner is taken, with little amusement or introspection, as an insult to the whole nation. I try to imagine, say, a Chinese making such a film in Japan and then trying even to get it distributed here (take Lost in Translation, which certainly has its problems and made me cringe with embarrassment at times but which is nonetheless far gentler than Borat; LIT had very limited distribution and was not well received).
And I take issue with the Monitor’s assessment that the film, “celebrates perversity, ugliness, and fear.” Of course it does not “celebrate” these things. It takes no joy in them; it is satire, using humor to point them out specifically as condemnable. Whether we see the satire as bad or good is largely a matter of personal taste, but to attack its motives because we don’t care for the humor seems unfair. If we take it as saying all Americans are idiots or that Europeans are “superior” to us, I think that response says more about us than about the film.
So, I come down somewhere in between on Borat, but more on the positive side. It uses stupidity in a rather smart way, I think.
[P.S. I saw Borat during a trip to the US. It has not come to Japan; we'll see what people make of it if it ever does.]
this guy is a dummy
Canadian humor is nothing like borat ...he is a mean spirited dick!
watch SCTV! Our humor is subtle and has English and french aspects
English:Timing and undestatment (punch line is delivered like a hand-grenade with a 5 second fuse so u think about it then get it)
French:crazy Fuckin' hair and super neon white teeth over the top yet self deprecating
so thanks for the kick in the nuts borat comment but your wrong NO TIM HOTONS FOR YOU :(
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