WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Borat

(Transcript)
Originally broadcast November 3, 2006

	Milos Stehlik

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It’s been a month since I saw the Sacha Baron Cohen film, Borat. With each passing day, I’ve disliked it more and more. No doubt this is because it’s hard to get away from. This guy and this movie are just EVERYWHERE. In what has to be one of the most blatant campaigns of self-promotion, Cohen has staged his impolitic, politically incorrect and just plain loud and lewd mini-dramas from London to Washington, D.C.

It almost makes you feel sorry for Kazakhstan, which is maligned in Borat, though entirely for the wrong reasons. This is not because this ally of our war on terror is a serious abuser of human rights, but because of the cheap shots Cohen takes at it. These, as have been well publicized, run the gamut from the racially offensive—“the running of the Jews”—to the stereotypical casting of a hefty woman as Borat’s Kazakh wife, to the depiction of his sister as the fourth best prostitute in Kazakhstan or the village mechanic as the abortionist.

What is particularly disturbing about Borat is that the humor—which often aims at the lowest common denominator—or, below the belt—is conceived by someone who is obviously intelligent. Baron Cohen is a first-rate comic talent and imaginative. But this makes the film’s cynicism doubly troubling.

The plot has been well-publicized. Baron Cohen takes off to America to report on the state of the nation to his fellow Kazakhs back home. Seeing Pamela Anderson in “Baywatch” in the New York hotel room sends him off, along with his producer Amazat, cross-country in order to meet her.

The hype generated around Borat is worthy of a presidential election. He is everywhere, “in character”, stirring up stuff about himself. The posters plastered around town suggest that this is “the funniest movie ever,” and someone slapped it with the cliché, “inspired lunacy.”

The film and its promotion are meant to offend nearly everyone, but especially Kazakhs, African-Americans, Jews and women. Considering that at least three of these have been the mainstay of cheap jokes for generation, Borat has not exactly found original targets. Of course the ideal core audience here are 19-year-old hormonal males—as John Kerry poorly said, the target demographic for military recruiters. Why not “sensitize” them a little to different cultures before they go off to the Middle East?

Baron Cohen aims for this Jackass crowd with a lot of scatological jokes and stuff that he couldn’t get away with even on cable TV—frontal male nudity, for instance. On his arrival in New York, Borat mistakes the elevator for his hotel room, and not much later the toilet bowl for a wash basin. Some of the situations were staged, others performed as kind of guerilla theatre. Baron Cohen, after getting the participants to sign release agreements, would start off with middle brow questions and then veer off into his schtick, most often to the bewilderment of the unsuspecting participants. This is how, during a staged interview with a group of feminists, he ends up with comments about how he believes a woman’s brain is the size of a squirrel, and later shows up at a rodeo chanting “May George Bush drink the blood of every woman and child in Iraq!”

The critics have, for the most part, been caught up in the Borat rapture, as if terrified that they will miss out on a very new, hip trend. Someone mind-bendingly praised the grainy cinematography as if this were some new realist form. Kristy Scott, in the Guardian, called the film “stupendously sexist, rabidly anti-Semitic and breathtakingly homophobic, but achingly funny.” If I read this right, the humor makes the sexism, anti-semitism and homophobia acceptable? Frankly, I think review comments like this are insulting. Insulting, too, was the comment that compares Borat to Lenny Bruce. Lenny Bruce may have used a lot of sexual innuendo, but his humor always had a larger social or political critique. A reporter for the BBC calls Borat “one of the year’s most popular films.” How does he know? It hasn’t opened yet. Offensiveness is welcomed as a newly-rediscovered virtue.

Baron Cohen attended university and did research in the United States on the Jewish participation in the Civil Rights movement. The fact that he is ostensibly a liberal or a civil libertarian, somehow make his prejudices and stereotypes acceptable. This would apparently excuse him for describing a southern Black American in the film as someone with “a chocolate face.”

The jokes in Borat are all at the expense of someone else—usually of someone innocent and unsuspecting of having the joke played on them. In many instances, it is someone of minority background. I don’t think, for example, that just because Baron Cohen is Jewish gives him the “droit-de-seigneur” to make offensive anti-semitic jokes.

We don’t need to make fun of the perceived stupidity of other nations or of people who seem to be unlike us. We are quite capable of being and doing stupid things ourselves.

However cleverly conceived, Borat is cheap trash.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s “Worldview.”

“Worldview” film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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