Borat

I saw Borat with Arnab and Jeff, so I know there’s stuff to say about the movie, based on our initial post-film discussion, and many I’ve had with students and friends since. I guess I’ve been waiting, hoping that others would say it. In a nutshell, the movie will make you laugh. It’s often very, very, very funny. And often a bit tamer and somewhat padded and not as exciting as we’d been hoping. . . but then again part of me is plain excited to see a mainstream(ish) comedy with such transgressive energy, with a sly sharp political edge, with a fat man and a skinny man wrestling nude. So complaining seems like whining (like my dessert was pie, and I’m crying for ice cream), and yet trumpeting seems mere repetition of arguments we’ve made before. I would be curious if someone hates it, then I could pull out my enthusiasm for a defense. I do recommend it, just can’t muster up enough sense of conflict to “make a case” for it.

34 thoughts on “Borat”

  1. (spoilers) Also saw Borat over the weekend – the first film I’ve seen in a theater in a long time. It was nearly sold out and I honestly don’t know if I have ever been in a theater of people laughing that loudly – so united in their enjoyment of what they were seeing. And I was with them almost every step of the way. The Entertainment Weekly hypothesis – Is this the funniest movie ever? – well, it’s hard to argue with it.

    Tamer than you thought? I suppose. Occasionally the bits seemed too calculated: I love that a bear is terrifying children who want ice cream, but the set up and punchline was so obviously not spontaneous, that it took me out of the world of the film briefly. (The ‘SC Frat boys fall into theis category as well. I recommend Bruns flunk them for that reason)

    But there was more than enough politically abhorrent stuff in it to absolutely delighte me: Particularly the Running of the Jew (with the Jew egg), and the discussion with the women’s lib group in NY.

    I also loved that bringing a bag of your own feces to a dinner table in the south is cheerfully tolerated, but bringing a black woman to the table for desert will get the local sherrif called out. I’m sure it wasn’t as cut-and-dried as that, though… (yeah right).

  2. Borat–I think my hopes were wildly high. And therefore my reading a bit unfair.

    Flushed Away–yeah, the kid enjoyed it. He was a tad dazed; I think it was pitched a little above his head, but he got caught up. But for those of us between 5 and 105, I think it plays very well.

  3. mike, i thought you’d said as we were walking out that you thought borat was really good? jeff liked it too–i was the one who was pretty disappointed. funny–i started liking it more in retrospect, you seem to have gone the other way. more about it later–i’ve been crazy busy since i got back to colorado.

  4. Yeah–upon reflection, my appreciation for the film (its objectives, etc.) was not quite on a par with my actual enjoyment. But the ‘drop’ was from A- to B+, a slight tempering of my enthusiasm. . . although much of that may have to do with the hype, and my own expectations.

    But I didn’t see the funniest film ever. A very funny film, and certainly the funniest this year. All this seems kind of nit-picky, though.

  6. I have not seen ‘Borat’ yet, but I guess I’m interested in the reactions of those of you who have to the same kinds of issues we talked about regarding ‘The Aristocrats’ and ‘Jesus is Magic.’ Not so much how funny is it, as how transgressive it is, and what it means to affect antisemitism as opposed to racism or incest. Does it get an easier ride because it is a foreigner using humor to critique some of the ugly underside of the United States whereas we tend to suspect that Sarah Silverman is complicit in the racism she affects to laugh at? Much has been made in the reviews of Baron Sasha Cohen’s Jewish identity, as a way of inoculating him of the the charge of antisemitism. Is that poor Sarah Silverman’s problem: that she isn’t herself black?

  7. I gave it a B+ but I still think there is nothing in this film as funny as the “Throw the Jew Down the Well” sequence on the “Ali G Show.” If I’m going to spend 90 minutes watching a television character expanded then I want more, more, more (like South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, which is far funnier than Borat). Even though Borat may deliver some mighty, mighty large laughs, it doesn’t come together as well as I might have hoped.

  8. Haven’t seen it yet but will. Just a note, though, I don’t teach at ‘SC. Don’t know where the confusion lies. But I do know Columbia lies north, about two hours away. Light years away from Charleston in other respects.

    Borat is a hit with the students here. And I must say I can’t wait to see it. But what keeps from going is not just lack of energy and time, but an unwillingness to squirm the way Borat (most of all) makes me squirm (Ali G and Bruno make me squirm as well, but less so than Borat).

    I think the big story here is the film’s surprising success, and whether or not this launches Cohen into superstardom. Hope it does. That is if he wants it. I’m happy either way.

  9. I see Silverman’s name above me. Some old Rolling Stone magazines have made their way into my house somehow, and I was reading through last year’s pointlessness. RS did a piece on Silverman, and in it she says she gets a little intimidated when African Americans are in her audience. She says she pulls her punches. She doesn’t tell African American jokes when they are in the audience “because then the jokes are racist.” Now that’s an interesting thing to say, isn’t it?

  11. (SPOILERS) saw borat last night and liked it a lot. his tv stuff, with its candid camera approach, is a bit funnier, i think, because there is no plot to move so the scenes can linger, uncut. but this is a really cool film that will make borat deservedly famous. i found the political work really excellent, and also remarkably politically correct. no one comes off as a jerk except the jerks. borat lets embarrassable people embarass themselves: the racist rodeo guy, the camper boys, the bigoted dinner table crowd, the crazy revivalists (the scene at the mega church is amazing: pure genius). the old fashioned feminists come out dignified, the jewish couple is totally sweet, all the black people are unscathed.

    i was left wondering who were the actors, and who was in on the jokes: pamela anderson? the black prostitute?

  12. I don’t think the revivalists come across as jerks; they truly want to save Borat’s soul. There’s something human and genuine and loving about the way Borat is enveloped in this community so my laughter was compromised by my prejudices. Did Cohen intend such a response, I wonder? What do you make of the story going around that Borat and his crew took the college guys out to a bar to get liquored up before going back to the frat house on wheels to “film” the scene. We, of course, want to believe that these boys pick Borat up and ideological chaos ensues, but this other story also sounds believable and makes me like the film a bit less. The way Borat flirts with the audience’s desire for “authentic” laughs is an interesting one. But our desire to pick the film apart to try and figure out which sequences are staged or constructed and which are captured on the fly is also interesting (me . . . I think the elderly Jewish couple is in on the joke as is Pamela A. and the black prostitute). Did anyone read Christopher Hitchens’ take on the film at Slate? It’s an interesting counter-reading.

  13. no, i don’t think the revivalists are jerks, either. they are clearly accepting of someone who is presented to them as a homeless and down n’ out person. that’s nice. at the same time, they also appear totally wacko. so they would be part of the embarrassable, not of the jerks. wackiness should be embarrassing, no?

  14. I read that Slate piece a couple of days ago, and was surprised that Hitchens would fall into this obvious trap of defending people made out to look like fools in a movie due to some combination of editing, unawareness and being fools to begin with. It’s just a movie, and it’s a really funny movie at that. I for one, am ready for the backlash against the backlash.

    His article is a clearer display of the “Hitchens is losing it” death-watch than any pro-Iraq ramblings he’s been giving of late.

  15. I’m not surprised by the Hitchens piece. Someone should really do a documentary on this guy. Since his fallout with The Nation 5 years ago, he’s been frighteningly difficult to take. Or maybe I wasn’t between the lines before then.

  16. The New Yorker had a sympathetic portrait of Hitchens in a recent issue. Frankly he was pretty obnoxious when he was on the left, but at least he was our attack dog. I first saw him when I was an undergrad and he was speaking at the Cambridge Union, beautifully decked out in a dinner jacket. A friend leaned over to me and said “now that is a Gucci socialist.”

    In his favor, though, is the fact that he has a book coming out next year with the title “God is not great.”

  17. For the interested, Sascha Baron Cohen gives a relatively revealing interview in the recent Rolling Stone; it’ll soothe a lot of anxiety about his intentions. So…. that makes him that little bit safer, I guess, but I still think he’s very challenging.

  18. back to Borat: it struck me that the documentary How’s Your News? does some intriguing, similar stuff–throwing a person whose difference discomforts the “regular folks” being filmed; what we end up with is a revealing portrait of how people respond to difference. A signal distinction is that the provocateurs here are a team of reporters from a camp for people with disabilities–the differences aren’t feigned, and the collision of the reporters with the bypassers (and the consequent strained politeness, the rudeness, the bigotry, as well as moments of genuine connection and delight) are … well, funny as well as revelatory. I’ve raved about it elsewhere, but–it’s damn good.

  21. what i really mean: is george saunders tongue-in-cheek, and impersonating someone else, or is he dead serious? cuz, if he’s dead serious, he’s some seriously pompous oaf and what he says seriously, deeply wrong. i’m pretty sure all the downtrodden people he lists are much less uncomfortable with borat’s humor than with the ideology he exposes/lampoons. duh.

  22. satire, gio. it is meant as a critique of the movie and the targets it chooses. i have to say he has a point about cohen’s political correctness within the incorrectness (rednecks are game, inner city youth he’s more careful around), but some of the other zingers are silly.

  23. Gio, first this is a “Shouts and Murmurs” column in The New Yorker so we know this is definately tounge-in-cheek (sometimes the column can be an acid bath of satire other times simply inpenetrable New York “humor”). Second, rush out and find a copy of George Saunders’ short stories In Persuasion Nation and read them up. I’d start with “My Flamboyant Grandson” and then move to “CommComm”–two terrific examples of Saunders’ genius. He is, without a doubt, a marvel.

  24. okay. i need to be clear: the fictional person who writes the letter is supposed to be a ruthless and idiotic fucker. is saunders suggesting that borat really is insensitive (those romanian villagers are not going to find the movie funny), or claiming that those who think it’s insensitive are idiots who don’t understand satire?

    or: does he like or does he hate borat?

    arnab’s answer seems to indicate that he is not tongue in cheek.

    i don’t have a problem with the targets he chooses, both in the conservative and the pushy directions. but i wonder, how far can comedy go? i, for one, am grateful for cohen’s restraint with, african americans and women. there are categories of people it is just plain racist to lampoon. it would have been wrong, for instance, to have portrayed jews the way he does, a few decades ago, or, possibly, had he not been jewish. if he had been black, he could have done things similar to those he does with jews, with black people. i have been thinking about how really restrained borat is. if you are lefty you are not shocked. you laugh. the only tension i felt was about the possibility of his going too far in the next scene. he didn’t.

    if saunders is making fun of the politically correct crowd who dislikes borat because the romanian villagers’ feeling should have been taken into account i’ll definitely buy his book.

  25. I think he is simply making visible what Cohen’s film might wish to remain invisible . . . but he does so in a funny way (he out Sacha’s Sacha . . . so to speak).

  26. I read it as a really cynical, mean-spirited (and unfunny) attack on Cohen, or perhaps (more so) on those gushing in the press about how Cohen hoists racists by their own petards. Saunders’s piece is getting a lot of praise–from the right (like David Frum from The National review). I question the The New Yorker’s decision to run this thing. Hey Saunders, sorry for laughing at the movie. I should have been thinking about all those hurt feelings.

    I understand Arnab’s point, the “political correctness” of Cohen’s choice of targets. But although I wouldn’t go so far as Gio by praising Cohen’s “restraint,” I would argue that there are other reasons besides political correctness for pulling punches with inner city kids, but pulling no punches with rednecks. Saunders seems to be saying Cohen isn’t playing fair: there are no offensive remarks thrown at gays or African Americans. Don’t they get enough of that already for Saunders’s liking?

    Cohen’s approach seems to me to be like the one Woody Allen’s character takes in Manhattan. There’s a scene with Gary Weis, who says that the best response to Nazi’s marching in the street is “a devasting satirical piece in the Od Ed page of the Times.” Isaac (Woody’s character) responds with: “no, baseball bats are much better than satire when dealing with men in shiny boots.” I think Borat is a baseball bat–which is the politically incorrect response.

  27. Hmm… I thought Saunders piece was funny, though not nearly as funny as Borat. But I really like Saunders’ writing in general. So if the right wants to use this as a “See? I told you so!” moment (as they did when Bill Cosby gave his speech to the NAACP about the failure of black families to live up to the opportunities presented by Brown V. Board of Education), well, let them. Who gives a shit what they think anyway? Their true motives are always so obvious (they don’t like gays, they don’t like blacks. Yawn), that I couldn’t care less about their attempts to enter the dialogue on sticky cultural topics.

    I’d much rather read a satirical critique like Saunders’ piece than the flat, humorless Christopher Hitchens article on Slate. Yes, Cohen does give a pass to poor blacks and gays in the film, and it’s worth it for Saunders to point that out in a rather pointed way. John’s also right to respond with “Don’t they get enough of that already for Saunders’s liking?” Saunders article doesn’t make me think Borat is any less funny at all, and it doesn’t make me fell bad for thinking it’s funny.

    I would only disagree with John that Borat is a baseball bat. Thirty years after Manhattan, Borat is merely the cultural equivalent of a devasting satirical piece in the Od Ed page of the Times.

    A baseball bat is still a baseball bat.

    And the men with the shiny boots, well, we just keep re-electing them.

  28. I prefer Jeff’s reading, but kind of agree with John’s. Kind of agree with John’s. Kind of agree with John’s.

    Saunders’ work/fiction is devastating and deadpan in its assault on corporate greed, the deterioration of compassion, the strange bleak empty-speak of various institutional discourses. He has this amazing story called (I forget the actual number but something like) “98339491,” which is written just like a lab report about the testing of an unamed chemical compound on monkeys, detailing their eventual deaths, recounting the unlikely survival of one (and the lab technicians’ confusion about how to deal with this one surviving). Its final punchline is that the amazing survivor is killed and autopsied to understand how the chemical didn’t affect him. I think he’s amazing. Saunders, not the monkey.

    That said, this new piece: it’s in keeping with Saunders’ attack on corporate-speak, and might very well be read as an attack on the reactions of Hollywood and most media to Borat/Cohen’s success–misunderstanding the ‘point’ and seeing any/all assaults as the same, reproducing (yet again) a victimization of those without voice, power, authority. Yet I fear that it reads a bit more like an earnest assault on Borat/Cohen, for its lack of compassion. I don’t think it reads as what John called a “cynical” attack–instead, I think Saunders is attacking the way a big (powerful?) media figure can control the representation and yet be read as subversive… and Saunders is (with compassion?) trying to imagine a position of victimization… or… well, it just seems like he doesn’t seem to like the way the joke is being read, and may not in fact like the joke.

    Which strikes me as very intriguing–Saunders’ own work seems to function by echoing, imitating the viciousness inherent in the kinds of discourse he assails. I’ve taught the monkey piece and had people get confused about the author’s position, to read it as an actual report or as a piece of bleak postmodern irony without any compassion. I.e., missing the joke, or not liking the way Saunders uses comedy.

  29. I think one can respond to Saunder’s essay/parody with a bit more elasticity than your reading John, though I do find your post (all three of them) worth considering and useful (even if you do brand me as a closet righty . . . or at least you appear to suggest that anyone who happens to laugh at Saunders be alligned with right-wing journalists). Maybe this satirical riff speaks directly to Jewish readers of the magazine (my colleague notes that members of her synagogue are reticent to see the film for a variety of reasons). Though I doubt that even as I write it. If anything, I would say this essay cements Cohen’s reputation as Hollywood’s latest enfant terrible; he is now on the A-list and that will make him a target for any and all.

  30. I haven’t seen Borat…I don’t see anything these days. But it seems to me to be a grain of truth in the idea that it’s easy to get laughs off groups somehow assumed to be in line with right wing ideology…one of the great failures of identity politics is the overlooking of class relations and the writing off of large groups of dispossessed people as little more than dumb rednecks. Sometimes the whole jokey attitude toward “the south” strikes me not as the expression of disdain for its purported racism, backwardness, etc., but as the bullying of class privilege, whether from an intellectual or an economic standpoint.

    honestly, from the reviews and descriptions I can’t figure out who Borat’s “targets” are–hitchens may have a point that it’s a bit of a leap to take stunned polite silence in the face of a train wreck as the same thing as wholehearted support of racist, anti-semitic,etc, sentiments. I also didn’t understand Saunders’ satire as somehow a call for ridicule to be heaped on blacks and gays–those who receive a “pass” in the film–but as the posing of the simple question of whether the victims of the comedy have much to do with the genuinely powerful who should be the target of subversive satire. I can’t say, because I don’t know. But I would put forward the question “Does Borat go after the powerful, or does he merely go after those who, though powerless themselves in many ways, are somehow assumed to be the props of reactionary ideologies?” Does his comedy, like Silverman’s which we discussed elsewhere, actually take himself for its subject, a critique of the persona doing the performing?

    I wish I could have been funnier.

  32. Got rid of the comments, but not the place-holders. Best I could do, John.

    Michael, I think politeness may in fact be more of Borat/Cohen’s target — in the rare interview as Cohen, he has talked about how politeness may be as vital a tool in the rise of anti-semitism (and other brutalities) as overt aggression; to see or hear the vicious comments, and then to calmly accept or act as if the comments hadn’t been made allows them to circulate, generate.

    But the “politics” isn’t foregrounded. Or, rather, I think the politics of his comic prank involve a disruption of the systems or frames of behavior–Borat walks into a room and begins pushing at the frames which legitimate (and/or cover up) polite, good citizenship.
    –for instance, the persona is very much part of the joke, very much something to be mocked; but what he’s after is not cheap jabs at the foreign guy, but how that guy’s “difference” so completely stymies American (or previously British) communication with him. People see the foreign and rather than engaging with it, they masquerade an acceptance–and this is an invitation for Borat/Cohen to see how far that masquerade will last. (See, for instance, this…)
    OR
    –for instance, his “foreignness” allows the masquerade prohibiting racism, sexism, anti-semitism to slip off, and reveals something we tell ourselves is not part of the culture…
    OR
    –we could keep going, I think. I think the audience of the films is part of the prank, too–at what point do we (in a specific audience) feel complicit, caught? When Jeff, Arnab, and I saw it, the scene with the frat boys in the RV produced a strange hush in the room–as if the reveal had suddenly made everyone a bit more uncomfortable. I’m not sure why, but could hazard guesses. I myself felt uncomfortable in the pentecostal sequence, because the people there were both people I *wanted* to dislike and yet people who did not in any way attack Borat — they were, in fact, quite generous with this interloper. I had no idea what to make of the scene; I still kind of don’t. (I think it makes me uncomfortably close to my own prejudices, the limits of my own notions of community, or….)

    Hitchens isn’t entirely wrong; neither, for that matter, is Saunders. But I think both miss the plasticity of this kind of comic performance, how its target is never a group or a kind of behavior–but the masks people put on. Those folks referenced in Saunders who “escape” the joke… well, I think there’s something interesting worth trying to unpack about the mask of ‘blackness’ (which Borat does try on, in a scene which falls kind of flat–that kind of racial masquerade is all too familiar, so less funny, I think) or about Borat’s inability to “see” homosexuality (even as he mouths the expected dismissals of homosexuality, he also engages in homosexual play–that fist up his ah-noose he notes to Alan Keyes, the play with the fellas in his motel room)…

    but now I’m feeling confused and need to have more coffee.

  33. we watched this on dvd last night–first time for sunhee, second time for me. i liked it more this time–perhaps this plays better on a small screen? not much more to say about it except that you should all rent the dvd even if you saw it in the theater–the deleted scenes are very good, in particular an excruciatingly long sequence in which borat explores a cheese display in a grocery store along with the most patient man on earth.

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