You might be interested in knowing that today, the country Kazakhstan is celebrating 17 years of sovereignty.
I wouldn’t even mention this–considering we sit here in Tucson thousands of miles away from this country that stretches over Eurasia—-except for one thing: Many of you scurried to the theater as I did last year to watch the Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
This movie was exciting for me, because it was banned in the country I grew up in, Saudi Arabia, as well as all of the other Arab nations (except Lebanon, because Lebanon is awesome). I couldn’t wait to watch the mockumentary in which actor/comedian Sacha Baron Cohen (sorry, I mean Borat Sagdiyev) traveled around the United States making fun of fraternity brothers, governors of the South, cowboys at the rodeo, an Evangelical church full of people speaking in tongue and some surfer dudes who he had screaming while they jumped off of a bus repeatedly. (That scene was phenomenal!)
Don’t think that I am hating on America (though it is healthy to laugh at what we have come to represent). Hell, the United States gives me an education, doesn’t make me cover my face (and the rest of my body) and offers me a great opportunities as a female. In the country I grew up in, Cohen could have have been beheaded.
However, it’s quite a tragedy the only thing we know about Kazakhstan is that this funny-looking guy named Borat is from there.
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2007.
I was pretty psyched to see “Borat” too, but it didn’t live up to the hype, and I found it much less funny than I had been led to expect. (Some reviews made it sound like the funniest movie ever made.) Of the few scenes that made me laugh, I laughed the loudest during the nude-wrestling scene, mostly because it was so outrageous and disgusting. The last time I recall that particular laugh-response being triggered in me was during “Something About Mary,” both when they showed the main character’s zippered scrotum and when they showed the semen on his earlobe and in Cameron Diaz’s hair. It wasn’t so much witty as audacious.
After thinking about it for a while, I also decided that I was morally disturbed by “Borat.” Some people heralded it as a look at the bigoted underbelly of America, but I found the filmmakers as unethical as anybody whose racism they exposed. And much of the time they didn’t even accomplish that; they just offended people to see their reactions. In fact, many of the Americans were laudably tolerant and good-natured in the wake of Borat’s provcations.
In general I do not find duping people and then never letting them in on the joke to be funny. They made people sign releases for some other movie, and even when Borat turned out to be this boorish, scene-making fool, the production assisants and other filmmakers pretended they were equally taken aback. Only when the movie was released did people discover that they’d been made into rubes. If Borat taught me anything about bigotry, it’s that yes, I am capable of sympathizing with stupid racist Southern frat boys.
It also occurred to me that Borat himself is a racist representation, much like Mickey Rooney’s Chinaman in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Though not explicitly Muslim, the man is obviously intended to be Slavic or Eastern European (in spite of his Kazakhstan origin, which is ethnically Asian). As it turns out Sascha Cohen first intended Borat to be Armenian, and he shoots several scenes in Romania. I think it’s hard to deny that Borat is a vague caricature of an uneducated Muslim, and the whole scene of “the Running of the Jews” further enforces that interpretation. That’s why I agree with people who criticize Borat as the Muslim equivalent of blackface.
That’s not to say it’s an evil, horrible movie or anything — just not as great as some (like the New York Times’ Manhola Dargis) have made it out to be. It’s watchable on many levels, it just inspires a lot of ambivalence (the link goes to Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review).
Out of curiosity, do you get excited by other movies that are banned in Saudi Arabia, such as “Bruce Almighty” (banned in Egypt)?
I forgot to mention I thought it was particularly cruel when Borat was having dinner with a bunch of genteel Southern people and he made a comment specifically implying that one of the men’s wives was ugly.