[lbo-talk] Borat

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Sat Nov 11 09:49:25 PST 2006


I guess it's what one reads into the movie - whether it is primarily a reactionary attack on Kazakhs and other "barbaric" non-Westerners or a spoof on reactionary culture in general, with the focus on the rural US. It's clear from many eftists on this and other lists that they think it is the former. So one of the weaknesses of the film at least is the ambiguity of who is being targeted, regardless of the intent.

Another weakness is the film's relentlessly misanthropic portrait of small town America. It's denizens are all uniformly brutish, homophobic, racist, sexist, etc. Significantly, one of the out-takes I saw on YouTube featured a kindly worker in a humane shelter who indignantly refused on "Christian" grounds to sell Borat a dog after he explained to her in his sweetly innocent way he was looking for one who could "hunt Jews" or be suitable for eating. It was a funnier scene than the scatalogical ones which made it into the movie, and I have to think it only ended up on the cutting room floor because her response contradicted the stereotype of the right-wing rural Southerner who is the most frequent object of Cohen's satire.

In fact, it's important to note there weren't any "Kazakhs". They were all caricatures of same, played by actors. The movie was about Americans - really existing Americans of a certain kind, and I think that is who we were being warned about in a particularly ham-handed way. ======================================= Yoshie wrote:


> On 11/7/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:


>> ...Borat is another riff, fair or not, on "the
>> idiocy of rural life" - and more so in the southern US, where the movie
>> is
>> mostly set, than in the the fictionalized "Kazakhstan", which is glimpsed
>> only briefly at the beginning, and is so over-the-top that it lacks
>> satirical punch. The mirror of America which "Kazakhstan" in the form of
>> Borat represents soon becomes apparent to an urban Western audience which
>> I
>> think explains a good deal of the movie's popularity in the Age of Bush.
>> In
>> general, apart from mostly being wildly funny the identification of
>> homophobia, sexism, anti-semitism, racism, and chauvinism with
>> backwardness
>> and ignorance has a progressive thrust. That said, the Borat sketches in
>> the
>> film are not as clever as those he has done on the Ali G show. You can
>> probably catch these on YouTube.
>
> I have yet to see Borat the Film, but I saw Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat
> (appearing in character) on Jay Leno's show. On its own, the Borat
> performance is essentially a minstrel show, except the character is
> Kazakhface, rather than Blackface.
>
> A couple of things that I have learned about Cohen:
>
> He was a member of Habonim Dror, a left Zionist youth movement (at
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habonim_Dror>);
>
[...]



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