[lbo-talk] Borat

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sat Nov 11 10:18:47 PST 2006


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

A mass cultural success, like any dominant ideology, tends to be contradictory, and it is by virtue of that very contradiction that it can appeal to both liberals and conservatives at the same time.

In this case, Borat, it seems to me, ingeniously gives both liberals and conservatives what they want: liberals get their idea of Middle America; and conservatives get their idea of a foreigner from a stan.

Stans in Central Asia being the West Virginia of the World in both liberal and conservative American imaginations, liberals can groove to Khazakhface in a way they never can to Blackface, too.

If neither of the above appeals to you, there is still the fact that Sasha Baron Cohen, a left Zionist masquerading as an anti-Semitic Khazakh who functions as the alter ego of anti-Semitic Middle America (an effect in part -- in large part? -- produced by editing that makes even those who are playing along with Cohen's joke seem as if they were naive anti-Semites: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20061106/021897.html>), speaks Hebrew and passes it off as the Khazakh language, a delicious bait for sophisticated cultural observers, who get a chance to meditate on mutual dependence of Zionism and anti-Semitism, repressed love in ambivalent identification in minstrelsy, etc. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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