You can see this segment of the film here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IUW_cm2z14
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> 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.
But in making many un-PC statements and observations he also acts out a certain fantasy of what some are calling the "post-PC" era--such as making fun of a group of feminists in NY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G4InQ_0oZQ
He is therefore able to make fun of feminists at the same time that he is playing on a stereotype of the Kazakh journalist who is secretly admired for his "barbaric" dismissal of these cultural norms.
I also think that the larger problem of the film is that Cohen refuses to do an interview out of character, which means that there is never a meta-critical moment of discussion about what Cohen thinks he's doing.
This means that, in addition to having to accept Borat as an accurate representative of "his culture" in the frame of the film, other journalists engage him as a journalist who is presenting them with an objective perspective on Kazakhstan. Someone already mentioned his appearance on the Daily Show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46lonCCYjwU
Here is a compilation of his interviews, which are, it seems, basically scripted endeavors with little variation in the type of Kazakh brute he represents:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPlbPR-YnkY
Here's one from CNN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TanBDQnGLk8
[note how marginal the statement of the Kazakh ambassador's statements of reproach are, how they are basically just innoculation for the overall thrust of the piece which is that he's just funny and no one should say anything more about it (which, it seems, is sort of Dennis' position, though perhaps I'm being unfair here). The interview, done by a female journalist, ends with her offering herself to him as a sex object. Very funny--and so unique and innovative. Except that it's basically the same thing he does with the US CNN interview,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke_yEDZCZLU
though it is Cohen that asks the female journalist if she is for sale, despite her rather courageous attempts to make the interview a respectable interaction, even if it is a charade.]
Even if everyone knows that this isn't a true representation, it is hardly a useful cultural commentary on any level except when, as Dennis puts it, PC professors start talking about humor and what it might mean.
I'm hoping Zizek writes something on this (not that he's a PC prof in the way Dennis means it) as he would be uniquely qualified in a variety of ways.
I think Cohen is far from a comic genius in this act. I can see shades of this character in the alter ego of Foer in his novel "Everything is Illuminated." There comically broken English, residual antisemitism, misogyny and general technological, social and cultural backwardness are used to interpret America from afar. Here the only real difference is that this character is transplanted to the US mainland, using the techniques of reality TV which are meant to reveal and poke fun at the kinds of "hidden" truths about US society that we see daily on Jerry Springer and the Simple Life, with a sprinkling of Jackass.
My students love Borat even as they find him unsettling. I am suspicious of the critical implications anything that is able to be so universally accepted as subversively funny. If one wants to say that it is funny, that is one thing; but to say that it is also producing some sort of avant-garde seems to be pushing it. I can see the space he opens up for conversation, but once this kind of parody becomes popular, it is pretty likely that its most uncritical, procrustean elements will become the contents of future representations.
I've already heard from several people who watched Cohen on the HBO special compared with the mass market film that much of the critical edge to the former has already been dulled in the latter. Perhaps this is a bit overzealous as a slippery-slope rhetorical maneuver, but I guess I'm trying to consider the anxious response from critics, which is hardly outside of this circuit of production. No doubt many cultural studies scholars have been filling up the archives with material for future scholarship on what Borat means as a cultural production and a few years from now the volume of discussion on this list will be mirrored in conference panels and journal articles long after most people have forgotten about the film. As a much better cultural satirist said, "So it goes."
s