It's been said to be a genius of a film, where Sacha Baron Cohen, apparently a well-known British comedian, though I hadn't heard of him before this, goes around the United States, pretending to be a visitor, Borat Sagdiyev, from a hick hillbilly village (see yellow box) in Central Asia.

The general idea was for Cohen to meet people, do outrageous things in front of them and record how they react, all this laid onto a narrative arc of Borat falling in love with Pamela Anderson and wanting to track her down.

Film critic Tay Yek Keak of the Straits Times said, "Mockery has not reached heights in such a manner as the escapades of this coarse shock jock, Borat Sagdiyev.... In high hilarity, mean trickery, great offence and telling exposes, he ingratiates, then provokes and then lets his well-meaning but unsuspecting American victims hang themselves with their apple-pie graciousness, hospitable hypocrisies and ingrained prejudices." [2] 

Cohen may be capable of that, but in the film, I counted only 4 instances where he (kind-of) succeeded. Considering that he must have spent months doing a huge number of interviews, if all he could obtain were 4 interviews wherein "American victims hang themselves", then far from saying the film exposes the dark side of American attitudes, it should be said that Americans come off quite well in it.

There are, after all, 300 million people in America. You look hard enough, you will find ignoramuses and bigots. If ignorance and bigotry is really so common, surely, one would have been able to capture more than 4 such interviews in months of filming?

The 4 examples (and even these can be disputed, as I will note below) were:

Borat in a gun shop. He asks the owner what kind of gun he recommends for killing a Jew. The shop-owner ignores the "killing a Jew" remark and gives him a reply. You could argue that any shopkeeper would do the same -- try to be civil and ignore a customer's provocation. You would also point out that in the end, the guy refused to sell Borat a gun, because he was a foreigner and the law didn't allow that.

Cohen tried to make this incident seem like anti-semitism on the part of the shopkeeper, but it isn't so clearcut.

Borat speaking to the rodeo organiser prior to his appearance at the rodeo. The organiser (or whatever he was) advises Borat to shave off his moustache because people may think he is Muslim. He makes the point that the crowd at the rodeo may not take kindly to a Muslim singing the US national anthem (I think that was what he said; I couldn't catch the dialogue clearly). The film hoped to make the point that Americans were prejudiced against Muslims and in particular, that this organiser was anti-Muslim.

Once again, I thought this interpretation was debatable. It is a fact that millions of Americans do harbour prejudices against Muslims, but no more than most non-Muslim societies. It is also a fact that keeping a moustache is a common emblem of masculinity in Muslim societies. Perhaps in advising Borat to shave his off, the rodeo organiser was trying to be helpful rather than displaying unfounded prejudice on his own part [3].

Related to this was the scene where Borat sang the US national anthem with new words. He prefaced it by praising America's "War of terror". At first the crowd cheered his arrival at the stadium and continued to applaud his first few words including the "War of terror", but you'd notice that very soon after, certainly by the time Borat got to saying the US should destroy Iraq to the point where "not even a single lizard can survive in the desert", they stopped cheering. You could say that the crowd was just being effusively welcoming at the beginning, failing to notice the first few (deliberate) slips of the tongue. However, as soon as they saw Borat go overboard in his rhetoric, they knew better than to agree with him. How does this reflect badly on Americans?

Frat boys. In this scene with Borat drinking with 3 students from South Carolina University, he catches them speaking approvingly of slavery. He also gets them to make misogynistic remarks. Indeed there is this subculture of White boys behaving badly, but what Borat has shown up under the influence of alcohol is nothing compared to what many others have documented. [4]

The evangelical church. Personally, I thought this was the most revealing bit of the film with grown men speaking in tongues, ululating and hopping around like rabbits. When Borat inserted himself as the centre of attention, the congregation went into a programmed mode uttering the name of "Jesus" as balm for everything.

I have noticed however that in the American blogosphere, many took exception to Cohen's use of this segment, complaining about him slighting their faith.

 
I gather that the film was meant as a spoof and thus a critique of various aspects of American culture, especially anti-semitism. But honestly, there was hardly anything funny, and virtually all the anti-semitism came out of Cohen's own antics rather than from his interviewees. Perhaps the spoofs are meaningful in the US, being exaggerated variations on the way ordinary people refer to Jews, but to a Singapore audience, they won't work, for we have little context in which to place these hyperboles.

You'd have to be blinkered not to see that most people in the film were polite, gracious, and often showed great forbearance of Borat's excesses. You may argue that these are excesses only in terms of American norms, and that the reactions captured on film only go to show how most Americans have little understanding of cultural relativity.

Frankly, I think it is stretching things too far to try to make such a point. Most people in any society take their expectations of social graces for granted; naturally they react with either bewilderment or aggravation when others, even foreigners, breach them. The film is only funny if one tries to hold Americans to impossibly high standards of cultural open-mindedness, in order to remark, "Oh what a narrow-minded lot they are!" But is this fair?

Significant parts of the film were utterly pointless. The whole premise about being infatuated with Pamela Anderson was infantile, the bits with the chicken, the bear and the nude fight, superfluous. They only showed how low the film had to sag to fill its 90 minutes. 

© Yawning Bread