LC#1: Watching Borat in 2020
A couple fun links, but mostly Borat in 2020.
Well hello, this is the first letdown comedy newsletter and I guess a re-introduction is in order. My name is Nicola Bozzi and I’ve written about comedy in the past. If you’ve read my stuff before, great. Otherwise, even better: it means somebody told you it was worth subscribing to this. Let’s both see how it goes.
Have you seen The Social Dilemma? I have, I’ve even written about it. But don’t read my review, watch this instead.
Also, you might have noticed we live in a pandemic right now. It’s pretty shit, but it doesn’t need to (I mean, it will be, but still). Anyway, Kenyan Instagram comedian Elsa Majimbo makes it better by joyously laughing in the face of covid-related stress and social expectations, all while shamelessly munching on potato chips.
This last thing may be a little too UK/London-specific, but these days we need all the wholesomeness we can get. The latest Jimothy Lacoste video might be just what you need to stay healthy and focused as you make 10s and 20s (which is all you get in this shit pandemic economy).
If you’re alive and breathing (good job, these days) you might have heard there is a new Borat movie out. I wanted to kick off this newsletter by writing about something else, but once I got to see it I just had to open with this instead. By the time you’re reading you might have seen the movie already, otherwise beware because there will be some spoilering. Sorry.
So. Borat is a character created by comedian and actor Sacha Baron Cohen, who introduced it to British audiences as part of Da Ali G Show. This now iconic format revolved around interviews with real, unsuspecting people (famous or not) who were systematically embarrassed by one of Cohen’s three personas: the white-wannabe-black Ali G, the flamboyantly gay Brüno Gehard, and a grotesquely “foreign” Kazakh journalist - Borat Sagdiyev himself. Each in their own way, those characters were designed to trigger a range of responses from their interviewees, revealing aspects of their personality or their attitude towards uncomfortable topics (racism, homophobia, sexism, etc). In other words, while Cohen’s personas play heavily (and often easily) into stereotypes and exaggeration, the target’s reaction and Cohen’s improvised response are getting the real laughs. While a common denominator of the three avatars is their innocence (which forces their interlocutors to really dig deep and explain their own reasons, as if facing a child) each character is usually combined with specific targets: a gay re-educator will be presented with Brüno’s fabulousness, a policeman with Ali G’s drug talk, and a bon ton expert with Borat’s barbaric customs. The latter, I shall explain, have been by far the most discussed and controversial about Cohen’s work.
When the first Borat movie came out (2006), it was following the first, pretty straightforward spin-off from Da Ali G Show: Ali G Indahouse. Abandoning the interview format, the movie is a scripted, plot-driven comedy in which the West Staines ignoramus winds up becoming a member of parliament, wreaking havoc among the stuck-up political class. Hilarity ensues, and the movie is fine. Borat, however, was a much more ambitious feat. There is a story arc, but it’s much looser: Borat and his funny-looking producer Azamat go to the US to shoot a documentary about American society and culture; he finds out Pamela Anderson exists, decides to make her his wife, meets lots of people during his quest. Beyond this premise, most scenes in the movie are based on improvised interactions that are largely dependent on Cohen’s engagement with the people he meets - among them: a hospitable Jewish family, a couple of frat boys, a Pentecostal congregation, a soon-enraged crowd of Southern patriots at a rodeo. The latter scene in particular demonstrates how ambitious the feature is compared to the TV sketches: after Borat butchers the national anthem on the rodeo stage and incites violence against Iraq, the crowd breaks into a riot and he (and the crew) need to rush out. Apparently, in shooting the situation got so out of hand that Todd Phillips (whose early films were pretty badass documentaries about topics like punk legend GG Allin, or the disgusting subculture of frat hazing rituals) decided to abandon the project to avoid death threats. He is still credited for contributing to the story, but the directing baton was later picked up by Larry Charles - a Seinfeld veteran with a penchant for daring humor coming from unexpected places. After Borat (and the following spin-off, Brüno), Charles went on to other ambitious endeavors in the same vein (Religulous, with Bill Maher) and more recently Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy (which does not have the same gonzo attitude, but pushes the interest for comedy in borderline contexts to more extreme lengths).
Personally, I see the first Borat film as the precursor of a comedic avant-garde of sorts, which definitely benefited from the convergence of the two talents mentioned above. At the time, its guerrilla/gonzo attitude served the purpose of exposing the bigotry of Bush’s America, and as a consequence Borat the character has been compared to a modern day Candide, a naïve stranger exposing society’s contradictions by either forcing people to explain it in plain, dumbed-down terms, or pushing them to emphasize their most compromising beliefs. If we put it in formal, universal terms, Borat was then (*cheap reference alert*) “great success”. When you zoom in on its gonzo attitude and learn how the movie was actually produced, however, you quickly realize why not everybody enjoyed it.
The opening scene of Borat introduces the main character in his hometown of Kuzcek, Kazakhstan. As he strolls along, Borat himself shows the crew around a derelict village, pointing to a range of characters (e.g. the town’s rapist, a very informal abortionist and his sister, the country’s no.4 prostitute); he also illustrates some of the local customs, like the Running of the Jew - a joyous Pamplona-style, anti-semitic celebration. The sequence sets the stage for Borat’s later exploration of the US, which covers almost the whole movie: Cohen’s (fake) anti-semitism will be the way he gets the casual American anti-semites to slip up, his brutal sexism the key to tap into the language of frat boys. Not unlike more recent movies where an actor impersonates a newborn Hitler or Mussolini to test people’s response to their ideologies (often with concerning results), Borat acts as a mirror to show us the worst in our society. Still, these first five minutes also encapsulate the most problematic politics of the movie.
First of all, Kazakhstan is a real place, with real people living in it. Not surprisingly, the movie sparked outrage for its depiction of Kazakhs as rapists and anti-semites, and apparently at one point screenings of the film were strongly discouraged in the country. Beyond the backlash, authorities also had to admit Borat brought in some tourists as well, which at least contributed to the economy (even more so in the case of the Czech kids who showed up wearing the character’s iconic mankini and getting fined, with Cohen even offering to pay up on their behalf). Money aside, some people like it when their country is finally on the map of ridicule: the only Kazakh I know owns a copy of the Borat book, and if you watch any Russell Peters show you’ll notice people from lesser known countries get the giddiest when the comedian nails their accents or references some obscure stereotype associated with them in their region. When it comes to Borat and his relationship with Kazakhstan the nation, then, we can grant Cohen the benefit of a poetic license: his Kazakhstan is the allegory for the ignored Other, a projection of all the stereotypes and ignorance of a self-reassuring West. After all, Borat himself is only the last iteration of a character that Cohen has been experimenting with since before Ali G, and whose previous incarnations were named Alexi Krickler (from Moldova) and Kristo Shqiptari (from Albania). What about the actual people in the movie, though?
The village in the opening sequence of Borat is Glod, a small Roma village in Romania, and the people depicted are its real inhabitants. Cohen and his crew told them they were making a movie (it is not entirely clear if they knew it was a documentary or not) and paid them pretty much the standard salary for an extra in the country (not a lot). As shown in a touching documentary titled When Borat Came to Town, those folks were predictably not happy with the way the comedian eventually portrayed their homes and likeness for the benefit of a global audience. Egged on by foreign lawyers (who later threw in the sponge and disappeared), a local family even tried to sue the production company to no avail, which brought even more humiliation and divisions within the village itself. After watching the documentary it’s not easy to see Borat’s opening sequence with the same eyes, especially if we consider it could have easily been done using professional (and better paid) actors.
Which brings us to the core issue with Borat. The most famous, unwritten rule of satire is that the comic is expected to “punch up”, rather than down. In other words, satire is supposed to target the powerful and take them down a notch or two, rather than humiliate those who are too weak to defend themselves. While this is great and noble in theory, a lot of established and critically acclaimed comedy is still built on indulging stereotypes and generally making references that are specific enough to resonate, yet also exaggerated enough to be recognized as poetic devices. For example, in the early 60s Lenny Bruce criticized the segregated American establishment by using the N-word repeatedly, so that it would lose its meaning. Bruce was not a racist and he meant well by it (among those publicly supporting him in the face of a blasphemy charge was James Baldwin), but his rhetorical technique would be much harder to justify within a media environment that is no longer as pervasively dominated by white voices. In short, what I’m saying is the formal brilliance of comedy is inextricable from its time and audience(s): it’s easier to claim your language is universal (the language of comedy, in this case) when not everyone is allowed to speak; it is a bit harder to avoid speaking over someone else if they are allowed to have their say. By not letting the people of Glod in on the joke, Cohen lost the opportunity to make Borat their movie, too. If that is not at odds with the gonzo/guerrilla attitude of its creators, it is still of some significance in terms of the movie’s legacy.
So here we are, finally: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Shot across the breaking of the pandemic between the US and Romania (not Glod, evidently), the second chapter of the Sagdiyev saga is immediately aware of its predecessor. This time, the premise for Borat crossing the ocean is reinstating his country’s dishonored reputation (which he destroyed himself) by bringing a monkey to Donald Trump. As events unfold, the monkey is replaced by his teenage daughter Tutar, while the receiver is more realistically scaled-down from Trump to Mike Pence. Awkward encounters dot the way, as is to be expected, and a disguised Cohen (either as Borat or as Borat-as-someone-else) entertains himself with anti-abortionist doctors, plastic surgeons, and Covid-deniers. The plot seems to do most of the heavy lifting, while the stunts feel less spontaneous and the whole idea of “mockumentary” fades way in the background compared to the previous film. Trump’s America is still the butt of the joke, but Borat’s fictional characterization of Kazakhstan and its monstrous customs is no longer limited to the first five minutes and takes a more central role than before.
The biggest innovation of Subsequent Moviefilm is of course the presence of Tutar. Played by the 24-year old Maria Bakalova, who is Bulgarian, the character brings renovated freshness to Cohen’s interaction with the unwitting (or semi-unwitting) extras, centering the focus of the movie’s comedic triggers on sexism-related issues (plastic surgery, female pleasure, sexual assault). The movie’s most impactful stunt - an interview gone wrong with Rudy Giuliani that you’ve likely heard of, or seen memes about - is entirely driven by Bakalova. When talking about the scene in at least one interview, Cohen (significantly speaking as himself and no longer stuck in character) refers to her as the lead, and himself as a producer. Cohen is clearly still the lead, but Tutar’s story arc is useful to balance the plot’s politics away from Borat’s more expected antics and nudges. As Cohen himself has noticed, in fact, the bigotry that the first Borat film tried to uncover is now much more overt: the Trump presidency has made people less scared of being sexist or racist in public, and this definitely takes some of the edge off of the make-believe Kazakh.
The fact that Borat is now effectively famous in the US doesn’t help, but I would suggest the character may have also come to represent something different from Cohen’s assumed intent. If you watched the aforementioned Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy like I did, you were probably not too surprised when the director found out one of the alt-right comedians he interviewed was in fact quite a fan of Borat. The second movie’s most high-profile victim himself, Giuliani, has also reportedly enjoyed the first episode and mastered the “Kazakh” accent, despite having called the police on its creator in occasion of the interview shenanigan. In other words, Borat’s cartoonishly sexist, racist, anti-semitic character may have come to be more than a mirror, but a sort of simulacrum floating unpredictably and engendering phenomena of its own. If the mankini-wearing Czech emulators mentioned above are just a trivial example of the unexpected ripples that mediated depictions can have these days, reports of the new Borat’s marketing team trolling Joe Biden are a reminder that comedy and actual politics may not be as far apart as they used to, especially on social media. I am not suggesting Borat will become another Pepe the Frog, but in the age of fake news we’ve learned appropriating cultural items and repurposing them is no longer just a comedic device, but a well tested tool for propaganda. There is no telling if Borat hurts Trump’s image more than it does the Kazakhs’ or the Romanians’, especially because nobody is waiting for a comedy character to teach them geography or politics, but in this postmodern, hyper-mediated scenario, the well-meaning poetic devices of a comic (even one who is actively protesting hate speech on social media) can easily become something else. It is at least relieving that actual Kazakhs have gotten ahead of the game this time, starting to leverage the movie’s momentum by launching the hashtag #whereboratlives to boost tourism (as well as the usual petitions to cancel the film).
Let’s wrap it up. Comparisons to the first Borat movie are inevitable, but with all its problems Subsequent Moviefilm is as good a Borat sequel as we were going to get. The issue is, as I discussed above, that the character may not be fit for 2020, or anymore. Cohen himself has wanted to retire it for a long time, and the actor has also demonstrated he still has the chops to create new personas. A case in point is Who Is America, which a couple years ago introduced a range of more topical figures, reinvigorating the comic’s signature gonzo interview format. Not all the characters are equally effective (reviews are mixed), but Israeli anti-terrorist expert Erran Morrad is definitely a gem. Disguised as Morrad, Cohen got Dick Cheney to sign a waterboarding kit, some NRA guy to support arming 3-year olds (as well as participate in a chilling educational video), and got a Republican state representative from Georgia to let all his racist self out (which led to his resignation). If only for this one character, the show proves Cohen still has something to say - and that he still loves punching up.