I am not sure whether I will go to see Borat, the blockbuster comedy starring British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. I am going to wait for the scuttlebutt. There is a difference between the earthy humor of Chaucer and Rabelais and the coarse vulgarity of some of the modern comedies that cater to younger moviegoers. My hunch is that Borat is in the latter category. If so, I'll stay home. But I will say this: every time I read a review of the film, I laugh out loud at the dialogue. They say the audiences are laughing so hard they cry.
What interests me just now is a topic that can be raised without seeing the movie. The reaction to Borat offers a revealing lesson in the selective indignation at the heart of modern political correctness. According to the press release, Cambridge-educated Cohen portrays "Borat Sagdiyev, Kazakhstan's sixth most famous man and a leading journalist from the state-run TV network, who travels from his home in Kazakhstan to the US to make a documentary. On his cross-country road-trip, Borat meets real people in real situations with hysterical consequences."
Central to the plot is Cohen's depiction of the Kazakhs from Borat's village of Glod as brutal and illiterate racists, rapists, anti-Semites, prostitutes, urine-drinkers and casual practitioners of incest. According to the Nov. 11th online edition of the British newspaper The Daily Mail, the villagers of Glod (actually a village in Romania where the film was shot) are suing Cohen for his portrayal of them. They allege the film-makers lied to them about the true nature of the project. They were led to believe the film would be a documentary about their hardship, rather than a comedy mocking their poverty and isolation. The villagers say they were paid just £3 each for this humiliation, for a film that took around £27million at the worldwide box office in its first week of release.
The villagers, according to the Mail, charge that "Baron Cohen stayed in a hotel in Sinaia, a nearby ski resort a world away from Glod's grinding poverty. He would come to the village every morning to do 'weird things', such as bringing animals inside the run-down homes, or have the village children filmed holding weapons."
The Mail also interviewed a woman who lives with her extended family in the house next to the one that served as Borat's home in the film. She said: "We now realize they only came here because we are poorer than anyone else in this village. They never told us what they were doing but took advantage of our misfortune and poverty. They made us look like savages. Why would anyone do that? All those things they said about us in the film are terribly humiliating. They said we drink horse urine and sleep with our own kin. You say it's comedy, but how can someone laugh at that?"
Good question. Why is it permissible for sophisticated Manhattanites and San Francisco champions of multiculturalism to roar with laughter over these gross misrepresentations of Eastern European peasants, when for decades now we have been scolded about the "dark undercurrents" that are revealed by the racial stereotypes and ethnic humor in American popular entertainment? Why is Borat good fun, when we have been told that the characters portrayed by Stepin Fetchit and on Amos ‘n' Andy are cruel and shameful indications of a racist past? Why is it nothing more than edgy humor to portray Kazakh villagers as drunken rapists, drinking urine and living in huts with dung on the floors, but a troubling sign of our anti-Semitic past when late 19th century comedians relied on stock images of oily, hook-nosed Jews looking to double deal innocent customers in their haberdasheries?
Let me take a stab at what the people who think Borat is hilarious, but who also think of themselves as progressives, might say. They will protest that there is no reason to get indignant about Borat because it is unlikely that anyone from Kazakhstan will see the film; that this is a "victimless crime" of sorts; that there will be nothing like the phenomenon of millions of American blacks and Jews seeing themselves depicted as objects of scorn and derision in their own country in the early days of Hollywood.
I say that is a tough row to hoe. The crowd that is enjoying Borat knows there are movie houses in Kazakhstan. Or they will if they take the time to think about it. I am not saying that they are "anti-Kazakh." They probably could not find Kazakhstan on the map on a dare. They reason they have no empathy for Kazakhs who may be deeply offended by this portrayal of their people is because they have not yet had their "consciousness raised" on the matter. My guess is that a few CNN interviews of crying Kazakh children asking why the world is making fun of them would make a good number of those who think Sacha Cohen a comic genius squirm a bit in their seats.
And that would be a good thing. Maybe the squirming will give some perspective to the university and media leftists who make such a big to-do about ethnic jokes and the racial imagery in our old films and popular fiction. No question, some of the Americans in the past who laughed at comic portrayals of racial and ethnic minorities were racists. But there is no reason to assume that about the country as a whole. The odds are that most of the people of that era were like the people who think Borat a hoot. Which means that they also are entitled to the defense that they didn't think anyone in the group being spoofed would be offended – because they didn't think of them as part of the audience.
A weak defense? OK. But what then is the defense for trendy leftists making Borat one of the biggest movies of the year?
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