More on Borat

On my last post about George Saunders’ take on Borat, Brady (on Facebook) makes the excellent point that it’s unfair to hold up documentaries to traditional journalistic standards, and I couldn’t agree more. This mythic “standard of truth” was what irritated me about the whole James Fry vs. Oprah debacle: Oprah got mad because James Frey was representing as “truth” was Oprah did not believe was truth, but Oprah never bothered to consider the messy meaning of truth, or what it means to tell the truth, or the circumstances under which one is obligated to tell the truth, or the artistic sensibilities of memoir as a valid genre, or the complexities of memory. No. Oprah felt that some “facts” were “wrong” and got on TV and yelled at James Frey. So I agree that Sacha Baron Cohen (creator of Borat) and Michael Moore deserve some slack.

Brady also writes that Borat is really about Borat and his stunts, and maybe that’s whence the big laffs in the movie, but the stick-to-your-ribs sinking feeling that accompanies you out of the movie theater is from the moments where Borat, with his outsider charm, forces the viewer to confront his society. As I asked myself leaving the theater, “I live in a country where people want to kill gays?” This is not information I have to confront every day (straight privilege!), and I originally thought the movie was successful at jarring me into revelations about my culture.

And this is why Saunders’ argument is so compelling. He contends that Borat appears to be “edgy” and shocking and attention-grabbing and jaw-dropping and an indictment of modern culture. But really all Borat does is make fun of people it’s okay to make fun of : (1) People in power -- middle-class people, white people, Christians and (2) People without a voice – villagers in Kazakhstan. For a movie with a backwards, anti-semitic outsider as a protagonist, its targets are surprisingly politically correct. Saunders further argues that Borat is not trying to Make A Point (as would likely be the case for someone like Michael Moore); instead, he’s trying to make a buck. In this way, the movie isn’t really compelling at all. It’s really rather mundane and somewhat mean-spirited. It’s not that Borat’s facts are wrong, it’s that his motives are impure.

Roger Ebert says that one judges a movie based on how well it accomplishes what it sets out to do. Borat was not marketed as truthful or journalistic, and we can’t hold filmmakers to a standard of Truth if they don’t represent their movies that way. But before we start revering Borat as a piece of cultural criticism, we need to examine what and who is being criticized.