Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Sacha Baron Cohen is a British comedian whose film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan targets an American audience. Americans are an eager audience--they’ve made Cohen’s The Ali G Show a popular success on HBO. As Ali G, Cohen plays an ignorant hipster journalist who interviews unsuspecting luminaries such as Andy Rooney, C. Everett Koop, Gore Vidal, and others. The subjects of these interviews don't realize that they're being lampooned. Most of them are easy targets. Americans in general are easy targets, apparently, as the film Borat repeatedly demonstrates.

Borat exults in perverse violation of all standards of political correctness. It exploits American xenophobia, especially concerning the Middle East—Kazakhstan is, after all, a Middle Eastern nation. The tenuous plot concerns Borat’s assignment by the television station he works for to travel to America to make a documentary about the American lifestyle that will educate and uplift his countrymen. In fact, this plot becomes the pretense for a series of sketches in which Cohen sets up various unsuspecting victims—mostly he just encourages his victims to be themselves. He does this by playing the foreigner ignorant of American ways--constantly committing faux pas and indecencies (he defecates in shrubbery on the side of a New York City street and masturbates in front of a billboard), asking inappropriate questions, misunderstanding basic facts (he thinks an elevator is his hotel room, he washes his face in a toilet). Most of the characters in these sketches are real and unsuspecting people, not actors—they do not realize they have been set up. Only Cohen/Borat knows what is going on. Thus while the plot is fiction, the individual episodes, most of them at least, are real.

The true plot of the film is set in motion when Borat sees an episode of Baywatch on his hotel television. Falling in love with Pamela Anderson, he vows to meet and marry her and sets out for California. Borat thus becomes a hilarious perversion of an American road film.

Throughout Borat we laugh at Cohen’s character for his foreign ignorance and his inability to understand how to act in America. This means we laugh at his comments about rape, prostitution, and women in Kazakhstan (he brags that his sister is “number four prostitute" in Kazakhstan; he is shocked to learn that woman in America cannot be forced to have sex), and we laugh as well at reactions he prompts in the Americans he encounters. Borat’s fundamental anti-Semitism is a constant subject. The film begins with a report on the annual “Running of the Jews” in Borat’s hometown. Stopping for the night at a bed-and-breakfast owned by an elderly Jewish couple, Borat and his manager are terrified that they will be killed and eaten. In an American gun shop, Borat asks the proprietor to recommend a gun that will protect him against Jews. With no hesitation, the proprietor makes a recommendation. Thus on the one hand while Borat invites us to laugh at anti-Semitism and other primitive practices in Kazakhstan, it also manages to identify those same traits in America. As a fundamental matter of the film’s style and point of view, there is never any editorial intrusion to make clear that the viewer is supposed to react to these scenes in a particular way. The film depends on the audience to react in the appropriate way—with laughter but also with repugnance. But it cannot prevent other reactions—that is, it cannot prevent the audience from concluding that in some way it is endorsing anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism. Moreover, there is an ethical question to consider here. By inviting us to laugh at anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism, is Borat criticizing those traits in American society, or is it exploiting them for comic effect, thereby perpetuating them? The fact that Cohen himself is Jewish complicates everything.

There are many anarchistic moments in Borat where the intent is not to make some political or cultural statement but instead simply to create disorder and comedy. One such moment comes in an antiques shop where Borat manages through a series of pratfalls to destroy a collection of china.

In its attention to the travails of Borat as he wanders across the American landscape in search of enlightenment, self-knowledge, and Pamela Anderson, Borat is portrayed as a kind of Adam Sandler character—essentially good and simple, put-upon and taken advantage of, ultimately victorious. (Before Sandler, I would have called him “Everyman”). In both the Sandler and Borat characters, an underlying moralistic perversity often takes aim at the hypocritical and mean spirited. Sandler’s characters take action to punish these individuals. Borat simply finds a way to film them. The most obvious example comes in a scene where Borat while hitchhiking is picked up by a group of fraternity boys from the University of South Carolina. They are drunk and in the course of the scene become drunker. Though they befriend Borat, they also make numerous comments of the sort that Borat seeks to satirize, especially comments about women and minorities. One boy complains that white men have no power in America any more, that minorities are in control. It doesn’t take long for these boys to tighten the noose and spring the trapdoor. In a lawsuit, they are claiming that the Borat film crew set them up: invited into a trailer, asked to sign consent forms, and plied with liquor, these hapless waifs had no idea what was going to happen. This does not mitigate their behavior: it is contemptible. But it does suggest that this film engages in a certain amount of manipulation.

In another scene Borat goes to see an “etiquette counselor” for advice on how to behave in America. She is patient and understanding and apparently does not have any sense that Cohen is tricking her, even when Borat shows her pictures of his son’s genitals. Her forbearance is considerable: she gently explains that it would not be appropriate in America to show these pictures. The etiquette counselor is now also suing Cohen, claiming that she was deceived by the filmmakers and made to look ridiculous. In fact, she emerges from the scene unscarred. Not everyone in the film can make the same claim.

There are numerous moments of mean spiritedness in Borat. One comes during a dinner with a group of conservative white Southerners. Despite Borat’s supposedly unwitting insults and embarrassing comments and actions, these people try to be patient with him. One woman even takes him aside and calmly explains various steps involved in using an American bathroom, including the function of toilet paper. The scene falls apart when an obese, grey-haired African American prostitute in hot pants appears whom Borat has invited to dinner without consulting his hosts. They realize they've been duped and call the police. Is the point here that the prostitute’s arrival exposes the limits of tolerance in the people at the dinner—tolerance that extends only to people with white skin--or is the point that they don't want uninvited prostitutes at their private dinner party--or is the point that they realize they've been exploited? The answer is not as easy as Borat might have it. These people are easy and helpless targets.

In another scene, Borat attends a Pentecostal worship service where people are speaking in tongues, shouting and dancing ecstatically, and otherwise emoting in the typical way of Pentecostal worship services. Borat allows himself to be “converted” and then announces that he is “going to California with my new friend Mr. Jesus to find Pamela Anderson” (my favorite line in the film). The service appears to be a genuine worship service. The worshippers do not know that Borat is feigning his salvation. They treat him with respect and compassion, and he never breaks character. The scene is amazing in a number of ways. I was moved by it. Yet Borat includes it in the film as a way of satirizing and ridiculing the worshippers simply for being themselves. I disagree with Pentecostalism on practically every level. Yet why does the Pentecostal worship service merit ridicule? If the film truly means to attack those who hate Jews, why does it invite us to laugh at Pentecostals?

A scene in which Borat tries to kidnap Pamela Anderson at a book signing also seems to be genuine, though she was apparently in on the joke. When she declines his request that she marry him, he answers that “Consent is not necessary” and pulls a “wedding bag” over her head. She runs out of the bookstore into the parking lot, in hysterics, while Borat is waylaid and arrested. By this point in the film, the joke has grown tiresome.

One might argue that this anarchistic, pseudo-improvisational film is a latter-day version of the 1960s television show Candid Camera, which made fun in a gentle way of people being themselves. There is precious little gentleness in Borat, whose tricks, jokes, impostures, and deceptions are fraught with meanness. Ultimately Borat/Cohen always makes himself the center of attention. With all the pretense of attacks on prejudice and racism, the point of the film is making people seem ridiculous.

While Borat satirizes xenophobia and racism and sexism and other American cultural failings, it also exploits and profits from them. It becomes what it is making fun of. In the anarchistic, guerilla-style comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen, this inconsistency perhaps does not matter. Whether it should matter to those of us in the audience is another question.