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Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Is it funny? Yes. Is it fair? Probably. Does it speak to the times? Mmmmmmmmmaybe. We’ll never look at America’s Mayor the same way again, that’s for sure.
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Further Reading
- Bouffon clown (if you like it, check out Philippe Gaulier)
- Schopenhauer’s “The Art of Being Right”
We Canadians are just excited that Sacha Baron Cohen noticed us. At the 2.30 mark, our Prime Minister’s unfortunate taste in costumes was acknowledged in a way I found hilarious.
The hero of the film for me is that lovely lady at the Synagogue who handles Borat’s offensive presence with compassion and gentleness. Not sure if that was “Staged” or not.
“I went to Synagogue to await shooting.” That was dark.
Fun fact: Sacha Baron Cohen is capable of serious acting. Check out The Spy on Netflix .
Update: She wasn’t pranked:
https://www.themarysue.com/borat-subsequent-moviefilm-feminism/
One point, here (from the podcast; I haven’t watched the movie and probably won’t) is that we do have an unfortunately wide array of quasi-journalists who think that their responsibility ends with proving that one political party is staffed primarily with hypocrites. The problem (at least as I see it) is that their main audience already knows this and is angry, and the audience they think needs to know…they already know, too, and think it’s a good thing, because hypocrisy is a powerful strategy when the opposition struggles to stay sincere.
Or replace “hypocritical” with racist, sexist, fascist, or whatever other adjective we might care about in a particular context. Obviously, a lot of the force behind it is just the curse of advertising-funded media (as Yoda pointed out, fear leads to hate; hate leads to gullibility; gullibility leads to ad responses and profit), but it also seems to involve a failure/disinterest to understand the perspectives of the actual audiences.
That is, instead of yet another “but in 2016, you said…” or “X said a misogynist thing about Y” story, I’d rather see pieces about why that MATTERS, societally speaking, instead of just the personal sleights or the offense against logic. Ideally, it’d be something I could send to people who smirk at politicians talking about clean energy like it’s a threat to their masculinity or think “America isn’t a democracy, it’s a democratic-republic” provides any information other than the speaker lacks a rudimentary understanding of how subsets work.
As for Giuliani, I don’t have specifics, because they’re not my stories to tell, but around New York, it’s more common than one would generally imagine to hear stories of “America’s Mayor” (a phrase Oprah should have answered for long ago) propositioning young women. More people around the country should be aware of the behavior, but it was the least surprising thing to hear about the movie…