At the movies with Robert Hawkes

The best one can say of Borat! is that it is a thoroughly apt entertainment for the culture which has produced it. Childish, mean-spirited, self-congratulatory, and irredeemably vulgar, this apparent satire on the American world view is little more than an extended excuse for slimy, utterly unerotic sexual jokes, and for the sort of thing that eight-year-olds might find funny - scatological humor of the most physically graphic kind. The premise, in case you don`t know it, is that Sacha Baron Cohen portrays a journalist named Borat from Kazakhstan, on his way across America to learn how to improve his own country. The gimmick is that he presents himself, \"Candid Camera style\" (it`s an old joke) to \"real\" people in \"real\" situations as an actual Kazakhstani journalist, duping them into being the eventual butt of whatever schoolboy prank is next on his list. The supposedly redeeming goal of this smug and self-satisfied offensiveness seems to be to excite in us some outrage at the bigotry both of the character Borat (a lively anti-Semite) and of some of the good ol` Americans he runs into, such as the rodeo cowboy who wants to hang all the homosexuals. The New Yorker tells me, too, that his point may be that we cannot legislate our prejudices out of existence - not news, surely, but something we need to keep in mind. The trouble is that it`s all just too puerile, self-gratifying, and oblivious to be actually effective as satire. As potty humor, it`s a winner. It`s a winner also as an exercise in the humor of cruelty, name-calling, and loveless sex now so popular on TV. But a film which begins by asking me to find rape funny has lost me at the start. And as for the Jew-baiting - Mr. Cohen is himself Jewish - something in its presentation invites me in some insidious way to laugh with it, rather than at it. The \"running of the Jew\" in Borat`s native village looks like nothing so much as good Mardi Gras fun, and massages my conscience with \"it`s only a joke, and a Jew himself is making it.\" The film is a thorough-going nastiness, posturing as satire but depending for its appeal almost entirely on the cheap titillation of shocking the grown-ups. Of course, in this culture of eternal youthfulness (actually a culture of selfishness, binge, and tantrum), which has the shallowest of popular art of all kinds at its very core, grown-ups are getting hard to find. -- Robert Hawkes, Upper School English Teacher