Borat goes political

Last night Mr. Sacha Baron Cohen won "Best Comedic Performance" at the MTV Movie Awards (and in a characteristic move, caused a scene by making out with Will Ferrell on stage). Now that the Borat movie mania has mostly died down, I've been thinking about how complex this film actually is. Baron Cohen set out to break all the rules, so it's not surprising that there were all sorts of reactions. But what makes the character of Borat important is that he has actually managed to strike right in the center of the "culture wars" that everyone says are being waged in this country. Sacha Baron Cohen took on the hottest political debates of the moment. Some people say that the film is just blatantly un-PC, and that those who take offense to it are overly sensitive and taking comedy too seriously. I understand this position, but I also know that comedy is one way we approach the big issues we don't know how to handle. American comedy is and has always been all about racial and sexual identity. And whether or not they take it seriously, millions of people have seen Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan and each person takes his/her own ideas and impressions away from it.

Borat is a movie about American prejudice, but Borat's anti-Jewish sentiment makes me uneasy (aside: anti-Semitism is a troubled term because Arabs are also Semites). Anyway, Baron Cohen is Jewish and therefore does have license to portray anti-Semitism, at least more than a non-Jew would. But there's been a lot of discussion about anti-Semitism as it relates to Israel in recent months, and it's a touchy subject. It's too much for me to go into now, but basically some people - Abe Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League for one - have argued that criticism of the Israeli government amounts to anti-Semitism. And there's an often brutal dispute between professors Norman Finkelstein and Alan Dershowitz, who are both Jews but are on opposing ends of the spectrum on the issue.

So what does Borat have to do with all this? I don't know exactly. But it makes me nervous to think that aspects like the bar scene with the "Throw the Jew down the well" song could be interpreted as evidence of present large-scale anti-Semitism. If we think about the fears and biases that come up most consistently in the U.S. of late, they don't relate to Jews; the hostility is directed toward Muslims and Arabs. Part of me wonders if through Borat's bigotry, Baron Cohen was actually alluding to the widespread anti-Muslim sentiment in the West, but this is never clear. And though some have said that the Borat character himself is an insulting Muslim sterotype (about half the population of Khazakstan is Muslim), in the film Borat is asked if he's "Islamic," and he says no, he "follows the hawk." So it's ambiguous. But I can't help agreeing with some critics who've said that if Sacha Baron Cohen were actually Muslim and he dressed up as a Jew who hated Muslims, the film would never had made it into the mainstream. The scenario wouldn't have made sense because the truth is, American audiences are accustomed to sympathizing with Jews, not Muslims. My (somewhat simplistic) belief is that international relations would improve considerably if everyone: Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Mormons, Pagans, Secularists, Atheists, Agnostics, and even Scientologists would go read a book about the history of Islam or talk to a Muslim.