November 2006 Archives

The Economist, a publication staffed by many smart people, has just run a sort of response to Sacha Baron Cohen's new movie. I don't know if you've heard about the picture; it's a little independently-produced art-house film that's only playing in three or four theaters in major cities. Okay, that's a lie. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is everywhere, and has been everywhere for long before it finally opened. And you know, it may not be the funniest movie ever made (especially if you've seen too much of Borat already, which is one of the many problems with this sort of pre-release publicity), but it's got its moments.

But what I want to talk about here is the remarkable blockheadedness of the Economist's piece about it.

Its basic message: Your correspondent has been covering Kazakhstan since before the Soviets fell, and it's a pretty damn important place, even though nobody in the West seems to know this. In short, he (one presumes it's a he; part of the Economist's old-school institutional tone is not providing its writers with anything so crass as a byline) pinned a Kick Me, I'm Humorless sign on his back.

But if you pick your way through the piece, something begins to emerge loud and clear. He hasn't seen the movie.

The result is something that's maybe not as horrible as Germaine Greer's "you had it coming for teasing that poor animal" encomium on the death of Steve Irwin, but it's still fun to watch. Here's my favorite:

The slick, self-satisfied Anglo-American creative elite is so devastatingly witty at other people’s expense, but ultra-prickly when it comes to its own dignity.

Okay, sir. Just so you know, there is a very long, extended fight scene in this movie in which slick, self-satisfied Anglo-American creative elite Sacha Baron Cohen engages in an insane, furious bout of hand-to-hand combat with his 300-pound-plus co-star. Both combatants are stark naked. This is broad physical comedy of the grossest kind ("What's funnier than a fat man? A naked fat man squashing his testicles in your face!"). Whatever else you can say about it, it is quite possibly the least dignified thing I have ever seen any comedian do. John Cleese's inadvertent nude scene in A Fish Called Wanda is Pinter next to this.

There are other what-rock-have-you-been-living-under moments. "There is plenty for thriller-writers to chew on, too: the combination of cynicism, sleaze and geopolitical arm-wrestling across the ex-communist world cries out for a return there by Le Carré." Well, not so much. Le Carré's Our Game, which covers the cynicism, sleaze, and geopolitical arm-wrestling across the ex-communist world, was not a great success: like so many before him, the poor man seemed to have wandered up into the Caucasus mountains and gotten lost.

And then things turn, well, a little creepy. "Kazakhstan is an easy target for a lazy wit," the writer continues. "There is no powerful Kazak diaspora to threaten a boycott." Hmm, what kind of powerful diaspora that threatens boycotts does the writer have in mind, exactly? Is he thinking, maybe, of Cubans? No, that can't be it; they're not really powerful once you get out of Florida.

You know, there's only one group of people I can think of that a writer would use "powerful diaspora" to describe: the group that Stalin used to like to call "rootless cosmopolitans."

This movie isn't really "flogging the tired old gag that the ex-captive nations are amusingly obscure and backward." Sure, Baron Cohen makes good use of that for the fish-out-of-water parts of the movie. But that isn't his point. This movie stings not when it's making fun of fictional Kazaks, but when it offers real plain-as-day Americans the chance to reveal themselves to what they believe is a real plain-as-day Kazak. The ways in which these Americans invite Baron Cohen into their world and then explain it to him are often very funny.

But they're also often horrifying.

And they leave one with the impression that even a culture so civilized that it knows to swathe its prejudices in phrases like "powerful diaspora" is really five or six bad years away from conducting its own version of the running of the Jews.