Borat Wasn't the Problem

I watched Borat on DVD this weekend. My husband and I have date night every Saturday and we usually use that time to go see a movie. I’m telling you this to let you know we had an opportunity of see it at a theater near us. We saw the trailers week after week. I don’t really remember, but I’m sure we did discuss it the week it came out. I’m also sure neither of us ever considered it seriously. I don’t like slapstick or jokes that don’t include all the players. My husband has other issues that would preclude him from watching such a movie, but I won’t go into it because this is my blog.

I didn’t laugh one time and I don’t remember smiling. The bits were much funnier in telling someone about them than in watching them. What really struck me more than anything else was the incredible patience Americans had with this “Kazakhstanian” visitor, in spite of his stupidity and crudeness, as they carefully explained the anti-Semitic racist American way.

At least a third of the time when I go out into the world to ask strangers anything, the best I can hope for is silent disdain. I have a degree from one of the top ten colleges in the country, I’m neat and clean in public, and I don’t speak loud or rudely. I can’t think of one of his bits that wouldn’t have gotten me arrested at the very least. For my husband and two sons, also well kept college graduates, they would have been shot anywhere in this country doing at least two of Borat’s stunts. How do I know this? Because Black men have been shot by the police doing much less.

I’m not saying the movie was anti-Semitism or racist, I don’t believe it was. It was satire or parody. Sacha Baron Cohen has a firm grasp of American’s underbelly. In one scene, a dinner party of genteel Southern attendees, Borat says and does things that should have gotten him booted long before dessert. The party included Newt Gingrich and his wife. What finally upsets the host and Gingrich so much that he jumps up and takes his immediate leave? Borat’s “date” for the evening arrives, an overweight Black woman that Borat identifies as a prostitute. They saw her and immediately announced that diner was over and Borat had to leave. The prostitute was friendly and mild mannered. She wasn’t banishing a weapon or using loud and or crude language; she just appeared at the door.

Don’t get me wrong, I would not have wanted this women to show up at my door under the same circumstances; but had she been acting the way she did in the movie, even dressed as inappropriately, I could not have been so rude. And that goes for her white or Asian counterpart. That women showing up, in my mind, was the most benign thing Borat did at the party–unless black folks at your dinner party is a deal-breaking problem.

I hope there’s a black film maker out there working on his own version of Borat. I’m not sure how it can be done without putting the main actor in harms way, but I hope somebody figures it out. I do hope the film company will check in with the police first in each city they visit. They’ll have a hard enough time dodging the bullets of the good everyday citizens and shopkeepers.