WhatzUp

Borat
by Derek Neff

Borat inspires the same kind of queasy discomfort that all great subversive comedies do. You sometimes laugh only because if you didn't you would have no other outlet for your unease. Sacha Baron Cohen's inspired blend of adolescent potty humor and canny prankishness – oh, how he loves to give people just enough rope to hang themselves with! – requires a kind of fearlessness and wit that most gonzo comedians only wish they had. To say that Borat is a watershed in the current American cultural landscape is only to state the obvious, so I'll go even further and say that it's the most incisive (and damning) portrayal of contemporary America this decade.

A guerilla movie if ever there were one, Borat's crew for most of the shoot consisted solely of Baron Cohen as the title character, Ken Davitian (who plays Borat's hirsute producer and sidekick Azamat), director Larry Charles and a few sound and camera people. (At one point some of the crew were reportedly arrested while Baron Cohen was questioned by the FBI. I won't go into all the lawsuits being brought against the producers by various people who now regret their appearance in the film.)

As Borat travels cross-country in his quest to find Pamela Anderson, he is filmed conversing with real people in real situations. The people he talks to are not actors; this isn't a script, and anything goes.

In one scene our lovably benighted Kazakh anti-hero gets his hands on a microphone at a Virginia rodeo and leads the unwitting crowd in what they think is going to be the national anthem. Instead, he brings them to a frenzied volley of cheers with increasingly bloodthirsty pro-war comments before launching into a faux-anthem for his own country and then insulting the crowd in ways that are guaranteed to get them riled up. It's a blisteringly funny and yet oddly horrific scene, not to mention one of the most tense things I've ever seen on film. Reportedly, Baron Cohen and the crew barely made it out of the place alive.

Not quite so dangerous but just as disturbing is the scene in which Borat gets into an RV with a few drunken frat boys and gets them to open up on such issues as slavery and women. They crudely and efficiently proceed to fulfill the frat boy cliché to a tee.

Baron Cohen's method is simple: play naïve and foolish (and homophobic, anti-Semitic and sexist), thereby duping other people into offering up their own vomit-inducing opinions. The results are outrageous, shocking, jaw-droppingly offensive and scathingly hilarious at every turn.

Borat isn't, as some contend, anti-American. Rather, it functions almost as a form of gonzo journalism that shows us an underbelly of mainstream society that most people, under normal circumstances, are too savvy and polite to ever reveal. He shows us – through unfair and devious and far from scientific and certainly not completely representative means, to be sure – that we still have a long way to go.