Boratfucking, or, How to Fix It in the Editing
— Everybody’s got to have something to hate. It burns. It burns like love.
— But why Albanians?
— Why not? (Tune in Tomorrow, 1990)
— You can get fired for things like that.
— I’ve been promoted for things like that. (Broadcast News, 1987)
The Kazakhs, they are a funny race. Or that, at least, is the conclusion that unenlightened people were said to reach after watching Borat, whether now or twenty years ago, when Sacha Baron Cohen’s character first became popular. Meanwhile, the enlightened people know that real Kazakhs aren’t like Borat, and if they are laughing at Borat, they insist that they are not laughing at Kazakhstan, see, they are laughing at the unenlightened people who are laughing at Borat and don’t know any better. Their enlightenment might not stretch further than the mere awareness that the Kazakh people are not like Borat, but it’s okay to laugh at an ethnic stereotype, apparently, if you are aware that it is one. All things considered, the Kazakhs, they are a funny race, but they are funny ironically.
The problem with it is that very little in what Sacha Baron Cohen does is new. The mockumentary format aside, Borat’s texture is similar to The Party, the Blake Edwards film from the sixties, starring Peter Sellers. The Party could have been a film ahead of its time, but a certain tastelessness was Edwards’ stock in trade, and one would have to squint to detect any trace of irony in his comedies. (Among his other films was Breakfast at Tiffany’s, an otherwise decent film marred by one of the most notorious Japanese portrayals in post-war American cinema. While the practice known as “yellowfacing” has clearly become unacceptable today, I am not averse to it in historical circumstances, provided the portrayal is positive or at least realistic; Mickey Rooney as Mr. Junioshi is neither.) Sellers himself built his reputation on ethnic stereotypes — French in the Pink Panther franchise, also by Edwards; Italian in After the Fox; Chinese in Murder by Death — and in The Party he plays an Indian film extra invited by accident to a Hollywood party held by a producer who had just fired him. The entirety of the humor rests on the inevitable clash between a brown man with an accent and film industry heavyweights who mistook him for someone of importance. More than half a century later, it makes for uneasy viewing, strangely less because of its racial stereotyping than because there is something sadistic about it, and you never quite know if the target is Sellers’ character, the audience, or both.
Borat elicits the same reaction, except that in this case the sadism is dished out by Cohen through his character, towards both his unwitting interlocutors and the audience. The joke, ultimately, is always on anyone but Cohen, regardless of how safe they might believe to be under layers of irony. An unrelenting smugness permeates it all. My reaction to the first Borat film in 2006 — my first exposure to Cohen’s oeuvre — was one of revulsion, and after it I managed to ignore its creator until this month. (I had even completely forgotten about Brüno, which became mixed up in my mind with Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, as I have to this day seen neither film — and I am far from convinced that I am missing much.)
In hindsight, I can see two reasons for my adverse reaction to the first Borat film. The first was my existing annoyance at a hidden-camera prank show called Just For Laughs: Gags, which traded in this very brand of sadism, described by one critic as “smugness masquerading as moral rectitude”. (One of the producers argued that the show, filmed in Canada, “can’t be produced in the United States because they have a culture of lawsuits”.) The gags were of varying degrees of bad taste, but those I remember now involved police officers. It’s one thing to fall for some silliness taking place as you walk down the street, it’s quite another when it comes at you dressed in uniform and flashing a badge. As such, the show elicits an unintentional discussion of police abuse, but all that is papered over with a laugh track and slapstick music, since the show is filmed silent to avoid paying actors for dialogue. I use the present tense because apparently people like this kind of programming so much that it is still being produced.
The second reason is more specific. In February 2004, Conan O’Brien hosted three episodes of his late-night show from Toronto, as part of the relief effort to restore the city’s reputation in the aftermath of the SARS outbreak. In one episode, he unwisely decided to include a segment in which Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a puppet entirely dedicated to insult comedy, travelled to Quebec City to greet the locals. For the benefit of the Americans who might be reading this, Quebec City is further away from Toronto than Cleveland is from New York City, is not located in the same province as Toronto, and was never affected by the 2003 SARS outbreak. Ostensibly, the crew wanted to capture some images of the annual winter carnival for the benefit of the audience; but Triumph the Insult Comic Dog was called that way for a reason. The result was eight minutes of insults (“I could tell you’re French, you know, you have that proud expression, that superior look, and I could smell your crotch from here.”), aimed at people who did not even understand a word of what he was saying (“You’re in North America, learn the language.”), relayed to a Toronto audience which booed at the mention of Quebec and loudly applauded at the French-language street signs being replaced by English ones, by a puppet perpetuating stereotypes from France rather than Quebec (dressed in a Basque beret and a striped shirt, he says “I only know the basic French expressions like ‘I surrender’.”) to a viewership in another country where Freedom Fries were the delicacy of the day. And if the purpose of Conan O’Brien’s visit was to boost Toronto’s profile, it certainly did —albeit not in the way intended. The resulting controversy made the New York Times.
My first and only screening of the first Borat film left me with a similar aftertaste. I do not much care whether it was, as they say, “punching up” or “punching down” — nothing is easier than to claim lack of privilege to take a cudgel to your enemies — but my impression remains that some of its targets were so inconsequential as to hardly be worth the time to punch at in the first place, and that he went after them only because his core audience expected it of him. The problem I saw was much like the pranksters in police uniforms: even without the implied threat of legal repercussions for not obeying, the participants were, in effect, trapped. Some had no choice but to accept to take part because their situation, professional or otherwise, all but forced them to; but even those who could decline were trapped, for if they decided to take part in Borat’s game, they were idiots because the game was rigged against them, and if they didn’t take part, or objected at any point to what Borat was doing, they were as good as exposed as bigots. The only way out was to embrace the same ironic posture as Cohen, but it was obvious that participants were chosen precisely because they were thought of as incapable of figuring this out, or incapable of declining to take part in his trap. And even if they managed to hold their own against him, he could still edit himself into a winning situation.
I will refrain on commenting on whether Borat is offensive or not to Kazakhstan, as I am not Kazakh myself; and if Kazakhstan objected to the first film, it now embraces the character for tourism purposes. However, I am far from convinced that reiterating a hodgepodge of old stereotypes in an ironic manner by no means exclusive to Cohen regarding the inhabitants of an undefined mass of land located somewhere between the Adriatic and China — a type popularized straight and with no desire to offend in classic Hollywood films by Akim Tamiroff in particular that Cohen just pushed into outright caricature, Borat’s Kazakh language being in fact Hebrew peppered with Polish, and his purported home village really located in Romania — does much in the way of fighting against bigotry, which is what he claims to do. Singing “throw the Jew down the well” doesn’t change much when you point out that Cohen is Jewish himself, in the same way I could hardly believe a black actor doing a Stepin Fetchit routine today would fight against racism by pointing out how ironic it is. As Cohen himself knows, there will always be someone to take it seriously; indeed his entire strand of comedy relies on the knowledge that someone will. However, much of the so-called ironic racism seen online these past few years turned out to be… not so ironic after all, and irony is now a convenient cover for every situation, universally adopted by racists and anti-racists alike, making a new Borat film both perfectly in step with the times and irremediably dulled in its initially transgressive comedic impact as a result of it.
The problem is not in which direction Cohen is punching: he punches in all directions from the average viewer’s perspective, but all his targets are down to him. The problem is that the rules are already written to his advantage from the beginning, and that even then, he cheats, then takes the moral high ground to justify what he does. He cheats, and it’s all for a higher purpose, you see. In this he reminds me of Michael Moore, who produced what he offered as documentaries but in which he played around with factual evidence to the extent that, while his films were entertaining, you could never trust them, the only difference between the two celebrities being that Moore always played himself, while Cohen never did.
Of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the latest — and, hopefully, last — Borat film, I have only seen the Rudy Giuliani segment, and, having watched it, I have no desire to see the rest of the film, as it is all too obviously resuming its old modus operandi of shooting fish in a barrel, in the full knowledge that the hatred for Giuliani is such among Cohen’s followers that they would never call out the filmmaker for not playing fair — it’s just another gotcha, no matter how dubious it really is. What is irksome here is that Cohen himself raises the stakes to make it a matter of truth versus mendacity, pretending to be the modern-day Edward R. Murrow while indulging in the excesses of a Michael Moore: “There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist,” he told the Anti-Defamation League last year as part of a denunciation of the propagation of Holocaust denial on social media. Then, a few weeks ago, he wrote the following in Time Magazine, which may explain why he went after Giuliani in particular:
“Trailing in the polls, Trump clearly believes that his only hope for political survival is to spin an alternate universe: Beijing deliberately spread the “Chinese virus,” we’re told, “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” and the election is “rigged” unless states “get rid of” mail-in ballots. It’s as if we’re in the final days of the Age of Reason — the Enlightenment-induced commitment to evidence, science and objective fact. “Truth isn’t truth,” the President’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani has said, and facts are “in the eye of the beholder.” We are told, without any sense of Orwellian irony, to deny the very existence of our external reality.”
The particulars of the Giuliani segment have received extended news coverage and are likely common knowledge by now. To summarize: a young woman pretending to be a journalist invites Giuliani to her hotel suite for an interview. A few questions, interruptions and pleasantries later, the woman takes Giuliani to the bedroom where Giuliani appears to be about to engage in sexual activity with her, at which point Borat barges in, tells Giuliani, “she 15, she too old for you”, and drags her out of the room. Giuliani’s response was that “the Borat video is a complete fabrication. I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment. At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold liar.” I have profound reservations about Giuliani’s claim that he was merely tucking in his shirt, as it certainly does not look like that, but this is not what Cohen’s defenders have been going after; instead, they are running with how Giuliani was about to go to bed with a 15-year-old. There are a few problems with this. We are only given an indication of her age when Borat appears, at the very end of the segment, and Giuliani had no reason to suspect that she was underaged. If the woman does not look like she is fifteen, it is because the actress playing her is 24 years old, and Giuliani might have chalked up her relatively childish behavior throughout the segment to those same alleged cultural differences that Cohen is exploiting for cheap laughs. (After all, in Cohen’s fictional Kazakhstan, fifteen is too old — ha ha.) With the age question out of the way, what are we left with? The mere possibility that Giuliani wanted to have sex with an adult woman who, from his perspective, appeared completely besotted with him and fully consenting — and if so, as far as he is concerned, what is wrong with that? Are the liberals who make up the bulk of Cohen’s followers now the new bedroom Puritans, or are they still proud of exposing Republicans as hypocrites on “family values” while Donald J. Trump is their leader?
The whole matter has been called entrapment, and as much as I am loath to defend Giuliani, that description might not be as hyperbolic as could be thought. There are definitely quite a few moments in the segment which appear highly suspicious. Consider, for instance, the entire exchange with the boom operator (also played by Cohen). I include on the left eight frames from the film in chronological order from 1 to 8. In all the frames with Giuliani (1, 2, 4, 6, and 7), Cohen holds the boom microphone with his left hand towards the top, and his right hand can be seen at the right end of frame 6. But in all the close-up shots of Cohen, in which Giuliani does not appear (frames 3, 5, and 8), he moves his left hand, while his right hand is at the top of the boom, which is pointing in the other direction. All the while, the segment goes back and forth between the Giuliani frames and the Cohen closeups within a few seconds, as the timestamp on the images indicates. In effect, this means that frames 3, 5, and 8 were not shot during the interview with Giuliani such as it is shown in the rest of the segment but at some later point. It is perhaps possible that Giuliani would have agreed to reshoot some segments for continuity reasons, but there’s a hitch with that particular theory here: Had it been a genuine video interview, the interruption by the boom operator would have been removed completely from the final cut. For a real interview, there would have been no reason to reshoot the scene in the first place!
And as much as it might be easy to fool Giuliani — after all, he did go to her hotel room, likely without making inquiries as to her credentials — I cannot imagine that someone with his extensive political career, and the media exposure that goes with it, would not have known this: no interview that is on the level would reshoot what is for all intents and purposes a moment that was going to be excised anyway.
And as Giuliani does not appear in frames 3, 5, and 8, is there any reason to believe that he was in the room at all when these were filmed?
And if he was not there when these were filmed, how do we know that Cohen’s remarks are indeed what he said to Giuliani, and that Giuliani’s responses were not in fact to something else entirely — something far less embarrassing? Even in the frames where Giuliani appears, it’s difficult to even see what his lips say, on account of his hair getting in the way. In particular, Cohen’s remark that “if I were you, I would stick to marrying your cousins” is spoken entirely in one of the close-up frames; was it ever uttered in Giuliani’s presence? If not, then what did Giuliani respond to? Cohen’s performance in the close-ups is so over-the-top that it’s difficult to believe Giuliani did not smell a rat; was Cohen’s performance more subdued in the original exchange?
There are so many red flags about this particular part of the video that it raises the question of what else might have been reshot and fabricated later on. That close-up of the book the fake journalist gives to Giuliani, for instance, ostensibly taken over his shoulder; is it really Giuliani’s hands in the frame, or is it another reconstitution with someone else, to insert a more embarrassing book into Giuliani’s hands than he was really given? And then there is the bedroom sequence, of course. How much time really elapsed from the beginning of the interview to Borat’s irruption into the room? What else was cut out? And why?
The glaring mistakes in the boom operator sequence remind me of a similar continuity error in the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever, where Bond’s car enters sideways into a narrow alley and emerges at the other end with the other side in the air; except that here a real person’s reputation is at stake. Even if the editing of the Giuliani segment is very accurate to the way it really played out, these mistakes have raised doubts about the veracity of the entire scene, and for the sake of what? keeping things fun and entertaining? Since when does “objective truth”, as Cohen desires it, take a back seat to entertainment? Or perhaps deception was intended after all? If so, what is striking in the boom operator part is how clumsy the deception is. This is not some brave-new-world deepfake computer wizardry at work here, but an old-fashioned continuity error that exposes how much mendacity can seep into a film simply by the way it is edited, a revelation so new that they were already aware of it back in the silent era. Perhaps, then, it was that Sacha Baron Cohen’s intent was to test his audience, to see if anyone would spot the questionable handling of the Giuliani exchange, and to teach Giuliani himself a lesson as to the importance of “objective truth”; if such was the case, we eagerly await the big reveal where Mr. Cohen will finally tell the world how things really played out between Giuliani, the actress, and himself in that hotel suite. Until that time, we have every right to suspect that Cohen’s only intent was to carry out a quick, easy hit job on an already disreputable politician in the hope of getting away with it. After all, who would believe Rudy Giuliani?
What the Giuliani segment tells me above all is how little the entire American liberal humor industry has changed in 15 years, with all its smug self-satisfaction intact despite years of political losses. And just as Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 failed to translate into political change in 2004, there is little reason to imagine that this will play out differently this time. All that is left is arrogance, and complacency, and the quick gotcha moment, cathartic and sterile, as America plunges into the abyss.
