Sunday, October 29, 2006
(1:45 PM) | Amish Lovelock:
Where there is race, see class
K-Punk's comments on Borat got me thinking about the now much-viewed YouTube clip of the "Throw the Jew down the well" scene again. A recent Guardian article came up with the following hand-wringing riff:People will not always challenge racist, antisemitic, homophobic and sexist
statements made by a buffoon. More, they will agree vehemently, and join in
with comments of their own. Borat is shocking because we cannot help but
imagine ourselves in the place of his hapless victims and because we
understand - though not, perhaps, consciously - that we might have acted
precisely as they did. We too might have remained silent when Borat
suggested"hanging" homosexuals, or nodded politedly at the suggestion
that a Humvee is suitable for "running over Gypsies". Not because we
fear for our lives if we disagree but, perhaps, to avoid embarrassment.
Borat is funny because he is shocking, and he
is shocking because he reveals the truth.
The other thing people are saying is that the little spots on the Ali G show which focussed on British targets were no where near as funny as the American stuff as the Brits were aware of Baron-Cohen's "self-reflexivity" (something which the Kazakhstan government seem to have accepted too now). The target in the scene here is rural working-class Americans. Borat seems to be growing in popularity among the middle-class in Britain too from what I can see. In the sense that grown up kids introduce it to parents who find it repulsive at first and then when they see the funny Americans and are explained the "self-reflexivity" become assured they can like it and laugh. This sounds an awful lot like the kind of embarrassment described in the above article.
