It has been nearly 10 years since Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was a No. 1 box-office hit, holding that position for two weeks and briefly making Americans cognizant that there is a Kazakhstan. (Somewhere between Hungary and Australia, I think.) The movie was released in the U.S. on November 3, 2006, meaning its one-decade anniversary falls only five days before our glorious nation finally votes for a president—a resonant coincidence, given that Borat is the most 2016-ish movie not actually released in 2016. Screened today, it feels like an unholy herald for the coming birth of Donald Trump’s America, and not only because one early scene depicts the title character defecating in a planter in front of the Trump International Hotel on Columbus Circle. Who in 2016, given the nerve, wouldn’t want to do that? A hero will rise, as they say in action-movie trailers. Or rose.
The film, a mockumentary, is based on a character Sacha Baron Cohen created for his Ali G television series: an oversexed, bushy-haired, porn-stached reporter for Kazakh TV, here on assignment to find the real America, like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, but with a tinnier soundtrack and a bear instead of Jack Nicholson. Not long ago I watched Borat for the first time since I saw it during its initial release. Back then, I remember laughing harder than at any time since I was introduced to Monty Python in high school via And Now for Something Completely Different—laughing literally to the point of pain. (How often is the “side-splitting” cliché beloved of movie reviewers actually true?) I’m pretty sure I haven’t laughed as hard at anything since. Certainly not while re-watching Borat. The movie is still funny and subversive, with its mix of loosely scripted scenes and put-ons of unsuspecting civilians, many of whom unsuccessfully sued Baron Cohen after the movie came out. (The director was Larry Charles, who cut his teeth as a director on the improvised Curb Your Enthusiasm.) But Borat’s transgressions against even R-rated comedy conventions now feel familiar rather than revelatory, and its catchphrases have dulled with overuse: Sexy time . . . Is niiice . . . You telling me the man who try to put a rubber fist in my anus is a homosexual?
I’d actually forgotten that last one, though not the film’s wide streak of gay-panic humor—an hors d’oeuvre, however, compared to the homophobic banquet of Baron Cohen’s follow-up film, Bruno (2009, based on another Ali G character). Where Borat now feels forward-looking is the way it investigates the angry xenophobia that would subsequently be unleashed by the Trump campaign. Of course, ugly strains existed in American political life long before Borat or Trump’s literal and figurative descent on the down escalator at Trump Tower; but that ugliness is so front and center in Borat it can feel as if the film was shot last weekend.
For example:
The man at a rodeo who warns Borat he resembles a Muslim terrorist and advises him to “shave that dadgum mustache off so you don’t look so conspicuous. So you look like maybe an Italian.”
The gun-store owner who doesn’t flinch when Borat asks, “What is the best gun to defend against a Jew?”
The Hummer dealer who doesn’t flinch when Borat asks, “If this car drive into a group of Gypsies, will there be any damage to the car?”
The drunken frat boys who explain to Borat that in “our country, the minorities actually have more power. Anyone that’s a minority has the upper hand . . . anybody that’s against the mainstream.”
That last comment could have been drawn from a Trump supporters’ focus group, or a Vox alt-right explainer. In the movie’s rodeo scene, following the unsolicited grooming advice, Borat addresses the fans and draws cheers for his support of America’s “war of terror”: “May U. S. and A. kill every single terrorist! May George Bush drink the blood of every single man, woman, and child of Iraq!” Rah rah rawwwrrr! To be fair, it sounded to my ears as if the crowd’s vocal bloodlust had been artificially amplified on the soundtrack. Still, the scene put me in mind of Trump’s raucous, red-faced immigration speech at an Arizona rally last week, where he made a nasty, gratuitous aside about deporting Hillary Clinton, and a supporter could be heard shouting out, “String her up!” Some commentators have speculated facecetiously—wishfully?—that Trump might be a satirical performance artist, epater-ing the booboisie. If so, he owes Baron Cohen even more than he owes Sean Hannity.
Borat’s problem is that its jokes often boomerang, but not always in ways that seem intentional. The movie wants us to laugh at red-state prejudice, ignorance, and backwardness, but it also wants us to laugh at a Kazakhstan it presents as even more prejudiced, ignorant, and backward. Here, Borat’s homeland is an impoverished hellhole of incest and bestiality, a nation where cars are horse-drawn and clock radios are coveted household luxuries, where the calendar’s annual highlight is a “running of the Jews” festival. You could argue that all this is meant to implicate elitist audiences in the film’s satire: if we laugh at Borat’s oafishness, aren’t we, in a way, just as benighted as the drunken frat boys and rodeo yahoos?
Maybe. I would argue that the jokes are simply meant to be funny, and that there’s not much risk for either filmmakers or audiences in laughing at a country most Americans are completely unfamiliar with and—more important—don’t have any guilt-inducing history of mocking, exploiting, or otherwise treating poorly. The Census Bureau estimates there are a scant 23,000 or so Kazakh-born people living in the U.S., so we don’t even have to worry—much—that laughing will offend neighbors. Certainly, many of the film’s jokes would curdle if Borat were Polish, say, or Chinese or Ugandan. (For the record, according to The New York Times, “Kazakhstan, a vast former Soviet republic in Central Asia with a vibrant economy driven by oil and other natural resources, bears almost no resemblance to the place caricatured in Mr. Baron Cohen’s film.”)
That said, I will confess that I laughed at nearly all the Kazakh jokes in Borat. I even laughed when Borat departs his muddy, tumbledown village for his trip to the U.S. and offers a cheerful farewell admonishment to one neighbor: “Urkin, not too much raping . . . humans only!” But I felt freer to laugh at that in 2006 than I do now, in a season when a major presidential candidate has been slandering a broad swath of Mexican immigrants as, he says, actual rapists. I suppose this makes me some kind of hypocrite, but there are worse sins kicking around these days.
