This sort of satiric fare might have been fresh back in 1922, when Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt. But nowadays, Cohen’s frenetic sucker-punching of one American rube after another just looks like the addictive behavior of a bully — and not a terribly funny one.
Look at those Southern squares freak out as Borat brandishes his bag of shit at the dinner table! Check their bourgeois alarm as an uninvited black prostitute turns up on their doorstep! Chortle knowingly at that xenophobic Virginia rodeo crowd, or the hapless Jewish B&B keepers, too clueless to grasp the clever performance-art send-up of anti-Semitism that Borat is benevolently doing on their behalf! And those crazy Pentecostals — dude, they totally speak in made-up words! Meanwhile, the hotly debated question of whether Pamela Anderson was in on the film’s climactic scene holds about as much dramatic interest as the pallid romantic crisis in the latest episode of The Hills.
This view of the American hinterland as a vast freak-show diorama says far more about the invidious social world of the viewer than the captive subject. And that’s why Cohen’s pageant of insular cultural self-regard is pretty much the opposite of what Borat was universally hailed to be: a slantwise satirical takedown of American provincialism. Any sharply conceived satire involves some telling moment of painful self-recognition on the part of the audience: think of Dr. Strangelove, Election, or Wag the Dog, to take just a handful of energetic big-screen political satires. Their point wasn’t that the American republic is peopled with stooges, louts and boobs; it was, rather, that the official speech that makes up our political reality is farcically divorced from anything that matters, up to and including the capacity to wage wars and destroy the world. However dumb individual Americans might be, the keepers of the psychotic national consensus are lethally more so. Of course, a late-night TV comedian needn’t be tasked with making such a solemn point — but it’s also reasonable to expect him to make some point bigger than noticing that foreigners talk funny, or that Southern frat boys get sexist, racist, and generally abusive when they’re drunk.
Toxic you
But that, it seems, is the role of the avant-garde in today’s cluttered media market — and yes, Cohen’s movie was as sure an index of cultural vanguard sensibilities as, say, Blow-Up or Bonnie and Clyde were back in the day. Less than ever is there a place for culture that openly challenges any viewer or reader’s larger assumptions about the world — even as there is all sorts of loose talk about the super-empowered prowess of the new media user. (Cf., of course, Time magazine’s decision to name you — yes, you, Mr. or Ms. Content Generator! — person of the year.)
The tacit social brief that reality programming, celebu-tard blogs, and gossip sheets, and the complacent failed satire of a Sacha Baron Cohen share is this: the idea that the indolent rich and famous, the bien-pensant Borat cheerleaders, and the hollow-eyed mannequins of Laguna Beach really are different from you and me. That, in turn, brings out the corollary view, so plainly programmed into our mass culture but so rarely stated in its overt logic: that the superstitions and folkways of the American interior are so backward, so hateful, so toxic that they must be outspent into oblivion (as in My Super Sweet Sixteen and its kindred guignols) or laid bare for no good reason other than to dramatize one’s own cultural superiority (the Borat rule — or as it should perhaps be better known, the rule of Borat). In this sense, the pseudo-reality reflex of viewer retreat is mutating into a far uglier pageant of class contempt. So the next generation of reality programming, with its virgin hazing and sexual one-upmanship, will make their fans feel very much at home. After all, the Roman Empire sacrificed puppets tricked out as virgins in times of crisis too.
Chris Lehmann is the author of Revolt of the Masscult. He can be reached atlehmannchris@mac.com.
