November 25, 2006
borat
While Da Ali G Show's bumbling host visited largely with politicians and entertainment-media figures, Borat visits with "ordinary Americans." Ali G's racially puzzling "voice of yoof" threatens that the mystery of his manner is both generational and cultural, while Borat's difference presents itself as national.
Which is to say that, as has been well-noted, Borat gets it larfs from the drama of hospitality: how far some Americans will go, and how brief a journey it is for others, to accommodate the faux-Kazakh's inappropriate behavior. This has the social appeal of seeming to make a general account of life in these United States, and I'm sure we're only fifteen minutes away from some hipsterdemic leveraging the Borat oeuvre into an MLA paper via the obvious technology of Derrida's late thought on hospitality, neighbors and gifts.
This will probably be interesting, possibly more interesting than the movie, which is pretty flat: Borat's various hosts have varying responses, but the tenor of the laffs-at-their-expense never changes tune (indeed, Borat's targets align him decisively with the Coen Brothers' "let's mock the rubes" cycle). As a result, the main source of dramatic tension in Borat's satire is closer to that of reality TV; we're consistently left to wonder whether episodes are "real" or "staged" or somewhere in-between, an uncertainty which these days is a marginal value at best.
Ali G's satire of discomfort, conversely, bypasses the generalized social critique for something far more specific. Borat, you see, is a stranger; Ali G is a possible voter, promising access to a larger class of same (the category of "voter" sometimes appears as "audience"; a thin allegory if at all). Borat discovers what absurdities "southerners" and "frat boys" will abide and exhibit so as to be hospitable. Ali G tests what Newt Gingrich, Christie Whitman and Pat Buchanan will do for votes and/or market share, and this is almost infinitely more incisive, discomfiting, and substantial: politics, not "the political."
Posted by jane at November 25, 2006 08:15 AM | TrackBack