Adam Cantor

Department of Art History and Communication Studies

McGill University, Montreal

Canada

Borat was all the rave at the box office last Christmas and fans of the film touted comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's ability, while playing the part of a transnational, racist holy fool, to strip the pretensions of civility from his interview subjects and make them say the darndest things. But is Baron Cohen's shtick just a way of exposing racism some or might the satirical barbs apply equally to the satirist himself? Who is being exposed as racist, for example, when Baron Cohen marches through a village of Romanian Gypsies, proclaiming this woman or that to be his sister/wife/prostitute? Who is being exposed when Baron Cohen appears on a talk show in character and spews anti-Semitic remarks? In such circumstances, after all, both the audience and the talk show host are already in on the joke. Is such a performance still satire or has it crossed over into minstrelsy? This paper examines Borat from a number of vantage-points: First: that Borat's success is constructed upon binaries that are intended to justify the Baron Cohen's behaviour, but in fact play back into the same old essentialist/ Orientalist mode of thinking. Case in point: Borat may be a half-wit anti-Semite from Kazakhstan, but it is ok because Baron Cohen is actually a Cambridge educated Jew and an Englishman. Second: that the appropriations and reappropriations of culture and identity, which began with Borat but have now extended to lawsuits by parties as diverse as the government of Kazakhstan and frat boys from the Southern United States (among other things), represent part of a new market of exchange for cultural identity made possible by the internet and the proliferation of video sharing online. In this new market, ownership of an identity is literally impossible, as anyone with access to the technology can put their own version of reality into cyberspace, without any mediation or regulation. The questions, then, become: do claims of authenticity have any moral imperative attached to them, what is the role of mediators now that mediation is not always required, and what tools will the culture victims of the next century have when responding to acts of appropriation? Third: Borat's transational appropriation of a cultural narrative (what is Borat, after all, if not the amalgamation of a number of stereotypical myths about the foreigner?), finally, is not to be regarded as an isolated incident. Other films, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, for example, will be discussed as a way of showing that while cultural appropriation in cinema is nothing new, the ways that audiences are responding to such films is changing. With the new-found ability to respond to the filmmaker on an equal ground, the audience of the twenty-first century is becoming surprisingly empowered.

About Adam Cantor