"Borat? Not so much."

If I should fall from grace with god
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
But the angels won't receive me

Let me go boys
Let me go boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry
—"If I Should Fall From Grace With God," Shane MacGowan

Not that I’m a big follower of the weekly box-office receipts for newly released major motion pictures, but this week’s ranking is worth noting as ‘Borat’ drops 2 notches to the #3 slot:

“No. 3 was Fox's spoof Borat, expanding into 2,611 theaters and taking in another $4.9 mil Friday its third week out. That's down 50% from last week; its cume now stands at $81 mil. (Although most of that money may wind up going to lawyers to fight all those lawsuits since there's a new one announced every day as the Borat backlash grows and grows.)”

What’s the lesson from all this? Well for one, never trust a so-called satire whose premise hinges on the reassurance that its creator really is an upstanding guy.

In the case of ‘Borat’, many critics who praised the film have noted factual tidbits about Sacha Baron Cohen, apparently as a way to justify his unique brand of comic thuggery — for example, that he is “an observant Jew.” Now what’s that all about? Is it some new postmodern take on “Some of my best friends are [fill in the blank]”?

From one Sean Burns, writing for Philadelphia Weekly, we also get this:

“The Cambridge-educated Cohen wrote his thesis on Jewish involvement in the American civil rights movement. Intolerance is his white whale, but crudeness is his secret weapon.”

As a justification for this:

“Cohen's meanest (and neatest) trick is using a variety of false pretenses to lure unsuspecting everyday folks into close encounters with the clueless Kazakhstani — just to film what happens next.”

What Burns coyly refrains from mentioning is what Cohen himself coyly omits from his film. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted last week (see Thursday’s post for his entire column):

“The genius of Sacha Baron Cohen’s performance is his sycophantic reverence for his audience, his refusal to challenge the sacred cows of the educated bourgeoisie. During the movie, Borat ridicules Pentecostals, gun owners, car dealers, hicks, humorless feminists, the Southern gentry, Southern frat boys, and rodeo cowboys. A safer list it is impossible to imagine.”

So what we get from Cohen is a “reality-based” farce in service to a glaringly obvious agenda: namely, to showcase the people of red-state, Bush-supporting America as the unclean rabble. It’s this agenda — perhaps even more than the “genius” of Sacha Baron Cohen — that explains the film’s immense popularity in Europe and among the Angry Left, as well as the many favorable reviews appearing in the left-leaning mainstream media.

Burns writes that ‘Borat’ was “[c]ulled from a mountain of footage under the supervision of director Larry Charles.” If that’s so, why is the running time only 85 minutes? Could it be there just wasn’t a heck of a lot of material to support the “reality” Cohen wishes to foist on his audience?

For me, this is the fundamental problem — and danger — of so-called reality entertainment. What we’re talking about is not reality at all but rather the point of view of the filmmakers, ie, the reality they want us to believe. It’s not much of a stretch going from here to Leni Riefenstahl. Let’s not forget that she too was a brilliant filmmaker in service to a cause.

There’s another force at play in the ‘Borat’ phenomenon: class. I went to see the film based on favorable reviews I read in the online editions of the Wall Street Journal and National Review, two publications we’d all agree are more red state than blue state in their political outlook. After seeing for myself Cohen’s bias at work, I was puzzled why neither review mentioned it. Later I learned that Sacha Baron Cohen shares the same type of background one would expect to find among writers for those elite publications: well-to-do family, private school education, a brief stint at Goldman Sachs, the prestigious investment banking firm. Who says the old boy network is dead?

I wonder how ‘Borat’ would have been received had it been made by a largely self-taught, evangelical high-school dropout?

Finally, can we please stop comparing Sacha Baron Cohen to Lenny Bruce, Groucho Marx, Peter Sellers, and the Three Stooges? If Lenny Bruce had made this film, do you really think he would have let Pamela Anderson in on the joke before filming her scene, as Cohen reportedly did? No way, Jose. Lenny Bruce was an equal-opportunity offender.

To steal a label from the rich, Sacha Baron Cohen is “N.O.K.” He’s precisely the kind of person the Three Stooges would have pummeled with pies.