Critical Learnings From the US...

You know, the other day I read the most extraordinary attack upon Sacha Baron Cohen in regard to his recent Borat movie. The gist of this attack - made by self-styled US film critic Joe Queenan in The Guardian - was that Baron Cohen is just another middle class snob laughing at the less fortunate in society by making them look stupid. Oh, and because the film was made mainly in the US, he must also hate Americans. I'm left puzzled by Queenan's arguments (if, indeed, we can even characterise his irrational tirade as such), most particularly that social class should be a deciding factor in humour. Following this logic, as someone of working class origin, it would be OK for me to take the piss out of, say, redneck bigots, but not middle class racists. But of course, as a Brit, I'd be anti-American if those rednecks came from, say, Georgia. Hmmm. Queenan's righteous indignation on the behalf of Borat/Baron Cohen's victims also seems misplaced, as they actually made fools of themselves. Nobody actually forced them to come out with racist and sexist comments on camera. They all knew they were being filmed. They all knew the film would be broadcast.

The anti-American angle also seems a somewhat bizarre charge to make against Baron Cohen. I'm guessing that the reason the film concentrates on taking the mickey out of Americans is mainly financial - it was backed by a US studio with American money and its main market is going to be the US. I doubt very much that such an audience would be terribly interested in seeing the British or Germans, say, parodied in the same way. The US is notoriously insular in this respect. But let's not forget that long before any two-bit US film critic had ever heard of him, Baron Cohen was busy doing exactly the same thing to both the British public and UK politicians and celebrities. You really shouldn't take these thing so personally, Joe. Actually, the thing which most amused me about Queenan's article was the way in which he so quickly fell back on that old diatribe as to how we Europeans shouldn't forget that it was those same Americans it was hating/laughing at (apparently the same thing in his mind) who had died on the beaches at D-Day to liberate them. Yeah, yeah... And you Yanks shouldn't forget that it was those same French you despise whose maritime interventions disrupted supplies to King George III's army and consequently contributed to US independence...

I'd also hope that the US's exposure to other cultures during WWII would have made them more tolerant of other races. But apparently not. As Michael 'Kramer' Richards showed last week, even apparently intelligent, educated, middle class Americans are prone to resort to racist abuse at the slightest (perceived) provocation. One final observation on Queenan is that he's the type of middle class critic who spends a lot of his time disparaging the kind of movies which attract mass, working class audiences. By extension, he is also disparaging the tastes and opinions of those who view them - precisely the crime he's accusing Baron Cohen of. But then hypocrisy is the very least we should expect from someone whose rantings have shown him up to be exactly the kind of narrow-minded reactionary Borat shows up.