So am I paying attention to subtext or do I just have no sense of humor?
Mr Cassandra and I attempted to watch Borat this weekend. We made it about 30 minutes in before giving up and turning it off.
Here’s the thing. I get what the joke is supposed to be with this movie – we’re not really being racist by openly mocking this dude from Kazakhstan, we’re just making an ironic comment on America’s ignorance about the rest of the world! For lo, we are very very clever! And he himself is Jewish and makes jokes about Jewish people and therefore it can’t possibly be offensive!
I’m not sure that I buy that, actually. I’m not sure that just because the creator is a Jewish man and the character he plays is an anti-Semite that gives him a get-out-of-racism-free card when it comes to mocking Kazakhs.
Then there’s the element which isn’t so much about race as it is about class and culture. Kazakhstan is poor. Really poor. And there are lots of historical reasons for that, many of them having to do with decisions made by the leaders of the former Soviet Union. The widespread poverty there has jack shit to do with who Kazakhs are as people. Am I the only one here who thinks that mocking poverty is in rather poor taste?
Kazakhstan is also predominantly Muslim, with the secondary religion being Russian Orthodox. Not only am I not convinced that there’s not some religious bigotry going on here, I’m also not convinced that it is at all politically advisable for a bunch of American intellectuals to have proclaimed their adoration for a movie that reinforces the idea that people in a country that is largely Muslim are uneducated buffoons. I have a friend who grew up in a small town near Moscow and I remember her saying when this movie came out how uncomfortable the online blurbs about it she saw made her, because she grew up surrounded by jokes about Kazakhs and other people from Central Asia and to her this sounded just like that. Her comment was part of the reason I didn’t go see the movie when it came out. But a work buddy lent it to Mr Cassandra, so…
Honestly, the movie made me really uncomfortable. Not only was it not very funny, I sat there watching it with the same kind of queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I see people on the news making comments about Muslims as a group, or when my mother-in-law tells racist jokes. One’s gut is often a better judge than one’s intellect, I’ve found, and in this case my intellect was telling me “well other people didn’t seem to find it offensive so maybe I’m overreacting” but my gut was saying “oh hell no, get this shit off of my TV right now!”.
The gut won. But now I’m wondering…did anyone else have the same reaction to this movie? Of all the reviews I saw the only complaints seemed to be that it was too slow and too long, and that some people were offended by the way it portrayed white-bread mainstream America. Nobody that I saw even mentioned that it might be, well, kind of racist. Not to mention snottily classist and condescending.
So, am I just a humorless harpy? Is there some meta-joke here that I’m missing? Or did anyone else get that nasty pit of the stomach there’s something wrong with this picture feeling?

And another thing…why the hell is it still considered OK to make fun of people for being poor? Or for being “unsophisticated”? And do people really not see that “oh look those people from X country are so unsophisticated, tee hee” is in itself racist? Add in the “Not like us, we’re SO beyond that” and you really look like a gigantic asshole.