Anti-American?

Rating: Null/10 (28 December 2006)

NOTE: I'm reposting a message board entry regarding alleged anti-Americanism in Borat. It wound up saying pretty much how I felt about the film, so I think it's worth posting as a comment, as well.
------------ Yes, a lot of the hapless victims in the film are just "being folks," and people anywhere would respond the same way. When you consider it in a piecemeal fashion, there's no need to see this film as particularly anti-American.
However.
For one thing, I think people like to watch others doing what they do best. Cohen has an undeniable gift of comic verite chutzpah.
I think this film is a kind of Rorschach. When you collide the aforementioned unmitigated comic cheek of Borat against all these features of "normal" society, trinkets spill out. This film then lays them all out for our delectation, like a comic garage sale; everyone is going find something they'll want to "take home" i.e., laugh at. For instance, I thought Borat's infiltration of a modern, "charismatic" megachurch was priceless. We get to take it all in; the hint of twisted antiprogressive politics (ex. the church/state nexus), resentment of science, the bogus speaking in tongues. The film takes us places many of us will never go, and we get to bask in the experience.
There are little "inside" gems, like Borat's meeting with Alan Keyes. You can't really savor the situation unless you have some background on Keyes; his "in-crowd" status with the fundies, his de rigueur doctrinaire stance on homosexuality, and his daughter having come out as a lesbian. There's a lot in this movie that rises like a heady aroma from the fecund loam of middle American culture. The scene at the rodeo is probably the basis for claims of an anti-American subtext. I've been to large social gatherings of staunch, nationalistic Americans, milked for patriotic fervor by play-to-the-crowd "entertainers." Given that, how hilariously cathartic and timely to see that scene with Borat.
His scene in the civil war antique shop is either a bludgeon or a scalpel. You're going to love it or hate it. It's either poorly sublimated aggression, or it cuts the Gordian Knot. Your call.
In short, if you analyze Borat, scene-by-scene, you'll miss something. Sort of like the Old Testament: If you analyze it scene-by-scene, you may conclude it's a load of rubbish (many do). But I feel that when you take it all in, the connections are made, and wisdom can be obtained. And real wisdom obtains you real benefits.
There's something wise in Borat. That's the important thing.
----------- Writing again, 12/16/2008
I just realized that I think I can explain the wisdom and overall genius of Borat.
It's a film fantasy on The Idea of a "Great Nation."
That's all there is to it; really. Borat does to national pride what Python's Meaning of Life does to the search for life's true meaning.
If you just keep that idea in the back of your mind, you'll see every scene weaves together into a larger brocade. If you stand back and look at the finished brocade, you'll see the clever hidden message, "Wake up, America; the laurel branches dried up and all the leaves fell off, a *long* time ago."
And *that*, my friends, is the wisdom of "Borat." I presume he will take this distilled wisdom back to his home country to, uh, make better it.