March 17, 2007: Media response #6

I just saw the movie Borat for the first time this week. It's so funny because I've heard so many people talking about it so much and I was really interested to actually see it myself. Now I can add to all of those conversations. It seems to be a pretty even split between people who are offended by this movie and people who think that it is hilarious. I would definitely fall into the second category but I can see how some people would be offended. I guess that I think it's funny because a lot of it is just making fun of how we let people get away with acting really terribly if they are foreign just because we think they "don't understand" what is going on. In this movie, Borat comes to the United States from Kazakhstan as a journalist. He is supposedly making a film about American to show back home. Because of this he interviews and thus insults many different kinds of people.

The parts that many people find offensive have to do with Borat constantly insulting Jews and woman. At first I didn't really know what to make of this because if you take what he is saying word for word it could very well be offensive. I have thought about it a lot, though, and I think that the point is that people tolerate him saying insulting things simply because they believe that it is his "culture." When Borat insults women and Jews people just kind of laugh and look uncomfortable whereas I think that if a United States citizen said some of the things that he was saying then people would be more likely to speak up against it.

Another part of this film that fascinated me was the part in which Borat interacts with a large group of southern conservatives at a rodeo. I was really intrigued by this because Borat gives an extremely racist speech in front of the crowd and they spend the whole time cheering but he then proceeds to insult the national anthem. This insults the crowd a lot. I think that the kind of person in the crowd at that rodeo is extremely contradictory. Those people are amused by racist comments and often put people down simply for not agreeing with them but if anyone insults their beliefs they are extremely insulted and angry.

As a whole I found this movie to be very interesting and I thought it brought up a lot of really good points about the way that people behave in our country. One thing that I didn't like was the fact that it did choose a specific country to make fun of. I think that it would have been better to have Borat come from some unidentified slavic country. It isn't really fair to the people of Kazakhstan to portray their citizens in this manor. These people are portrayed as extremely racist as well as very sexist and primitive as well as very obsessed with prostitution and beastiality. I don't like that element of the movie especially because 2 of my very young cousins are adopted from Kazakhstan. I would feel embarrassed to talk about this movie in front of them and I think that seeing it would make them feel very bad about their country. The film company could have been much more tactful when it comes to this element of the movie.