While neverminding the discourse between what's faux/real and improvised/staged, the moviefilm that is Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan doesn't generate as much interest in what the mockumentary tells us about ordinary America as much as the loose plot that structures its telling tells us about American narrative. So goes the story of Borat Sagdiyev, a foreign journalist who arrives in New York and — like Horatio Alger, Jack Kerouac and Navin Johnson — gradually makes his way westward in a travelogue that, while attempting to make a spectacle of the subject of ordinary America, effects, in an oddly more revealing-about-America way, the more awkward drama of his self-becoming.
This drama is, of course, consummated in the scene at the suburban mega-church; a scenario in which our hero becomes culturally/socially (if not formally) American by accepting Jesus as his savior and converting (body and soul) to Christianity. The narrative of how one's subjectivity can be left up for grabs and how that identity can attain rough parity through the potential of spiritual renewal is forever classic. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe a century-and-a-half before him, Sacha Baron Cohen makes intractably connected the possibility that Borat can become simultaneously "American" and self-aware through the rigors of Christian piety. Uncle Tom's Cabin remains a historical example-par-excellence of a popular fiction that ventures to articulate the bonds between American freedom and Christian faith: with the book acting as a covert ideological vehicle for Stowe to express modern mainstream evangelism while politically contending for not only the abolition of slavery but also for women's suffrage. Therein resides the more serious humour of Borat, and the ironic turn that arises from a character who confuses those same civil freedoms as a license to ill. With the US and A idealized not so much as a nation of liberty as it is a fantasized site for antisocial, libidinal behaviour, Borat travesties the more-or-less worst potential of total freedom through the vulgar sentiments of racism and misogyny; a canny surfeit, that all the while comically diminishes (in typical covert fashion) the altruistic ambitions behind cultural learnings.
* En Vague had a peculiar experience watching Borat in the middle of the Netherlands. Not just for the odd opportunity of communally pausing for an intermission in the middle of the screening, but also for the delirious way in which the intertitles for the movie appeared in Kazakh, then English, and then Dutch. Language as infinite regress!
