Two years ago, my mother lured me to a dinner party hosted by one of her friends from KC Jewish Singles with vague promises of free food and good company. At the time, Borat had just been released and my mother's friends, who don't exactly follow real current events, soon found themselves in a heated debate about all of the supposed anti-Semitism contained in the movie.
This, of course, is a problem that all good satirists eventually encounter. Satire can only capture our imagination and temporarily fool our sense of reason by quietly bypassing our mental checkpoints and masquerading as "the real thing" while planting seeds of doubt along the way. Minutes or even hours after the movie has been seen and the article has been read, it is up to us, the reader and the viewer, to have an "aha" moment and discover the real message under all the slapstick vulgarity. Good satire, then, is a shared experience created as much by the reader/viewer as by the artist/comedian.
The nature of the relationship between the reader/viewer and the artist makes satire a far more intellectual experience than any other form of comedy. For this reason, satire acts like a slow-release capsule that may not deliver an immediate punch but that certainly leaves a lasting impression. Margarte Cho's stand-up routines, for example, help me think through the Korean-American experience but often leave me as fleetingly as they came when the routine ends. Articles or clips from The Onion, on the other hand, stay with me for years. This article about Hamas supposedly convening a major summit with all Israelis, for example, brilliantly intertwines the current situation in the Middle East with the historical legacy of the Holocaust (a difficult feat, no doubt). After reading the "Hamas" article, I found myself thinking about the role of collective guilt in American foreign policy and Iran's complicated stance toward the state of Israel for hours.
However, when I tried to explain that Borat was Cohen's attempt to critique deep-seated anti-Semetism in a way that would provoke thought and discussion, my mother's acquantance threw an aggitated glare my way. Clearly, the only "shared experience" this woman wanted to create involved the dinner table petitioning me to shut up.
Much to my surprise, however, this woman turned out to be right. Borat was an offensive film, but certainly not in the way that she had invisioned. In the course of carefully planning and executing scenes that brilliantly provoked and prodded our most base assumptions about Jews, Cohen may have inadvertantly (although probably advertantly) exploited another group: the Roma.
The grand irony in all of this is that Borat was supposed to make us think and learn about anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Long committed to the equality of all people and religions on paper, the Soviet Union turned out to be one of the most anti-Semitic empires of the 20th century (if Bruno is in fact the second greatest Austrian of the 20th century, than the Soviet Union is perhaps the second most anti-Semitic state during that same time period). When the Soviet Union dissolved, Jews believed that they were being scapegoated by ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, and seventy years of pent-up anti-Semitism sent millions of Jewish regufees fleeing to Israel and the United States.
As one of the many Jewish transplants from Ukraine, I find myself particularly interested in minority relations throughout the former USSR. Last summer, I travelled to Ukraine and interviewed impoverished members of the Romani community in order to gain a better sense of why the Roma, persecuted during the Holocaust like the Jews, have failed thrive in a post-World War II environment that sympathizes with (and pehraps pities) those targeted by the Third Reich (though certainly less so now than in the 1950's). I left Ukraine with no real answers, and no real clues.
I was, however, struck by the hostility that many Roma harbor towards the Jewish people. One activist, for example, believes that Jews siphoned Holocaust reparation money intended for Roma victims. Others insist that the Jews are degenerate and have infiltrated the Verkhovna Rada's hardline nationalist faction. Any initial assumptions that I had about mutual solidarity between these two groups of people were quickly shattered by bitter racism on both sides.
Nearly two years after watching Borat and laughing at allegedly uneducated "Kazakh" villagers, I watched the mockumentary once more last Octorber and realized, much to my horror, that the Kazakh villagers (who, by the way, are technically a Turkic people) were in fact Roma ("gypsies"). Like Ukrainian Roma, these individuals live on the margins of society. While their shamshackle houses may be amusing to a Western audience, inside those homes Romani women suffer severe domestic abuse at the hands of their husbands, and almost every Romani community is faced with rampant tuberculosis, severe water sanitation problems, hunger, environmental injustice and a littany of other hardships.
Why Cohen would exploit the Roma in this manner is beyond me, particularly because the Roma were never identified as such. Anti-Semitism in the movie is only "funny" because it serves a purpose in the plotline; the exploitation of the Roma, on the other hand, is far more sinister. Instead of fbeing incorporated into the storyline, the Roma are shoved under the table and hidden from view.
Knowing all of this, and having spoken to dozens of Roma, I felt guilty for going into a movie theater last week and gleefully watching Bruno. My moral qualms not only involved the knowledge that I was financially supporting a man who had played an awful trick on the Roma but also hinged on the fear that he might exploit someone else in a manner that served no larger purpose. With reports surfacing that the alleged terrorist in the Bruno film is actually a former terrorist who now promots nonviolence, these fears may be coming to fruition.
With a reformed Palestinian terrorist and a village full of Roma humiliated on film, Cohen walks a fine line when it comes to groups who traditionally have shaky relations with Jews. And, in the end, this might be part of Cohen's larger plan. For the time being, however, it seems that Cohen's message on film and his behavior in "real life" conflict in ways that promote negative stereotypes of Jews. This is, unfortunately, something that we have become accustomed to. Now, as always, the joke is on us.
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