Berkeley Loves Borat

I saw the new Borat movie this weekend. I hate to add to the hype already surrounding it, but I need to get something off my chest: it angered me that the crowds were surprisingly old. That is, there was a lot of gray hair in the audience. I don't hate old people. It's just indicative of a situation that I always knew existed, but that annoys me everytime I have to confront it. Let me explain.

In case you live under a rock in Uzbekistan, Borat is just Sacha Baron Cohen (an Englishman) playing a man who makes people uncomfortable with his apparent lack of English skills and ignorance of Western customs. He pretends to be a journalist from Kazakhstan who was sent to the "US and A" to figure out why Americans are so successful. Cohen uses Kazakhstan as a stand-in for an obscure foreign country, and most of the facts he presents about this country are totally fake or embellished immensely.

He interviews real people who have been duped into thinking he is an actual reporter from Kazakhstan. In these interviews he reveals his own (fake) viewpoints on hygiene, prostitution, modern technology, appropriate social customs, or women's rights. Each interview segment ha two main methods of getting a laugh.

1. The subject either squirms or gets incredibly angry. They rarely get visibly angry because they want to give this smiling foreign man the benefit of the doubt and respect his customs. Example: Borat does not understand a toilet, poops in a bag, brings it to the hostess of a dinner party, and asks what to do with the waste.
   
2. The bigger pay-off: get the interview subject to say something racist, anti-Semitic, bigoted, or absurd. Example: he gets a gun shop owner to reluctantly say that a certain handgun is great for killing Jews.
   

The aging "liberal hippie douche" (LHD) (thanks South Park!) population of Berkeley picks up on the second one. As a super-liberal friend of mine put it: "Borat really highlights what's wrong with America." I strongly disagree with this statement. I certainly think that anti-Semitism is wrong and that women need to have the same rights as men; I am, after all, a liberal. I get pissed off when people from either extreme (radical or reactionary) jump on an ambiguous issue and elevate it to a clear case of X (where X = "moral decay", "Republican hypocrisy", "activist judges", or "how Bush is going to destroy the world").

I don't want to make this post all about why I hate the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum. So back to my original point: older people don't really want to see a movie where a comedian makes fun of people and engages in potty humor. They didn't belong at this movie! These unthinking liberal drones in Berkeley (old and young) popped up because "red state America was gonna get theirs!" They probably didn't show up at Jackass: Number Two; why would they show up at Borat?!

I DO like the fact that Borat was not as clear a case of Republican-bashing as the LHDs hoped. There is a lot of riffing on fake customs in Kazakhstan like the "Running of the Jew" (I'm sure this absurd joke was unappreciated by many there. After all, people hissed during the preview for Mel Gibson's new movie. Who hisses anymore? Geez). There was also an extended, homoerotic fight/wrestling match between two naked men that spilled out into a real estate convention. I was elated that a few of the aging LHDs walked out of the theater during this scene. It was a small victory.

I bet the people who walked out don't even support America's "War of Terror" or want George W. Bush to drink the blood of every Iraqi man, woman, and child.