Borat and Cognitive Dissonance
4 Comments Published by ginny on Sunday, November 12, 2006 at 8:43 PM.
I had a delightful (if guiltily unproductive) day yesterday thrift-and-vintage shopping with Gail and Maggie and then watching Borat and The Goonies with Gail, Maggie, Tim, and Gabe.
I'm glad I saw Borat, but, as I told both Jamie and Chrissy this morning, there's still a place in me that hurts from it – like the hurt caused by watching The Office, only worse. Why do I feel that way? For one thing, a lot of the effect of Borat is shaming – the shame of recognition, I guess you could call it. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't, since if you laugh at Borat's maladjusted prejudices you are in some way buying into the very dialectic of degradation you intended to deride (the alliteration just happened, I swear). But then the other option is to laugh at the deeply troubling and moronic behavior of the Americans he interviews, which entails conceding not only the equation between "ignorant foreigner" and "knowledgeable American," but also the impossibility of dismissing any of the racism, irrationality, crudity, and ignorance as freakish – all viewpoints are equally freakish, and thus all are equally naturalized.
Of course, that's the founding principal of Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy – or satire, more properly – but being as this is my first real exposure to him (I saw Talladega Nights and Madagascar, both of which he acted in, but that's different), this is the first real thought I've given it.
It's making me think a lot about the reading I've been doing on "reality" and celebrity pursuant to my still-only-hypothetical paper on American Idol this semester. One of the essays I read yesterday described the way we interact with media in terms of the "adjacent realities" of the mediascape and the tangible world thus:
Sacha Cohen's comedy removes the perception of that difference of adjacent realities, or rather, collapses them: unlike the gamedoc (i.e., Survivor, Big Brother, American Idol, etc.), where the audience derives pleasure from the perception of television life as separate from but adjacent to everyday life, Borat suggests that these two worlds – mediascape and everyday – are not so much adjacent realities as adjacent illusions, both fabricated to support an entirely different set of (shameful) illusions about the world in which we life. The suggestion that reality is an illusion, or that film is an illusion, or that both are illusions, is of course nothing new – both Platonism and postmodernism depend upon such thinking. But what's striking about Borat is that both "illusory realities" (an awkward term, I know) act as lenses with which to refocus the camera's moral eye (and I do think this camera has a moral eye) on the viewer's own subjectivity. The viewer finds herself in the awkward position of being all subjects and all objects in a disgraceful and yet terrifically entertaining spectacle – the gladiator, the lion, the plebe and the prole all at once.
It leads, I think, to a cognitively dissonant shock – thus the shame of recognition. The shame I'm talking about isn't the shame of being caught in a lie, but of being desirous of the act of lying itself. What's exposed in Borat is the act of self-mythologizing we all necessarily engage in, on both a personal and a national level, during the process of our own self-fashioning.
Now that I write that, I find it odd that I would consider that shameful. I'm hyper-conscious at all times of self-fashioning. Like a good postmodernist (which I think – I’m afraid? – we all are), I never stop interrogating the way in which I am choosing to tell my own story. I am hyper-conscious of life as a performance. "Candid Camera," in a sense, has ceased to be a shock for me, because I accept life as an endless series of surveillances – as many critics of reality television have argued, one thing the popularity of shows like BB or AI indicate is that people consider constant availability to surveillance "real," desirable, or at the very least acceptable. I choose – via this blog, for one thing – to constantly and consciously re-construct my life for viewing.
And yet, I'm disturbed (and amused, and disturbed by my own amusement) by the cognitive dissonance that Borat aroused in me – disturbed by being so pointedly directed to examine my own amusement; disturbed by the satire; disturbed by real people's ability to parody themselves; disturbed by my desire to feel affection for or find redemption in the embodiment of stereotype; disturbed when there is a lack of said redemption or affection-provoking qualities. Maybe it's Brechtian? Maybe I'm being violently shaken out of my theatrical complacency? But no – I really don't think I have the same theatrical complacency Brecht posited – and I've never (this, too, is a potentially shameful admission) really liked what I perceived Brecht to be saying.
And that's because, really, I take the audience to be far more active, far more conscious to begin with than I think Brecht gives it credit for. So maybe what I’m trying to identify about Borat has to do with the idea that I may be failing that consciousness as a viewer. The movie causes me to interrogate my own strategies of taste, of self-performance and of performance-evaluation, and that's uncomfortable, although also enjoyable. It's like a workout, a little, only it's a workout of the subjectivity or something.
I'm still not sure I've really gotten at it, actually. I think I've actually managed to sidestep the question of "reality," and I'm also treating the movie as if it were really very pointedly moral, which, though I believe that, is a position that requires significant ideological defense or analysis. How can such a carnivalesque/grotesque comedy be moral? Isn't the grotesque explicitly amoral? And how come I tend to identify almost all modern stories as grotesque? These are questions I need to think about harder.
In the meantime, if you haven't seen Borat, you probably should – another thing I've sidestepped in this entry is that it is really, really, really funny.
1Lewis, Justin. "The Meaning of Real Life." Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. Ed. Laurie Oulette and Susan Murray. New York: New York UP, 2004: 288-302.
I'm glad I saw Borat, but, as I told both Jamie and Chrissy this morning, there's still a place in me that hurts from it – like the hurt caused by watching The Office, only worse. Why do I feel that way? For one thing, a lot of the effect of Borat is shaming – the shame of recognition, I guess you could call it. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't, since if you laugh at Borat's maladjusted prejudices you are in some way buying into the very dialectic of degradation you intended to deride (the alliteration just happened, I swear). But then the other option is to laugh at the deeply troubling and moronic behavior of the Americans he interviews, which entails conceding not only the equation between "ignorant foreigner" and "knowledgeable American," but also the impossibility of dismissing any of the racism, irrationality, crudity, and ignorance as freakish – all viewpoints are equally freakish, and thus all are equally naturalized.
Of course, that's the founding principal of Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy – or satire, more properly – but being as this is my first real exposure to him (I saw Talladega Nights and Madagascar, both of which he acted in, but that's different), this is the first real thought I've given it.
It's making me think a lot about the reading I've been doing on "reality" and celebrity pursuant to my still-only-hypothetical paper on American Idol this semester. One of the essays I read yesterday described the way we interact with media in terms of the "adjacent realities" of the mediascape and the tangible world thus:
One of the features of public life in the mediascape is that for most of us, most of the time it is beyond our tactile experience – it is something that goes on elsewhere. We can accept the veracity of two distinct realities: the one we live in and the mediascape…In contemporary culture, these two worlds are juxtaposed so routinely that they seem to be two aspects of a single epistemological category…The other world overlaps with our own: it is part of us, and we feel that we are part of it…There is evidence that even though we may only consciously refer to one reality, we can identify two adjacent realities, each with its own conditions of existence…The gamedoc epitomizes these two epistemes: it places people from the everyday world and thrusts them into an adjacent tele-reality. 1
Sacha Cohen's comedy removes the perception of that difference of adjacent realities, or rather, collapses them: unlike the gamedoc (i.e., Survivor, Big Brother, American Idol, etc.), where the audience derives pleasure from the perception of television life as separate from but adjacent to everyday life, Borat suggests that these two worlds – mediascape and everyday – are not so much adjacent realities as adjacent illusions, both fabricated to support an entirely different set of (shameful) illusions about the world in which we life. The suggestion that reality is an illusion, or that film is an illusion, or that both are illusions, is of course nothing new – both Platonism and postmodernism depend upon such thinking. But what's striking about Borat is that both "illusory realities" (an awkward term, I know) act as lenses with which to refocus the camera's moral eye (and I do think this camera has a moral eye) on the viewer's own subjectivity. The viewer finds herself in the awkward position of being all subjects and all objects in a disgraceful and yet terrifically entertaining spectacle – the gladiator, the lion, the plebe and the prole all at once.
It leads, I think, to a cognitively dissonant shock – thus the shame of recognition. The shame I'm talking about isn't the shame of being caught in a lie, but of being desirous of the act of lying itself. What's exposed in Borat is the act of self-mythologizing we all necessarily engage in, on both a personal and a national level, during the process of our own self-fashioning.
Now that I write that, I find it odd that I would consider that shameful. I'm hyper-conscious at all times of self-fashioning. Like a good postmodernist (which I think – I’m afraid? – we all are), I never stop interrogating the way in which I am choosing to tell my own story. I am hyper-conscious of life as a performance. "Candid Camera," in a sense, has ceased to be a shock for me, because I accept life as an endless series of surveillances – as many critics of reality television have argued, one thing the popularity of shows like BB or AI indicate is that people consider constant availability to surveillance "real," desirable, or at the very least acceptable. I choose – via this blog, for one thing – to constantly and consciously re-construct my life for viewing.
And yet, I'm disturbed (and amused, and disturbed by my own amusement) by the cognitive dissonance that Borat aroused in me – disturbed by being so pointedly directed to examine my own amusement; disturbed by the satire; disturbed by real people's ability to parody themselves; disturbed by my desire to feel affection for or find redemption in the embodiment of stereotype; disturbed when there is a lack of said redemption or affection-provoking qualities. Maybe it's Brechtian? Maybe I'm being violently shaken out of my theatrical complacency? But no – I really don't think I have the same theatrical complacency Brecht posited – and I've never (this, too, is a potentially shameful admission) really liked what I perceived Brecht to be saying.
And that's because, really, I take the audience to be far more active, far more conscious to begin with than I think Brecht gives it credit for. So maybe what I’m trying to identify about Borat has to do with the idea that I may be failing that consciousness as a viewer. The movie causes me to interrogate my own strategies of taste, of self-performance and of performance-evaluation, and that's uncomfortable, although also enjoyable. It's like a workout, a little, only it's a workout of the subjectivity or something.
I'm still not sure I've really gotten at it, actually. I think I've actually managed to sidestep the question of "reality," and I'm also treating the movie as if it were really very pointedly moral, which, though I believe that, is a position that requires significant ideological defense or analysis. How can such a carnivalesque/grotesque comedy be moral? Isn't the grotesque explicitly amoral? And how come I tend to identify almost all modern stories as grotesque? These are questions I need to think about harder.
In the meantime, if you haven't seen Borat, you probably should – another thing I've sidestepped in this entry is that it is really, really, really funny.
1Lewis, Justin. "The Meaning of Real Life." Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. Ed. Laurie Oulette and Susan Murray. New York: New York UP, 2004: 288-302.
Labels: audience, morality, movies, representation, reviews
Good post on Borat. I agree with most of what you wrote. I know that one thing that irritated me about the movie is that I couldn't tell how much had been staged, and how much was improvisation - left me with a lingering distrust or sense of unease with it.
I like your ideas...
The movie was great. Making fun of americans is really too easy though... It is really an absurd nation. I have figured that out for myself, living here for 2.5 yrs.
How about an analysis that addresses the issue of what exactly it would take for americans to pull their heads out of their collective asses for a minute or so? My vote is on another Depression or some similar catastrophe.
Then again, maybe that is to optimistic. whether American Idol (or whatever) is produced by Fox or some Chinese MegaCorp is really irrelevant given the fact that it works well on Yanks.
Some people come to the US and think that they can freeload off of hard working citiznes. Unfortunatly because of the election of lieberals in this country we cannot kick you back to where you belong! When you are waiting in lines for bread and milk in your Socialist country I bet you will be sorry you said anythin bad about the USA then!!!
Now excuse me I have to F*** your girlfriend and watch uniiko, island of magic.
Jess? Jess W. is that you? Masquerading as a HATER?
Man, I love my country. Even when it's being stupid. Especially when it's being stupid, becaues that's when it needs it most.
I also, DeadMike, love American Idol! Man, I love it! And with eyes wide open, too -- I'm reading about this theory of the operational aesthetic -- we're a nation of P.T. Barnum-lovers. We love it when somebody tries to pull the wool over our eyes, because then we get to try and figure out how they're doing it. It's a much more optimistic view of pop culture than the one that asserts "the masses" are zombies. Cause that's clearly not true.