Borat, the movie, so provocatively foregrounds prejudice that you can easily overlook that it’s also a portrayal of journalism.
True, this is not a film you go to see because it is about a reporter. That Borat is a fictitious Kazakhstan journalist is incidental to filmmaker Sacha Baron Cohen who created and acted the boorish character.
The primary purpose of the movie — Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit of Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, in full — is not to make a monkey of the media, but to get you caught up in the outrageousness of Borat’s antics, and allow an emerging realisation that, in fact, the game’s on you.
Certainly, the film’s humour trips you up, leaving you deep in your own unconscious reservoirs of bigotry. For instance, laughing at Borat the country bumpkin mistaking a hotel’s wood-panelled lift for the room being allotted to him.
But much as Borat simultaneously shames and amuses, the movie also triggers some musing about the boundaries of journalism, documentary and entertainment.
By exploiting the name of a real country, Kazakhstan, and using the persona of a television reporter who goes on to interview real people (rather than actors), Cohen goes beyond the candid-camera genre and into a realm of reality TV not far from journalism.
As United States commentator Tom Hall has noted, “for all intents and purposes, the film’s subjects are interacting with a real foreign journalist in an environment of their own making (a crucial difference), the only difference being that the journalist is, in fact, not what he says he is. How this is different than any other undercover journalism, I’m not so sure.”
Agreed, and even if few journalists are quite as prejudiced as the character of Borat himself, this is not a defining difference between the movie and journalistic documentary.
Instead, what’s significant is, as Hall points out, that despite us knowing that Borat the character is a fiction, this doesn’t diminish the reality which the film documents.
Indeed, Borat’s reportage is no less credible than those of many TV story-tellers who themselves often play a larger-than-life part in their stories.
For the movie as for TV journalism, many of the subjects are paid to appear, either by the media wanting their time or by their institutions where their job is a spokesperson.
In many cases, many interviewees are also equally victims — captured on camera and placed in an edited context in ways they would probably prefer not to be. In both the making of the movie and of television journalism, the subjects are sometimes misled about what they’re getting into.
One critic describes this as a kind of “gotcha journalism”, and the genre is also dubbed “mockumentary”. It’s true that the film does have a mean streak, like much tabloid journalism, even if the end may justify the means. Also, the parts that are cruel to the subjects are all too often the result of them crucifying themselves.
However, besides the similarities between Borat’s practice and conventional journalism, there’s also a contrast that in effect constitutes a critique of journalism.
Borat allows viewers to adopt a superior-to-the-subjects — in fact, a politically correct — value set. This lets you, while appalled, chortle at the naive and often unpalatable views of Borat’s interviewees. But Cohen then sabotages your pleasure by making you ask yourself why you’re laughing: what’s being elicited about your own values and voyeurism.
In a similar vein, the movie sabotages the complacency of journalism through the results of Borat’s interviews. It shows just how blurred the genres are regarding truth and fiction and the making of meaning. Even while entertaining, the movie provides insight into “truths” about US society that are seldom served up in reports of press conferences and staged media events.
Underlining this point is the way some US media decided to play along with the Borat character — interviewing him as if he were a real person. Borat himself takes no prisoners in his movie, and it’s therefore unedifying to see journalists voluntarily falling prey to the fantasy (incidentally giving the movie free publicity).
Such forays out of journalism, and into entertainment, have attracted some deserved criticism. One person has argued that “the viewer will scratch his head and wonder where he should turn for serious journalism, for information that actually is going to improve his life and his understanding of the world”.
The implication is that “true” journalism should keep its distinctiveness from what happens in the Borat film. Indeed, this imperative is probably all the more real because Cohen’s character not only pulls the rug out from under much of the pretentiousness of the news media by emulating it so closely (and crudely). Indeed, when the Kazakh journo successfully infiltrates news as a real-life source, we also know we are in need of some distinctions.