Fighting indifference
FOR most of Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Bruno, I had to turn away, cringing at the sheer squirmishness on the screen. The relentless gross satire of Euro campness, celebrity culture, gay excess and American redneck homophobia.
Bruno is about a gay Austrian fashionista who goes to the US to seek fame and fortune. It is yet another satire that employs coarse parodies of sex to show us the prejudices that lie beneath the surface.
Like Borat before it, most of the film provoked murmurs of “no, no” in the audience, followed by “hands-over-face” discomfort. The important difference between the two is that people laughed much more at Borat. The combination of ambush interviews and gross humour was new then.
Bruno did not feature many Jewish moments to speak of: a minor confusion between Hamas and hummous, the gay appropriation of Orthodox garb, a couple of pro-Austrian references to Hitler.
Several critics have suggested that Baron Cohen has run out of humour and the excess of his style is now being laid bare. We will have to wait for a few more films to make that judgement.
Funny or infantile, confronting or contrived, the one thing that everyone will remember is the visceral power of Baron Cohen’s social commentary. You feel it in your stomach and the tensing of your muscles. Ali G, Borat and Bruno form a body of work that can’t be ignored.
And that is, literally, Baron Cohen’s underlying motivation behind his outrageous brand of humour.
He is an Orthodox Jew, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, and is on record as saying he wants to highlight the role of indifference in what happened to European Jewry. In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2006, which the magazine claimed was the only interview he had given as himself, Baron Cohen said: “When I was in university, there was this major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw, who said, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.’
“I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.”
When his song in Borat, Throw The Jew Down The Well, was enthusiastically received, he told the magazine: “Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism.”
This sheds an interesting light on the comedian’s sensibility: create a character or situation profoundly disgusting to flush out the prejudices we feel comfortable about being expressed in response. The offence of the agent provocateur justifies the prejudice, so to speak. Whether it’s about anti-Semitism, jingoism or homophobia.
In some ways, this modus operandi is expressing the classic Holocaust survivor traits: paranoia and heightened sensitivity.
But the Borat-Bruno axis of excess has gained a real-life relevance through the¬† death of Michael Jackson. The singer’s untimely death unleashed an outpouring of grief, reverence and adoration that clarified his status as a pop-culture god.
In the torrent of tributes, the unpalatable side of his character was at best excused and at worst whitewashed (excuse the pun): his transformation from black to white skin, his dangling of a baby, his unresolved involvement with young boys.
And his apparent antipathy to Jews. In 1995, Jackson wrote a song titled They don’t care about us that included the lyric: “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me”. Jackson later apologised for the lyrics and removed them from the song.
In a 2005 court case, tapes were broadcast of a voice message Jackson had left for one of his former advisers. “They suck … they’re like leeches,” Jackson is heard saying. “It’s a conspiracy. The Jews do it on purpose.” He was by that time divorced from his former Jewish wife, Debbie Rowe, the mother of his two children.
So many people seem happy to forget one person’s flaws and prejudices. Baron Cohen is intent on ensuring that the rest of us do not remain indifferent.
Michael Visontay lectures in media at the University of NSW.