Articles

Borat Subsequent Movie Film: the Collapse of Western Civilization

by Umar Nizarudeen 

Borat 2 not only fails as a film, but breaks down as a document of humanity. A ballroom dance sequence, where the central character introduces his menstruating daughter, amidst elegant debutantes, where she goes attempts to entice with a show of her oriental menstrual `moonblood’. If western civilization and its commonwealth were to survive a thousand more years, then this sequence shall be its testament. Babies will be christened with the film running in the background, and also, marriages consummated.

The suspicion one gets is that the Borat character and his daughter Tutar, who is about to be offered as a bride to the Vice President Mike Pence, is at least loosely based on the celebrity figure from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Malal Yusufzai. At 15, she was shot by Taliban extremists for standing up for the educational rights of girls. She survived the attack and became the centre of a global campaign fighting for the rights of women.  As the youngest even Nobel laureate, she also has been a visitor to the White House, meeting then President Barack Obama and his family. Unless it is being developed as a defense against decent aliens, `Borat 2’ should qualify as the most hate-filled human document ever, that made people laugh and discuss it over dinner parties, chortling into their glasses of wine.

What marks the second Borat film out is the father-daughter relationship where it focusses its humour  on. Ziauddin Yusufzai has been a celebrity of sort, following the ascension to stardom of his teenage daughter. He eminently supported his daughter through the crisis and in the process, also gave her the space to grow, far beyond himself. Ziauddin Yusufzai, with his impeccable manners and dignified mien, is as far away as one can imagine from a Borat-like character. But what goes by the name `masala’ seems to be peddle under the name `satire’ in Hollywood. Western civilization is all the more poorer for it.

The mediatized world we live in, can create chimerical apparitions that can alter the course of global thought. Borat and Tutar are fragments of Sacha Baron Cohen’s fantasy, but Malala and Ziauddin Yusufzai are not. They comprise, not any ordinary father-daughter duo, but a lodestone for millions of girl children and their parents suffering under constant bombardment and warfare. The immense sacrifices that the Yusufzai have made for the cause of universal education have made them honoured and respected in what still is essentially a society which puts immense store by atavistic notions of respect and honour.

The analogy might seem far fetched, but there is very little about this film that isn’t. Although most of the criticisms against the film were directed at its negative portrayal of the nation of  Kazakhstan and its people, the movie appallingly fails to do justice to its commitment as a human document. It announces the advent of post-humour. When you are scraping the bottom of the comic pail, menstrual blood comes gurgling up, apparently. While having a bit of bawdy humour on the side seems fine (come on, even Shakespeare had his share of it), earning global encomium for the same is not.

Samuel Beckett wrote a pared down, elemental play, `Waiting for Godot’. But Borat 2 is humanity pared down to its ground zero. Beckett’s farce makes no truth claims, whereas `Borat 2’ is that sugar-coated bitter pill about the bigotedness to end all bigotedness. What 9/11 did for the Taliban, Baron Cohen sets out to achieve for the US. There certainly is calumnious lore ringing around in heads, apropos Ghenghiz Khan, Hulago and other marauders from Central Asia, laying Europe to waste. This makes the hatred easier to breakdown and assimilate and then propagate. The hatred is visceral. The status of women in the orient, becomes a pretext to decimate it.

If ever there was an intellectual equivalent to Borat, that would be Slavoj Žižek. Žižek claims that essentialism operates through exceptions. The fact that something is not saturated, brimming with a certain quality only goes on to prove its ascription to that particular quality. Essentialism, like power operates in capillary ways.

There is a strange coincidence that when the Malayalam writer OV Vijayan wrote his much-celebrated novel `The Legends of Khasak’, he chose the title from the former Soviet Republic since it was familiar to him from anti-Soviet polemics emanating from the West in the 1960s, which lambasted the enslavement of the central Asian republics under the imperial hegemony of Moscow. There was hatred then, there is hatred now. There was Communism then, there is Islam now.

The very fact that Kazakhstan was part of the erstwhile USSR seems to have dislodged it from the cultured scheme of things and rendered it `unhuman’ and unworthy of the normal courtesies accorded to humans. An entire people are turned into `Homo Sacers’, anyone with control over the airwaves can Moonblood others.

Genghis Khan, Stalin, Trump, so goes the satirical logic of Borat. Henri Bergson in his work `On Laughter’ remarks that only entities and qualities pertaining to humanity can evoke laughter. Even when we laugh at animals, it is at their quasi-human antics. But Borat 2 bores its way into post-Bergsonian apocalyptic humour where moonblooding or setting fire to someone’s house is the coolest thing to do.

The humanism of the victims, Kazakhstan and Kazakhs in this case, is intact. It is the perpetrators, the US in this case, that it exposes. As Gandhi is supposed to have said, an eye for an eye would make the whole world blind’. Borat 2 gouges the eyes out and then some more; it goes inside the skull for the rest of the gooey stuff. The mankini moonblooding brutal vehemence of violence, on the very people who commit it, sears their humanity, souls and love. Soul is a term one should cautiously use in satire. Yet one feels for the soul of America. Whether it has one? As the late Malayalam poet Ayyappa Panikkar once quipped, `we’d never know’.

About the Author:

Umar Nizarudeen is with the University of Calicut, India. He has a PhD in Bhakti Studies from the Centre for English Studies in JNU, New Delhi. His poems have been published in Vayavya, Muse India, Culture Cafe Journal of the British Library, Ibex Press Year’s Best Selection, and also broadcast by the All India Radio.

Comments are closed.