Only Dimly Aware of a Certain Unease in the Air . . .
Mrs. P. and I will be attending the Borat movie this weekend. HBO recently ran a marathon of Ali G. shows, and we TiVo’ed the entire two seasons. It’s great fun watching Ali G. interviewing Dick Thornburgh, Boutros Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and the incredibly humorless Andy Rooney. Booyahkashah!
But one of the most striking scenes of the whole series — one that manages to be funny, but is also incredibly disturbing and even makes your skin crawl — is the one you can watch here. In it, Borat sings a cheerfully anti-Semitic song to a group of idiots in a bar, who are soon clapping along and chanting: “Throw the Jew down the well!”
Nice.
Here is a seemingly unrelated story that is in fact related:
The headmaster of my high school, Stephen Seleny, who grew up in Hungary, once told us a story I’ll never forget. Mr. Seleny’s father was a decent, tolerant man who was appalled by the ugly racist ideology of Hitler. So Mr. Seleny’s father went to a Nazi rally to see first-hand how crowds of people could treat such a monster with such worshipful reverence. At the end of the day, Mr. Seleny’s father returned crying. His son asked him why he was crying. Mr. Seleny’s father replied that he had gone to the Nazi rally. He had heard Hitler speak. He saw the crowd raising their arms in the Nazi salute.
And Mr. Seleny’s father had raised his hand as well, and cried: “Sieg Heil!”
The lesson is simple. Always think for yourself. Always. Humans have a built-in tendency to be sheep. Don’t fall into that trap.
UPDATE: Per See Dubya, rumor has it that the folks singing “Throw the Jew down the well” knew it was a comedy bit, and that Borat warmed up the audience with refrains of “throw your mother down the well” and “throw your sister down the well.” Whether this makes it all OK — or whether it’s the frog being boiled slowly — is for you, the reader, to decide.
UPDATE x2: Now Xrlq says in comments that boiled frog theory is wrong, too. My world is crashing down around me.
Yeah, but I’ve also heard that that scene was choreographd pretty carefully and the bar was told it was a comedy routine, and that a few verses that made that fact clear were edited out of the tape, so it looks like folks who were laughing at the antics of a comedian were protrayed as jew-haters.
Not that there isn’t a lot of anti-semitism out there, but that may have been a case of tricky editing.
I was reading somewhere on some blog that sometimes videotape doesn’t always tell the whole story…
See Dubya (fede1f) — 11/14/2006 @ 1:10 amMe, I’m guily of singing anti-Swedish Nazi ditties, myself.
Ah, here’s the source of what I said above about the editing in the bar scene.
See Dubya (fede1f) — 11/14/2006 @ 1:13 amInteresting. So they were *tricked* into joyously singing along with a song talking about throwing the Jew down the well.
Well, there you have it, then.
Patterico (de0616) — 11/14/2006 @ 1:14 amWell, follow the links and see. My experiences among people that go to kicker bars like that is that they’re not just burning through their Stetsons with incandescent jew-hatred. The comedy performance seems much more plausible to me.
Your point remains–even if someone says “hey, this is just for a movie”, don’t do stupid things like sing along to racist songs. Especially on camera.
That’s like when someone tells you they’ll give you Mardi Gras beads if you’ll make out with a guy on camera, but then they say, don’t worry, this won’t end up on the internet.
Last time I fall for that line.
See Dubya (fede1f) — 11/14/2006 @ 1:23 amAnother account of how the well scene was generated (via Steve Sailer).
James B. Shearer (5ce248) — 11/14/2006 @ 2:06 amHmmm,
paul from fl (967602) — 11/14/2006 @ 3:55 amWhat impact does it have that Borat is really Mischa Cohen? I mean, isn’t he a Jew?
“OK” is a relative term, I suppose, but selective editing turned an all-purpose-stupid song into a racist one, that certainly makes it a hell of a lot more OK than it appears in the film (or so I’ve heard – I haven’t seen it yet myself).
Besides, boiled frog theory is a bunch of crap, anyway.
Xrlq (f52b4f) — 11/14/2006 @ 5:49 amIt’s a schtick. People being filmed are aware of it and agree to it. Do people still think like that for real? Sure. Does Cohen’s routine expose it or perpetuate it? Your discision.
sam (159d86) — 11/14/2006 @ 7:01 amIf the bar crowd was in on the joke, you definitly can’t hold it against them for laughing and enjoying the song. I laughed my butt off at the insantity of that segment.
I kinda feel cheated, because if Borat really did a 2 1/2 hour show for these folks, I want to see more than just five minutes of it! I bet the verses about throwing the mother and sister down the well were pretty funny too.
That said, I’d like to know more about the football game and rodeo scenes. I guess those could have been accentuated through editing, too, but I’ve heard that Cohen had to be escorted from those events for his own protection.
I think Cohen is at his best when he gets knee-jerk reactions out of people. Like the way the crowd roars when he says he hopes Bush “kills every man woman and child in Iraq.” That sort of knee-jerk “support the troops” mentality, whatever they’re doing, is a great comment on why we’re in Iraq today. And the way he almost gets beat up when he dances with cheerleaders on the football field — the rage the fans show is frightening.
Another element people aren’t paying attention to is that the character Borat also demonstrates the sillyness of extreme racism. The “running of the jew” segment in the movie didn’t set anyone up — it just turned extreme anti-semetism into something absurdly comedic. I think that alone makes such ideas harder to spread. After seeing Borat the movie, I bet today’s youth are going to be a tougher sell for anyone looking to blame the jews for everything . . .
It’s also important to note that Borat isn’t just about exposing racism and other bias. He’s also a genius improviser of slapstick comedy, on the level of Chaplan. The scene where he stumbles into various pieces of china and glass in an antique shop, breaking everything, could have been in a silent movie — as could the drivers’ ed scene in the movie, where he’s trying to drink whiskey, and refuses to put both hands on the wheel.
Phil (88ab5b) — 11/14/2006 @ 7:54 amActually, the lesson is that crowd situations like the rallies will inherently cause this reaction. Sports events, although their purpose is not evil, are similar in effect. If a non-sports fan goes to a game, he/she will be swept up in the enthusiasm. I know this from my own personal experience.
Jim C. (85b830) — 11/14/2006 @ 5:58 pmThere was some serious editing that went into that video.
The thing I noticed was the clapping. The way it was edited, it sounds like people just started loudly clapping to the music. That struck me as manipulated.
Borat is playing a guitar, but with nowhere near enough talent and nowhere near enough singing talent to justify that sort of instant response.
Yeah, when a great musician like Johnny Cash starts belting out a song like “I walk the line” you can expect an instantaneous response.
But not to an unknown like Borat. No way. He would have to perform for a while to win the crowd over. And for them to get used to his music. Assuming that he actually did have alot of musical talent. Which he didn’t.
But in this video, it seemed to happen almost instantaneously. Which isn’t credible to me. So I believe that the theory that the crowd was in on the joke, or told to laugh and clap along for the joke/documentary film or whatever he portrayed it as to them.
If Borat is doing this just to get a laugh, more power to him. I’ve seen his movie. And it is hillarious. Me and my date laughed our heads off, even as we winced at some of the scenes.
But what if he is trying to use this to make some sort of serious point, or to point the finger of racism and anti-semitism? Well, then I’d say it looks like he is cooking the books in order to make the data he collects fit his hypothesis.
EFG (f0e683) — 11/14/2006 @ 7:33 pmSo let me see if I’ve got this right, Patterico. Borat sings a comedic song about throwing jews down a well and that’s OK. He encourages others to sing along with it and laugh about it, and that’s OK. You can watch his antics in a move and laugh at this song about throwing jews down a well and that’s OK. But the people where were actually there and enjoying his antics first hand and going along with his pretend anti-semitism, those guys are evil anti-semitic bastards?
I’m having a little trouble following this.
Doc Rampage (4a07eb) — 11/15/2006 @ 2:57 amHmmm
Paul from fl (967602) — 11/15/2006 @ 4:23 amMaybe the next performance we can make it ‘throw the muslim down the well.’ See if anything happens then.
Funny, but I’ve never even heard the “boiled frog theory” before. Then again I can’t imagine why I would ever want to boil a frog.
I have heard it said about lobsters and crabs, and it probably works for them since they can’t jump as high.
Arnold (f53dc2) — 11/15/2006 @ 12:10 pmSacha Baron Cohen is an exploiter, and a creep. He makes fools of decent, polite, folks with extensive editing and makes tens of millions and we are supposed to be calling the folks names. Crap. Where are you people.
RJN (e12f22) — 11/15/2006 @ 4:57 pm“The headmaster of my high school, Stephen Seleny, who grew up in Hungary”
You should know some facts.
When your Mr Seleny first started his school with volunteers, it was modeled after intellectual elitist European schools. In the early years, children who displeased were slapped, caned, “klobbered”, and beat on the heads with textbooks. Today, these acts might be prosecuted as crimes against children. Perhaps you would be the prosecutor. Things were different then, but these are facts. There is more about the school in its early days, but this is enough. The school would not have survived had it not changed.
Mrs R (551239) — 5/4/2007 @ 7:16 am