A year ago, I wrote a post about the Bruno movie's moral quandary. A year ago! Time flies when you are having BLOGS! (You have no idea how sorry I am. For everything.) The post concerned what seemed to me then and seems to me now to be the biggest problem facing Sacha Baron Cohen's new movie: Borat-style jokes built on exaggerated stereotypes to "expose bigotry" are different and potentially more "dangerous" when they deal with a genuine group of discriminated people, especially one that currently sits at the white hot center of a national debate on equal rights. For one thing, it's going to be a much less charming hipster Halloween costume. Not very niiiice!
Now, as Richard Lawson points out at Gawker, some gay rights groups are voicing some complaints and some concerns about the movie:
A representative for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation told the New York Times for a feature running on Sunday that, while the movie's satire is "well-meaning," mostly it's just "problematic in many places and outright offensive in others."
Meanwhile the Human Rights Campaign feels that Bruno should be responsible for the fuckwittery of its audience, saying that a disclaimer should run before the film so people know that it's, y'know, sayin' somethin':
"We strongly feel that Sacha Baron Cohen and Universal Pictures have a responsibility to remind the viewing public right there in the theater that this is intended to expose homophobia."
Uh oh! Well, the fact of the matter is that some people definitely won't get "the joke." Does that mean that a movie like Bruno shouldn't get made? Just because we have got some dumb thumbheads up in this country/world? No. We cannot cater to them anymore than we already do. But it does mean that the laffs of the movie become more suspect, and one's motivation for laughing--not to mention what exactly one is actually laughing at--needs to examined. How many people need to sing along to "Throw the Gay Down the Well" before it stops being a commentary on homophobia and starts just being an engine of it?
Richard ends his post this way:
So what are we to think (and do) here? Say that these groups are being humorless prigs? Dismayingly acknowledge that they're sort of right--that now, especially, isn't the time for humor that might be interpreted the wrong way?
Honestly, we're really asking.
And that seems about right. We all support gay rights here. But no one wants to be the humorless scold who can't draw the line between what's a joke and what is actually offensive and damaging**. That's the fine line that Sacha Baron Cohen has chosen to walk. He has done it brilliantly in the past, but the stakes were never really that high. So what are we to think (and do) here?
Honestly, I'm asking.
*The laffs in Borat, which is an amazing movie, I own it, relax, were actually quite problematic in their own right, and if I ever finish building my time machine I'm going to go back in time and KILL HITLER, and then I am going to blog about the complications of Borat's humor, especially in a theater-setting, when it was STILL RELEVANT.
**Before the commenters who love to cry "PC Police" get involved, it's important to point out that the distinction between something being a joke and something being racist/sexist/homophobic is one of the more complicated distinctions, mainly because a lot of times it's both! A lot of you guys seem to have a really hard time recognizing that just because you laugh at something that is racist or homophobic or sexist doesn't necessarily make you those things, but it also doesn't make the thing you're laughing at NOT racist or sexist or homophobic. It's all a big mess! But that is the world that we live in, and I for one think that it's more important to at least acknowledge when something is based on stereotype and/or bigotry. That doesn't mean you can't laugh at it, which would only be out of some kind of condescending false empathy. Just know what is what! Don't play games! Eracism! Eracophobia! OK, Edgy Jokes University class of 2009 DISMISSED.
