Loading ...- Category:
- Community, Soap Box
- Author:
- Doug Pollard
- Posted:
- Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Bruno, or, confronting people with overblown stereotypes for the purposes of making yourself look good, them look bad, plus making lots of dollars, while dodging criticism by taking the moral high ground and claiming to expose hidden prejudices, thus allowing you to perpetuate damaging stereotypes and get away with it.
I haven’t seen the movie Bruno. However, I have seen numerous clips, trailers and downloads, and many of Bruno’s public appearances at premieres. More than enough!
The concept of Bruno, like Borat before him, is that of the ventriloquist’s dummy. A dummy can say things that wouldn’t be right, or proper, or even safe for their operator to say (drag acts work the same way, except the operator is inside the dummy).
A dummy allows the ventriloquist to pander to the audience’ prejudices. Ahmed the Dead Terrorist (Google it if you haven’t already) allows us to laugh at Islamic suicide bombers and subtly reinforces anti-Muslim prejudices. When criticised, ventriloquist Jeff Dunham hides behind the dummy, claiming it isn’t a Muslim.
Bruno is a ventriloquist’s dummy with Sacha Baron Cohen inside. A dummy designed to allow us to laugh at shallow, fashion-obsessed screaming queens while subtly reinforcing our prejudices against them.
The filmmaker claims that putting this screamer in with ignorant rednecks exposes their hidden homophobia. Actually, what Bruno mostly exposes is an astonishingly high level of tolerance. People put up with this jerk for much longer than they ordinarily might precisely because he is homosexual. Cohen has to push extremely hard to get the reactions he wants. It’s embarrassing and uncomfortable to watch. I ended up feeling sorry for his victims.
When they finally snap, it’s not Bruno’s homosexuality but his boorishnesss that drives them over the edge. A group of white middle-class anti-racist liberals would find their -˜hidden racism’ similarly exposed if Robert Mugabe called round to harangue them on the evils of colonialism.
With Borat, this stoking of prejudices didn’t really matter much (except to Kazakhs, of course). There’s no deep-seated worldwide anti-Kazakh hatred, no religions devoted to curing Kazakhsuality, no steady toll of anti-Kazakh murders. Kazakhs are not jailed and executed in dozens of countries, and Kazakhs have always been able to marry one another, even, according to Borat, their own relatives.
I’m sure Cohen means well and really wants to expose prejudice, and he certainly doesn’t lack courage. Unfortunately, his intentions are utterly irrelevant. Only the public reactions count. Sophisticated urban audiences may -˜get’ the anti-homophobia messages, if they’ve been appropriately coached by their newspapers (and can manage to sit through the movie).
Most audiences won’t. They’ll just see another stupid ridiculous queen stereotype trying to -˜shove homosexuality down our throats’, and some will go out and look for one to bash, or worse.
Let Cohen stop aiming at soft targets and put his talents to better use. I know! He could be a Palestinian estate agent offering to buy houses and businesses in the Israeli-occupied territories.
Now that’d be really funny.
Tags: Bruno
