Status Anxiety

11 July 2009

As funny as Bruno undoubtedly is, Baron-Cohen’s film is fundamentally dishonest

One of the funniest scenes in Bruno is when Sacha Baron-Cohen, playing the gay Austrian television presenter, appears on a talk show in Texas called The Richard Bey Show. The African-American audience is none too impressed when he tells them he’s looking for a black male partner to help him raise his African baby — and is even more outraged when the baby is brought out wearing a ‘Gayby’ T-shirt. ‘He’s a real dick magnet,’ Bruno explains. The audience is then shown a picture of the child in a hot tub with four other men, two of whom are performing a sex act. ‘You’re going to burn in hell for that one,’ shouts a member of the audience.

When I watched this scene during a screening earlier this week I laughed as loudly as everyone else, but afterwards it left a sour taste in my mouth. What is its purpose, exactly, beyond making people laugh? According to Universal Pictures, the Hollywood studio behind the film, ‘Bruno uses provocative comedy to powerfully shed light on the absurdity of many kinds of intolerance and ignorance, including homophobia.’ But that’s a bit of a stretch. After all, Baron-Cohen doesn’t ‘shed light’ on the homophobia of this African-American audience so much as provoke them into a homophobic reaction — and he keeps pushing and pushing until they finally snap. In any case, it isn’t clear that objecting to a baby being present while a homosexual act is performed is ‘homophobic’. I daresay the audience would have responded similarly if it was a man and a woman having sex instead.

Once you strip away the supposedly high-minded intentions of Baron-Cohen and his collaborators, the scene in question begins to seem uncomfortably snobbish, not to say a little racist. A sophisticated, metropolitan audience is being invited to laugh at poor Southern blacks for not having the wherewithal to conceal their visceral disgust when being confronted by someone who looks suspiciously like a pederast. If the purpose of satire is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, then Bruno doesn’t qualify as satire. On the contrary, Baron-Cohen is comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted.

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John McKee

July 9th, 2009 12:33pm Report this comment

Thanks for putting my unease about this man's humour into words, Toby. Hadn't actually put much thought to it before, but there's a big difference between agent provocateur stunts to expose and ridicule real bigotry (racism, xenophobia, antisemitism etc) as he did in Borat and entrenching dangerous common misconceptions like 'them queer folks is after my kids'.

silke

July 10th, 2009 9:44pm Report this comment

please do not be afraid to sound like a prude!
It was OK in the Sixties and Seventies to rebel against all those stupid rules but now the pendulum has swung way to far in the direction of anything goes - as a sound balance is probably unachievable the time of the courageous prude has come and I for one salute everybody who dares - up to now I have only found Miss Manners of the Washington Post as a role model - weren't it nice if the British took the lead

Crystal Bullet

July 11th, 2009 8:20pm Report this comment

Is Bruno provoking an unintended conflict? How can we measure it? Politics governs for society what people can or cannot do. Currently politics decides scientists cannot clone humans or artists take erotic pictures of naked children. Thousands of such controls exist if you look for them from a historical perspective. Huxley’s research behind “The Doors of Perception” would not be possible today with the controls on hallucinogenic substance abuse.

The process which governs the acceptable often takes decades to change. We rely on watershed moments to indicate what the new rules are. Those subsequently breaking them can expect harsh treatment because a groundswell of opinion exists to support vilification of the transgressor. The Ross-Brand affair in October 2008 was such a watershed moment.

Does Bruno break these new rules? Superficially the treatment of race and sexuality in this film might seem contentious. However the use of TV reality playfulness makes it impossible to judge what the politics of the message is. What is shocking is the pornographic element. The Ross-Brand affair was fought out over a radio show. By nature only the language was offensive. Visually some of the scenes in Bruno were “disgusting”. Does it provoke debate on race and sexuality? Or in the mood of “harsh times” should it be vilified for being pornographic regardless of intent?

Ben

July 20th, 2009 9:23pm Report this comment

I think you've got it exactly backwards, Toby. When the woman in question agreed to have liposuction performed on her baby, everyone in the cimema I was attending pretty much stopped laughing - but not because it had dawned on them that she was an actress, as you are suggesting... I think they stopped laughing because they were worried that she wasn't an actress. I don't claim to know for sure whether she was or not - and neither can you, really - but I'd wager that she was for real. I think you are underestimating the depth of the sickness - in both American and British cultures - that stems from obsession with celebrity.

Furthermore, the entire premise that your article is based on is not supported with evidence. How do you know that a third of them were actors? Source, or GTFO!

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